The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

This novel won various awards including most notably the 2013 Booker Prize. I really enjoyed it – it’s a story of various crimes of passion and property in an isolated New Zealand gold rush town in 1865-66, set in a somewhat splintered narrative which only gradually draws together to form a whole picture. I found the intense, detailed portrayal of the raw settler society very compelling, and in particular Catton’s unsentimental depiction of lack of communication across gender and race, driven by the power structures developed and reinforced in a new(ish) society.

I was less convinced by the astrological framework of the narrative, but I am rather picky on this subject as a former historian of astrology. It seemed to me an unnecessary superstructure to what is a very good book without it. But I decided to just ignore it, and to enjoy the rest.

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Lunch with Norman Lamb

Shortly after I made my previous post about the Lib Dem leadership election, I got invited to a lunch with Norman Lamb in Brussels last Friday. As I wrote last weekend, I knew very little about Norman Lamb, except that he had been a minister in the coalition government and that he had the backing of a number of party heavyweights – though only one of the other surviving MPs (Farron has three other MPs supporting him, with Clegg and Carmichael silent as far as I can tell). So I went along, with my ballot paper in my pocket and an open mind, ready to change my #1 Farron vote if I was sufficiently convinced.

The discussion was a private one among a group of about twenty, most of them Lib Dem members based in Brussels, and concentrated entirely on policy; the leadership campaign was barely mentioned. I was impressed despite myself. As various friends who are more involved than I am have reported, Lamb is clearly cerebral and reflective, and wants to get the best information available from many different sources. He did not pitch us; he asked for our views (which I gave at some length, though he was nice about it afterwards).

So I ended the meeting reassured on substance at least, if Lamb rather than Farron is elected on Wednesday. However, my prejudice on style was reinforced: Farron speaks from the heart, Lamb from the head. At this point, I think the party needs passion as well as reflection. If the party ends up with Farron as leader and Lamb as spokesman on EU policy, there may be some hope of that. So I dropped my vote unchanged into the postbox on Rue de Treves as I walked back to my office.

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Sculptor’s Daughter, by Tove Jansson

I find it generally difficult to write up short story collections here; I don't find it satisfactory to either list them all in exhaustive detail, or to concentrate on a few outstanding pieces, disregarding the rest. The most satisfying ones for blogging purposes are those with a unifying theme, preferably by a single author, and this collection of autobiographical snippets by one of my favourite writers ticked all of my boxes.

This was familiar territory – more than half of the autobiographical short stories and vignettes in Sculptor's Daughter are also in A Winter Book, but here there's a more systematic narrative of childhood, of a girl maybe around seven or nine years old growing up in an artistic household, in Helsinki in the 1920s. Some bits really stood out – her relationship with the household staff, her exploration of the countryside on her own, the grown-up political talk (with the recent horrible civil war an unspoken background), all built up parts of the bigger picture.

It's a very short book – 160 pages – and Moomin fans can safely try it as a sampler for Jansson's adult work. But it will also enlighten anyone interested in how European history was lived in small traumatised countries in the third decade of the last century, from the perspective of a child then looking back in later years.

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Links I found interesting for 10-07-2015

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Thursday Reading

Current
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
Ulysses, by James Joyce

Last books finished
Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons
The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton
Splintered Light: Tolkien's World, by Verlyn Flieger
Halflife, by Mark Michalowski

Next books
The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson
The Sorrows of an American, by Siri Hustvedt
Ghost Devices, by Simon Bucher-Jones

Books acquired in last week
Splintered Light: Tolkien's World, by Verlyn Flieger

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The Romance of the Three Kingdoms / 三國演義, attributed to Luo Guanzhong

Some time in the last year I read a novel in which the protagonist tried to read this, and bounced off it. (I'm having trouble identifying which novel – a search of my electronic copies of likely suspects The Fat Years and The Three-Body Problem doesn't pull it up, so it must have been something else, possibly a Clarke submission.) I winced a little when I came across that reference – the group of friends with whom I read War and Peace in 2012 and Anna Karenina more recently had also tried The Romance of the Three Kingdoms as a collective reading project in 2013, and we ran into the sand pretty quickly. For those who don't know China or Chinese history, the names of people and places are pretty baffling; and the plot seemed to be epic politics and war, with few female perspectives and none at all from outside the ruling elites, and not a lot of characterisation.

But I gave it another try, this time curbing my ambition and going only for the abridged University of California Press edition translated and edited by Moss Roberts, which cuts out about half of the material. I found this more digestible, though I still felt the need of maps to explain where the three contested kingdoms were in relation to any geography that I am familiar with. The main strand of narrative of the book is the rise to power of Cao Cao to displace the authority of the Han dynasty emperor (in the late second century of our era), but his power is restricted to the northern kingdom of Wei; after his death, his sons actually displace the Han heir from the throne, but their rule declines and eventually ends (in the mid-third century of our era). Wu and Shu, the other two kingdoms which have split off from the Han realm, alternatively fight Cao Cao and each other, but the core narrative seems to me to be in the north. It's a detailed study of the use and abuse of military and political power, drawing on Chinese philosophy and Sun Tsu (who is repeatedly quoted, with approval), and the moral we are supposed to draw is taht integration must follow disintegration. I didn't feel equipped to engage with it as I would have liked, because of my lack of familiarity with the core material. I think there may be a market for a Three Kingdoms for Dummies edition, with maps and family trees.

One thing that struck me, both on this reading and my previous effort, was the role of magic and especially ghosts in the story. The unjustly executed become unquiet dead, haunting those who persecuted them, often with direct physical consequences, such as frightening generals and kigns to death. I don't think this makes the story a fantasy any more than the Lovejoy books are fantasy due to their protagonst's supernatural ability to detect antiques – rather less so, if anything, given that it's presented as a normal part of the world of the Three Kingdoms, but it's worth noting.

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Links I found interesting for 08-07-2015

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True History/Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα, by Lucian of Samosata

I wrote this on Sunday, the day of the Greek referendum, when it seemed appropriate to write up a work of classical literature, claimed by some as the first ever science fiction novel. Indeed, it does start rather well, with our hero unwittingly drawn to the Moon where he finds himself embroiled in a space war between the inhabitants of the Moon and the Sun over the colonisation of Venus (strictly Ἑωσφόρος, Lucifer) which seems very close to much more recent tropes of sf narrative. But apart from that particular shaft of forward thinking, it's a fairly standard odyssey tale of going to strange places, seeing strange things and meeting strange people, and I think it is better to let classical scholars hang onto it as a mildly imaginative outlier in classical literature than for sf fans to spuriously (and unnecessarily) claim classical legitimacy for the genre starting here.

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Self-Portrait and Naked, by Anneke Wills

Anneke Wills was probably the most glamorous actor ever cast as a companion in Old Who. In Self-Portrait, the first volume of her autobiography, she gives what seems like a pretty frank account of her life as a young actress in the late 1950s and early 1960s; she was in with celebrity from a young age, being more or less adopted by the Craxton family when she first moved to London and then circulating among the bright young things – her first serious boyfriend was Edward Fox, another boyfriend dumped her for Joan Collins while she was pregnant. But she then skipped up a generation and found stability, if not complete happiness, with Michael Gough.

It would be easy for such a book to be a series of name-droppings and anecdotes, and such books have been often done before (David Niven's are probably classics of the art). But Aneeke Wills took a long time out of acting and public life, and she has clearly taken the time and space to reflect on and absorb her own experiences, making Self-Portrait a much better and slightly quirkier book than most celebrity autobiogs are. The only chapter that feels a bit out of place, oddly enough, is the account of her time on Doctor Who, possibly based too closely on her prepared remarks for conventions which are aimed at a different audience in a different style. Otherwise, I really enjoyed dipping into her stream of consciousness, and learning all kinds of things about how the British theatrical community turned the corner from the 1950s to the 1960s. (Quite apart from anything else, I had never heard of The Alberts.)

I have to admit that I bought Self-Portrait a couple of years ago, and hadn't especially prioritised reading it. But I enjoyed it so much that I ordered the second volume, Naked, immediately. The second is a somewhat more personal book, picking up the story from the end of her acting career, when she decided to concentrate on her family with Michael Gough. She discovered transcendental meditation, the marriage ended, she travelled the world doing bits and pieces linked with the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rashneesh (and other things; in both books she reflects that cleaning bathrooms in California she became aware that her former romantic rival Joan Collins had achieved international megastardom), attracting and discarding husbands and lovers along the way, and eventually very much to her surprise discovered that she was a venerated figure among Who fandom on the basis of a year's work decades earlier. The book retains the breathlessly entertaining present tense of the first volume, but loses a bit by being less focused on a single professional activity, and slightly loses momentum towards the end. I still enjoyed it, if not quite as much as the first volume; I heartily recommend both to Who fans, and the first to students of 1950s and 1960s British entertainment culture.

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The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer

This was a best-seller back in 1974, and boy does it feel like it. Sherlock Holmes is lured to Vienna by Watson in order to get treatment for his cocaine addiction at the hands of Sigmund Freud; together they solve the mystery of a lost heiress and prevent Europe from falling into war before its time. There is a thrilling chase sequence on two steam trains across Austria. That's about it, really; every generation updates Holmes for its own age, perhaps, and this was the 1970s version. I'll stick with Cumberbatch, Freeman, Gatiss and Moffatt.

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Mating, by Norman Rush

I wasn’t hugely impressed by this novel of an activist struggling with emotion and revolution in 1980s Namibia. As with Doris Lessing, I found myself not terribly interested in the problems of white people trying to make sense of African society; it feels like it’s all about them. I have a feeling I got this after it was highly recommended by someone, but I can’t remember who.

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Me and the Lib Dems and Tim Farron

As you may remember, I left the Liberal Democrats (of which I was a founding member back in 1988) a few years back. I was angry about the so-called welfare reforms, started by Labour and continued by the Conservatives, which the Lib Dems in government colluded with, in some cases with unseemly glee. Any notion of a war on poverty and disability seems to have been transformed into a war on the poor and disabled, and the families of the disabled; and not enough of the Lib Dems were audible on the right side of the debate for me to continue feeling comfortable. I am fortunate enough to live in a country with a real welfare state. I pay huge amounts of tax, and I get every euro-cent of it back one way or the other. But people here retain confidence in the system as a back-stop for everyone.

I was angry also that two significant constitutional reforms, electoral reform and reforming the House of Lords, were comprehensively botched. The AV referendum was a stupid idea for anyone who actually wanted change in the system. On the House of Lords I recognise that I'm an outlier anyway, in that I'd prefer to abolish it than make it an elected body, but the actual plan proposed was massively silly and would actually have increased the percentage of bishops among members. It was right that it failed and wrong to propose it.

I remain angry about both of those sets of issues, and the party deserved the kicking it got in retribution from voters. There was no alternative to coalition with the Conservatives – Labour had neither the necessary numbers nor any serious intention of making it work – and the party was right to do it but wrong in the way that it was done. The rot set in early, with the debacle over university tuition fees (which in fairness was more a question of presentation, but a catastrophic failure in that regard), and it was never stopped. I do not say this with any joy. I feel sorry particularly for the ten MEPs who lost their seats (or in a couple of cases stood down pre-emptively) in last year's election. I know almost all of them personally, and they were tremendous contributors to the European Parliament, for the party, for the UK and Europe. They paid the price for other people's decisions.

It would be better for the UK if there was a stronger voice for liberalism which actually believes in the sorts of things I believe in, and doesn't screw up when in government. The two lasting public policy changes forced on the coalition by the Lib Dems, equal marriage and (more wonkishly) fixed-term parliaments, are very good things; and the Lib dems did stand up against the loopy anti-immigration policies of both Conservatives and Labour. My feeling was that if the Lib Dems stopped colluding with government policies I find disgusting and started sounding a bit more effective, I might give them another try.

In anticipation of this, I kicked in £20 to a party fund-raising appeal during the election campaign. The premise was rather silly; it was to enter a draw for a dinner with John Cleese. It was also fairly early in the campaign, so of course meant that having paid once, I got further despairing appeals for funds as the campaign went on. I'm in political communications myself, so I smiled and then ignored them. Rather to my dismay, one thickish envelope arrived by snail-mail, labelling itself a membership pack. I hadn't rejoined; I'd just made a small donation. So I binned it.

When the exit poll was handed to me in the TV studio in Belfast at twenty to ten on election night, my first reaction was that 10 seats might be an over-statement and we could well see the Lib Dems level-pegging with the DUP. Fortunately for me, I said so on camera, so my reputation for predictive power is maintained. Unfortunately for the party and (on reflection) for the UK, I was right. As the Lib Dem seats tumbled in all directions, I watched with some anxiety for the fate of one old friend in particular.

In roughly 1988-1991, which a brief spasm again in the mid-1990s, I was active in student politics with the Lib Dems, and became briefly a large fish in that rather small pool. Way back then, Tim Farron, who is three years, a month and a day younger than me, was already someone to watch. We were both involved in a certain number of political battles which seemed awfully important at the time but whose details have mercifully faded from memory. What I do recall is that when Tim and I differed politically, he usually won; and on reflection, that was usually because he was right and I was wrong.

Watching from afar, I had supported his candidacy for President of the party, and appreciated that he was on occasion prepared to vote against the government, notably on tuition fees at the beginning, and continued to keep up the pressure, including on immigration. Some complained that he had not taken responsibility by accepting a government position; frankly that doesn't look to me like a stupid move at all, in the light of the performance of the party in government. When it became clear that the choice of new leader would be between Tim and another candidate who had held office in the coalition government, and who had emerged since I moved away from the UK in 1997, I resolved privately that I would rejoin the party if and when Tim got elected.

Well, the decision has been partly thrust into my hands. Because the party has chosen to treat my £20 as a membership renewal rather than a one-off donation, a membership ballot arrived the other day. And although I feel it's frankly sneaky of the party to count me among its (supposedly burgeoning) numbers before I had really decided on that for myself, I will fill in the form and send it back for Tim. Whether I renew again next year depends on what he does with the leadership once he gets it, as it seems likely that he will. Good luck to him.

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2015 Hugo fiction: How bloggers are voting

For three of the last four years, I carried out a survey of how bloggers were planning to vote in the Hugos. Last year this proved a fairly effective methodology, calling Best Novel and Best Short Story correctly and pinging the actual winners as front-runners for Best Novella and Best Novelette. In 2013 two winners were clear and two were missed (including Best Novel). In 2011, however, my survey failed to pick a single winner of the four fiction categories. So this should be taken as a straw poll, necessarily incomplete and this year earlier than usual. There is certain to be a selection bias in that people who feel more strongly are more likely to blog about it; so we have no insight into the preferences of less articulate or invested voters.

Having said that, the results are interesting. In particular, No Award appears to be leading in all the short fiction categories (though not necessarily decisively in every case), and there is no clear single front-runner for Best Novel.

Best Novel: I found 17 bloggers so far who have disclosed which way they plan to vote, and it is close between three candidates. Seven are voting for The Three-Body Problem and four each for Ancillary Sword and The Goblin Emperor, with one for Skin Game and one wavering between Ancillary Sword and The Goblin Emperor.

On that basis I think it’s impossible to call a winner, though I think it’s also fair to say that Skin Game, The Dark Between the Stars and No Award are probably out of the picture. Fans of both Ancillary Sword and The Goblin Emperor transfer to The Three-Body Problem, so I think it’s fair to say that it has an edge. For what it’s worth, fans of The Three-Body Problem tended to put Skin Game second, so it may pick up a lower place more easily than its first preferences suggest. I will note, however, that my surveys of 2011 and 2013 failed to pick up a single blogger who admitted voting for the Best Novel winner in either year, and that Skin Game‘s supporters may not be fervent bloggers.

The Three-Body Problem (7): Wombat-Socho, Vox Day, H.P., Bradley Armstrong, Joseph Tomaras, Nick Mamatas and Brian Z.

The Goblin Emperor (4½): Ian Mond, Tim Atkinson, Reading SFF, Rachel Neumeier and maybe Cat Faber.

Ancillary Sword (4½): Steve Davidson, Nicholas Whyte, John Snead, Lisa Goldstein and maybe Cat Faber.

Skin Game (1): Patrick May

Best Novella: I have found 19 bloggers who have recorded their votes for Best Novella. There is a clear winner: No Award is favoured by 11 of them, with “Big Boys Don’t Cry” on three, “Pale Realms of Shade” and “One Bright Star to Guide Them” getting two votes each and “Flow” one. I have to say that my experience from previous years is that if that margin of surveyed bloggers supports a particular candidate, it’s likely to win. Two of those who are voting No Award will put “Flow” second, so it is as strongly placed as any to take second place, if No Award wins.

No Award (11): Joseph Tomaras, Steve Davidson, Nicholas Whyte, Timo Pietilä, Melina Dahms, Font Folly, Abigail Nussbaum, Laura Gjovaag, Marion, Lisa Goldstein and Cat Faber.

“Big Boys Don’t Cry” (3): Chris Gerrib, Peter Enyeart and Brian Z.

“Pale Realms of Shade” (2): Rachel Neumeier and Joe Sherry.

“One Bright Star To Guide Them” (2): Vox Day and Nick Mamatas.

“Flow” (1): Patrick May.

Best Novelette: There are three leading contenders for the Best Novelette votes of declared bloggers, not sufficiently differentiated that I can confidently call a likely winner. However, No Award is in front with 11 of 23 bloggers supporting it. “The Triple Sun” has 5 and “The Day The World Turned Upside Down” has 4, and 1 is choosing between them. “The Journeyman: In The Stone House” and “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” have 1 supporter each; nobody has declared that their first preference will go to “Championship B’Tok”. A majority of No Award voters will cast second preferences for “The Day The World Turned Upside Down”.

No Award (10): Andrew Hickey, Kat Jones, Nicholas Whyte, Melina Dahms, Timo Pietilä, Laura Gjovaag, Abigail Nussbaum, Brian Z, Lisa Goldstein, Cat Faber and Steve Davidson.

“The Triple Sun” (5½): Kiesa, Rachel Neumeier, Mark Ciocco, Joe Sherry, Joseph Tomaras, Peter Enyeart and maybe Marion.

“The Day The World Turned Upside Down” (4½): Font Folly, Russell Blackford, Chris Gerrib and maybe Marion.

“The Journeyman: In The Stone House” (1): Patrick May.

“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” (1): Nick Mamatas.

Best Short Story: There are two clear leaders from the declared Best Short Story votes of 25 declared bloggers, close enough that I don’t feel able to call a winner with confidence, but far enough ahead of the field that I am pretty sure the winner will be one of the two. As with the other two short fiction categories, No Award is pretty clearly in the lead, with 14 votes; “Totaled” is in a strong second with 8. Of the No Award voters who have expressed a second preference, most will transfer to “Totaled”, so it looks like a strong second place at the very least. “Turncoat” has two supporters, and “On a Spiritual Plain” one. Nobody has yet declared that their first preference will go to either “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” or “A Single Samurai”.

No Award (14): Andrew Hickey, Katya Czaja, Timo Pietilä, Melina Dahms, Martin Petto, Nicholas Whyte, Steve Davidson, Font Folly, Abigail Nussbaum, Laura Gjovaag, Nick Mamatas, Brian Z, Lisa Goldstein and Cat Faber.

“Totaled” (8): Mark Ciocco, Liz Barr, Chris Gerrib, Rachel Neumeier, Patrick May, Joseph Tomaras, Russell Blackford and Peter Enyeart.

“Turncoat” (2): Vox Day and Vivienne Raper.

“On a Spiritual Plain” (1): Joe Sherry.

I haven’t looked at other categories in detail, as the numbers are still fairly few, but it’s already clear that 2015 will see No Award do better than any recent years.

Please let me know if I have misrepresented your vote, or misused your preferred online handle, in the list above. And please point me to other lists; if I am able, I hope to do an update post before the voting deadline on 31 July.

(Updated later on 3 July to bring in a few more votes.)
(Updated again on 4 July for two more voters. This post will not be updated again, but I will hope to do another update before the end of voting.)

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Links I found interesting for 03-07-2015

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Weekly reading blog

Current
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton
Ulysses, by James Joyce
Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons

Last books finished
Sculptor's Daughter, by Tove Jansson
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by Luo Guanzhong

Next books
Meditations on Middle Earth: New Writing on the Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien
The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson
Halflife, by Mark Michalowski

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Links I found interesting for 02-07-2015

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Links I found interesting for 01-07-2015

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