Monthly Archives: April 2019

Tuesday and April Books

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Books finished in the last week
Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, ed. Catherine McIlwaine
The Weather on Versimmon, by Matthew Griffiths
Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage, by Luuk van Middelaar

April Books

Non-fiction: 7 (YTD 14)
Publishing and the Science Fiction Canon: The Case of Scientific Romance, by Adam Roberts
Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History, by Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson and Sam Witwer
On the Waterfront, by Malcolm Johnson
The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan
Doctor Who Episode Guide, by Mark Campbell
Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, ed. Catherine McIlwaine
Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage, by Luuk van Middelaar

Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 9)
A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara
Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot

sf (non-Who): 7 (YTD 22)
Time Was, by Ian McDonald
The Land of Somewhere Safe, by Hal Duncan
Embers of War, by Gareth Powell
Phosphorus, by Liz Williams
Exit Strategy, by Martha Wells
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
Dread Nation, by Justina Ireland

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 7)
Combat Magicks, by Steve Cole
The Day She Saved the Doctor, by Jacqueline Rayner, Jenny T. Colgan, Susan Calman and Dorothy Koomson
The Weather on Versimmon, by Matthew Griffiths

Comics 3 (YTD 5)
On A Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden
Troll Bridge, by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran
De Terugkeer van de Wespendief, by Aimée de Jongh

6,700 pages (YTD 17,700)
11/22 (YTD 23/58) by non-male writers (McIlwaine, Yanagihara, “Eliot”, Williams, Wells, Novik, Ireland, Rayner et al, Walden, Doran, de Jongh)
3/22 (YTD 7/58) by PoC (Yanagihara, Ireland, Koomson)
0 rereads (YTD 2/58)

Reading now
Dark Lord of Derkholm, by Diana Wynne Jones
A Sunless Sea by Anne Perry
The Cruel Prince, by Holly Black
The Good Doctor, by Juno Dawson

Coming soon (perhaps):
Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M Banks
The Ginger Man, by J. P. Donleavy
Bland Ambition, by Steve Tally
Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, ed. Kevin J. Anderson
Sovereign by R.M. Meluch
Will Supervillains Be On The Final?, by Naomi Novik, art by Yishan Li
Five Women Who Loved Love, by Ihara Saikaku
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters
In Another Light, by Andrew Greig
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll
Becoming, by Michelle Obama
“Goat Song”, by Poul Anderson
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Graham
1913: The World before the Great War, by Charles Emmerson
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew
Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson
Het Amusement, by Brecht Evens
Grimm Tales, by Philip Pullman
The Ghosts of Heaven, by Marcus Sedgwick
The Slender-fingered Cats of Bubastis, by Xanna Eve Chown

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Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

But this blessed persistence in which affection can take root had been wanting in Gwendolen’s life. It was only a year before her recall from Leubronn that Offendene had been chosen as her mamma’s home, simply for its nearness to Pennicote Rectory, and that Mrs. Davilow, Gwendolen, and her four half-sisters (the governess and the maid following in another vehicle) had been driven along the avenue for the first time, on a late October afternoon when the rooks were crawing loudly above them, and the yellow elm-leaves were whirling.

Way back in the summer of 2002 we visited a friend who was living at Chilworth Manor near Guildford. The BBC were filming the TV version of Daniel Deronda there – Chilworth Manor was playing the part of Offendene – but it was the weekend so nobody from the film crewwas there. While we weren't looking, five-year-old B opened and played with the BBC's cans of paint, and had great fun. It was a memorable afternoon…

Anyway, I was inspired to get this, not by an embarrassing afternoon in Surrey in 2002, but by reading F.R. Leavis' The Great Tradition many years later, in which Leavis says that half of Daniel Deronda is really good, however it's not the half with Daniel Deronda but the other half, about the novel's heroine Gwendolen. To be honest I disagree. I thought that both stories were pretty good. Gwendolen, like several other George Eliot characters, marries the wrong man for reason that seem to her right at the time (and that the reader can clearly understand) but which are obviously doomed to failure. It's a story told well, but I actually found the Middlemarch version more compelling. (I guess because Dorothea is a nicer person than Gwendolen.) Meanwhile Daniel Deronda finds himself on a quest for his own roots, and ends up as an early Zionist having started the book unaware that he was even Jewish. I found that absolutely fascinating; Zionism in the 1870s was obviously a very different phenomenon from its later permutations. Deronda's awakening does depend on a coulpe of lucky coincidences, but great stories are often told about unlikely events. I'll give a shout out for the three mothers in the books as well – Deronda's mother, who makes a late but spectacular appearance; Gwendolen's mother, who is smarter than her children realise; and Mrs Glasher, the mother of Gwendolen's husband's children, who we see from several different perspectives. (Mrs Glasher is also Irish, though this is stated only once and obliquely.) Both halves of it are a great book, if a long one. You can get it here.

This was both the top unread non-sf fiction book on my pile and the top unread book by a woman. The next on both counts is The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters.

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A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

So they didn’t mind JB deciding for them, not in this case. They figured they could accommodate twenty-five people comfortably, or forty uncomfortably. “So make it forty,” said JB, promptly, as they’d known he would, but later, back at their apartment, they wrote up a list of just twenty, and only their and Malcolm’s friends, knowing that JB would invite more people than were allotted him, extending invitations to friends and friends of friends and not-even friends and colleagues and bartenders and shop clerks, until the place grew so dense with bodies that they could open all the windows to the night air and still not dispel the fog of heat and smoke that would inevitably accumulate.

I was in Croatia a few years ago and was given such a strong recommendation for this novel that I bought it on Kindle on the spot; however it took a while before I actually got around to reading it. It's a tough read but a very good one. It starts off as the story of four friends sharing a New York apartment, JB, Malcolm, Willem and Jude; but then it zooms in on Jude, who has overcome a horrible childhood of sexual and physical abuse to become a top lawyer – who still self-harms and will never really get better. Jude's frustration with his own limitations often cuts him off from his friends and those who love him; the whole scenario is delicately and sympathetically observed. At some length – the book is over 700 pages, all meticulously judged. I was interested to see Gillian Anderson recommending it too, so if you don't believe me, believe her. Strongly recommended. You can get it here.

This was both the top unread book on my pile by a writer of colour, and my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next respectively on those lists are Five Women Who Loved Love, by Ihara Saikaku, and Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson.

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Combat Magicks, by Steve Cole

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

"What's the panic?" asked Ryan. "Who's Attila the Hun?"

The two best episodes of last year's Doctor Who series were the two historical settings which are up for the Hugo this year; here, Steve Cole takes the Tardis crew to a less well known historical moment, the conflict between Attila the Hun and the Roman general Flavius Ætius which culminated in the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields in 451, near what is now Troyes in France. As it turns out, there are aliens involved as well as human factions; the Tardis crew get split up four ways – to facilitate the plot of course, but it also gives Cole a chance to show off his grasp of detail in the setting and the characterisation. Cole is one of the most prolific Who writers, and I felt he was well on form. You can get the book here.

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Faustus Kelly, by Flann O’Brien

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Opening of Act III:

Four weeks later.
The scene is the same save that the room is in a far more advanced state of disorder with posters, stationery, banners, flags and all manner of electioneering paraphernalia. A clock shows that it is about nine in the evening. The curtains are drawn.
MARGARET is sitting disconsolately alone on the sofa, which is facing the audience towards the left of the stage. KELLY is listening on the phone, bending over a small table towards the right. There is complete silence for a few seconds after the curtain goes up.
KELLY: What? What?
(MARGARET sighs and passes her hand wearily across her brow.)
KELLY: (Eagerly.) Yes. Yes, yes! Good, good. Excellent. Yes? (He pauses to listen.)
MARGARET: What does he say?
KELLY: (Holding up his hand to silence her.) Are you sure of that? WHAT? (He listens.) Good! Ring me up later. I SAID RING ME UP LATER! Goodbye!
(He bangs down the phone and turns to MARGARET, gleefully rubbing his hands.)
KELLY: Margaret, Margaret, I’m nearly home and dried. I’m nearly home and dried! (He flops down on the sofa beside her and takes her hand.) I’m nearly home, Margaret.
MARGARET: (Dejectedly.) That’s good news.

I read this as potential education for this year's Retro Hugo Awards; since it ran for 11 performances in the Abbey Theatre, it would have been eligible in one of the Best Dramatic Presentation categories, but it was not at all clear which one. In the end I concluded that it would have been well over 90 minutes in length; the pagecount is somewhat more than Noel Coward's Cavalcade, which was cut from a three-hour stage script to make a film almost two hours in length, and about two thirds that of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird which was four and a half hours long when first performed. So I reckon Faustus Kelly would take the guts of three hours to perform. However, Hugo voters did not support it in sufficient strength to make tjhis a live issue.

I'm a huge Flann O'Brien fan, but this is not his best work. There are two jokes: the chairman of the local council, Kelly, sells his soul to the Devil, who in turn finds that the ins and outs of local Irish politics are too much for him. And there is the realtionship between Kelly and Margaret, who is clearly his girlfriend, but whose very Anglicised brother retorns from England to fight the election against him. There are a lot of good turns of phrase, but fans will have come across all the best bits elsewhere.

Apparently he was deeply upset by the play's commercial failure, which of course came soon after all the unsold copies of At Swim-Two-Birds were destroyed in a London air-raid and The Third Policeman was rejected by Longmans. Later in 1943, he carried out the most gruelling assignment of his professional career, the inquiry into the Cavan Orphanage fire which took place only a short time after Faustus Kelly closed. Another play also failed in 1943 (Rhapsody in Stephen's Green, an adaptation of the Insect Play by Josef and Karel Čapek). He was fired from the civil service in 1953 and did not publish another book until 1961, by which time the end was in sight.

Anyway, I read this as part of the Plays and Teleplays collection, which you can get here.

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Present Danger, ed. Eddie Robson

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Second paragraph of third story ("Six Impossible Things", by Simon Guerrier):

He lay on the cool, hard floor, waiting for someone to make the obvious gag that their luck would have to change sometime. But no-one spoke and he couldn't hear them breathing. Just across from where he lay, something stank of burning flesh and plastic.

A collection of Bernice Summerfield short stories, set in the middle of Season 11 of the Big Finish audio adventures, which I don't seem to have written up and can't now remember much about. The two audio stories that bracket the collection are both by Eddie Robson, who provides the framing narrative as well for Present Danger as well.

The premise is that the galaxy is under attack from the time-travelling Deindum, and the book fills the space between the appearance of the alien aggressors at the end of Resurrecting the Past and the fightback in Escaping the Future. Since I had missed out on the context, the stories and collection did not work all that well for me, though there are some nice flashes – the cave museum in Kate Orman's “Don’t Do Something, Just Sit There”, and Braxiatel's use of time travel and recorded history in Lance Parkin’s “Winging It”. But really I need to catch up on the Bernice Summerfield audio thread a bit more systematically.

You can get this collection here. Next up is The Weather on Versimmon, a novel by Matthew Griffiths, set during the Road Trip stories which I do remember listening to.

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  • Tue, 17:35: Chap opposite me in Eurostar reading “A Handbook on the WTO Customs Valuation Agreement”, by Rosenow and O’Shea. A sign of the times?
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Tuesday reading

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Current
Dark Lord of Derkholm, by Diana Wynne Jones
A Sunless Sea by Anne Perry

Last books finished
The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
The Day She Saved the Doctor, by Jacqueline Rayner, Jenny T. Colgan, Susan Calman and Dorothy Koomson
Dread Nation, by Justine Ireland
Doctor Who Episode Guide, by Mark Campbell

Next books
Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M Banks
The Ginger Man, by J. P. Donleavy

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The Capital, by Robert Menasse

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Es sollte tatsächlich der Tag werden, an dem er Abschied nehmen musste. Er dachte, es wäre der Bauch. Sein großer Blähbauch drückte gegen seine Lunge und presste sie zusammen, so empfand er es und er meinte, dass das der Grund für seine Atemnot wäre, die immer wieder wie ein Seufzen klang. The day would surely come when he would have to take his leave. He thought it would be his stomach. His large potbelly was pressing against his lungs, forcing them together. That was what it felt like and he supposed it was the reason for his breathlessness, which sounded again and again like a sigh.

This novel by an Austrian writer took German-speaking Brussels by storm last year, and hasn't quite had the same impact on English-speaking Brussels (or French-speaking Brussels) since it came out in translation earlier this year. It's a multi-stranded story of Commission officials, Brussels people and visitors, with a mixture of sardonic humour and grim observation of the miseries of the human condition. The central plotline concerns an initiative to commemorate the anniversary of the European Union in Auschwitz, the people who promote it and the poeople who kill it off; this is combined with a peculiar subplot about a runaway pig. A lot of the bureaucratic personalities are well observed, and there are some great set-pieces – the cyclists ganging together on the morning run, the think-tank conference, the graveyard.

Menasse is of course a controversialist, and has taken flak for inventing quotes from Walter Hallstein, the first President of the European Commission. To a certain extent I think that you are entitled to put things in novels that are not actually true, but he has apparently also included them in supposedly non-fictional texts, which is less praiseworthy. The pig-trading strand of the book is based on a total misinterpretation of EU agricultural trade rules. Much more trivially, the book is set after the 2016 Brexit referendum, but has the European Policy Centre still at its former location in the Residence Palace, rather than Rue de Trône where it’s been since 2015.

I think it appeals more to the German/Austrian sense of humour, and at the end I was slightly wondering what the point was. But there are few enough novels looking at European Brussels in anything more than cliche, so it's welcome from that point of view. You can get it here.

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Bitter Angels, by C. L. Anderson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

So, I lingered with my family. David made a his classic slow-recovery breakfast: waffles with butter and maple syrup, or ice cream, if you wanted it, which the kids invariably did, except for Jo who ate her waffles naked to prove one of her more esoteric points. Don’t ask me which one. There was also bacon, and stewed apples. Not even Jo turned those down. I drank a third cup of coffee while talking about nothing much with the kids.

Gritty complex far-future espionage story, whose heroine is recalled from retirement with her young family to investigate the disappearance of an old frenemy. I found it all a bit too complex and the characters not all that attractive. I know some people liked it more than me. Author better known as Sarah Zettel. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2012. Next on that pile is Sovereign, by R.M. Meluch.

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The Life of Sir Denis Henry, Catholic Unionist, by A.D. McDonnell

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Henry, of course, was not the only Irish Law Officer of note during this period, and he was assisted by two Solicitor-Generals [sic]; D.M. Wilson, followed by T.W. Brown. Born in Ballymena and son of a former moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, Wilson had been educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Trinity College Dublin. Called to the Bar in 1885, Wilson had practised in the North-West Circuit, winning the West Down seat in the 1918 general election. Thomas Watters Brown was born in Newtownards in 1879, and had been educated at Campbell College Belfast and Queen's University. Called to the Bar in 1907, he became a KC in February 1918, successfully contesting the North Down constituency in the , general election of that year. Brown, in fact, became Attorney-General on 5 August 1921 when Henry was appointed Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. The vacancy in the Solicitor-Generalship resulting from Brown's promotion was never filled, and he thus had the distinction of being the last holder of the two Irish Law Offices of Solicitor- and Attorney-General. Henry was also supported by the appointment of William Evelyn Wylie as Law Adviser, which arose from the number of legal problems that the Irish Law Officers had to deal with, and the fact that one of the two Law Officers was frequently out of the country. The position of Law Adviser had been abolished in 1883, but was revived in 1919, with Wylie's brief to act as a general assistant to the Attorney General. Wylie, born in 1881, had been called to the Bar in 1905, and became a KC in 1914. Such were the pressures on all of the Irish Law officers, it was found necessary in 1920 to employ M.D. Begley in a temporary capacity to assist the Law Adviser as well. A barrister of some repute, Wylie had designs on the vacant Solicitor-Generalship following Henry's promotion in 1919. After his close friend Sir John Maxwell wrote to Lord French on his behalf, Wylie met the Chief Secretary, Ian Macpherson, who told him that the government's wish to have the Solicitor-General in the Commons made him ineligible. However, Wylie was quite taken with the prospect of the post of Law Adviser, and recalled: 'Macpherson was empowered to offer me the appointment at a salary of £2,000 a year with the right to practise as well … I jumped at it.' Within a year, not only would Wylie clash with Henry and other members of the cabinet over the direction of government policy, but he would also reveal his formidable powers and eventually exercise a considerable influence on the government response to the Anglo-Irish War.

A nice short monograph about a rather obscure figure of the Irish revolutionary period. Denis Stanislaus Henry was something of a paradox – a Catholic from Draperstown who got into Unionist politics, fighting four Westminster elections and winning two of them (he lost the other two by less than ten votes); he was the last Catholic to be elected to Westminster as a Unionist from Ulster, just over a century ago in 1918. He served as Solicitor-General and then Attorney-General for Ireland in the critical 1918-21 period, where he found himself defending government violence in the House of Commons without necessarily being fully in the loop himself. Then when the government of Northern Ireland was set up in 1921, he became the first Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. An exciting period of setting up and implementing new institutions ended with his sudden death at the age of 61 in 1925. For almost 80 years after that, only Protestants were appointed as Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland (though both the incumbent and his predecessor are Catholics).

Henry is an interesting case of someone who was convinced by the economic and legal case for Unionism, and not so much by cultural considerations. It was a consistent position through his career (as far as we can tell); of course it did him no harm – the positions of Solicitor-General and Attorney-General would not have been open to political Nationalists even as late as 1918 and 1919 – but he did not push it as hard as he might have done, particularly when he lost North Tyrone so narrowly in 1906 and 1907. What I missed was an account of the internal workings of the Unionist Party; it must have been a bit of a stretch to ask the Orangemen of North Tyrone and then South Londonderry to endorse a visibly non-Protestant candidate, and presumably he had done some local footwork and/or got the backing of a significant political patron. But we don't see that here.

The story of the installation of the Northern Ireland judicial system was very interesting, though. When Henry took up the position of Lord Chief Justice in August 1921, it was not at all obvious that the new government of Northern Ireland would even survive until the end of the year. I know the Royal Courts of Justice building as a fixed point in the middle of Belfast – but of course it was only opened in 1933, and we see Henry and a very small staff fighting for space in Crumlin Road to create a new structure, Henry himself signing off on demands for office furnishings. My own dealings with the Northern Irish justice system amount to a small claims case against an ex-landlord, but I have the greatest respect for those who kept Henry's system going in hard times. Still, I feel that there is more to be told here too.

This was the shortest book acquired in 2011 which was still on my unread shelves. You can get it here. Next up after that is The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement by my old friend (Lord) Paul Bew.

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Tweaking The Tail, by John Leeson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

This was perhaps quite a far-sighted move on my father's part, as my new experience would certainly bring me down to earth with a bump and put me squarely face to face with the realities of life and death on a daily basis. My very first well-remembered job was to carry the wrapped body of a three-year-old child, the victim of an accidental drowning in a local canal, to the hospital mortuary.

Yet another one of the Doctor Who books rushed out for the 2013 anniversary (in this case a revision and expansion of a 2011 book with a different title), by the actor who played the voice of K9 in both Old and New Who and also in no less than three spinoffs (K9 and Company, the Sarah Jane Adventures, and the Australian K9 series). Leeson's style is a bit twee, rather reminiscent of Arthur Marshall's Myrtlebank; but he writes about some serious subjects, most notably his own struggles with mental health as a teenager – without going into extensive detail, he makes it clear that he had a lot to overcome. Apart from that, he's had an actor's career, done a few conventions, become an expert on food and wine, been a local magistrate; curiously omitted is the fact that he stood in local council elections for the Liberal Democrats in 2002 and 2010 (and did so for a third time in 2018). Much the funniest anecdote is his attendance, at first incognito, at a convention in the USA where he came second in a competition for K9 impressions, before revealing who he actually was. A very quick read. You can get it here.

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Fanny Hill, by John Cleland, and Candide, by Voltaire

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Pornography meets philosophy today, in two novels both named after their protagonists.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Fanny Hill:

Alas! it was enough I knew his pleasure to submit joyfully to him, whatever pain I foresaw it would cost me.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Candide:

Enfin, tandis que les deux rois faisaient chanter des Te Deum, chacun dans son camp, il prit le parti d’aller raisonner ailleurs des effets et des causes. Il passa par-dessus des tas de morts et de mourants, et gagna d’abord un village voisin ; il était en cendres : c’était un village abare que les Bulgares avaient brûlé, selon les lois du droit public. Ici des vieillards criblés de coups regardaient mourir leurs femmes égorgées, qui tenaient leurs enfants à leurs mamelles sanglantes ; là des filles éventrées après avoir assouvi les besoins naturels de quelques héros, rendaient les derniers soupirs ; d’autres à demi brûlées criaient qu’on achevât de leur donner la mort. Des cervelles étaient répandues sur la terre à côté de bras et de jambes coupés. At length—whilst, on the orders of the two kings, the Te Deum was being sung in both camps—he decided to go and continue his meditations on the nature of cause and effect in some other part of the world. Passing over heaps of dead and dying, he came to a neighbouring village. It was in ashes, having been an Abarian village and therefore burnt, in accordance with the laws of war, by the Bulgarians. Old men mangled by bayonets watched their wives dying with gashes in their throats, clasping their children to their blood-stained breasts. Amongst the dying were girls who had been used to satisfy a number of heroes' natural needs, and had afterwards been disembowelled. Other women, half burnt alive, begged to be put out of their pain. The ground was covered with brains, arms and legs.

My various unread piles happened to throw these two books up simultaneously, which gave a fortuitously appropriate paired reading. Fanny Hill, published in 1748, is a novel ostensibly about sex which brings in some philosophical reflections. Candide, published in 1759, is a novel about philosophy in which the protagonists' sex lives are strongly reflected. Both are mercifully short. Both are by men (at least ostensibly, though I have to say I suspect an anonymous female hand assisting John Cleland).

The purpose of the two books is very different of course. Candide is satirical; we are not meant to take the adventures of the title character, or his lover Cunégonde or their teacher Professor Pangloss, as reportage of what could happen to real people, though of course they go to real places and experience real events. (My edition also includes the sequel, which is not generally thought to be by Voltaire and takes the characters to new but less well realised adventures in Turkey, Persia, and Denmark.) The point of Candide is to challenge complacency on the part of the reader, both in terms of assuming that society in general gets things right and in terms of presuming that there is an easy philosophical fix.

Fanny Hill is supposedly realistic – she doesn't leave London, but has plenty of adventures while there (meanwhile her first lover is banished to the South Seas). We are meant to take it as more or less documentary of what actually went on in the sex trade in mid-18th century London (probably not all that different from the sex trade before or since). It is of course meant to be very titllating, though I must say that the language used is a lot less explicit than you can find on Archive of Our Own without looking too far. Where Candide varies the geographical setting, Fanny Hill varies the sexual activity.

Both are Bildungsromane, but actually I think Fanny has the more interesting and convincing character arc. Candide has grown up a bit by the end of the book; Fanny has grown up a lot, and has moved from complete dependence to almost complete independence. She was also new to me (I had read Candide many years ago) and I enjoyed her adventures more. You can get Candide here and Fanny Hill here.

Fanny Hill was my top unread book acquired in 2015. Next on that pile is A Sunless Sea, by Anne Perry. Candide was top of my list of books that I had previously read but not reviewed online. Next on that pile is The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame.

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Happy Patch: short films in Brussels

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I did something last night I have not done before – I went to the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, which has been going for about as long as I have been living in Belgium. The partner of one of my colleagues at work had a short film in the mix, so I persuaded Anne and F to join me at Bozar for its session. In the space of two hours we saw ten very different films from nine different countries, all made in 2018. They were:

Stray (14 min, Australia), written by Katherine Chediak Putnam and Dean Law, directed by Dean Law

Spooky story of a returning WW2 soldier (David Breen) who finds his wife (Melinda Joan Reed) is now possessed by the spirit of a stray cat and therefore has stopped wearing clothes.

Lendemains funèbres (18 min, France), written, directed by and starring Ambroise Michel

Silly story of an undertaker whose daughter (Ambre Hasaj) starts predicting which member of the family will die next – and it's Papa's turn…

Synthia (11 min, Austria), directed by Maria Hinterkörner and Bernhard Weber, written by Maria Hinterkörner

Maria Hinterkörner was actually there last night and did a short interview before we launched into the films for the evening. This was our second favourite film of the ten, with near-future designer Pez (Lisa Schrammel) balancing work commitments over boyfriend Chris (Aksel Stasny). She ironically asks her home AI Synthia (voiced by Doris Wolf) if it can kill Chris for her. Robots have no sense of humour…

In a foreign town (11 min, USA), directed and written by Michael Shlain, based on stories by Thomas Ligotti

A chap (Yuri Lowenthal) talks to his therapist (Tony Amendola, by far the highest-profile name of the evening) and relives being taken to a strange theatre as a boy (Jack McGraw) where he saw a scary showman (Strange Dave). Even at only 11 minutes, it went on a bit.

Moriran los niños (no IMDB but here's a trailerAlien Death Fuck (They Came) (4 min, Norway) directed by Thomas Lunde

The shortest film of the night, actually originally a funders' perk for a Norwegian alien sex invasion TV series. A seduction with a twist. (Didn't note the two actors' names at the time, and now can't find a cast list online; not on IMDB, at least not yet.)

Le Blizzard (12 min, Andorra) written and directed by Àlvaro Rodriguez Areny

In wartime, a woman (Aida Folch) has been separated from her young daughter (Irene Quero) in a blizzard which appears to be on the French border with either Spain or Andorra. Gruesome violence and special effects, but yet another film with an inconclusive ending. Judging by the length of the credits, the entire population of Andorra appears to have participated in the making of the film.

Regulation (12 min, USA) written and directed by Ryan Patch

The standout of the evening, which is just as well as it's the one by my colleague's other half. In the not very distant future, a social worker (Sunita Mani) has the task of persuading a young girl (Audrey Bennett) to take the mandatory "happy patch" which stops children and adolescents from experiencing negative feelings. In a very few minutes, the details of a future society are convincingly conveyed by showing rather than telling. Here's the trailer.

Neverending Kitchen (12 min, Spain) written and directed by Fernando González Gómez

Three friends (Javier Bódalo, Carmen Ibeas, Niko Verona) talking in the kitchen after a party, with comic horror effects. Dialogue depends at one point on an untranslatable Spanish pun. Seemed a bit pointless.

Dead Teenager Séance (20 min, Brazil) directed by Rodrigo Gasparini and Dante Vescio, written by Dante Vescio, Rafael Baliú and Rodrigo Gasparini

Rather silly teenagers-explore-haunted-house story. Good make-up and effects and some funny lines that even survived translation from the Portuguese. Notable performance from Sofia Peres as Punky, the girl who gets killed near the start and spends the rest of the film plotting vengeance.

So, that was a reasonable strike rate – only a couple of them were actively bad and a couple were actually rather good. I might go again another year.

Friends in the London area might like to note that Regulation is also being shown at Sci-Fi London on 18 May at 1440, 19 May at 1445 and 21 May at 1330, along with a bunch of others.

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My tweets

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Tuesday reading

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Current
The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
The Day She Saved the Doctor, by Jacqueline Rayner, Jenny T. Colgan, Susan Calman and Dorothy Koomson

Last books finished (rather a good week – though some of these are pretty short)
On A Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden
A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara
Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot
Troll Bridge, by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran
Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History, by Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson and Sam Witwer
Phosphorus, by Liz Williams
Exit Strategy, by Martha Wells
On the Waterfront, by Malcolm Johnson
De Terugkeer van de Wespendief, by Aimée de Jongh

Next books
Dark Lord of Derkholm, by Diana Wynne Jones
A Sunless Sea by Anne Perry

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My tweets

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  • Mon, 20:22: RT @er1cmau: « Chaque face, chaque pierre, du vénérable monument est une page non seulement de l’histoire du pays mais encore de l’histoire…
  • Mon, 20:26: RT @POETSorg: The towers of Notre Dame cut clean and gray The evening sky, and pale from left to right A hundred bridges leap from either q…
  • Mon, 20:48: RT @AntonyJohnston: A reminder: Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, often considered the first SF novel, is *literally* a story examining whether…
  • Mon, 21:16: RT @GreggFavre: After my last tweet, I got a couple DMs asking firefighting related questions about the #NotreDameFire. I -like most of yo…
  • Tue, 10:45: RT @BrigidLaffan: Short thread on Ireland’s management of Brexit negs. 1. Ireland did its homework & had a contingency plan ready by 24th J…
  • Tue, 11:29: RT @VinayPatel: GDPR is my therapist https://t.co/GqsA7Fbfky

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Molten Heart, by Una McCormack

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The friends shook themselves off, checked for scrapes and bruises, and then turned to thank their saviour. She was slighter in build than the others they had already met, but still manifestly the same species. She gleamed jet black in the half-light, and when she moved, flecks of mica shimmered all over her body.

First (I think) of the new novels featuring the Thirteenth Doctor and the new Team Tardis. This is a well-paced and well-written book that captures the regular characters very well. I was a bit less convinced by the setting – a society of silicon-based creatures living on the inner surface of a cavity inside a planet, which itself is threatened by environmental catastrophe; I think there would be logistical difficulties with some elements of this. But the social and political non-human world is well portrayed, and it is one of those stories that you can imagine would have worked well on screen; as it is, it’s a fun read. You can get it here.

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