Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883
Simon Winchester
20,778
4,139
Max Havelaar
Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker]
9,306
1,654
Bumi Manusia / This Earth of Mankind
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
19,907
762
Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History
Giles Milton
4,927
1,731
Cantik itu Luka / Beauty Is a Wound
Eka Kurniawan
14,764
467
Laskar Pelangi / The Rainbow Troops
Andrea Hirata
30,237
224
So, I’m excluding Eat, Pray, Love because less than 50% of the book is set in Indonesia – the Indonesian section is longer than the Italian or Indian sections, but still less than half. In Lord Jim, the settlement of Patusan where the protagonist finds redemption is certainly in what were then the Dutch East Indies and is now Indonesia, but we don’t get there until just over halfway through the book, so it also fails my 50% test. (But it’s a great book.)
I haven’t managed to get hold of Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa, but it sounds very much like the kind of book that I would like, and importantly for our purposes, most (but not all) of it deals with events in and offshore from the current territory of Indonesia. I am less certain about Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, but it seems more likely than not that the majority of its pages are set in the islands.
On the fictional side, Max Havelaar does well on LibraryThing, but three Indonesian works do much better on Goodreads, with Laskar Pelangi / The Rainbow Troops scoring best on GR. It seems to have a real following in other Asian countries as well as Indonesia.
The six-part 2021 season of Doctor Who was produced under pandemic conditions, and by the time it ended, I was myself recovering from my bout with COVID and didn’t feel inspired to write about it. A year later, after the broadcast of The Power of the Doctor, I returned to Flux and wrote:
So. The 2021 six-part story, Flux, was a mess. There’s no kind way of putting it. I actually like John Bishop as new companion Dan Lewis; I love Barbara Flynn, whatever she is in; I was really thrilled by Thaddea Graham as Bel, the first semi-regular Irish character in almost sixty years [of the show’s history]; and there were some good spine-chilling moments, such as the destruction of Dan’s house and the Doctor being transformed into a Weeping Angel.
But unfortunately the plot made very little sense, and the climax took place largely offscreen. Of course it was filmed under serious constraints due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t excuse the writers from sitting back and thinking about what they were really trying to convey. For all their faults, Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffatt generally remembered that they needed to please their audience as well as indulging their own inner impulses. I felt that Chibnall had lost the run of himself.
I rewatched it again for this blog post, and felt very much the same. This time around I had various plot summaries to hand, which helped me make a little more sense of it; but TV science fiction at its best, unlike say opera, is not normally one of those art forms which requires the consumer to follow along with notes. I love Whittaker as the Doctor, but there are far too many moments where she is attempting to carry the full burden of audience interest through facial expressions and body language, and not helped by the dim studio lighting, the lack of other actors to interact with, or (crucially) the script.
Once again, I did like the fourth instalment, Village of the Angels, much more than the rest – a coherent plot which is more than adequately explained, higher production values, and interestingly the only episode of the six for which a co-writer (Maxine Alderton) is credited alongside Chibnall; and it ends with one of the best visual cliff-hangers ever, as the Doctor herself becomes a Weeping Angel. Interestingly, when I surveyed the Internet Movie Database for the top-rated episode of each era and spinoff of Who, Village of the Angels was a clear winner for the Thirteenth Doctor.
In his editorial foreword, Paul Driscoll explains that the fact that there are six very tightly linked episodes provided a challenge for the Black Archive series. What they have done is to commission six essays from six different authors, topped and tailed with shorter pieces by Alasdair Stuart.
Stuart’s introduction reflects on the terror of the time, when Doctor Who became to an extent a pandemic coping mechanism.
James Cooray Smith’s essay on The Halloween Apocalypse, ‘Apocalypse? Now!’, starts by reflecting on Chris Chibnall’s previous career and how different his Doctor Who turned out to be from his previous work, looks also at the importance of Liverpool as a setting and 31 October as the date for the episode, and recognises the weaknesses in the characters of Karvanista, Swarm and Azure; as I like to say, their means and motivation are never made entirely clear.
Emma Reed’s ‘A History in Flux’, looking at War of the Sontarans, examines the role of history (and fictionalised history) in Doctor Who, especially the Chibnall era’s emphasis on women in history. It also explained to me what the Temple of Atropos stuff was meant to be about, a point which had escaped me on both viewings of the story.
In ‘The Primordial Division’, Once, Upon Time is examined by Philip Purser-Hallard. I found it a thoroughly confusing episode on both viewings, and rather hoped that everything would come out right with the rest of the show. Purser-Hallard explains to me much better what is going on than the actual script did. He makes a number of interesting observations also about the role of double identities in the story and the Jungian resonances, but basically he enjoyed and was interested in this episode and I didn’t, and he doesn’t sell me on it. The second paragraph of his piece is:
She’s perfectly correct, as ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ has already shown: in the Ravagers’ introductions, Swarm was confined to a cylindrical energy shield, supposedly ‘since the dawn of the universe’, while Azure was reduced to ‘Anna’, a human woman living with her partner Jón in the far north of Iceland, without recollection of her extraterrestrial past.
Village of the Angels was broadcast on the worst day of my bout with COVID in 2021, and I did wonder when re-watching if it would hold up to re-watching. I’m glad to say that it did, and as noted above it’s my favourite episode of the series. I therefore had high hopes of Oliver Tomkins’ analysis, ‘The Angels Have the Goggle Box’, and they were fulfilled – it’s an in-depth look at the Weeping Angels, where the come from in terms of story and what they mean, why they are frightening and what they do, and how they break the fourth wall. Tomkins also looks at how the Bel plotline integrates into the Flux story.
‘Doctor Who’s Mother’, by James Mortimore, looks at Survivors of the Flux, considering the colonial framing of the Time Lords (vis-à-vis the Shobogans, and the rest of the universe), and looking at Tecteun and representations of motherhood in the show.
Finally, we get to The Vanquishers. In ‘The Three Doctors… and a Sontaran Stratagem’, Matt Hills is disarmingly frank about its failure to provide satisfactory narrative resolution, and puts this down to Chibnall’s emphasis on surprise. He then looks at the triple-Jodie Whittaker Doctor in the episode as a tribute to The Three Doctors, and reflects on how a fannish show-runner reacts against fannish expectations. It’s a good explanation of what the episode was trying to do, though again I do not feel that it succeeded.
Alasdair Stuart’s conclusion, ‘You are the Universe, Doctor’, defends the whole sequence of episodes, though as will have become apparent, I am not convinced.
Incidentally there are six ways of arranging three different things, and I have arranged the episode title, essay title and essay author’s name differently in each of the previous six paragraphs.
In sum, I did learn quite a lot from this Black Archive, largely because it explained to me what several of the episodes were supposed to be about. I’m afraid that underlines to me that the entire thing was a failure of art. I prefer to understand my TV at the time that I watch it, rather than waiting until I read serious analysis two and a half years later. But you can get it here.
From here on in, I’m switching to doing just one Black Archive write-up per month, as I am catching up with current releases all too quickly.
I got this coffee-table book as a thank-you for giving a lecture in Istanbul a few years back, and it is really lovely. Although the title is 40 Years of Photographs, they are concentrated in the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, giving a sense of a vibrant and human European city full of change but also of history. Although they are at opposite ends of Europe, a lot of the people in Güler’s photographs look very much like their Irish counterparts. And in any case they are just beautiful compositions. The book has an impassioned foreword by Orhan Pamuk. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Devil Kissed Her: The Story of Mary Lamb, by Kathy Watson.
Non-fiction 10 (YTD 25) All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison Kinda, by Frank Collins How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt Flux, ed. Paul Driscoll The Devil Kissed Her, by Kathy Watson Belfast: Approach to Crisis, by Ian Budge and Cornelius O’Leary Belfast: The Story of a City and its People, by Feargal Cochrane The Return of Marco Polo’s World, by Robert Kaplan Chindit Column 76, by W.A. Wilcox The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
Non-genre 3 (YTD 14) The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout DOOM 94, by Jānis Joņevs
SF 11 (YTD 27) The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu Mammoths at the Gates, by Nghi Vo Translation State, by Ann Leckie Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch Liberty’s Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera Life Does Not Allow Us To Meet, by He Xi Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older When the Moon Was Ours, by Anna-Marie McLemore
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 6) Doctor Who: Kinda, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson
Comics and art books 5 (YTD 11) Conversion, by Al Ewing et al Saga, vol 11 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples Ara Güler’s Istanbul: 40 Years of Photographs The Witches of World War II, by Paul Cornell and Valeria Burzo Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons, by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha and Nicola Scott
314 books currently tagged unread, down 7 from last month, down 75 from April 2023.
Reading now (as of last night) Starter Villain, by John Scalzi The Then and the Now, by Si Spurrier et al
Coming soon (perhaps) Imaginary Friends, by Jacqueline Rayner The Cradle, by Tasha Suri The Self-Made Man, by Mark Griffiths The Angel of Redemption, by Nikita Gill Wannabes, by Dave Rudden The Monster in the Cupboard, by Kalynn Bayron The Girl Who Died, by Tom Marshall Moroda, by L.L. McNeil Belfast City Hall: One Hundred Years, by Gillian McIntosh Black Helicopters, by Caitlin R. Kiernan Discovering Tudor London: A Journey Back in Time, by Natalie Grueninger When Voiha Wakes, by Joy Chant Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse The Virgin In The Garden, by A.S. Byatt “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch South, by Ernest Shackleton
