Monthly Archives: July 2017

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Marzi: A memoir, by Marzena Sowa

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Second frame of third chapter:

An autobiographical narrative about a young girl growing up in the last decade of Communist Poland – very vivid on the intersection of politics, religion, family, friends and school, and perhaps an honest preservation of a world that has now disappeared, changed mainly (but not entirely) for the better.

This was my top unread comics book in English. Next up is the Moomin collection by Lars and Tove Jansson.

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In Xanadu, by William Dalrymple

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Good sir’, he said, ‘Tourists are my friends. Permit me to welcome you to Turkey.’

Another birthday present, again from Bob Hall (as part of a private joke), this was a book I had read many years ago; I must have been in the same room as the author on occasion when we were Cambridge students in intersecting circles, but don’t recall ever meeting him. Since then I’ve read three of his other books (two hits and a miss) so it was interesting to return to my first encounter with him twenty-five years ago.

We’ve both grown up a bit since then. Like all travel writers, the 22-year-old Dalrymple was trying to be Patrick Leigh Fermor (who chose this as his book of the year) – it was a brilliant adventure to recreate Marco Polo’s journey from Jerusalem to Kubla Khan’s Xanadu, with two different girls for each half of the route (the memorable Laura went on to become a top business executive). I think the mature writer must surely groan now at some of his own arrogance and naivety combined, but it’s right to let the original record sit.

The first half of the journey was much more fun than the second, and included places that were much safer thirty years ago than they are now – Syria (to put it mildly), south-eastern Turkey, western Pakistan. On the other hand, I would not be surprised to learn that China is now much easier for the casual foreign traveller than it was in the mid-1980s.

Anyway, I enjoyed my return visit to this book, and it certainly stirs one’s own eagerness to travel. (It also reminded me of the Xanadu restaurant of my time in Cambridge, now the Pizza Express on Jesus Lane under the Pitt Club.)

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Replacing Juncker: A centre-left struggle

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(This was originally published by EurActiv on 11 July 2017. In February 2025 I requested that it be deleted from the Euractiv site.)

There are almost two years to go until the next European Parliament elections in June 2019. Already Pierre Moscovici, the European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs, has hinted that he might be interested in the job of President of the European Commission. But, if that appointment is made in 2019 in the same way as it was in 2014, what are his chances, or the chances of any candidate of the political left?

In 2014, the President of the Commission was the candidate of the most successful party in the European Parliament elections – the European People’s Party, which won 214 seats to 185 for the Party of European Socialists. On the face of it, that’s not an unbridgeable gap. The centre-left party actually got more votes than the centre-right in 2014, but the structure of the electoral system meant that EPP votes in small countries, and countries with lower turnout, were worth more than PES votes in larger countries with more enthusiastic voters. 

However, the withdrawal of the United Kingdom removes a significant reservoir of PES support. The British Labour Party won four million votes and 20 MEPs in 2014, all of whom will be gone in 2019; while the EPP will lose nothing electorally from Brexit. The PES therefore need to make good not a 29-seat deficit but a 49-seat deficit.

It is a tall order. In Italy, where the new prime minister Matteo Renzi crushed Silvio Berlusconi’s party in 2014, a more balanced outcome is likely in 2019. In France, the PS and PRG combined won only 13 seats to the UMP’s 20 in 2014; in the Macron era, they seem unlikely to do better. It is difficult to predict what will happen in Germany, a year and a half into the next government’s term, but despite a relatively strong performance in 2014 the SPD were still seven seats behind the CDU/CSU, and it would be a courageous wager to predict that they will close that gap in 2019.

There is a bigger structural issue. In Poland and Hungary, the parties of the old left are out of the picture, and the key political battleground is between the centre right and the hard right. The absence of a strong PES partner in those key Eastern member states is a serious weakness. Even where the centre left is relatively strong, there are problems – the SPÖ in Austria and ČSSD in the Czech Republic currently lead their respective governments, but have both slipped to third place in opinion polls for their countries’ October elections.

It’s not impossible. My calculation is that a net uniform swing of 4% of voters from EPP member parties to their local PES equivalents in each member state would be enough to put the centre-left ahead. Such a swing would not be unusual in a national election, nor indeed unprecedented at European level – in 1999, the PES lost 6.1% and the EPP gained 9.5% compared with previous elections, giving the EPP the status of largest party which they have held ever since.

So Pierre Moscovici, or whoever the centre-left candidate turns out to be, has a tough hill to climb in the next twenty-three months, especially if the Spitzenkandidat process is undertaken again as it was in 2014. (Moscovici as Spitzenkandidat will have the additional challenge of negotiating the support, or at least assent, of President Macron.) Of course, if we have learned anything from the events of 2016, it is surely that anything can happen.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, by Yuval Noah Harari

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The flourishing field of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long pre-agricultural era. Even today, scholars in this field claim, our brains and minds are adapted to a life of hunting and gathering. Our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality are all the result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-industrial environment, with its mega-cities, aeroplanes, telephones and computers. This environment gives us more material resources and longer lives than those enjoyed by any previous generation, but it often makes us feel alienated, depressed and pressured. To understand why, evolutionary psychologists argue, we need to delve into the hunter-gatherer world that shaped us, the world that we subconsciously still inhabit.

Two different people were kind enough to give me a copy of this for my birthday, and I can see why they might have thought it would appeal to me – it’s an attempt to write a history of human consciousness, read through politics, economics and social structures. The author is a history professor and takes great glee in putting things together and trying to make a greater whole out of a lot of data.

I was not entirely convinced. The book has a strong start – looking at the fact that there were in fact six species of the genus homo, and asking how homo sapiens came out on top. It’s a good question, but it doesn’t get a very clear answer. Hariri then heads very much onto his own track by pointing out the damage done to us all by the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic period, in a way somewhat reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ remark about coming down from the trees having been a mistake, and proceeds through unrecorded and recorded history, coming to no particular conclusion other than that it is all a bit of a mess. I did not detect a central organising principle or methodology, and not for the first time I felt that anthropology often has better insights to offer than the usual historical or political narrative.

Irish readers will be surprised to learn that no saint is more venerated in Ireland than St Brigid, and there are various other slips indicating wide but not very deep reading.

Still, it’s interesting to see someone try to put all of human history between two covers, even if it isn;t a huge success.

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Sunday reading

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Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
The Angel Maker, by Stefan Brijs

Last books finished
1688: A Global History, by John E. Wills
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
Lives of Girls and Women, by Alice Munro
It’s Dark In London, ed. Oscar Zarate
Short Trips: The Quality of Leadership, ed. Keith R.A. DeCandido
Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Glass Prison, by Jacqueline Rayner
New Europe, by Michael Palin

Next books
Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 by David Kynaston
Etymologicon, by Mark Forsyth
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman

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Wonder Woman in Belgium

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I went to see Wonder Woman last weekend in my local cinema. I haven't been following the DC movies recently — the last I saw was The Dark Knight Rises five years ago — and went into it pretty unspoiled with no expectations. I really enjoyed it, and heartily recommend it to everyone.

Spoiler alert!

I had no idea that the film is largely set during the closing weeks of the first world war, in November 1918, with almost all of the second half set in a fictionalised Belgium. Although we Belgians have contributed greatly to the comics tradition, we're not used to seeing our country in superhero movies.

The fictional Belgian village of Veld, typically for Flanders of the time, has shop signs in French but the villagers mainly speak Flemish to each other — and a frisson went around the movie hall as Wonder Woman spoke to them in their own language. Later in the film, the audience went very quiet at one point.

The resonances were pretty strong. The cinema I was sitting in (which committed a major faux pas on the film's opening night) was built on the site of buildings destroyed during the invasion of August 1914, close to the monument to the 272 civilians in our town killed during that terrible month. The movie's interrogation of the rationale for war hit very close to home.

And although it is (rightly) being noted that the portrayal of chemical weapons in Wonder Woman has an eerie similarity to what is happening in Syria right now, it remains the case that the Belgian military Service for the Removal and Destruction of Explosive material — which is based in the woods in our home village — is still finding 150-200 tons of first world war munitions every year, 5-10% of which is toxic, with no sign of that abating.

I'm glad to say that the century-old chemical weapons don't come near our local headquarters, but are kept in Poelkapelle, 150 km west of here. They are currently working through a significant backlog with their new disposal chamber, which started working only last April after the previous one got blown up in 2012.

Coming from where I do, I'm used to writers taking my own cultural heritage and mangling it horribly. I think Wonder Woman very successfully avoided this trap as far as Belgium goes (though the castle where the military gala ball takes place appears to be in a very un-Belgian landscape). (And I did wonder about Themiscyra apparently being within a day or so of both Turkey and London.)

It's fundamentally a funny, witty action film with a light approach to actual history; but it does the serious bits very well. As I said, strongly recommended.

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De piraten van de Zilveren Kattenklauw by Geronimo Stilton

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

"Ja? En?"
"So what?"

Originally Il galeone dei gatti pirati, translated into English as Attack of the Bandit Cats, this is the eighth (or, in Dutch, third) of a series of many books about the gallant mouse hero Geronimo Stilton, who in this case is forced into exile after an embarrassing accident with phone directories and must evade death at the hands of pirate cats who want to invade Mouse Island and eat the inhabitants. Young F was into these quite a long time ago, and it took me until now to try one; I don't think I need to try another, though we have a few more on the shelves.

The is both the most popular book left on my shelves acquired in 2010, and the shortest. Next in the first category is Thorns by Robert Silverberg; in the second, Moon Stallion by Brian Hayes.

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Dune, by Frank Herbert

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Second paragraph of third section of first part:

It was near sunset at Castle Caladan on the day of Paul’s ordeal. The two women were alone in Jessica’s morning room while Paul waited in the adjoining soundproofed Meditation Chamber.

Second paragraph of third part:

Past the private kitchen he [Baron Harkonnen] stormed —past the library, past the small reception room and into the servants’ antechamber where the evening relaxation had already set in.

I last re-read Dune sixteen years ago, when I was starting my previous attempt to run through all the joint Hugo and Nebula winners, in alphabetical order of title. Now I’m trying again, but chronologically, which makes more sense really. Back then, I wrote:

I considered writing a joint review of Dune and the next book on my [alphabetical-by-title] list, Ender’s Game. Both are coming-of-age stories of a Messiah figure, who turns out to be the end product of a carefully engineered breeding programme. Both deal heavily with war; both feature apparently incomprehensible and terrifying alien life-forms. Both novels pretty much established their author’s reputation, and built a cult of fans who eagerly bought the many sequels (though in both cases the later volumes are generally agreed to be inferior). Both, indeed, are novelisations of stories originally published in Analog. However the two novels are so powerful individually that they deserve separate treatment.

It must have surely been at least partially an sf response to the challenge of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (to which Arthur C. Clarke compared it on first publication). Apart from anything else, it is a big fat book (longer, I suspect, than any other two of the Nebula or Hugo nominees for its year put together). The human environment of Dune is rather closely related to that of a medieval fantasy, with a feudal system involving Barons, Dukes, and the Emperor who bestows entire planets as fiefs on his followers. Every ruler has a genetically and mentally enhanced Mentat adviser, who fulfills the role of court wizard à la Merlin; the sect of Bene Gesserit are actually described as witches; the giant worms of Dune guard the immense riches of the planet’s spice.

Herbert did not stretch himself linguistically as Tolkien had – the languages of his Fremen and Bene Gesserit are much more closely based on Arabic and Hebrew than Tolkien’s Quenya and Sindarin on any real language. On the other hand Dune is the more daring work in its vision of a whole new planetary ecology: the desert, the spice (essential to space travel), the sandworms, and the adaptations made by the people living there to their environment, while Middle Earth is rarely far from pastoral England or chivalric Europe. The only recent sf that I know attempting anything as ambitious as the Dune project are Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and the Helliconia trilogy by Brian Aldiss. Wisely, each stopped after the third full novel (with a few spin-offs). [Sixteen years on, and I can’t thnk of any subsequent work in the same league as Dune, Mars or Helliconia.]

After 11 September 2001 (I was writing in December 2001), Dune once again makes interesting reading. The tough, fanatical, yet noble Arabic-speaking sons of the desert clash with the corrupt leaders of an imperialist civilisation, who find that they have much underestimated their foe. However direct parallels with the present day soon run into the, er, sand. The hero who leads the Fremen to victory is himself a child of the evil Empire; and the main goal of the Fremen – to make their planet a garden rather than a desert – is not obviously incompatible with Paul Atreides’ plans for political power as Emperor, whereas al-Qaeda want to destroy western civilisation, not rule it. And of course in our time line in 2001, at the time of writing anyway, it seems that the sons of the desert were overrated as fighters. (In retrospect I really regret drawing this parallel, which distracted a lot of readers.)

Herbert’s portrayal of the difficult encounter between the two cultures is particularly convincing. Most readers will vividly remember the scene early in the book where Stilgar, a Fremen leader, spits on the table before Paul’s father, Duke Leto, as a mark of respect, to the consternation of the Duke’s men who have not taken in how significant a tribute of water is on this desert world. Equally effective though more subtle (and lengthy) is a passage describing a dinner party hosted by the Atreides family shortly after, in which various local dignitaries give away more than they intend to about the actual political constellation on the planet. The dual role of the Imperial planetologist who is also the Fremen’s overall leader, and the careful manoeuvring of the spice smugglers in and out of the two cultural worlds, reflect this encounter and are also a part of the political intrigues which enrich the book – the Byzantine manoeuvring for power between Duke Atreides, Baron Harkonnen and the Emperor; the treachery of Dr Yueh; the ultimately unsuccessful plots of the Bene Gesserit, who as a female class of political advisers in an otherwise male-dominated society, have a better position than most women got in Tolkien.

If the portrayal of culture clash and Machiavellian politics are part of the book’s success, its biggest weakness is the handling of Paul Atreides’ prophetic mission. The philosophical foundations of his role as Kwisatz Haderach must surely smack rather too much of the Übermensch for today’s audience; the rather nasty distinction between “humans” and “animals” made in the first chapter by the Reverend Mother is if anything reinforced by the book’s ending. While for most of the book one can feel sympathy for the young man born for leadership trying to get to grips with his fate, once he has got into the stage where his plans are coming to fruition, he stops being interesting; even the villainous Baron Harkonnen expires not with a bang but a whimper.

There are a few niggling details that never quite gelled for me. I never quite grokked the impunity of the Harkonnen attack on the Atreides in the first place; does the kanly blood feud overwhelm all prospect of punishment for mass murder and invasion of someone else’s imperial fief? This galactic empire doesn’t seem to be all it is cracked up to be, with Dr Yueh’s imperial conditioning apparently broken down by simple blackmail, and the imperial troops regularly whopped by the Fremen. On a more ecological point, one has to question whether the sandworms really have enough food to satisfy their enormous energy needs. I suppose that if spice can get spaceships across gaps of light-years it can fuel a planetary population of sandworms. (And the Fremen seem a little too violent among themselves for viability.)

On rereading this time, I stand by most of the above, except where noted. Two new points: Herbert was no feminist, but he did at least give his female characters agency in a way that was rare at the time. And more on the craft side: the fact that each section of each chapter is prefaced with a scholarly quotation both prepares us for the Princess when she appears on stage at the end of the book, but also more importantly persuades us very cunningly that we must be reading an epic, because we are repeatedly told that we are. I’ve seen a lot of other writers try and fail to do this trick – I don’t think Herbert was the first to do it in this particular way, but he pulled it off successfully.

Dune was actually the joint winner of the 1966 Hugo for Best Novel, along with …And Call Me Conrad aka This Immortal by Roger Zelazny, which remains a firm favourite of mine. The other Hugo finalists were The Squares of the City, by John Brunner; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein; and Skylark DuQuesne, by E.E. “Doc” Smith. The Heinlein is the only other one I’ve read, and it is of course a classic, but was it perhaps a bit too advanced for the Hugo voters of the day? I must say as a voter I’d have found it a tough choice between Paul, Conrad and Mike.

The other novels on the 1965 Nebula shortlist – which was actually rather a long list – were The Star Fox, by Poul Anderson; Nova Express, by William S. Burroughs; Rogue Dragon, by Avram Davidson; Dr Bloodmoney, by Philip K. Dick; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick; The Genocides, by Thomas M. Disch; The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, by G.C. Edmondson; A Plague of Demons, by Keith Laumer; All Flesh is Grass, by Clifford D. Simak; The Clone, by Thomas T. Thomas and Kate Wilhelm; Open Prison aka The Escape Orbit, by James White. I have read the two Philip K. Dick novels, which are typically but not outstandingly mind-blowing, but none of the others. This was the first ever Nebula Award for Best Novel, and not for the last time, the Hugo ballot was better. (At least The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was shortlisted for the Nebula the following year.)

Other winners in the other categories included “‘Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”, by Harlan Ellison for the Nebula for Best Short Story and the Hugo for best Short Fiction; “The Saliva Tree” by Brian Aldiss and “He Who Shapes” by Roger Zelazny sharing the Nebula for Best Novella; and “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny winning the Nebula for Best Novelette. I don’t think the Ellison story has aged as well as Dune, but I like all the other winners.

Next up in this list: The Last Castle, by Jack Vance, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 1967 and the Nebula Award for Best Novella for 1966.

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Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, by J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne

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Second line of dialogue of Act 1 Scene 3:

ROSE GRANGER-WEASLEY (spotting ALBUS POTTER's loving look at the Chocolate Frogs):
Al. We need to concentrate.

Though described as the canonical eighth Harry Potter story, the central character is his and Ginny's son Albus, who faces parental disappointment partly because of his friendship with Scorpius Malfoy, son of Draco, and decides to right the wrongs done by the youthful Harry to Cedric Diggory during the events of Goblet of Fire (which I think is the best of the original series). It is enjoyable enough, but I felt the central narrative was a bit overstrained (and the female characters overshadowed, apart from the duplicitous Delphi), The plot revolves around time travel and paradoxes, and I think honours the source material well, taking us back not only to the Tri-Wizard Tournament but also to the murder of Harry's parents in Godric's Hollow, forcing everyone to confront their own pasts and alternative presents (there's a particularly grim moment for Hermione and Ron in one of the alternative timelines). It would be nice to see it on stage of course, but this will do.

This topped three of my lists simultaneously – the most popular unread book by a woman, most popular unread book acquired in 2016, and most popular unread sf book. Next in those respective lists are The Help by Katherine Stockett in the first, and The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A. Heinlein in the second and third.

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The Area X trilogy, by Jeff VanderMeer

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Annihilation, second paragraph of third chapter:

Beyond, the lighthouse stood, and before that, I knew, the remains of a village, also marked on the map. But in front of me was the trail, strewn at times with oddly tortured-looking pieces of heavy white driftwood flung far inland from past hurricanes. Tiny red grasshoppers inhabited the long grass in legions, with only a few frogs present to feast on them, and flattened grass tunnels marked where the huge reptiles had, after bathing in the sun, slid back into the water. Above, raptors searched the ground below for prey, circling as if in geometric pat-terns so controlled was their flight.

Authority, second paragraph of third chapter:

Control didn't recall much beyond the raw information from those prior times, but talking to the Voice made him nervous. He was sweating through his undershirt as he punched the number, after having first checked the hallway and then locked the door. Neither his mother nor the Voice had told him what might be expected from any report. His mother had said that the Voice could remove him from his position without consulting with her. He doubted that was true but had decided to believe it for now.

Acceptance, second paragraph of third chapter:

You usually start out front, on Chipper's rotting but still functional Safari Adventure miniature golf course, like you used to with your dad when you were a kid. The lions at the ninth hole are a sleeping huddle of dreamy plastic melted and blackened at the edges from some long-ago disaster. The huge hippo bestride the course-ending eighteenth has dainty ankles, and flaked-off splotches reveal bloodred paint beneath, as if its makers had been too obsessed with making it real.

I had previously read the Southern Reach trilogy when it was submitted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (and we didn't shortlist it); since then, the first volume, Annihilation, actually won the Nebula that year and then someone kindly gave me the three collected volumes for my birthday, not realising that I had already read them. So I gave it another try.

I think that Annihilation is a very strong opener, a story of a scientist sent as part of an investigating team – the latest after many failed missions – in a mysterious and dangerous area, discovering only slowly that she is more a part of the mystery than she had realised. The tone is eerie and detached, and the book itself quite short. It was well worth revisiting, and apparently there will be a film of it out next year starring Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh and written and directed by Alex Garland.

I'm still surprised that it won the Nebula. Three of the other shortlisted books survived Puppy attack to make it to the Hugo final ballot, and I liked them all better – The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie and The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu; the other two were Trial by Fire by Charles E. Gannon (which only just missed the Hugo shortlist) and Coming Home by Jack McDevitt (who appears regularly on the Nebula shortlist). On the other hand, Annihilation alone just scraped the very bottom of the Hugo "long-list" of the top fifteen vote-getters at nomination stage.

My own enjoyment of Annihilation was retrospectively dulled by my failure to enjoy the other two books. Eerie and detached is all very well, but in Authority I lost interest in Control, the central character, and lost trust in the means attributed to the evil government bureaucrats. By the time i reached Acceptance I was really confused about what was going on, not really interested in any of the characters, and frustrated by the lack of resolution of the central plot. A lot of people liked all three books more than I did; that's the way it goes sometimes.

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Europe in the Sixteenth Century, by H.G. Koenigsberger and George L. Mosse

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

By the end of the fifteenth century, the towns were almost everywhere governed by an oligarchy, a patriciate of rich merchants and property owners. The composition of these oligarchies varied considerably. In England there were hardly any patrician dynasties: after one or two generations of urban success, patrician families and their property tended to be reabsorbed, by intermarriage and land purchase, into the upper strata of rural society. This is one, though not the only, reason for the relatively small size and restricted autonomy of English provincial towns. As a further consequence, the smaller English boroughs were frequently dominated by one or several great county families, who, from the fifteenth century on, tended more and more to represent the boroughs in parliament. In Hamburg members of the knightly class were not allowed to reside in the city. In Lübeck, by contrast, the patriciate were generally landowners. In Frankfurt a small ring of families monopolized the town council. Most Italian cities had tamed the country nobility of their regions by forcing them to live for at least part of the year in the city; but the cost of urbanizing the feudal nobility was high: it introduced their family feuds into the cities where they became mixed up in the social and faction fights of town politics. Only Venice escaped these feuds; but the Venetian patriciate became the most exclusive ruling class in Europe, looking down even on the oldest nobility of the Venetian mainland who could trace their families back to the Lombards of the seventh century. From 1381 until 1646, the Venetian patriciate admitted no newcomers to its ranks — a unique degree of exclusiveness among the European aristocracies of the time. In the rest of Europe the variations were equally great, from the hidalgo-dominated cities of Castile to the complex of business and aristocratic groups ruling the Netherlands cities, with the banking and mercantile plutocracy of Antwerp as another extreme.

I’ve been digging into the detail of sixteenth-century Irish history so much that I thought it was time to take a step back and think about the wider European context. This is an Open University textbook (probably written to accompany a course) which does what it says on the tin, looking mainly at Western Europe. There is half a chapter on the Ottomans, Russia and the Americas; if Ireland is mentioned, I did not spot it. There are a lot of good set-pieces – Charles V, Henry VIII, the Dutch Revolt, Florence, Luther, Calvin; it was an exciting time in Europe.

I took three main things from it. The first is that the religious situation in the rest of Europe was confused and unsettled for much of the century, so the English flip-flopping between religious regimes in the 1550s and the uncertainty of the Elizabethan settlement has a wider context of which all policy-makers and most international merchants would have been aware. The second is just how marginal Ireland was; the authors go a great deal into the developed economics of the cities, the surrounding countryside and the wider realms, but I suspect that Ireland had never really recovered from the Black Death two centuries before and was only loosely connected to the wider European economy. And the third is that this was an amazing period in the arts and sciences – the authors make the claim that in the sixteenth century, “more of the finest paintings and fresoes of Europe were painted, and in a greater and more contrasting variety of styles, than in any other similar period.” I just had a quick look at Wikipedia; it lists over a thousand Italian painters from the sixteenth century. Europe would never look at itself the same way again.

Anyway, no particular Irish insights but useful context for the day when I get to work on my project. This came to the top of the list of non-fiction recommendations from you guys at the end of last year; next up is Common People: The History of an English Family by Alison Light.

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The Class novels

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Back in January I managed to score signed copes of the three spinoff novels based on the Doctor Who spinoff, Class; and having watched the whole series, I went to the books to maximise my Class experience. (I wonder if there were comics as well? Perhaps Big Finish will do audios in due course.)

Joyride, by Guy Adams

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Of course it is, The biggest. The best.”

Set between episodes 2 and 3, this is a decent self-contained story of alien tech exploited by nasty humans – the “Joyride” of the title allows people to take over other people’s bodies for a short time, and cause havoc with no consequences to themselves but plenty for their unwilling hosts. Guy Adams wrote a couple of Torchwood books as well (The House That Jack Built and The Men Who Sold The World) which both explored the background of the Torchwood universe in a bit more depth; he doesn’t do that so much here, because the palette of present-day human depravity is background enough. Particularly good for Ram fans.

The Stone House, by A.K. Benedict

Second paragraph of third chapter:

If the rumours are true then kids have visited and gone missing, that others have died. You’d think that’d make it the perfect place for teenagers to dare and date each other but most stay away. Last time Tanya was here, she’d stepped inside the porch and felt so cold and alone that she ran out and didn’t come back. Until now.

A.K. Benedict is a new writer to me, with a couple of novels edging between fantasy and crime, and also a rather fun Torchwood audio, The Victorian Age. This is a straightforward haunted house story, very similar in fact to this year’s Doctor Who episode Knock Knock, though with some good moments from Tanya and some great moments from Miss Quill, and with plotline involving a Syrian refugee, also trapped in the haunted house, for a contemporary feel. It’s set between episodes 3 and 4. All in the present tense for some reason.

What She Does next Will Astound You, by James Goss

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Learning how to make his new leg work? Worth it.

James Goss is one of the most consistently excellent writers in the Whoniverse right now, and he’s pulled it off again here: this is a great book, both thrilling and funny, about social media, fake news, memes, and awful alien invasion from a parallel reality (and perhaps the former producer of the BBC’s Cult TV website has been thinking about these themes for a while). He even manages to make April’s character look interesting (and has some quite good Charlie/Matteusz exchanges). The three books are all pretty decent efforts, but this is the best of them. (Not sure when it is set, but I think also between episodes 3 and 4 is the most likely.)

Alas, there are unlikely to be more of these, but I’m glad we have what we have.

The Humans, by Matt Haig

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

As I walked towards it, I noticed it was some kind of refill station. Cars were parked there, under a horizontal canopy and stationed next to simple-looking fuel-delivery systems. It was confirmed: the cars did absolutely nothing for themselves. They were practically brain dead, if they even had brains.

A novel about an alien who is sent to contemporary Cambridge to wipe out all knowledge of a particular mathematical theorem, and observes the weirdnesses of human society from the viewpoint of an outsider. It didn't really work for me; I found the protagonist a bit too detached, and the afterword to the book which makes clear that it's all Really A Metaphor rather retrospectively spoiled the reading experience for me. Lots of other people seem to have loved the book, but I didn't. (Read in January, only getting around to blogging now.)

This was the most popular book on my unread shelf acquired in 2015. Next up is Etymologican, by Mark Forsyth.

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