The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete. There were no windows, just two narrow shafts Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts
I met Seamus Heaney only once, a chance encounter in a pub (the Foggy Dew in Temple Bar in Dublin, some time around 1989); he offered to buy me a drink on the basis of having known my parents in his Belfast days, but I was too shy to accept. I wish I had. I would have learned something from even ten minutes’ conversation with him. I also once sat opposite his wife Marie at a dinner, but did not pluck up the courage to say much to her.
He came from Bellaghy, 30 km up the River Bann from my own ancestors in Aghadowey, and this first collection is very much about growing up there and growing into his role as a poet. I knew a few of them from school days: the opening “Digging”, where he sees his vocation as poetry rather than agriculture:
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.
The heart-wrenching “Mid-Term Break”, about the death of his younger brother in a car accident:
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four foot box, a foot for every year.
The rather regrettable “Docker”:
Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets; God is a foreman with certain definite views
Reading the full collection is well worth it. There’s a real underlying narrative, of a shift from his family heritage on the farm and boyhood fascinations with the land, to adulthood and poetry, There are some lovely natural images, such as “Waterfall”:
Simultaneous acceleration And sudden braking; water goes over Like villains dropped screaming to justice.
And romance in a sequence beginning with “Twice Shy”:
Her scarf à la Bardot, In suede flats for the walk, She came with me one evening For air and friendly talk. We crossed the quiet river, Took the embankment walk.
And at the end, another moment of self-dedication in “Personal Helicon”:
I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
I don’t read a lot of poetry, and I should read more.
And there are those who say: chaotic. This interpretation seems to allow the words, which are all that we have of the beginning, their voice. Tohu vavohu. Higgledy-piggledy. Upside down. Inside out. Hither and thither. The Creator wanted to show us the first contraction of all-that-is. All modes of expression were open to Him, every human sense. He chose words—tohu vavohu. Tumble-jumble.
I’ve read two other books by Naomi Alderman, a Doctor Who story and a novel where all women have the power to strike down their enemies, and enjoyed them both. Disobedience is not sf; it’s a closely observed story of a Jewish woman returning to London from New York after her rabbi father’s death, and becoming simultaneously enmeshed in and rejected by the dynamics of the Jewish community in which she grew up, where the new rabbi is her cousin who has meanwhile married the girl she loved as a teenager. The dynamics of grief and disruption of a conservative community are very well described; the Hendon synagogue isn’t quite the Satmar sect of Unorthodox, but that actually means it is recognisably closer to the Irish Catholicism that I experienced growing up. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was the top unread book by a woman on my shelves. Next on that pile is Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
I started the month with Brussels Comic Con, and got photographs with both Billie Piper and Michelle Gomez.
The following weekend I went to Kosovo for a conference (dubbed into Albanian from 38:00 here) and caught up with my former intern – now the same age as I was when she worked for me, fifteen years before.
But my big trip that month was to Nashville, Tennessee, to give a lecture on Brexit, which I linked with a couple of days in Washington where I admired the portrait of Alice Roosevelt Longworth in the Willard Hotel.
In Nashville, the goddess Athena inside the replica of the Parthenon is very disturbing.
I took B and F for a walk in the park, and frites.
I ended a month of much travel in Dublin, filming the Hugo announcement video. Our last filmed segment was on Howth Head with the legendary artist Jim Fitzpatrick.
The grimmest news of the month was the murder of Northern Irish journalist Lyra McKee. I did not know her, but we had a lot of mutual friends.
It being the month when Hugo nominations closed, and when the Brexit drama was occupying much of my thinking time, I read only five books.
1,500 pages (YTD 11,000) 1/5 (YTD 12/36) by non-male writers (Newman) 2/5 (YTD 4/36) by PoC (Lee, Thompson)
With only five books I won’t go into great detail about what was bad and what was good, but Rosewater by Tade Thompson was good, and you can get it here.
Hoegaarden is a white beer for most of us, and a small town near Tienen for some of us; it is the home of my daughter’s secret boyfriend. I also discovered, via the Megalithic Portal site, that it has a potential menhir, standing by the river of a side street. There is very little detail available about this stone (some mutter darkly that it’s a deliberate imitation of the Pierre de Brunehaut, the largest menhir in Belgium). The Megalithic Portal site says that it was “found at the end of the 1990’s, a bit further down the road, near the river where it was lying flat. Hardly documented so far, and little known. Its overall shape and type of stone are common characteristics of several menhirs found in the region.” There used to be a much bigger megalith in the neighbourhood, but it is long gone.
So I went to see it with B. It was a cold day and she was not prepared to give me a smile, but she gives the stone a sense of scale.
As Spın̈al Tap almost put it,
No one knows who they were or what they were doing But their legacy remains Hewn into the living rock… Of Hoegaarden
We stopped off to visit B’s secret boyfriend as well. He got a bit of a smile.
Current A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg φ1 Official Secrets, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko Filter House, by Nisi Shawl
Last books finished υ1 The Road To Kosovo: A Balkan Diary, by Greg Campbell The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell Song of Time, by Ian R. MacLeod
Next books Doctor Who: Origin Stories (no editor given) Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence M. Schoen “Schrödinger’s Kitten”, by George Alec Effinger
Mad Max: Fury Road won the Ray Bradbury Award in 2016; it was on the Hugo ballot, but beaten by The Martian. Also on both ballots were Ex Machina and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, with Inside Out and a Jessica Jones episode rounding out the Bradbury list. More important in the wider scheme of things, it won six Oscars, more than any other film that year – the Best Picture winner, Spotlight, won only two. IMDB users rate it top film of the year on one ranking and third on the other.
I found only one actor who had been in a previous Bradbury/Hugo-winning film, and none who had been in Oscar-winners or in Doctor Who. But it’s a big role: Max himself is played by Tom Hardy, who was the forger Eames in Inception.
I don’t often drift into real-world politics in these reviews, but during the worst agonies of the Brexit debate back in 2018, British minister David Davis incautiously promised that the UK, after leaving the EU, would not be plunged into a “Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction”. Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times had great fun with this:
To the undoubted relief of everyone concerned, David Davis, the Brexit secretary, announced on Monday that the UK was not seeking a dystopian “Mad Max-style” Brexit. At one level this is a shame because the cars in that movie are well cool. Kudos, though, to Mr Davis, who was of course trying to mock the fears of Brexit’s opponents, for an A-grade effort in expectation management. However bad it may be, Brits can rest easy that Brexit will not be a post-apocalyptic dystopia characterised by societal collapse, murder and Jacob Rees-Mogg and his gang terrorising the roads in pinstriped suits and Bentleys.
Then again, there was a disturbing specificity to Mr Davis’s point. He did not rule out all dystopian visions. Only Mad Max. While murderous biker-gangs form no part of the Brexit planning, this column understands that several other movie dystopias remain on the table. Indeed, the 62 Conservative MPs in Mr Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group are said to be urging the prime minister to hang tough on the “dystopia red lines” they consider to be part and parcel of a hard Brexit. The Financial Times has seen a secret memo listing the options:
The options include:
the Hunger Games Brexit (24 children from Remain enclaves are chosen by ballot and offered each year as tributes to the European Commission in return for continued British access to the single market)
the Fahrenheit 451 Brexit (the fire service no longer exists to put out fires, but to burn books and reports issued by the Bank of England, the Treasury and any other economic experts)
the Blade Runner Brexit (it is always raining.)
the Terminator Brexit (a robotic terminator is sent back from the future to the year 1972 to murder Sir Edward Heath before he can sign the Treaty of Accession)
the RoboCop Brexit (a frictionless technological solution for policing the Irish border)
The Matrix Brexit (UK citizens are implanted with devices which make them believe everything is normal and that life is good)
and worst of all the Real Life Brexit.
Anyway. Mad Max: Fury Road is an unashamed action film, which basically consists of an extended chase across the desert in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone seems to be white. Good Max and his good ally Imperiosa escape from the evil Citadel with the five wives of evil Joe. Imperiosa finally finds the all-woman clan from which she originally came and together with other good people they capture the Citadel and kill evil Joe. Max and Furiosa do not wander romantically into the sunset together but respectfully part company at the end.
There’s a lot of action here, and a lot of special effects. The most striking special effect is small in scale but big in impact: Imperiosa is missing a hand and arm below the elbow, while Charlize Theron who plays her is fully endowed. This was achieved by her wearing a green sleeve which was then edited out by CGI. At one point she accidentally broke co-star Tom Hardy’s nose by hitting it with the sleeve, which was hard.
Although Hardy’s Max is the title character, the central figure is the story is definitely Theron’s Imperiosa, whose personal journey is much more interesting. Max has only 52 lines in the entire film. Hardy was apparently difficult during filming, and later made a public apology to Theron and director George Miller for his behaviour. (Meanwhile Theron and Hardy’s stunt doubles fell in love and got married.)
It’s good to see a successful rebellion against an oppressive patriarchy led by women, even if they are all white. But I prefer a little more plot and characterization in my movies, and although the stunts and effects are spectacular (and as the FT said, the cars are well cool) I don’t think I’ll rewatch this film often in the years to come.
I’ve decided that I’m going to stop my sequence of rewatching Hugo, Nebula and Bradbury-winning films after The Martian, which is next, because I saw all of them shortly after they came out, which was in the last five years. I might go back and rewatch the Retro Hugo winners which I never wrote up, but I didn’t actually like them all that much so I’m not in a big rush.
As my regular reader knows, I like to preface my write-ups of the Black Archive series of monographs on Doctor Who stories with my previous writings on each story. In this case, the two-parter that opened Matt Smith’s second season as the Doctor in 2011, I seem to have failed to write anything much about it previously. I watched it on first broadcast and again before reading the Black Archive.
If you saw it, you’ll remember that The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon is the story that starts with the Doctor apparently being killed by a mysterious astronaut, and then reappearing as a younger self; it turns out that a mysterious alien race called the Silents have been infesting humanity for a very long time, but people forget that the Silents exist as soon as they stop looking at them. The TARDIS team (Eleven, Amy, Rory, River Song) discover this while visiting Richard Nixon as president in 1969.
The Doctor embeds a subliminal message in the broadcast of the first moon landing encouraging humanity to rise up and destroy the Silents, and meanwhile a little girl who has been phoning the Oval Office regenerates a la Time Lord.
I’ll be frank. Series 6 is my least favourite of the three Matt Smith seasons, and my second least favourite of New Who as a whole (after last year’s Flux), and the opening two-parter is a large part of that. It’s difficult to take the supposed shock of the Doctor being killed too seriously; we know he’s going to be bouncing around again for more adventures after it’s all resolved. Too many threads are left hanging after the second episode (and resolved in haste months later at the end of the series). Steven Moffat is working so hard on trying to make us interested in the complex scenario that he has dreamed up that he forgets to be funny.
And to be honest, the Silents don’t actually seem to be very evil; sure, they look scary, and one of them vaporises a White House staffer, but if we decide that we’re going to exterminate any species where one of them has vaporised a White House staffer, where will we stop?
One casting comment – we’ve been watching Firefly, from a few years earlier, and it’s been amusing to see Mark Sheppard as Badger there; here he is the 1969 version of FBI agent Canton Everett Delaware (the 2011 version being played by his father, William Morgan Sheppard).
The story came in at a respectable 85th in last year’s rankings of all Doctor Who stories, run by Twitter user @Heraldofcreatio, below Robot and ahead of The Seeds of Death, but I’d put it lower myself.
John Toon had previously written the Black Archive volume on the Tom Baker story Full Circle; I commented then that it was largely about the intellectual ideas behind the story rather than on how the story was actually made, and why certain things were done or not done in the course of production, and the same is true this time. There are indeed a lot of ideas in this story, but they are not as well executed as they might have been; Toon does a good job of pulling them into the light, without going into too much agony about the story’s disappointments.
A short introduction talks about withholding key information from the audience, and conspiracy theories.
The first chapter, “Who World Order”, briefly looks at conspiracy theories around the Moon landings, Men in Black, Area 51, fake celebrity deaths, secret underground tunnels, government mind control, subliminal advertising, the Templars and Freemasons, and (at more length) Watergate.
The second chapter, “A Conspiracy of Silents”, looks at the general phenomenon of conspiracy theories, and in particular how they have fed into and been presented in Doctor Who over the years.
The second paragraph of the third chapter, “Killing in the Name of the Doctor”, is:
The term ‘genocide’ has been in circulation for less than a century. It was created in 1944 by Raphäel Lemkin in a book describing the murderous social policies of the Nazi regime that would later come to be known collectively as the Holocaust; genocide was first recognised as a crime under international law in 1946 and codified as such by the United Nations in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II of that convention specifies that genocide is an act ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’ and lists five behaviours that could be defined as genocidal: ‘a. Killing members of the group; b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’3 3 ‘Definitions: Genocide’.
The chapter looks at the dubious ethics of the Doctor’s instruction to humanity to kill the Silents, and whether or not the audience is intended to question the Doctor’s morality. He doesn’t go on about it for fifty pages, at least.
The fourth chapter’s title is “‘Waste No More Time Arguing What a Good Man Should Be. Be One.'” It attempts to find a justification in plot terms for the Doctor’s actions against the Silents, looking also at other similar plot twists in the Moffat era. The discussion is interesting but the justification is not really found.
The fifth chapter, “Controlling the Narrative”, looks at the Moffat-era shift to the Doctor finding more aggressive solutions in general, and also speculates that the Silents are a metaphor for a particular type of fan, closing the main thread of discussion in the book.
The sixth chapter, “When the President Does It, It’s Not a Celebrity Historical”, switches tracks completely and asks if the story can be considered a “celebrity historical” story in the same was as The Unquiet Dead (Dickens), Tooth and Claw (Queen Victoria), The Shakespeare Code (I needn’t say) and Victory of the Daleks (Churchill), if we grant that The Girl in the Fireplace (Madame de Pompadour) may not fit that category. The answer is, probably yes.
So, I felt that the book is a valiant attempt to look at themes of interest in a story that doesn’t quite deliver. You can get it here.
Third of the four books in the prequel series to Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, by the much less gifted writer John Betancourt. Oberon, our hero, starts to put together a governing regime for Amber, the new magical centre based around the mysterious Pattern. I confess I had lost track of all of his brothers and sisters, and they are pretty indistinguishable as characters – apart from the one who is obviously going to perpetrate a sudden yet inevitable betrayal, and duly does so. Unnecessarily confusing that there is a princess called Blaise here and the original Chronicles had a prince called Bleys. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is the fourth and (thank God) last of this sequence, Shadows of Amber.
