Jim, a pipe in his teeth, leaned back against the oak pew. His eyes shifted from the game and went to Nancy, who, with her chin supported in the crutch of her two hands, was working out her next move.
This was the best selling book of 1925 in the USA, by the largely forgotten Arthur Hamilton Gibbs – it’s his best-known book on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, but has only 11 raters on Goodreads and only 9 owners on LibraryThing. (The Great Gatsby, also published in 1925, has been rated by getting on for six million Goodreads users, and has almost 80,000 owners on LibraryThing, as of present writing.)
It’s a coming of age story about a young Englishwoman, who goes to Paris, discovers herself, discovers love, discovers that men are both tempting and awful, and finds her destiny back in England looking after her disabled father and developing her own Art; then at the end, one of the men turns out not to have been so awful after all.
There are comic yokels / grovelling working class folk, and although the heroine at one point seems ready to break into full feminist independence, the book doesn’t have the courage of its convictions and goes for a safe ending. It is not as funny as it thinks it is, and, like its heroine, is coy rather than sexy.
It is set immediately before the war and during its first half, and perhaps the readers of 1925 liked the story it told about the time before and during the collective loss of innocence. However I can’t really construct a case for rediscovering it as a lost classic. You can get Soundings here, but NB that the text is riddled with electronic scanning errors.
These both won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for work of 2007, awarded in 2008.
The second paragraph of the third section of The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate is:
He was wandering by the Zuweyla Gate, where the sword dancers and snake charmers perform, when an astrologer called to him. “Young man! Do you wish to know the future?”
Back in 2008, I ranked it second on my ballot, behind The Cambist and Lord Iron, by Daniel Abraham, and wrote:
A lovely lovely story of time travel at the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, working up all those human themes of loss and love in a richly imagined fantastic environment that Chiang has done so well before. I expect this will win.
I still think that it is really good, and it has certainly proved to have staying power. It’s a story of time travel paradoxes, predestination and acceptance. I love Borges’ short story “The Other”, in which the writer meets his younger self and finds that they do not understand each other. Chiang riffs on this theme as well, with the extra twist that the older self comes to collude in his younger self’s destiny. I also give it good marks for the subtly different portrayals of Baghdad and Cairo, respectful rather than Orientalist (at least that was my take).
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate was the only work on both the Hugo and Nebula ballots for Best Novelette that year. The other Hugo finalists were “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics”, by Daniel Abraham; “Dark Integers”, by Greg Egan; “Finisterra”, by David Moles and “Glory”, by Greg Egan. The other Nebula finalists were “Child, Maiden, Mother, Crone”, by Terry Bramlett; “The Children’s Crusade”, by Robin Wayne Bailey; “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs Of North Park After the Change”, by Kij Johnson; “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche”, by Delia Sherman; “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, by Geoff Ryman; and “Safeguard”, by Nancy Kress.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union starts as follows (explicit surgical details redacted):
Instead, he lights a papiros. After a decade of abstinence, Landsman took up smoking again not quite three years ago. His then-wife was pregnant at the time. It was a much-discussed and in some quarters a long-desired pregnancy—her first but not a planned one. As with many pregnancies that are discussed too long there was a history of ambivalence in the prospective father. At seventeen weeks and a day—the day Landsman bought his first package of Broadways in ten years-they got a bad result. Some but not all of the cells that made up the fetus, code-named Django, had an extra chromosome on the twentieth pair. A mosaicism, it was called. It might cause grave abnormalities. It might have no effect at all. In the available literature, a faithful person could find encouragement, and a faithless one ample reason to despond. Landsman’s view of things-ambivalent, despondent, and with no faith in anything prevailed… Three months later, Landsman and his cigarettes moved out of the house on Tshernovits Island that he and Bina had shared for nearly all the fifteen years of their marriage. It was not that he couldn’t live with the guilt. He just couldn’t live with it and Bina, too.
I ranked it third on my ballot that year, writing:
The setting is an alternate present where a large chunk of Alaska was colonised by Jewish refugees after the Second World War, and the Israelis lost in 1948 – there are other differences too, but those are the major ones. Now, sixty years on from those events, the Alaskan territory is within weeks of reverting to US control and its inhabitants face displacement again.
Chabon’s viewpoint character is a memorably seedy and depressed detective, trying to solve a murder which appears to be linked to chess and a Messianic Jewish sect, and at the same time dealing with his own professional and family dilemmas. The tenuous society of Sitka is well depicted at all its levels. In places it’s terrifically sad. I was a bit dubious about the portrayal of conspiratorial politics at the highest political level, but perhaps that was part of the point.
However, it’s not going at the top of my Hugo list; I don’t think it is sfnal enough. Apart from the ahistorical setting, there is no sfnal content (well, a couple of miracles are hinted at, but I’m not sure that counts). The genre of this novel is detective, not sf; the setting is not much more counterfactual than Agatha Christie’s country houses, or Lindsey Davis’ richly imagined and researched Rome, or Ellis Peters’ medieval Shrewsbury (which also gets the very occasional miracle, but that doesn’t make it fantasy).
Don’t get me wrong: I liked the book enormously. The setting seemed to me a very thought-provoking response to the history of Jews, in America in particular, since 1940, far better than the other attempts I’ve read recently. I’ll probably end up ranking it ahead of the other two nominees which I haven’t yet read and of which I don’t have huge expectations. But, while in a lot of ways it may be the best novel of the three I’ve read so far, it lacks the sensawunda that I got in spades from both Halting State and Brasyl, so loses my vote on that account.
Coming back to it seventeen years later, I was not sure that I liked it as much. It’s difficult to believe the political set-up; where are the people who would have been lobbying in Washington to allow Sitka to remain Jewish? Is political extremism really monopolised by religious extremists? There is an intersection, sure, but it’s rarely the perfect overlay depicted here. There’s a bit of an assumption that the experience of urban American Jews applies to Jews everywhere, and I don’t see that that really tracks. And I must also say that I found it rather a long book. Anyway, you can get The Yiddish Policemen’s Union here.
In the Best Novella categories, three stories were nominated for both Hugo and Nebula: the Nebula-winning “The Fountain of Age”, by Nancy Kress; “Memorare”, by Gene Wolfe; and “Stars Seen Through Stone”, by Lucius Shepard. The other two Hugo finalists were “Recovering Apollo 8”, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which I voted for, and “All Seated on the Ground”, a particularly silly story by Connie Willis, which won. The other Nebula finalists were “Awakening”, by Judith Berman; “The Helper and His Hero”, by Matt Hughes; and “Kiosk”, by Bruce Sterling.
There was no overlap in the Short Story categories. The Hugo finalists were “Tideline”, by Elizabeth Bear, which won, and also got my own vote; “Distant Replay”, by Mike Resnick; “Last Contact”, by Stephen Baxter; “A Small Room in Koboldtown”, by Michael Swanwick; and “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?”, by Ken MacLeod. The Nebula finalists were “Always”, by Karen Joy Fowler, which won; “Captive Girl”, by Jennifer Pelland; “Pride”, by Mary Turzillo; “The Story of Love”, by Vera Nazarian; “Titanium Mike Saves the Day”, by David D. Levine; and “Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse”, by Andy Duncan.
The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form went to Stardust, and for Short Form to Blink. The Nebula for Best Script went to Pan’s Labyrinth.
Next in this sequence is The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Current Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou
Last books finished The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith The Year Before Yesterday, by Brian W. Aldiss The Decline of the English Murder, and other essays, by George Orwell How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, by David DeSteno An Experiment with Time, by J. W Dunne
Next books Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino
Every season of the year wagons came through the streets and picked up bodies of derelicts. Late at night old ladies in babushkas came to the morgue looking for their husbands and sons. The corpses lay on tables of galvanized iron. From the bottom of each table a drainpipe extended to the floor. Around the rim of the table was a culvert. And into the culvert ran the water sprayed constantly over each body from an overhead faucet. The faces of the dead were upturned into the streams of water that poured over them like the irrepressible mechanism in death of their own tears.
This was the best-selling book of 1975 in America, though Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot has proven to have more staying power. It’s set in the period from 1902 to 1915, mostly in New Rochelle, New York, and concerns a white family (referred to as Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather, and ‘the little boy’) and their relationship with a young black woman, her pianist boyfriend and their baby, and also a older Jewish man and his young daughter; but also all of these interweave with many famous people of the time, notably Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington and the intriguing socialite Evelyn Nesbit, who I hadn’t previously heard of and who sent me scurrying to Wikipedia to see how much of her story as told here was true (answer: most of it).
I really enjoyed this. I thought that the spirit of the age was convincingly portrayed, and the motivations of the characters always crystal clear and consistent. There is a gripping subplot about a racist fire chief who harasses the pianist, and the pianist’s revenge. The people seem like real people and the places real places. You can get Ragtime here.
I was surprised to see, however, that Ragtime was on the (very long ballot) for that year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel. I wouldn’t classify it as speculative fiction, not even as alternative history – the world is supposed to be our world, and historical events all take place as we know them to have taken place. But there were nineteen books on the ballot that year, so perhaps it was a quirk of the rules combined with some imaginative nominating. The winner of both Hugo and Nebula that year was The Forever War, with the other Nebula nominees including The Female Man, The Computer Connection, Invisible Cities, Dhalgren, (The) Missing Man, The Stochastic Man and my personal favourite Doorways in the Sand.
“But Cudjo know his father takee him to de compound of his father. I didn’t see him after he died. Dey bury him right away so no enemy come look down in his face and do his spirit harm. Dey bury him in de house. Dey dig up de clay floor and bury him. We say in de Affica soil, ‘We live wid you while you alive, how come we cain live wid you after you die?’ So, you know dey bury a man in his house.[”]
I came across this while looking up books which are set in the present-day country of Benin; it was written in 1927 and 1928 by the great Zora Neale Hurston, but published only in 2018, ninety years after it was written and more than half a century after she died. It’s an account of her interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, born Oluale Kossola, who was one of the last Africans to be captured, enslaved, and sold into the American South. About a third of the book describes his childhood and life in Africa. As a teenager, he was captured by the ruler of a neighbouring territory in 1860, and sold to an American slaver who brought him along with more than a hundred others to Mobile, Alabama.
Importing slaves had supposedly been illegal since 1808, but one could politely describe the enforcement of the ban as rather patchy. (My distant cousin Joseph Whyte was one of the crew of a Royal Navy ship which intercepted several American slave ships off the African coast in 1857; after being too successful, his ship was sent to Australia, but it disappeared with all hands somewhere along the way.)
Kossola / Lewis’s slavery lasted only five years, as the South lost the Civil War and all slaves were freed. He and some of the other ex-slaves tried to raise enough money to return to Africa, but the odds were stacked against them, and in the end they formed a new community south of Mobile called Africatown (or Plateau). He married and had six children, all of whom he outlived. (He would have been in his late 80s when Hurston interviewed him.) One of his sons was shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy; nothing new there. He himself was severely injured in a railway accident in 1902; he sued the train company and won compensation, but the award was overturned on appeal.
There are questions about how much of the text is Hurston’s and how much by local Mobile writer Emma Langdon Roche, but there are no questions about the effective immediacy of the first-person account of slavery and its aftermath. Apparently one of the reasons that the book was not published in Hurston’s lifetime is that she reports Kossola/Lewis’s words in his own dialect; for me that adds to the impact. I was startled to discover that 40 seconds of footage of him survives at the start of this short film compiling Hurston’s fieldwork:
A really interesting and moving book. You can get Barracoon here. My edition has extensive footnotes, and a foreword and afterword by Alice Walker.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Rwanda.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Philip Gourevitch
36,385
3,747
Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
Immaculée Ilibagiza
47,158
2,003
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
Roméo Dallaire
13,713
1,823
Gorillas in the Mist
Dian Fossey
21,128
1,146
Baking Cakes in Kigali
Gaile Parkin
6,881
806
An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography
Paul Rusesabagina
6,762
788
Running the Rift
Naomi Benaron
7,210
598
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
Gil Courtemanche
4,522
770
As with some other countries, there is one dominant historical event in Rwanda: the genocide of 1994. Six of the above eight books are directly about it, the top two being non-fiction accounts: Philip Gourevitch’s prize-winning account, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, and Immaculée Ilibagiza’s first person story of how her faith helped to get her through those dreadful days, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust.
Immaculée Ilibagiza is the top Rwandan writer on the list; Paul Rusesabagina is also Rwandan, though his autobiography was ghost-written by Tom Zoellner. The top fiction book set in Rwanda by a Rwandan writer is Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga.
It is easy to forget that other things have happened in Rwanda, but in fact it was also the location of Dian Fossey’s work, recounted in her own Gorillas in the Mist, later adapted as a film starring Sigourney Weaver. I should also add that Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin looks at the country having moved on, with the genocide in the background but receding.
I disqualified eight books this week. Collapse, by Jared M. Diamond, and A Problem from Hell, by Samantha Power, take Rwanda as a case study in their wider arguments. Say You’re One of Them (fiction), by Uwem Akpan, and The Shadow of the Sun (non-fiction), by Ryszard Kapuściński, look at Africa more broadly including sections set in Rwanda. The Girl Who Smiled Beads, by Clemantine Wamariya, and Pagan Babies, by Elmore Leonard (an author who I did not expect to be mentioning in this context), have substantial chunks of the narrative set in Rwanda but they seem to amount to less than half of each book. And finally, Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder, and Small Country, by Gaël Faye, are about Burundi rather than Rwanda.
Speaking of Burundi, it’s up next, followed by a step away from Africa to Bolivia, and then back again to Tunisia and South Sudan.
Back in the summer, Lewis Baston wrote a fascinating geeky piece about which Westminster constituencies in the UK have voted for the winning party in the most elections. Both Dartford and South Derbyshire / Belper voted Labour in 1964 and 1966, Tory in 1970, Labour in both 1974 elections, Tory in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992, Labour in 1997, 2001 and 2005, Tory in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 and Labour in 2024. However, both of them voted Labour in 1959 when the Conservatives won, so the chain stops in 1964. If you allow a couple of lapses from an otherwise perfect record, Buckingham (now Buckingham and Bletchley) has voted for the winning party every time since 1868, except in 1929 and the two 1974 elections.
He then goes on to consider Scotland and Wales separately, and to define the bellwethers in each case as those where the winner in a particular seat matched the party which won the most seats in Scotland or Wales. Labour has always won in Wales since 1922, and there are six constituencies which have consistently voted Labour since then (three of which voted for the Coalition in 1918). In Scotland, if you allow both Labour and Conservative seats in 1951 when the two parties tied, Central Ayrshire has voted for the Scottish winner since it was created in 1950.
Baston leaves out Northern Ireland, because there is no seat that elected both a Sinn Fein MP in 2024 and a DUP MP in 2019. But if we apply a bit more generosity (a la Buckingham and Bletchley), we can get a bit more texture.
For Northern Ireland, we have to start in 1922, both because that’s when it became a separate entity and because the six counties had had a lot more MPs before then, so it’s more difficult to assess what the successor constituencies are. From 1922 there were six single-seat territorial constituencies (plus the Queen’s University of Belfast), and also three two-seat constituencies, which after 1950 were split into six single seats (and the QUB seat was abolished). Five new seats were added to the map in 1987 for a total of seventeen, and an eighteenth was added in 1997.
The Ulster Unionist Party won the most seats in Northern Ireland at every Westminster election from Partition to 2001 (we can be generous and count in all the other MPs elected on the UUUC ticket in the two 1974 elections, but it doesn’t make much difference in the end). The DUP then won the most seats in 2005, 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019, and Sinn Fein won the most in 2024, so we are looking for seats that voted most often for the winners in recent elections.
Up until 2019, three of the seats created in 1983 had an unblemished record of going with the biggest party in Northern Ireland: East Antrim, Lagan Valley and Upper Bann, which all switched from UUP to DUP in 2005. If you allow Lagan Valley and East Antrim as partial successors to the old South Antrim seat (and to the previous County Antrim two-seater), and Upper Bann as a partial successor to the old Armagh seat, the record goes for almost a century from 1922 to 2019.
East Londonderry (considered as a successor to the old County Londonderry) and South Antrim itself (considered as a successor to the old South Antrim and the previous County Antrim) missed only one election in those 97 years (East Londonderry won by Gregory Campbell of the DUP in 2001, South Antrim by Danny Kinahan of the UUP in 2015). Strangford also missed only 2001 since its creation in 1983, but its predecessor seats were a bit more variable.
However, that’s no good for the present day, because none of those seats were won by Sinn Fein in 2024. Most of the current Sinn Fein seats have been held by Sinn Fein or the SDLP for decades, so none of them are potential bellwethers either. Of today’s SF seats, the one that is closest to a bellwether constituency is North Belfast, which has gone with the largest party at each Westminster election since 1922 with three exceptions: 1979 when Johnny McQuade won it for the DUP, 2001 when Nigel Dodds took it also for the DUP, ahead of the 2005 surge, and 2019 when John Finucane of Sinn Fein defeated Nigel Dodds. It looks pretty safely in the Sinn Fein group for the time being.
There is also an anti-bellwether seat, which has never voted for the Northern Ireland-wide largest party since its creation. That seat is Foyle, which has been held by the SDLP from 1983 to the present day, with the exception of the 2017 election when it was taken by Sinn Fein. North Down has only once voted for the province-wide winner since 1983, and that was in 2001 when Lady Sylvia Hermon first won it for the UUP. She was still UUP in 2005, but all the other UUP seats were lost.
(I wonder if there are also similar anti-bellwether seats for the UK as a whole, or for England, Scotland and Wales?)
I had a quick look to see if one could make the same calculation for Assembly constituencies, to identify which has a representation which is proportionally the most similar to the Assembly as a whole. It’s very difficult to assess that. Right now, the answer would probably be North Belfast again. In 2022 it elected two members from the two biggest parties (the DUP and Sinn Fein) and one from the third biggest (Alliance), and similarly in 2019 (when the third largest party overall, and the fifth North Belfast MLA, were SDLP). In 2017, when there were six seats per constituency, North Belfast again came closest to the make-up of the Assembly but did not quite match it, with three DUP MLAs, two SF and one SDLP (whereas the UUP had the third largest number of seats at that election). This probably demonstrates that the concept of a bellwether seat cannot really be adapted to a proportional multi-party election.
And I’m not going to attempt to apply the concept to the Dáil. That’s for stronger-minded psephologists than me.
Adam’s father Cyrus was something of a devil—had always been wild—drove a two-wheeled cart too fast, and managed to make his wooden leg seem jaunty and desirable. He had enjoyed his military career, what there was of it. Being wild by nature, he had liked his brief period of training and the drinking and gambling and whoring that went with it. Then he marched south with a group of replacements, and he enjoyed that too—seeing the country and stealing chickens and chasing rebel girls up into the haystacks. The gray, despairing weariness of protracted maneuvers and combat did not touch him. The first time he saw the enemy was at eight o’clock one spring morning, and at eight-thirty he was hit in the right leg by a heavy slug that mashed and splintered the bones beyond repair. Even then he was lucky, for the rebels retreated and the field surgeons moved up immediately. Cyrus Trask did have his five minutes of horror while they cut the shreds away and sawed the bone off square and burned the open flesh. The toothmarks in the bullet proved that. And there was considerable pain while the wound healed under the unusually septic conditions in the hospitals of that day. But Cyrus had vitality and swagger. While he was carving his beechwood leg and hobbling about on a crutch, he contracted a particularly virulent dose of the clap from a Negro girl who whistled at him from under a pile of lumber and charged him ten cents. When he had his new leg, and painfully knew his condition, he hobbled about for days, looking for the girl. He told his bunkmates what he was going to do when he found her. He planned to cut off her ears and her nose with his pocketknife and get his money back. Carving on his wooden leg, he showed his friends how he would cut her. “When I finish her she’ll be a funny-looking bitch,” he said. “I’ll make her so a drunk Indian won’t take out after her.” His light of love must have sensed his intentions, for he never found her. By the time Cyrus was released from the hospital and the army, his gonorrhea was dried up. When he got home to Connecticut there remained only enough of it for his wife.
First of the books that I acquired this summer from the old family home in Dublin, and what a start. It’s a grand generational story of Adam Trask, who moves from Connecticut to the Salinas Valley in California with his pregnant wife Cathy. After she gives birth to twins (it is implied that at least one of them is fathered by Adam’s brother), she shoots Adam in the shoulder and leaves, settling down discreetly to work at and then own the brothel in the next town over. The two boys, Aron and Caleb, grow up, and we move with deliberate and measured pace to a grand conclusion which I won’t spoil. The book was apparently Steinbeck’s favourite of his own writing and must have helped him get the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years after it was published.
There’s also a very interesting character from Northern Ireland in the first part of the book, Sam Hamilton, based on Steinbeck’s own grandfather from Ballykelly, which is about 25 km from the home of my own ancestors in Aghadowey (where my distant cousins still farm the land and live in the house built by my 4x great-grandfather). The Irish Times summarises Steinbeck’s description of his own visit to Ballykelly in 1952 and you can read the original here. That must have been after he wrote the Hamilton parts of East of Eden though, as he says he went to Ireland in the summer and the book was published in September. It’s rare enough to find Northern Ireland intruding in classic literature, and his depiction of Sam Hamilton, his wife Liz and their many children is intense and sympathetic, even though the main thrust of the novel is the story of the Trasks. (Steinbeck even puts himself as a child into the novel, as a casual onlooker.)
There’s also the intriguing character of Lee, who starts as a Chinese servant in the Trasks’ house, but ends up as a family member, shifting from pidgin to standard American English and supplying Biblical exegesis and philosophy when it is needed; there’s a particularly effective moment of Marcus Aurelius at the end. The women fare less well; Cathy / Kate is meant to be the villain, and I found her just a bit too evil at a couple of key moments, and Aron’s girlfriend Abra was just a bit too virtuous to be real. Still, Steinbeck was trying, I think.
This was my top unread top non-genre book, my top unread book acquired this year and the top unreviewed book in my LibraryThing catalogue. Next on all three piles is The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.
War here [Kosovo], of course, did not arrive without warning. It rarely, if ever, does. There were the tell-tale signs. Spikes in nationalistic rhetoric, defiant and threatening in tone, vowing to avenge the humiliation wrought upon their people and prevent further degradation. There was palpable tension and uncertainty, with mounting casualties amongst civilians and police as a game of cat and mouse ensued between the insurgency and security forces; the latter contriving even tougher curtailments of liberty and ultimately life. Regular army exercises meant the call to arms arrived long before the postman delivered the formal conscription notice. Decaying weapons were distributed and fraying uniforms procured. There always seemed to be a deficit of ammunition, at least for those inexperienced in handling weapons. Checkpoints were erected through the usual rudimentary means and identification cards closely scrutinised. There were mass arrests and confessions of terrorist activity forced under duress.
This was sent to me by the author in 2022, but I have only just got around to reading it; and I really regret having left it so long. It’s a well constructed set of anthropological observations about history and society in Northern Kosovo, which remains mainly inhabited by Serbs and under the strong influence of Serbia. But rather than look at the big picture, Bancroft zooms in on particular localities, and particular situations, to colour in the blurry spaces on the map. Kosovo is a complex country, and its history is contested, but in the end its people – including the people of Northern Kosovo – just want to live in peace and prosperity. You can practically smell the macchiato in the cafes.
I was particularly startled to read of the involvement of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty in the exploitation of the Trepča mines from 1927. I associate him mainly with the spectacular manuscript collection which now resides in Dublin Castle; but of course this collection was assembled as the fruits of exploiting mineral resources in many other countries, and Kosovo was not one of his bigger areas of operation. So it was an unexpected connection between Ireland and Mitrovica.
I suspect I’ll be featuring this in my list of Books You Haven’t Heard Of at the end of the year. Meanwhile, you can get Dragon’s Teeth here.
Current The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith The Year Before Yesterday, by Brian W. Aldiss
Last books finished Time Zero, by Justin Richards Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks (did not finish) The Spark that Survived, by Myra Lewis Williams Salvage, by Emily Tesh Doctor Who: Empire of Death, by Scott Handcock Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore
Next books How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, by David DeSteno Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch An Experiment with Time, by J. W Dunne
Its lamps lit very little. The colourless sheen of the arching, segmented stems, that looked more like plastic than wood or anything living. The faint flurries of the feeding fans or gills or whatever their function actually was. The limited range of the lamps the drone could mount barely cut through the sheer gloom, the curdled soup of what passed for air on Shroud. All was in shades of brown-grey, light and dark. Nothing had invested the energy into manufacturing pigments, because why put on an art show if nobody can see the pictures? Light and dark, and some yellowish tones, like old bone or diseased teeth or mustard gas. The brown of mud or excrement.
Adrian Tchaikovsky keeps doing it; this is yet another gripping story of the encounter between human explorers and a new form of alien life. The human protagonists trek across the hostile surface of a dangerous moon, and we also get viewpoint snippets from the perspective of the globe-spanning alien entity itself, as the two sides gradually come to understand more of each other, and the humans’ masterplan of converting Shroud into a hob of exploitation becomes less and less realistic. It’s really vivid, and Tchaivkovsky plays fair with the reader, with a coherent and credibly built world. Good stuff. You can get Shroud here.
I participated in a great Brian Aldiss centenary panel at Novacon last weekend, with Caroline Mullan, Mark Plummer and Alan Stroud. There was a fair bit of “what did he do” and “what was he trying to do” but we had a fair bit of “what Aldiss should people read” as well, to which the answer is “Helliconia”. A request for a show of hands from anyone who actually understood Report on Probability A produced a sea of people looking around without putting their hands up.
Here we have one of his less celebrated mid-period novels. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Directly I faced the Master, I felt some of those emotions—call them empathic if you will—which I have referred to as being unsusceptible to scientific method. Directly he spoke, I knew that in him, as in his creatures, aggression and fear were mixed. God gave me understanding.
Not one of the great Aldiss works, I’m afraid. Published in 1981, set during a global war in 1996, the narrator, who is the US Undersecretary of State, crashes on a Pacific island where the sinister Dr Dart, himself an embittered thalidomide victim, has been carrying on the tradition of H.G. Wells’ Dr Moreau by combining animal and humans through experimentation. Various other human exiles also live on the island.
It’s not so much a sequel to the original Wells novel, more an update to the present-ish day. There are a lot of traps about disability, race and gender to fall into here, and I’m sorry to say that Aldiss falls into pretty much all of them. I’m generally a huge Aldiss fan, but I would hesitate to recommend this even to completists.
I got the American edition, whose title is An Island Called Moreau; the original UK title, in homage to George Bernard Shaw, was Moreau’s Other Island. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is another short Aldiss novel, The Year Before Yesterday.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Benin.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The Viceroy of Ouidah
Bruce Chatwin
1,409
768
It Takes a Village
Jane Cowen-Fletcher
153
948
Instruments of Darkness
Robert Wilson
490
257
A Darkening Stain
Robert Wilson
275
112
Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey
Stanley B. Alpern
123
69
The Dahomean
Frank Yerby
109
55
Spirit Rising: My Life, My Music
Angelique Kidjo
156
21
The Hand of Iman
Ryad Assani-Razaki
119
15
This week’s winner, The Viceroy of Ouidah, is a 1980 novel about a European slave trader who builds a life for himself in West Africa; it was filmed by Werner Herzog as Cobra Verde, starring Klaus Kinski.
This week’s LibraryThing winner, It Takes a Village, has been overshadowed by the book of the same title published two years later by Hillary Clinton. It is a 1994 children’s book about living in a village in Benin and being looked after by the neighbours.
Of the listed authors, Angelique Kidjo is from Benin; I am not quite sure how much of her autobiography is set there, but I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt. Ryad Assani-Razaki is also from Benin, and my sources seem to agree that The Hand of Iman (original French title just Iman) is set there.
I disqualified a lot of books. Some are about the Benin Bronzes, which however originated in the historical Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria.
There are also a lot of books about slavery with the ‘benin’ tag in both systems; these however tend to concentrate on the protagonists’ lives after they left West Africa. It’s not at all certain that Olaudah Equiano, the most celebrated example, was even from what’s now Benin (though personally I’m pretty sure he was from West Africa). It seems more likely for Cudjoe Lewis / Oluale Kossola.
The protagonist of the Bruce Medway thrillers by Robert Wilson lives in Benin. I was sufficiently sure of Instruments of Darkness and A Darkening Stain to list them above; I wasn’t quite so sure of the third novel in the series, Blood is Dirt.
Coming next: Rwanda, Burundi, a step away from Africa to Bolivia and a step back again to Tunisia.
Buxton, I am in you, attending Novacon which is just as much fun as I hoped.
But yesterday I hired a car and did a tour of three ancient sites in northern Derbyshire. Derbyshire as a whole has more ancient stone circles than the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg combined (they have none). I reckoned I could take in a few of them and still return the rental car in time for the Novacon opening ceremony.
There is a great website, named Pecsaetan for some reason, dedicated to the ancient sites in and around Derbyshire. It covers a lot more than stone circles, so there is plenty left to look at on future visits. The Peak District seems to have retained a lot of its heritage. I suspect that it is very beautiful as well, but unfortunately the weather yesterday was too foggy to tell.
Arbor Low (and Gib Hill)
I started with probably the best of them, also conveniently the closest to Buxton: the henge and stone circle of Arbor Low, 16 km southeast of the town along the A515. You are supposed to pay a pound into the honesty box for the farmer whose land it sits on. It is described by local enthusiasts as ‘the Stonehenge of the North’; I was a little sceptical, as the photographs that I had seen showed most of the stones as lying horizontal.
But before you even get to the stones, you encounter the vast ramparts of the henge which encloses the stone circle. In ancient times it must have been three metres high and the ditch must have been about the same depth. It would have looked amazing.
And though the stones are now recumbent, they are big, most of them two metres long. They are limestone which apparently explains why they have fallen, due to erosion. Within the circle is a central set of three or four stones which could have been an altar of some kind. Other visitors had left offerings of nuts and acorns on the largest of them.
But the amazing thing about yesterday was the mist sitting over this ancient site. There was a real Barrow-Downs feel about it.
Nearby is a much smaller barrow-mound called Gib Hill. You cannot see much anyway, and you can see even less in the mist, but it is a Stone Age tomb, with a Bronze Age tomb on top, built a thousand years later, but still many thousands of years ago.
Doll Tor (and the Andle Stone)
This was the most difficult to find of the three sites. It is about 11 km due east of Arbor Low, on Stanton Moor, accessible from a lay-by on a small road perhaps 2 km south of Stanton-in-Peak and 1 km north of Birchover. I should note that Stanton-in-Peak appeared to be infested with pheasants. That’s pheasants with a ‘h’.
Luckily Pecsaetan gives explicit and good directions to Doll Tor, which worked even in thick fog when you cannot see to the end of the field you are in. When you get to the Doll Tor circle in a wooded glade, it’s a delightful surprise, almost faery-like. None of the stones is more than a metre in height, but the shape of the circle is clear, and there is a cairn attached to the northern side of the circle.
Again, other visitors have left offerings at the site, including a lot of coins on a flat stone at the edge of the circle.
The fact that it sits in a valley meant that the fog was not as heavy as with the more elevated sites, but it still felt isolated – I think it was the one most distant from other human activity of the three. Magical, but a very different kind of magic from Arbor Low.
On the way across the fields to Doll Tor is the Andle Stone, thought to be a natural boulder (and a big one) but augmented by human activity.
There is an inscription on the other side of it commemorating the Duke of Wellington and local boy William Thornhill.
There are several more stone circles and other monuments nearby on Stanton Moor, and you could easily spend a half day just exploring them. But the fog was a bit treacherous and it seemed better to press on.
I should note that Doll Tor and the Andle Stone are on private land, and there is no public right of access to them.
Barbrook 1 and 2
About 20 km north of Doll Tor and Stanton Moor are the monuments known as Barbrook 1 and 2, on Big Moor. The road takes you past the very well signposted Chatsworth House, home of the Dukes of Devonshire. This site is the easiest to find of the three, though perhaps for that reason it was less atmospheric – lots of dogwalkers, and the audible roar of traffic.
You park at a layby on the A621, four or five km north of where it starts, and there is a clear path to Barbrook 1 and a less clear path to Barbrook 2. Barbrook 1, 500 metres from the road, is a straightforward stone circle with one big stone about a metre high and a small bank around it.
Barbrook 2, 200 metres away, is different. It is a ring cairn, which has been reconstructed to give a best guess at its original appearance. It looks like a sheepfold except that it is sunk into the ground. It’s quite different from any other monument in Derbyshire.
There are many smaller ancient cairns on Big Moor, and you pass maybe ten or twelve on this route.
There is also a Barbrook 3, but it is apparently difficult to locate and not that impressive when you do find it. And lunch at The Grouse Inn in Longshaw was calling.
This would have been fantastic in better weather, but even in yesterday’s fog the Arbor Low and Doll Tor circles were pretty amazing to visit. And there are still plenty more Derbyshire stone circles to explore.
The Papyrus and the Pet Shop Boys
It is a little known fact that the oldest surviving fragment of the New Testament, a papyrus dating from the mid second century, is held by the John Rylands Library in Manchester. When I first visited in 2021, it was in storage, so I anxiously called ahead this time to make sure that I could see it after I landed on Thursday. The person who answered the phone a week ago assured me that it would be on display, but either they were wrong or plans changed, because when I pitched up on Thursday afternoon, P52 was in storage again. You can get a fridge magnet of it though.
However, there was also a temporary display on LGBTQ+ culture, which delightfully had the original manuscript of the Pet Shop Boys’ hit West End Girls and the original typescript of It’s A Sin.
You never know what you are going to find. The John Rylands Library is free to visit, and even without P52, there is plenty there.
(Incidentally, WordPress refuses to publish the lovely Gothic P used by New Testament scholars to designate papyri. Every time I tried to include it in an update to this entry, it refused to upload.)
I first watched The Mysterious Planet in 2007. I wrote then:
The Mysterious Planet was Robert Holmes’ swan-song, from 1986. He wrote some of the best stories of the original Doctor Who run; this is not one of them. It’s the first segment of the infamous Trial of a Time Lord season, with the action of the main narrative (the Doctor and Peri land on a mysterious planet and must prevent the local bad guys from taking over the universe; also confusingly it may or may not be a far future Earth) frequently interrupted by flashforwards to a courtroom where the Doctor is on trial, the main story being presented as evidence for the prosecution.
The trial sub-plot simply does not work. There appears to be no due procedure that makes any sense; the evidence presented by the Valeyard (at least as far as this story goes) doesn’t do much to prove the case (as even the Inquisitor admits). If you simply tune out these deeply embarrassing bits, you are left with a fairly standard story: a couple of decent performances from guest actors, and a couple of very cardboard-looking robots.
When I came back to it in 2011, for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
I started watching the Trial of a Time Lord season in a rather foul mood. But in fact, rather to my surprise, I found myself warming to The Mysterious Planet – in relative terms, of course; it’s definitely in the lower third of Robert Holmes’ stories, and has a number of plot elements recycled from his previous scripts when he did them better. But there is a sense that the show might be finding its feet again: back to the 25-minute format, and also embedding the season in a narrative arc (which was successful last time it was tried) in which the Time Lords are up to no good; the basics are actually there, and I think it is the production values that let it down as much as anything. (Though I should admit that the plot is also a bit confusing and over-filled.) The Mysterious Planet is a little dull but it’s not actively bad, unlike most of the previous season.
Rewatching it again, I remain more negative than positive, though I liked some of the Holmesian characterisation. The ridiculous trial set-up remains very poor.
Holmes’ life ended sadly early. He died aged only 60 in 1986, half-way through writing the final story of that year’s Doctor Who season. This was the much contested Trial of a Time Lord arc, for which Holmes had contributed the first four episodes and was due to write the final two (but died before starting the last one). A higher-up at the BBC had sent round a brutal deconstruction of the flaws of the first four episodes (generally now referred to as The Mysterious Planet), which clearly deeply wounded Holmes and possibly even contributed to his illness and death. In a career of a quarter of a century, nobody before had been quite so brutal about his writing. It’s painful reading, and the one positive thing I will say is that the account here raises Eric Saward’s reputation in my view, as he attempted (but failed) to shield Holmes and also keep the show on the road. But between the lines it’s clear that Holmes no longer had what he had once had had. Between 1982 and his death in 1986, literally the only non-Who scripts he sold were three episodes of Bergerac and five for a short-lived drama series set in a Citizens Advice Bureau. Brutal though it is, the BBC higher-up’s criticism of The Mysterious Planet is mostly pretty well-founded.
Molesworth is defensive of The Mysterious Planet‘s virtues, but I’m afraid I am with the BBC hierarchy; it’s a turkey.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is:
This is, however, not one of Dicks’ greatest efforts. I’ve noted before how the Dicks/Holmes combination is only rarely successful on the printed page, and this, the last of the sequence, is fairly typical, a faithful recounting of what the viewer sees on the screen without much added. There are some mystifying slips, Peri’s full name being given as “Perpegillian”, for instance. It also fails (as did the original TV version) to establish the Time Lord trial setting convincingly (let alone fit it into continuity).
Nothing to add to that, on re-reading.
So I turned with interest to the latest Black Archive, released last month, by Jez Strickley. Sometimes the Black Archives about Doctor Who stories I did not like much achieve a bit of redemption for me by calling attention to aspects that I had not considered before, and sometimes they at least woo me with the author’s enthusiasm. Which would it be?
I’m sorry to say that of the 79 Black Archives that I have read so far, this was the least penetrable. Strickley has written it as an exploration of his pet concepts, topophilia and topophobia, through the lens of the story, but using many other sources as well. I found it dense and uninteresting, and I gave up after the first chapter. The second paragraph of the third chapter will give you some idea, though I did not get that far.
The life of daleswoman Hannah Hauxwell may be a rare example of Heidegger’s concept of dwelling in practice. Born in 1926, Hauxwell lived most of her life at Low Birk Hatt, a farm in Baldersdale in the North Pennines. In the early 1970s, her life became the subject of a television documentary. Until then, and for a time thereafter, Hauxwell lived frugally on the produce of her farming, managing without electricity and running water. Yet, despite these privations, her love of her home and the nearby Hunder Beck, whose ‘waters sing a song to me’, was unwavering. Reflecting on her life in that remote and, in winter at least, unforgiving setting, she once observed that ‘I know this place will always be loyal to me […] It’s mine […] and always will be […] even when I’m no longer here.’⁴ Hauxwell’s turn of phrase, described by one critic as ‘Wordsworthian’, acknowledges a conception of place which goes beyond the purely material and approaches a bond that may be Heideggerian in nature⁵. ⁴ Hauxwell, Hannah, and Cockcroft, Barry, Seasons of My Life: The Story of a Solitary Daleswoman, p10. ⁵ Hauxwell and Cockcroft, Seasons of My Life, p186.
You see what I mean? Heideggerian, eh?
An unprecedented miss for me in this generally hugely enjoyable series. I believe that the next will be on The Enemy of the World, by Robert Fairclough, who has previously written about The Prisoner; I have higher expectations.
I listened and contained myself with difficulty. Most of these women were rich. The whole wide beautiful world was theirs to wander in and they deliberately stayed in dirty dull London and talked about milkmen and servants! I think now, looking back, that I was perhaps a shade intolerant. But they were stupid – stupid even at their chosen job: most of them kept the most extraordinarily inadequate and muddled housekeeping accounts.
I came across this when researching my list of books set in Zimbabwe, and was sufficiently intrigued by an Agatha Christie book with an African setting to search it out. It didn’t make my list in the end, as less than a third of it is set in what was then Southern Rhodesia, the other settings being London, a ship on the Atlantic, and South Africa. And I don’t think it is classic Christie, but I enjoyed the diversion.
The protagonist, Anne Beddingfeld, is the daughter of a famous archaeologist / anthropologist, her father dies in the first chapter, leaving her free to have adventures on a budget. She gets involved with investigating two mysterious deaths in London; the trail takes her to Africa for mortal peril and romance. Agatha Christie had visited South Africa in 1922, during a political crisis, and clearly she observed and noted her surroundings. There’s some great description and characterisation, especially of the heroine – apparently Agatha Christie’s own preferred title for the book was Anna the Adventuress.
Of course, the whole book is permeated with casual racism – it almost goes without saying, but it must still be said. The plot is utterly bonkers, with a sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal at the end and an unreliable secondary narrator. It’s much closer to the thriller genre than to Christie’s home turf of determined detection. But it was only her fourth novel (after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Secret Adversary and The Murder on the Links) and she was entitled to a bit of experimentation. An interesting variation from a familiar writer. You can get The Man in the Brown Suit here.
Current Time Zero, by Justin Richards, by Justin Richards Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith
Last books finished The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon Soundings, by A. Hamilton Gibbs The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine Sonic Boom, by Robbie Morrison et al Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett
Next books Doctor Who: Empire of Death, by Scott Handcock The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore
Even while screaming, part of the Doctor’s mind analysed the problem. They were falling towards something, which most likely meant they were dropping towards a planetary surface. Based on the rate of their descent, he made a guess at the strength of the planet’s mavity. Then he ran that information through a complicated calculation involving the number of seconds they had been in freefall and came up with an estimate that they had so far fallen 30,000 feet.
The Well was my favourite of this year’s Doctor Who stories. I wrote of it:
Midnight is (still) my favourite Russell T. Davis episode, and I must admit I was delighted when The Well turned out to be a sequel, with a real base-under-siege plot and a really scary monster. We had more mind-blowing stuff to come this season, but this was the scariest episode by far.
I was a bit surprised by the news that Gareth Powell had been assigned the job of writing the novelisation – I don’t think he has published any other tie-in literature, instead developing his own complex universes. But it makes perfect sense – Powell’s writing is definitely on the more advanced side of military SF, and The Well is the most military Doctor Who story for years; the Doctor and Belinda even change into military uniform, before the horror part of the story gets going.
And of course it’s a good piece of work. A lot of the appeal of the episode was visual, which can be difficult to translate onto the printed page, but Powell actually uses this for freedom to explore the rather small world of the Well and its visitors a bit more. The story is broken up by brief bios of the military characters, fleshing them out a bit more than we got on screen. The tension of the plot is effectively maintained. I felt pretty satisfied. You can get Doctor Who: The Well here.
Immediately after the war, a commission for transforming the KLA was set up, including representatives of KFOR, UNMIK, the KLA, and the FARK. The commission met approximately 40 times in order to determine the details of transforming the KLA. Three variants were discussed: the transformation of the KLA a) into a National Guard with 14,000 men; b) into a territorial defense with an active reserve, modeled on the old Yugoslavian pattern; and c) a combination of a) and b). KFOR and UNMIK rejected the Kosovar ideas since it was feared they could be a precedent for independence. As a result, the KPC model was actually dictated by the protectorate powers. The ambiguity with regard to the future role of the KPC was accepted by both sides. It is no coincidence that the Albanian name of the organization—Trupat Mbrojtese te Kosoves (TMK)—can also be translated as Kosovo Defense Corps. The question of why KFOR accepted the creation of a thinly veiled KLA successor organization remains open. Some possible answers include the emotional attachment NATO officers felt for the professionalism of their KLA counterparts (German General Reinhardt has, on occasion, noted that KLA commander Hashim Thaci was “like a son” to him). The hope that the KPC might play a useful ‘proxy’ role in combating violent acts by Yugoslav or Kosovo Serb forces may have played a role too. According to a statement repeatedly heard by the authors in Kosovo in early 2001, KFOR was simply interested in retaining some degree of control over the more radical firebrands within the KLA structures—“better in the KPC and under control, than in the hills and on the loose”.
As I work through my books acquired in 2022, there will be quite a few about Kosovo, because I stocked up on the subject in that year for a project that ultimately did not come to pass. This is a very brief start, an analytical paper from the Bonn Institute for Conflict Studies, dating from 2001, so only two years after the end of the conflict and before the debate about Kosovo’s future status shifted decisively in favour of independence.
It does what it says in the title, though the historical part has now been much more comprehensively covered by James Pettifer in The Kosova Liberation Army, and the present to near future part has been completely overtaken by events, starting with the 2001 conflict in North Macedonia which broke out only a few weeks after this paper was published. However it does bust a few myths about the origins and structure of the KLA, which was important to the overall narrative at the time.
In retrospect, the weird thing is that people in the international community were so neuralgic about the future security arrangements of the Kosovo government, independent or not. In my last year at the International Crisis Group (2006), we published a paper advocating a model which was pretty close to the eventual Kosovo Security Force which was founded in 2009. The skies have not fallen.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Guinea-Conakry.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The African Child (aka The Dark Child)
Camara Laye
2,527
758
The Radiance of the King
Camara Laye
787
378
The Hanged Man of Conakry
Jean-Christophe Rufin
1,065
103
The King of Kahel
Tierno Monénembo
247
73
A Dream of Africa
Camara Laye
30
32
The pickings were very thin this week. I disqualified dozens of books which had nothing to do with the Republic of Guinea, often called Guinea-Conakry to try and minimise confusion with the other possibilities. The data were badly contaminated by references to Papua New Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Equatorial Guinea (all of which are different countries from each other and from Guinea-Conakry), also confusion with Guiana, and Guinea pigs.
This week’s winner, eventually, is an autobiographical memoir by Guinea’s most famous writer, Camara Laye (Camara is his family name, Laye his given name) about growing up in central Guinea. Two of the other four books on the list are by him as well.
With a slightly heavy heart I disqualified Little Brother: A Refugee’s Story, by Ibrahima Balde and Amets Arzallus Antia, because as far as I can tell from reviews the protagonist leaves Guinea before the half-way point of the book. I was also not sure about The Guardian of the Word, by Camara Laye, which retells part of the Sundiata epic – most of which takes place in what is now Mali, but some in what is now Guinea.
Bubbling under I was pleased to see two books by my former colleague Mike McGovern, Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern and A Socialist Peace?: Explaining the Absence of War in an African Country.
Coming next: Benin, Rwanda, Burundi and a step away from Africa to Bolivia.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 68) The New Machiavelli, by Jonathan Powell The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition Het lijkt Washington wel: Hoe lobbyisten Brussel in hun greep hebben, by Peter Teffer Wag the Dog: The Mobilization and Demobilization of the Kosovo Liberation Army, by Andreas Heinemann-Grüder and Wolf-Christian Paes The Mysterious Planet, by Jez Strickley (did not finish) Dragon’s Teeth: Tales from North Kosovo, by Ian Bancroft Barracoon: the Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, by Zora Neale Hurston
Non-genre 5 (YTD 37) Our Song, by Anna Carey The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie East of Eden, by John Steinbeck Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow Soundings, by A. Hamilton Gibbs
SF 6 (YTD 104) Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon, ed. Ian Whates An Island Called Moreau, by Brian Aldiss “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, by Ted Chiang Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 26) Mean Streets, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who: The Well, by Gareth L. Powell Doctor Who: The Mysterious Planet, by Terrance Dicks
Comics 2 (YTD 29) The Twist, by George Mann et al Paradise Towers: Paradise Found, by Sean Mason and Silvano Beltramo
6,000 pages (YTD 68,000) 4/24 (YTD 103/270) by non-male writers (Hurston, Christie, Carey, Constantine) 2/24 (YTD 31/270) by non-white writers (Hurston, Chiang) 4/24 reread (“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, Mean Streets, Doctor Who: The Mysterious Planet, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) 189 books currently tagged unread, down 15 from last month, down 78 from October 2024.
Reading now Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett
Coming soon (perhaps) Sonic Boom, by Robbie Morrison et al Time Zero, by Justin Richards Doctor Who: Empire of Death, by Scott Handcock Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks The Spark that Survived, by Myra Lewis Williams The Year Before Yesterday, by Brian W. Aldiss How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, by David DeSteno The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch An Experiment with Time, by J. W Dunne Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown Spa 1906, by Drac Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe The Woman in White, by Willie Collins The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Full printed extract from third letter (to his fiancée Edith Bratt, 26 November 2015):
The usual kind of morning standing about and freezing and then trotting to get warmer so as to freeze again. We ended up by an hour’s bomb-throwing with dummies. Lunch and a freezing afternoon. All the hot days of summer we doubled about at full speed and perspiration, and now we stand in icy groups in the open being talked at! Tea and another scramble – I fought for a place at the stove and made a piece of toast on the end of a knife: what days! I have written out a pencil copy of ‘Kortirion’. I hope you won’t mind my sending it to the T.C.B.S. I want to send them something: I owe them all long letters. I will start on a careful ink copy for little you now and send it tomorrow night, as I don’t think I shall get more than one copy typed (it is so long). No on second thoughts I am sending you the pencil copy (which is very neat) and shall keep the T.C.B.S. waiting till I can make another.
I’m a bit of a Tolkien obsessive, as you may perhaps have noticed, and this is the primary source for a lot of the stories about his life that I have known and loved for decades. I read all of the History of Middle Earth volumes a few years ago, but even so, it’s quite a delight to read about his writing in his own words. I knew that the process of writing The Lord of the Rings was painful and difficult; I had not realised that it was literally painful, given the extent of his and Edith’s ill health at the point that he was struggling to complete the book; perhaps there is a selection effect in that people in those days instinctively wrote openly to business partners about their medical problems?
He also complains bitterly about the costs of tax and housing – he and Edith moved several times to smaller and smaller places, and only at the end did Merton College provide him with free lodging and partial board, for which he was duly grateful.
His relationship with children and grandchildren seems to have been genuinely warm and loving. There are no letters to his daughter here, but that is presumably accidental, as she is mentioned in passing in other correspondence. He lived long enough to see his grandchildren starting on their careers, which obviously gave him much pleasure.
There are still some surprises. At the end of May 1945, writing to his sone Christopher about the coming end of WW2 in Asia, he says, “as I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust, I am afraid I am not even supported by a glimmer of patriotism in this remaining war.” There is also some poorly articulated but deep anger at the racist policies of the government of South Africa, where he was born. One of those cases where an icon slightly exceeds one’s hopes.
And there’s his lovely reminiscence of his first encounter with Finnish, in a 1955 letter to W.H. Auden:
It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.
And I love this namedropping story from a January 1965 letter to his son Michael:
An amusing incident occurred in November, when I went as a courtesy to hear the last lecture of this series of his given by the Professor of Poetry: Robert Graves. (A remarkable creature, entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of wild bees, half-German, half-Irish, very tall, must have looked like Siegfried/Sigurd in his youth, but an Ass.) It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard. After it he introduced me to a pleasant young woman who had attended it: well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well. But Graves started to laugh; and he said: it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before’. Quite true. And I had not supposed that the lady would ever have heard of me. Her name was Ava Gardner, but it still meant nothing, till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude, and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her….
I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who is not a Tolkien completist; but there are a lot of us around. You can get The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien here. (This is an expanded version, published only a few months ago.)
I have finished the last book on my shelves that I acquired in 2021, but am not blogging it for the time being. It is only two months since I finished off the 2020 acquisitions. I’ll never wear down the pile completely, but at least there are fewer books that have been hanging around unread for many years.
My pile of unread books from 2022 is larger, and also has quite a lot about Kosovo thanks to a project that I started but was unable to finish. Starting off the list are:
Wag the Dog: The Mobilization and Demobilization of the Kosovo Liberation Army, by Andreas Heinemann-Grüder and Wolf-Christian Paes – the shortest book of those that I acquired in 2022 and have not yet read
An Island Called Moreau, by Brian Aldiss – the sf book that has lingered longest unread on my shelves
Dragon’s Teeth: Tales from North Kosovo, by Ian Bancroft – the non-fiction book that has lingered longest unread on my shelves
The enchantments of flesh and spirit, by Storm Constantine – the top unread book of those I acquired in 2022
Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity, by Carla del Ponte with Chuck Sudetic – the top unread book about Kosovo of those I acquired in 2022
The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks – the non-genre book that has lingered longest unread on my shelves
There are fifty books on the 2022 list, and I tend to get through them at about four every month, so I suspect I’ll be doing a post looking back at my 2022 books and forward to those I acquire in 2023 somewhere around this time next year.
Current The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon Soundings, by A. Hamilton Gibbs The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett
Last books finished East of Eden, by John Steinbeck Barracoon: the Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, by Zora Neale Hurston Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow
Next books Sonic Boom, by Robbie Morrison et al Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte The Great Famine, by Cecil Woodham-Smith
General Favalan: Viv-2 is infected by that most deadly disease… curiosity. She wrongly believes there is more than Paradise Towers has to offer. / But there is nothing that Paradise does not provide.
Another of Cutaway Comics’ Doctor Who-related slipstream graphic stories, these four issues (which I bought as a collection) include, first, a full four part story, “Paradise Found” set a few years after the events of the Seventh Doctor TV series Paradise Towers, but also an eight page prequel, “Paradise Before” explaining (a little) how Paradise Towers ended up that way, and yet more: a spinoff from The Happiness Patrol, “Terra Alpha Blues”. It comes with several DVDs, combining extra stories and commentary both on the comics and about the original series, and I felt it brilliantly captured the spirit of the original story, which I always liked more than was fashionable anyway. You can get Paradise Found here.
‘Lol?’ Katie calls from the sitting room. She’s the only person who stills calls me Lol. It was my nickname in school but, unsurprisingly, it faded from use once people started using LOL as an acronym. I like that Katie still calls me Lol, though. It makes me feel … I dunno. Known. ‘Everything okay?’
I admit that I only bought this because I know the author a bit (I know her sister better). I really really enjoyed it. It’s a romance novel set in Dublin, jumping between student days around the turn of the century and grown-up days in 2019. Quite apart from the excellent and excruciating portrayal of the protagonist’s emotional journey with her love-interest, it also catches the passion of creating music together, along with some clear-eyed commentary on infertility (and on tabloid journalism and social media). I am glad to say that I actually understood the Irish-language joke on page 78 as well. You can get Our Song here.
I am conscious that I’ve been reading a few more romance novels this year, all by people I know; perhaps I’ll broaden that out.
Before I get into this, I was challenged over the methodology of these posts last week by Dilman Dila, who pointed out, quite fairly,
the lists are misleading, especially in relation to the African countries, and only perpetuates systemic and platform / corporate biases against African authors. Eg, the Uganda list doesn’t have Okot p’Bitek and the Kenya list doesn’t have Ngugi, though both names are in the Top 10 of Goodreads list!
All feedback is welcome, and this spurs me to give a bit more detail about what I am doing here.
The lists I publish for each country are of the books which are more than 50% set in that country, and have the highest number of owners on LibraryThing and the highest number of raters on Goodreads, taking the geometric average of the two figures. I will generally do eight books for each country, unless there are very few, in which case I will stop at five. I may not always make it to five in the future, but so far it’s proved reachable every time.
At the early stages, I was listing all of the books tagged with the name of each country on LibraryThing and Goodreads. But I realised that in a significant number of cases, a lot of books get tagged as relevant to country X without the majority of the text actually being set there – sometimes the author has close links, sometimes the plot has a small element set in country X, sometimes it’s just reader ignorance. (You can imagine what I faced with Guinea, which is coming next week.)
This means that my lists differ from those that Goodreads and LibraryThing serve up for each country, which rank books by the number of times a book has been tagged as relevant to country X. I have deliberately chosen a different metric, taking the number of people who have rated (GR) or own (LT) a particular book, as long as more than half of it is set in country X. (You can also dig out the number of people who own a book on Goodreads, or who have rated it on LibraryThing, but it is more effort.)
So I record the extent to which books set in country X have penetrated Goodreads and LibraryThing, ie by and large the Western English-speaking world (though Goodreads has some interesting pockets of support for other languages); but in the relevant entries, I will also note with regret where these do not include indigenous authors and will suggest further reading – as I did with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o for Kenya.
For Uganda, the Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi got two books in the top eight, and I’m afraid that the top book by Okot p’Bitek, a combined edition of his poems Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, scores only 764 raters on Goodreads and 156 owners on LibrayThing, some way below the threshold to make my list.
Often, particularly in Africa, colonialist narratives have prevailed, and I hope that what I am doing is a first step to mapping out where that is worse and where it is better. (I was pleasantly surprised by Cambodia, for instance.)
This is a start, not an end, and perhaps I’ll be able to run a different methodology some time in the future. And don’t let me stop anyone else from looking for an improved version.
Having said that, on to this week’s country, Zimbabwe. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set there.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
This week’s winner, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, is a childhood memoir of growing up in a white farmer family in Rhodesia in the dying days of white rule, and what happened after the war was lost. I checked, and although the Fullers started in England and ended up moving to Malawi and then Zambia, that’s well after the halfway point in the book so it definitely qualifies. The LibraryThing winner, The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, is a children’s science fiction novel set in a future Zimbabwe.
The top book set in Zimbabwe by a Zimbabwe-born author is Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga, a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in Rhodesia in the 1960s. The nearest miss – which would have been ninth on the list if I went any further – was Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, a fantasy satire that is clearly about Zimbabwe.
I disqualified eight books. The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins, is mostly set in England and I don’t know why a number of readers have tagged it as relating to Zimbabwe. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith, is firmly set in Botswana. The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie, has about 20% of the plot in Rhodesia, with the rest in South Africa, England and at sea. The location of King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard, is disputed but in any case less than half of the book takes place there.
More than half of I Will Always Write Back: How One Letter Changed Two Lives, by Caitlin Alifirenka and Martin Ganda, is set in the USA (I found a copy and counted the pages). Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, by Alexandra Fuller, seems to be more Kenya than Rhodesia. I awarded A Girl Named Disaster, by Nancy Farmer, to Mozambique a few months back. And the majority of Scribbling the Cat, by Alexandra Fuller again, seems to be set just across the border in Zambia and I counted it in my Zambia list published (belatedly) last week.
This is the first in a run of five African countries (not sure if I have stated this previously, but in principle I am running through the countries of the world in order of population). The next four are Guinea (Conakry), Benin, Rwanda and Burundi.
This is a consolidation of two blogposts from 2021, telling the story of how I identified the parents of a baby found abandoned in a Philadelphia park at the age of three weeks, in 1917. There have been no new developments since then, but I wanted to have a single account of the story in one place. Some names have been changed below; some have not.
In 2020 as the pandemic hit and indoor hobbies became suddenly more important, I sent a DNA sample to Ancestry.com (I had already done so with 23andMe) and waited with excitement for the results. Within a few weeks, I received notification that my sample had been processed, and eagerly checked to see who my closest genetic matches were among Ancetry.com users.
Six of the top seven were easy enough to work out. Three of them were descended from siblings of my mother’s maternal grandmother, an Ulster Presbyterian born near Coleraine in the middle of a family of nine. Another three of them were descended from siblings of my father’s maternal grandmother, who was one of eleven children of a thrice-married Pennsylvania steel broker. One, however, who I will call “Bella”, did not seem linked to either of the other two sets, and so I wrote to her in curiosity.
It became clear after some back and forth that Bella’s brother “Derek” and sister “Patricia” are also linked to me on Ancestry.com. The strength of their relationship to me appeared to be something at the level of third cousin (shared great-great-grandparents) or fourth cousin (shared 3x-great-grandparents). They had joined Ancestry.com to see if they could solve a family mystery: their mother had been found abandoned in a Philadelphia park as a baby. That story is told in a newspaper article from 25 August 1917:
PRETTY WAR BABY IS ABANDONED IN PARK Note on Tiny Girl Says Mother Is Dead, Father Gone Philadelphia’s first known war baby – a pretty, chubby, little girl of three weeks, was found on a bench on a hillside near Sedgley Guard House in Fairmount Park early today. Two women, who found the child, carried it to House Sergeant Maginn, of the Guard House, who sent it to the Philadelphia Hospital. The baby was wrapped in a white blanket and pinned to its spotless dress was a sealed envelope, which contained this note: “This baby was born August 5, of legitimate parentage of refinement and respectability. The mother died in childbirth at the age of 22. The father, a professional singer, travels, but has now gone to the war. There is no one else to look after the child and, being unable to get it into a home, has been obliged to resort to this means. Hoping the dear little baby will get a home, I am, ONE WHO CARES.” Park guards and the police are searching for the woman who is believed to have left the child in the Park, though they believe the story told in the note. The woman who found the child said she believed a woman they had seen near the bench a little earlier had left the child there. She was about fifty years old, had gray hair, and wore a black skirt and a white waist. She carried what they supposed was a baby wrapped in a white cloak. The Child when found, however, wore only its dress and the blanket.
All very dramatic. To jump ahead, the baby was adopted by a Philadelphia doctor and his wife, and grew up to marry her high school sweetheart, who became a university professor in Illinois. They retired to Vermont, where she died in 1987, with no knowledge of who her biological parents were from seventy years before.
As it happens, my grandmother was born in Philadelphia in 1899. But from the DNA, there was no chance that the baby in the park could have been her secret child; in that case, Bella, Patricia and Derek would have been my half-first cousins, and our DNA would have overlapped at around 6% rather than the 1%-ish that was actually the case. (In fact, two of my half-first-cousins on my mother’s side are on the DNA sites, and both score about 8% of overlap with me, which is more than average but within the normal range.)
Also, though this is supporting rather than conclusive evidence, my grandmother’s life is an open book thanks to her somewhat oversharing memoirs, and there is no hint of a secret teenage pregnancy.
Bella, Patricia and Derek, all born in the 1940s, knew nothing more than what is in the newspaper article about their mother’s origins, and were somewhat frustrated by the opacity of the DNA results that they got, and also by not always getting hugely helpful information from others who they had contacted on the site. I corresponded back and forth quite a lot with Patricia, and eventually she agreed to let me look at her own links on Ancestry.com.
She has a lot more close relatives on Ancestry.com than I do – starting of course with her siblings Bella and Derek, and then another five who are all genetically her second cousin or closer. The top two of those five, I quickly realised, were both descended from a couple who I will call Hugh and Peggy, born in the 1890s, who married in 1919 in Philadelphia. The next three were all related to Peggy’s siblings, but not to Hugh. It seemed pretty clear to me. The baby in the park’s mother was certainly Peggy. The baby’s father was definitely not Hugh.
Peggy’s family lived less than a mile from Fairmount Park in Phildelphia, where the baby was found. She is recorded as being a professional musician in the 1910 and 1920 censuses. She and Hugh appear to have had a baby together in 1916, but they did not get married until he returned from the war in 1919. Their marriage did not last, and the 1930 census records that Peggy and their child were living in Philadelphia while Hugh was living with a new wife on the West Coast.
Hugh died in the 1930s, and Peggy successfully applied for a pension as his widow, with dependent child, from the Veterans’ Administration, suggesting that their divorce, and Hugh’s other relationship, may not have been formalised. As noted above, several of Patricia’s DNA connections are descended from their child born in 1916; but as far as I can tell, they had no other children together. (Actually I have no genetic proof that the 1916 baby’s father was Hugh, but he seems to have acknowledged his own paternity.)
Reading between the lines, I speculate that Peggy and Hugh had parted company around the time that their child was born in the first half of 1916, and she and another chap got together towards the end of that year, with the August 1917 baby in the park as a result. But by the time the 1917 baby was born, Peggy and Hugh had reconciled or were about to reconcile. Hugh had just been drafted for the war, and the new baby was surplus to the requirements of the rekindled relationship.
So Peggy took a sad walk to the park that warm August evening – or more likely, perhaps, her mother did, if the reports of the older woman in the area are correct. I find this really heart-breaking: Peggy gave up her baby to a completely uncertain future, for the sake of a relationship which had already failed once, and was destined to fail again.
The note left with the baby said that “The mother died at childbirth at the age of 22. The father, a professional singer, travels, but has now gone to the war.” None of this was true. The mother had not died, was 27 rather than 22, and it was she who worked as a professional entertainer. We’ll get to the baby’s biological father in due course, but I will reveal now that he was an industrial executive who did not go to fight in the war at all – though Hugh, the baby’s stepfather, was about to. To quote G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown:
“Suppose someone sent you to find a house with a green door and a blue blind, with a front garden but no back garden, with a dog but no cat, and where they drank coffee but not tea. You would say if you found no such house that it was all made up. But I say no. I say if you found a house where the door was blue and the blind green, where there was a back garden and no front garden, where cats were common and dogs instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts and coffee forbidden — then you would know you had found the house.”
Since I was not related to Peggy, nor to Bella, Patricia and Doug’s father, that meant by a process of elimination that the father of the baby in the park must be a relative of mine. I originally thought that it might have been quite a distant cousin, who lived in New England and was a travelling salesman, but on reflection I realised that his relationship to me was too distant to explain the strength of the DNA links between me and the siblings.
I worried away at this. My grandmother’s mother had strong Pennsylvania family links; but the limited DNA evidence pointed instead to her Massachusetts-born father’s side of the family. I went back to look at the list of my grandmother’s first cousins, rather than anyone more distant; all descended from my grandmother’s paternal grandparents, a couple who I will call Bill and Sally, born in the 1810s, who lived all of their lives near Boston.
I realised that I had missed one interesting candidate, who I will call “Edward”, son of Bill and Sally’s older daughter. Edward’s older brother “Chris” had moved to California in 1909, so I had ruled him out, but I had somehow failed to notice that Edward and the middle brother “David” had stayed in the East. David spent his whole life in Massachusetts, but Edward moved around a fair bit. He actually died in Philadelphia during the second world war; and, digging a bit further into the records, I discovered that he had also spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania from 1907 to 1917, including, crucially, that he lived in Philadelphia in 1916, exactly when the baby in the park was conceived.
To say that I was excited was an understatement. I realised also that although Edward was not himself known to have had other children, I had identified two of Chris’s great-grandchildren, Edward’s great-great-nephews, on another genetics site, myheritage.com – identified as “Henry” and “Ian” on this diagram.
Patricia needed little persuading to let me upload her DNA sample to myheritage.com. If I was right about Edward being her grandfather, then the link between her and Edward’s great-great-nephews should be around twice as strong as the link between her and me; second cousins once removed, as opposed to third cousins.
On a Saturday morning, my email pinged with a message from myheritage.com. I clicked excitedly to their site to see the analysis. Would it prove my theory that Edward was the father of the baby in the park?
Er, no. Patricia’s link with Henry was actually weaker than her link with me. And her link with Ian was so weak that it was off the scale of measurability. My Edward theory looked to have been completely blown out of the water.
I went back to the drawing board. Specifically, I went back to 23andMe, the website where I had first signed up for this kind of thing. After a bit more digging around, I realised that no less than three other known descendants of Bill and Sally, my great-great-grandparents, were on the site. And we knew that the father of the baby in the park must have been a mature man in 1916. If he was also a descendant of Bill and Sally, there were only seven males in the right age range:
Bill and Sally’s sons, “Albert” and “Brian”, aged 62 and 60 in 1916;
Bill and Sally’s daughter’s sons, Chris, David and Edward, aged 46, 43 and 35 in 1916;
Albert’s son “Frank”, aged 32 in 1916
Brian’s son “George”, aged 23 in 1916.
Luckily four of these had descendants on 23andMe – Chris’s great-great-granddaughter by his eldest daughter, who I’ll call “Jo”; Frank’s great-granddaughter “Kate”, also Albert’s great-great-granddaughter; a great-grandson of Albert by his second marriage, who I’ll call “Lenny”; and me, great-grandson of Brian and great-nephew of George.
There is no need to go into complexity here. It’s pretty simple.
If Chris, David or Edward was the grandfather of Patricia, Bella and Derek, then Jo is their half first cousin twice removed (Chris) or their second cousin twice removed (David or Edward), and their DNA should be closer to Jo’s than to Kate’s, Lenny’s or mine. (Already pretty much excluded as a possibility, by the myheritage.com results from Chris’s great-grandsons Henry and Ian.)
If Frank was the grandfather of Patricia, Bella and Derek, then Kate is their half first cousin once removed and their DNA should be closer to Kate’s than to Jo’s, Lenny’s or mine.
If Albert was the grandfather of Patricia, Bella and Derek, then Lenny is their half first cousin once removed and their DNA should be closer to Lenny’s than to Jo’s, Kate’s or mine.
If Brian or George was the grandfather of Patricia, Bella and Derek, then I am their half second cousin or half second cousin once removed, and their DNA should be closer to mine than to Jo’s, Kate’s or Lenny’s. (Already pretty much excluded, because their links to me should be a lot closer than they are, if this was the case.)
The balance of probabilities already pointed towards Frank. The DNA evidence that we already had weakened any case for Chris, David and Edward on the one hand, or for Brian and George on the other. That left 62-year-old Albert and his son, 32-year-old Frank; and Frank seemed more likely than Albert to have been at a time of his life when he would have been playing the field.
At this point I needed to persuade Patricia, Bella and Derek to all submit samples to 23andMe. Again, they needed little persuading. It took a while to get everything organised, but the results came back in the end:
DNA share with
Jo
Kate
Lenny
me
Patricia
0.63%
1.85%
0.70%
0.86%
Derek
0.42%
2.44%
0.23%
0.62%
Bella
0.86%
1.38%
1.06%
1.23%
For all three of them, the link with Kate was much closer than their links with Jo, Lenny or me. It looked very much like Frank must be their grandfather. As noted above, Kate is their half first cousin once removed; Lenny is their half second cousin; I myself am their third cousin; Henry and Ian are their third cousins once removed; and Jo is their third cousin twice removed.
In general you’d expect the link with Kate to have been a bit stronger, around 3% for a half first cousin once removed, and you’d expect the links with a half second cousin like Lenny to be closer than their links with a third cousin like me, whereas in fact I share more of their DNA than Lenny does. The connection with Jo, their third cousin twice removed, is surprisingly strong as well. But it’s all within the bounds of normal variation.
Another factor elevates this from probability to certainty. 23andMe allows you to do chromosome-by-chromosome comparison. (Since I first wrote this, Ancestry.com has now also rolled out that function.) Very interestingly, Kate shares X chromosome DNA with all three of Patricia, Bella and Derek. We people who have Y chromosomes can only inherit X chromosome DNA from our mothers and not our fathers. (You folks with two X chromosomes have inherited that DNA from both of your parents.) That means that if you share X chromosome DNA with anyone, there cannot be a father-son link in the genealogical link between you, because sons inherit X chromosome DNA only from their mothers.
But Kate’s link with six of the seven potential fathers of the baby in the park does include a father-son connection, which would eliminate any shared X chromosome DNA. Six of them are related to her through the father-son link between Albert and Frank, including Albert himself. The only one of the seven with whom Kate could share X chromosome DNA is her own great-grandfather, Frank. (I myself do not share X-chromosome DNA with any of the other people in the chart, because my link to them all is through my father; my X-chromosomes will be the same as my mother’s.)
(The X-chromosome connection also eliminates one remaining remote possibility, that the baby’s father might have been descended from one of Bill or Sally’s siblings – this was unlikely anyway, since that would have added another one or two steps to the genealogical distance with Bill and Sally’s known descendants, but the X-chromosome link with Kate meant that they had to also be related to Albert’s first wife, who is not related to me.)
So, I was able to solve a century-old mystery. We still don’t know how Frank and Peggy got together, to set in motion the course of events that resulted in the birth of the baby abandoned in the park in Philadelphia. I know that Frank was working in Buffalo that year, as a corporate executive, and also that he visited Washington DC for his business; we also know that his cousin Edward was living in Philadelphia. Perhaps Frank stopped off in Philly to visit his cousin Edward, who was about the same age, and met with Peggy then? (Though Edward was reportedly not close to the rest of his family.) Then again, Peggy was a musician; perhaps she was performing in DC or in Buffalo, and met Frank there? I doubt that we will ever find out.
But we do know for sure who the biological parents of the baby in the park were.
I tend to think, with no evidence at all, that Frank was unaware that Peggy was pregnant with his baby. Though only in his 30s, he was already a wealthy man, and could have made discreet provision for a baby (or indeed an abortion) without anyone finding out about it except his lawyer. It is not difficult to think of scenarios where Peggy did not have Frank’s contact details, though again I tend to think that she made a positive decision to bet on her relationship with Hugh and therefore to keep Frank and his biological child completely out of her family’s future life.
Frank married a woman from Ohio five years later, in 1922, and in due course they had a daughter – Kate’s grandmother. Frank lived most of his life in New York, eventually retiring to the Southern state where his daughter (his younger daughter, as we now know) had meanwhile moved, and where in due course his great-granddaughter Kate was born.
Peggy stayed in Philadelphia for the rest of her life, and as mentioned earlier had no other children (that we know of) after she married Hugh. Her son, born in 1916, married at least four times and had numerous children. He too lived most of his life in Philadelphia, though he went to the West Coast in the 1930s and came back again after the second war. Helpfully, several of his grandchildren are Ancestry.com users, as are some of Peggy’s great-nieces and great-nephews.
This sort of research is really difficult and not cheap, though not eye-wateringly expensive either. We needed Patricia, Bella and Derek to supply DNA samples to two different testing sites, and I think if I had not been related to them myself, it would have taken a lot longer to get to the bottom of the mystery. It would also have been much more difficult if they were not all Americans; we needed a critical mass of not-too-distant relatives who had joined at least one of the DNA testing sites to make the identification possible.
But it’s immensely gratifying to have been able to do this, and in the process I have very much enjoyed and valued getting to know Patricia, Kate and Kate’s parents. In the end, everyone has a right to know where they come from. I have a real job, so I doubt that I will ever make a living out of this kind of work, but it would be really interesting to do it again.
Second paragraph of third story (“Acts of Defiance” by Eric Brown):
I worked all morning on my portable typewriter, and towards lunchtime replaced it beneath the floorboards of my study. Old habits died hard, even though I was no longer on the mainland where the government might swoop unannounced at any time. I had moved to Shapinsay after the death of my wife, fleeing painful memories and the Party both. None of us were free these days, though paradoxically I did feel a little less imprisoned on the island which measured just five miles by four.
The last of the books that I acquired at Novacon in 2021, this is a collection of fourteen short stories which were donated to the convention by their authors – quite a stellar list of contributors. I thought they were all good; the two best for me were “Acts of Defiance” by Eric Brown, in a future totalitarian Scotland where reading dangerous books has been forbidden, and “The Ships of Aleph” by Jaine Fenn, whose protagonist sails over the edge of a flat world and finds himself in a place both familiar and unfamiliar. You can get Burning Brightly here.
This was the top unread book that I had acquired in 2021, the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2021 and the sf book that had lingered longest on my shelves. That leaves only one book in my 2021 pile, Het lijkt Washington wel: Hoe lobbyisten Brussel in hun greep hebben, by Peter Teffer.
The city, and indeed the planet, have a strange history and an oddly mixed economy.
A very solid and enjoyable Bernice Summerfield novel by Terrance Dicks, bringing her and Chris Cwej to a large city called, er, Megacity, where a huge corporate crime scheme called The Project is bubbling under the surface, and parts of the story are told in the first person by an intellectually enhanced Ogron who is a private eye. It’s not trying to be deep, it’s just trying to be fun, and it succeeds. You can get Mean Streets here (at a price).
That takes me to the end of the Bernice Summerfield novels that I read ten years ago and failed to blog at the time. I’ll jump now to the unblogged Eighth Doctor novels, starting with Time Zero by Justin Richards.
