…he zoomed off into the sky.

Just like that guy, y’know, E.T.

This is regarded as the great work of Belgian fantasy (at least in the novel form: there are loads of Belgian comics and films with sfnal content). It’s quite difficult to get hold of and I eventually picked up a copy of the 1998 Atlas Press translation on eBay. It appears at first to be about the peculiar inhabitants of the house of Malpertuis, in a city which is presumably Ghent in the dying days of Francophone supremacy; but in fact it turns into a peculiar confrontation between the organised Catholic church and the gods of ancient Greece. My edition makes the inevitable link with H.P. Lovecraft; I would add James Stephens’ The Crock of Gold as a potential source, and I wonder if Neil Gaiman drew on it, consciously or not, for American Gods (and likewise, for the nested narrative structure, David Mitchell for Cloud Atlas). Ray is not quite as terrifying as Lovecraft (though fairly gruesome in places), and he is certainly not as cheerful as Stephens, but he does add a certain level of surrealist incomprehensibility to the mix that is appropriate for a slightly older contemporary of Magritte, who like Magritte stayed in Belgium and wrote this book during the German occupation. Certainly an essential read for sf fans interested in Belgium, or Belgians interested in literary sf.

is one of several people who have recently shifted completely from Livejournal to Facebook, but now I know where he got his name from while he was here.

I have been reading up on Sudanese issues over the last few days, and have come to realise the depths of my ignorance on the subject.

I started with A History of Modern Sudan, by Robert O. Collins, the most recent of these three books (published in 2008). It is a good basic political overview of the history of the country since Mohammed Ali, the Albanian Ottoman ruler of Egypt, conquered it in 1821; followed by the religious rule of the Mahdi and his successors, and then then the peculiarly named condominium arrangement which preserved Egyptian sovereignty in theory but was completely British-led in practice. Independence brought an alternation between elected governments, military rule and (as at present) mixtures of the two.

(I was surprised that Egypt didn’t try very hard to reassert its theoretical sovereignty, either at the point of decolonisation in the 1950s or at any other point. Certainly it would have made a difficult situation even worse, but that isn’t a reason for it not to happen.)

Sudan was soon cursed with Africa’s first civil war, as the southern part of the country, promised autonomy by London but not given it by Khartoum, chafed under direct rule and various southern armed movements, with varying degrees of popular support, territorial control and external backers, challenged the central authority of the state (and Khartoum’s inclination to establish Islam as the state religion) and made parts of the south ungovernable and ungoverned. An autonomy deal in the early 70s was abrogated by Khartoum in the early 80s, and the most recent war kicked off, with horrible loss of life and destruction. Eventually in 2005 the southern leader, John Garang, and Sudan’s President Bashir signed a new deal for autonomy for the south (without Islamic law applying there) and an independence referendum in 2011.

Just a few weeks after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement came into effect, Garang died in a helicopter crash; meanwhile, elsewhere in Sudan the province of Darfur, long an arena of conflict between neighboruing Libya and Chad, had become the scene of appalling attacks upon civilians by government-led forces, as a result of which President Bashir was indicted by the international war crimes tribunal.

(Points not mentioned in the above summary: the southern oil reserves, the period of sponsorship of worldwide Islamic terrorism by Khartoum, Sudan’s previous and subsequent relations with the US and the West, questions of “Arab” and “tribal” identity, involvement of Ethiopia and Uganda, etc: all hugely important issues which I can’t do justice to here.)

Bashir’s indictment is outside Collins’ time frame, but the rest is all in there, and is (usually) soberly explained, with perhaps a mild bias towards an enlightened Khartoum perspective (which survives despite the decades of repression). For my own purposes I needed a run down of the basic political facts, and Collins provides them.

Douglas H. Johnson’s The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars, published in 2003 when the most recent north-south conflict was still raging, takes a more southern view than Collins, and indeed invokes anthropology (which I always appreciate) as much as political analysis to tell, essentially, much the same story. (Johnson snipes at some of Collins’ earlier work from the footnotes.)

Johnson’s focus is, not unreasonably, on the north-south conflict. He provides a much deeper understanding than Collins of what made the resort to war not only credible but almost inevitable – and not only between the south and the north, but within the south, in particular when John Garang’s lieutenant Riek Machar struck out on his own to lead what became a largely Nuer struggle against Garang’s largely Dinka forces (though as Johnson rightly points out, one should not try and categorise too rigorously). Apart from “tribal” identities, there was also the strategic choice between Garang’s ideal of a secular state in the whole of Sudan, with southern autonomy, or the option of independence for the south which Machar explicitly adopted.

Johnson finished his book before the most recent peace agreement, and although at first sight the agreement itself disproves his conclusion that conflict is deeply entrenched and self-perpetuating, in fact he highlights many of the issues which remain unresolved even now, and will need to be sorted out in the short to medium term if peace between north and south is to continue.

Johnson also points out that humanitarian aid itself becomes a factor in the perpetuation of conflict: inevitably, the deliverers of such aid must compromise with (and thus empower) certain local forces against others. It certainly isn’t news to me (I remember seeing, and indeed buying, food in our local shops in Bosnia which had been stolen from the World Food Programme), but I think it’s worth adding that organisations which claim to be devoting all their resources to aid on the ground, without campaigning on the issues at home, are likely to be colluding with their local warlords without doing anything to challenge those power structures.

While Johnson’s book is very good at getting into the mechanics of South Sudan, I thought he missed on two other important areas. First, he seems to see the Darfur (and other) problems in the north as reflections of the north-south question. It’s pretty clear that there are plenty of indigenous and external factors to make Darfur unstable even if the South were not an issue (and in fairness to Johnson, his book was finished before the worst in Darfur). Second, in his introduction he claims that conflict in Sudan, as elsewhere, is caused by internal problems being escalated by external actors. It’s not at all clear to me, on the evidence that he and Collins present, that external actors were a prerequisite for the outbreak of conflict. It is, however, clear that external actors have played a crucial role in ending it – the 1972 autonomy deal would not have happened without Ethiopia, the current peace agreement is particularly a credit to Kenya. But the merit of Johnson’s book is that he writes clearly enough that one can make up one’s own mind about the extent to which the facts he presents justify his conclusions.

The split between John Garang and Riek Machar is the backdrop for the closing chapters of Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins. Emma McCune was the daughter of colonial parents, kicked out of India in the 1960s. They split up and her father committed suicide; Emma grew up with that missionary zeal which one sometimes encounters, to make the world a better place regardless of the personal consequences.

A lot of Scroggins’ narrative isn’t actually about Emma McCune, but about the horrors of the Sudanese conflict and the ensuing famine, which she covered as a journalist. She gives a decent summary of the background history but her strength is the human dimension. Both Collins and Johnson record, for instance, that when the refugee camps in Ethiopia closed in 1991, their inhabitants returned to South Sudan, causing further strain on local and international resources; but Scroggins was actually there, and converts the historical record into the sight of thousands of human beings trudging desperately along the Sobat river, being strafed by Sudanese planes and raided by bandits, in just one of many vivid descriptive passages which will linger with me for a long time.

Scroggins is also very good at describing the mentality and lifestyle of the foreign aid workers in a crisis situation. Where Johnson raises (reasonable) doubts about the entire enterprise, here we have an explanation of the zeal that motivates people to get into the field and do what they can for humanity. It’s a world I have dipped into (particularly in my time in Bosnia) and I recognised most of the characters who Scroggins describes. (And one or two of the actual people.) Her insider critique of why the rest of the world engages with humanitarian crises is very well argued.

One of the most intensely engaged of the expats was, of course, Emma McCune, who got heavily involved with delivering educational aid and trying to liberate child soldiers, largely in the Nuer areas of the SPLA-held south. She then went one further by marrying the local warlord, Riek Machar, who shortly after split from John Garang, creating a civil war within the SPLA. Machar’s new English wife was blamed for this by Garang’s supporters, but Scroggins is pretty clear that “Emma’s War” was not her fault.

One other figure who repeatedly appears in the narrative is the British businessman Tiny Rowland, who I knew of only as the owner of the Observer newspaper, but who of course had made his fortune by building up his company, Lonrho (from London and Rhodesia) into a conglomerate with tentacles all over the continent. Rowland, never a man for modesty, claimed in one conversation to have created the SPLA. He certainly played a crucial role in its history, and in the internal politics of many other African countries; like Emma McCune, he had a particular obsession with Sudan.

Emma McCune and her unborn baby were killed in a traffic accident in Nairobi only two years into her marriage. Scroggins follows the story a bit further – Machar signed a separate peace with Khartoum, and found another wife, this time from Minnesota; after Scroggins’ book was published, Machar actually reconciled with Garang and, with Garang now being out of the picture, is again one of the leading figures in south Sudan.

All three of these books are probably essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about Sudan. But Emma’s War is one of the best books I have read this year, and is I think essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about the human condition.

• Judge a Book by its Cover
  (tags: books)
• marnanel: Jono Bacon: The burnout cycle
  (tags: work)
• 30 things any would-be politician should do this summer (Part I) – Liberal Democrat Voice
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  30 things any would-be politician should do this summer (Part II) | Mark Pack
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My office rent has been increased. Not by very much, so I don’t complain. What is a little amusing is that I realised that I was being asked to pay two invoices, one for the increased rent on my own office, and another for an office of about the same rent but with two rooftop broadcasting antennas. Which is odd, I thought, as I don’t broadcast.

Then I realised I had been sent not only my own bill but the one for ITN‘s Brussels studio, which is also in this building.

I’ll go upstairs and introduce myself now, and give them their exciting new rent invoice. (And also see if they are getting more or less space for the same money as I am paying.)

Edited to add: They weren’t in. No doubt out reporting somewhere.

From Mark Reckons via Nick Barlow: Can you list all your MPs?

1967-1974: Rafton Pounder
1974-1981: Robert Bradford
1981-1985: Martin Smyth (all South Belfast, all UUP though Bradford first elected as Vanguard)
1985-1986: Harold McCusker (Upper Bann), though I was working in Armagh when Seamus Mallon defeated Jim Nicholson in the bogus by-elections, and also spent two months in 1985 in Raunds, Northamptonshire, which was represented either by William Powell (Corby) or Peter Fry (Wellingborough), not sure which.
1986-1991: Robert Rhodes James (Cambridge, Conservative)
1991-1995: Martin Smyth again
1995 (briefly) Roy Beggs (East Antrim)
1995-1997: Cecil Walker (North Belfast, UUP like the other two)

That covers the almost three decades of my residence in the UK. Bosnia and Belgium don’t have single-seat constituencies so I can’t answer for the most recent period (Croatia did for half the Sabor, the rest being elected proportionally, so perhaps someone keen can identify who was elected in 1995 to represent the constituency containing the big office building at the lower end of Šoštarićeva where we lived for eight months in 1996). Likewise for the four months I lived in Leingarten, Baden-Württemberg, which presumably had a direkt gewählte MdB.

Very much enjoyed last night’s episode (apart from the peculiar slip of demoting Queen Victoria from HM to HRH – on a Home Office computer to boot). But we had a certain amount of background noise so I missed one important line about a character we didn’t actually see:

What was said about Martha’s wedding? And at what point in the episode?

I have social engagements in Brussels both tonight and tomorrow night, but will have to cut them short to get home in time…

…to fill in the time before Torchwood.

These are the top 15 books in each of the main Doctor Who series of novels, as ranked by the number of people who own them on LibraryThing (also the top 15 non-fiction Who books at the end). Apologies to co-authors who fall off the list due to LibraryThing’s practice of prioritising first-named collaborators compounded by my laziness in not looking them up.

Edited to Add: Bah, listed one book twice. The Face of the Enemy is of course a Past Doctor Adventure not a Missing Adventure. But you can’t edit polls, so there we are.

It’s not surprising that the “Companions of Doctor Who” series of books was dropped; if anything it’s more surprising that another two were published (Harry Sullivan’s War by Ian Marter and Terence Dudley’s novelisation of K9 and Company) after this very unimpressive start. The evil female leader’s name is Rehctaht, which probably tells you all you need to know. The plot, such as it is, has Turlough, back on his home planet, reinventing the Tardis and trying to prevent nuclear destruction. There is much confusion of timelines, and too much material hastily thrown together. I think there are about three different novels in here, but it is difficult to tell if any of them would have been any good.

(Lists from a combination of Wikipedia and LibraryThing, with fairly arbitrary cutoff points which meant I missed off The Manchurian Candidate etc. Interpret the word “read” to your own satisfaction.)

For as long as I can remember, I have been aware of the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by the Reverend Ian Paisley in 1971 and now the largest Unionist party in Northern Ireland.

Now I discover that there is another Democratic Unionist Party (referred to by its members as الحزب الإتحادي الديموقراطي‎) in Sudan, founded in 1967. I doubt very much that Ian Paisley and Desmond Boal were aware of it when they rebranded and slightly expanded the Protestant Unionist Party four years later, but I shall be on the lookout for parallels as I do my weekend reading of African history.

A decent enough Rose/Ten novel, based a little bit on Planet of Evil with human invaders disrupting a world that should have been left to itself. A couple of references to the Doctor’s friendship with Shakespeare (this is pre-The Shakespeare Code).

The BBC have broadcast three Torchwood plays over the last three days, available only with difficulty for those of us outside the UK. But my determination overcame the difficulty, and I managed to listen to all three.

Individual discussions of each below the cut, but one common slightly disappointing factor is that John Barrowman seems to be under sedation for all three plays. I guess he is just one of those actors for whom the visuals are essential – certainly, having seen him on stage, he seems to love the thrill of interaction with his fellow-performers, which perhaps is rather different in a sound booth (and I’ll note again that I wasn’t impressed with his reading of The Ancestor Cell). In the first and third plays it doesn’t matter so much since Jack is less prominent, but it rather takes the shine off The Golden Age. (I will add that the female guest stars in all three plays were excellent.)

Anita Sullivan’s Asylum centres around Gwen, Andy the policeman, and Frieda, a girl from the future who has mysteriously been thrown into today’s Cardiff. I found the ending inconclusive but none the less intriguing. Erin Richards is great as Frieda, and there is a nice Jack/Ianto exchange as they play with the weapon she has brought with her. I thought Andy’s character was pushed to places where a beat policeman wouldn’t normally go, but Tom Price carried it off well.

(Big space to allow for those who haven’t heard the other two plays yet.)

James Goss’s The Golden Age is just a bit silly: back in 1924, Torchwood’s Indian branch retreated inside the timeproof walls of a gentlemen’s club in Delhi, using salvaged alien technology which now needs to be fed, Matrix-like, with human lives. Oh yes, and it is run by a Duchess who is an old flame of Jack’s. Obviously this has to Be Stopped, and our team does it, though as mentioned above with an audible lack of enthusiasm from the show’s star. Jasmine Hyde is, however, suitably dotty and homicidal as the Duchess. (Though she ought to be addressed as “Your Grace”.) Eve Myles and Gareth David Lloyd are not given much to do other than wander round and get captured, but they do it very well.

(Space left for those who have’t heard The Dead Line yet.)

Phil Ford’s The Dead Line is probably the best of the three. Here we have the focus on Gwen and Rhys, for a change: all over Cardiff people are collapsing into comas when answering the phone. Jack becomes one of the victims, and Ianto can’t tear himself from Jack’s bedside (which gets Gareth David Lloyd a nice soliloquy about the future of their relationship). We meet another of Jack’s old flames, a neurologist played by Doña Croll (probably the best known of the guest stars), which gives an excuse for much gossip about the 1970s. Eventually Gwen and Rhys track down the problem to a building society’s internal phone system; it is all suitably horrific, though I found the ending a bit abrupt and had to play it again to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

So, three worthy additions to the Torchwood canon. There is no internal order to the plays, so if you can only listen to one make it The Dead Line.

• YouTube – Ukulele Orchestra of GB – The Good the Bad the Ugly
  I almost gave up on this after the first minute, but that would have been a mistake.

• Meeting a king (and running out of things to say) | Charlemagne’s notebook | Economist.com
  The Economist confronts Swedish royalty
  (tags: eu)
• A Literary Theory : Uncertain Principles
  Why so many awful Mike Resnick stories end up getting shortlisted for awards
  (tags: sf)

Doctor Who Files 1: The Doctor, by Jacqueline Rayner with a story by Stephen Cole
Doctor Who Files 2: Rose, by Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who Files 3: The Slitheen, by Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who Files 4: The Sycorax, by Jacqueline Rayner with a story by Stephen Cole

These four 50-page hardbacks, published very early in the Tennant era, originally retailed for £5.99 each. I got the lot for 99p plus postage from eBay, which is just about what they are really worth. They would be an interesting element (though a small one) in a study of the rhetorical practices of Who merchandising as exercised under the RTD regime (perhaps with a comparative element considering the precedents set by JNT and others). The first 30 pages of each book consists of reheated Who lore (almost entirely of the first year and a half of New Who) of greater or lesser relevance to the topic, based on the TV series (and for the Slitheen also incorporating elements from Stephen Cole’s novel The Monsters Inside). The final section of each book has a short story, the two by Rayner being decidedly ordinary (the one in the Rose book is tediously educational on philately), but the two by Cole much better – his story at the end of the Sycorax book retells The Christmas Invasion from the monster’s point of view, which is a welcome shift of perspective and carried off smoothly. But really, I’d hesitate even to recommend these to completists, unless you can pick them up as cheaply as I did.

I took a detour from my usual intellectual pursuits at lunchtime yesterday and wandered over to my former workplace at CEPS, to hear the Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett talk about her book, Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe. I was CEPS’ researcher on Balkan issues when I was there in 1999-2002, but its strongest area is on the economic side, and although I don’t know the field I always suspected that Karel Lannoo, the chief executive, had carved out a commanding position in the world of intellectual analysis of how capital markets function and should be regulated.

Gillian Tett, given the task of summarising her 350-page book in 20 minutes, presented it as effectively an anthropological study of the small tribe of bankers at J.P. Morgan who invented the credit default swap, in the blind faith that the three deities of globalisation, innovation and market capitalism were infallible. (She mentioned her own much earlier anthropological field work in a village in Tadzkhikistan before she became a journalist.) The book is also an attempt to overcome what she described as the “information asymmetry” between the inside and the outside of the banking industry, where the technicalities of what was going on were too complex (or at least were presented as being too complex) for regulators, let alone politicians, to understand. This asymmetry happens within institutions as well; she feels that we should not describe banks as “too big to fail” but should ask if they are in fact “too big to manage”.

I found myself very sympathetic to both of these general points. I have remarked before that although I work in politics, I find that it is anthropology, rather than political science, which gives me much better insights into what I am doing and more useful ideas about what to do next (see several books on Cyprus, also this one.) It seems to supply a set of analytical tools which are operationally more useful, some of which I was fortunate enough to absorb when doing my PhD in the Social Anthropology department at QUB (though my subject was rather different). I am also fascinated by what Tett calls “information asymmetry”; my job at the moment is effectively ensuring that sensitive information reaches the information-poor in time to affect sensitive political decisions, which is a fascinating process; the role of information poverty in political decision-making doesn’t often get taken into account by IR analysts who assume that all actors have access to much the same set of facts. (The two sets of issues are more or less combined in the Haas concept of the epistemic community.)

The discussion afterwards was pretty high-powered – those who spoke included Ireland’s Permanent Representative to the EU, the top official of the Commission’s Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs, and the number two in the Internal Market and Services Directorate General – so I sat back and kept my mouth shut. At CEPS the discussion part of the meetings isusually off the record, but you won’t be surprised that it was more about debating (and failing to agree on) policy solutions rather than challenging Tett’s basic assumptions or intellectual framework.

It’s an interesting subject, I also had an interest in attending in that the author and I were exact conteporaries at Clare College, from which we graduated twenty years ago last week. In our first year, she lived on the same staircase as three future CUSFS committee members, , and myself. We have all changed in the meantime, but she did catch my eye when telling a Star Trek joke as part of her presentation…

• YouTube – Jumpin Jive – Cab Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers
  Just amazing

You won’t find this in dead tree format: it is an audiobook read by Gareth David Lloyd, who plays Ianto Jones in the series, and written by the show’s script editor/assistant producer (who also happens to be my cousin). The next week or so is going to be Torchwood-heavy, what with the new radio plays on today, tomorrow and Friday, and the new five-part TV story next week, but it was largely coincidental that I slapped this onto the MP3 player a few days ago.

To get the obvious out of the way first: it’s a monster-of-the-week story, with a resolution that effectively hits the reset button so that the world is not much changed after the events described. But I think it is a very good story of its kind. The Sin Eaters derive from Christian theology, and infiltrate their victims via a special form of baptism, with inevitably nasty consequences. It would be very easy to write a very stupid religion-and-Torchwood story; but Minchin confidently takes Gwen and Rhys through matters ecclesiastical, in what for me is the slightly foreign church environment of South Wales.

The brutal reduction in the core cast at the end of Torchwood’s second series means that we have only Jack, Ianto, Gwen and Rhys left as central characters. There is a neat contrast in the relationships – Gwen/Rhys, married over a year now; Jack/Ianto, still at the frenetic fumbling stage; and also Rhys’s friend Matt whose stag night provides the catalyst for the story as a whole. Given the extra space (2 CDs of audiobook is worth several Torchwood episodes) we get a lot of decent exploration of love and religion in the world of Torchwood, though I felt that the author would gladly have given us more if space had allowed.

Also, Gareth David Lloyd is an excellent reader, switching easily from strong to weak Welsh accent depending on character, and also doing a good job on Jack’s American. He is recognisably Ianto from the start, but (of course) more so when in character, and also carries a conviction that lifts the various character moments and vivid descriptive passages tremendously. I was disappointed by the first Torchwood audiobook I tried, and probably wouldn’t have bothered with this one if it hadn’t been for the family connection, but I will try some more in future.

Wow. Just… Wow.

This is too short a book to rave about at length. It begins with a dead mouse and ends with a dead man. It has tremendous characterisation and horrible choices. It has biting but subtle commentary on gender, race and disability. Perhaps the ending is just a bit too inevitable, but it had a tremendous buildup. Superb, and I am amazed that I had never thought to read this before.

Just got an email from a very weird person who came to see me yesterday with a business proposition. The meeting was short and unsatisfactory as I simply couldn’t understand what kind of business proposal the guy was trying to make to me. He sent me a very weird email just now, saying that I appeared to him to be

…someone being intellectually channeled, somehow rigid and sinister in attitude and words, having a down turned voice, behaving in an odd way…

So, let’s resolve this by the wisdom of livejournal.