Second frame of third issue of first story (“Beneath the Waves”):
Compilation of two Titan Twelfth Doctor stories, a four-parter and a one-shot. “Beneath the Waves” by George Mann was an unexpected hit for me, in that I normally bounce off Mann’s writing, but this is a competently done tale of creepy alien seaweed monsters in an English town, with Hattie the future rock star pulled back into the Doctor’s adventures from the previous volume. “The Boy With The Displaced Smile”, by James Peaty, has an alien incursion into a Western American town, another standard enough story, competently done.
There was no beauty in her careless, haggard face, but it had distinction. Her voice was charming.
For the day that’s in it, Happy Christmas everyone! And let me take you back to 1938, where Hercule Poirot is called in by the local police to solve the spectacular murder of a patriarch whose children, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, are all conveniently clustered around the crime scene, as the Christmas season unfolds around them.
Agatha Christie’s characterisation isn’t always her strong point, but she has some memorable bit players here – the insecure oldest son who is now an MP, the black sheep who has returned to the fold, the daughters-in-law, the Spanish granddaughter escaping the Civil War.
The actual solution to the crime bends the usual rules a bit, in a way that Christie also used elsewhere, but vital clues are given to the attentive reader from quite an early stage, so it’s fair enough. If you need something to take you out of your own holiday environment, you can get Hercule Poirot’s Christmas here.
Current This Way Up, by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel
Last books finished The Enigma Score, by Sheri S. Tepper Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss The Moon of Gomrath, by Alan Garner Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade Mawdryn Undead, by Kara Dennison The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews (did not finish)
Next books Lost In Time, by A G Riddle The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Second paragraph of third story (“On the Ship”, by Leah Cypess):
It was as if they knew childhood was all we would ever have.
A collection of thirteen stories by authors writing in Chinese and English, published simultaneously in China and the USA in 2023. I knew three of them already because they had got onto the 2024 Hugo ballot, which I administered, but it was interesting to see them in context.
It’s actually quite an old-fashioned collection – most of the stories are about people on spaceships or on alien planets getting into trouble, which of course a lot of SF is still about, but few of these stories really touch on anything else. “Answerless Journey”, by Han Song, one of the Hugo finalists, takes this in an interesting direction by de-humanising its space travellers (if indeed they are human, which is – deliberately? – not clear). The thirteen stories range in length from 65 pages (“Shine”, by Chen Zijun) to 13 (“The Darkness of Mirror Planet”, by Zhao Haihong), most on the shorter side. Still, it’s an interesting step in intercultural communication.
Surveying the sight, Ambassador William Walker, a seasoned American diplomat who had witnessed his share of atrocities while serving in Central America and who now headed the KVM, described what he had seen: [gory details redacted]
A good full-throated defence of the NATO conflict with Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, written shortly after the event, and coinciding largely with my own views: the conflict was a deliberate, unforced choice by Slobodan Milošević, and western policy rather floundered into NATO participation, but once a ground invasion was seriously being discussed, the Serbian leadership folded and the conflict ended with NATO and the UN, and of course the Kosovars, taking control.
It was written so soon after the conflict that a lot of important later developments are missing because they had not happened yet: the 2001 Macedonia conflict, the 2004 Kosovo riots, the 2006-08 independence process. This last, the future status of Kosovo, is the one point that the authors are a bit mealy-mouthed about, as the Western policy community had not quite got to the stage of comprehending that it was only going in one direction. (I am glad to have been part of the debate pushing that comprehension.)
But otherwise, the authors deal efficiently with a number of counter scenarios as to how the conflict could have been averted; the fact is that the USA and the rest of the western alliance had limited scope for affecting events, and while that limited scope was not always exploited to the full, in particular in the early phase of the NATO bombing campaign, this was not the big problem; the big problem was Milošević and his policies.
This was my top unread book about Kosovo acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill.
Second paragraph of Chapter Three (which is not the third chapter):
Il romanzo che stai leggendo vorrebbe presentarti un mondo corposo, denso, minuzioso. Immerso nella lettura, muovi macchinalmente il tagliacarte nello spessore del volume: a leggere non sei ancora alla fine del primo capitolo, ma a tagliare sei già molto avanti. Ed ecco che, nel momento in cui la tua attenzione è più sospesa, volti il foglio a metà d’una frase decisiva e ti trovi davanti due pagine bianche.
The novel you are reading wants to present to you a corporeal world, thick, detailed. Immersed in your reading, you move the paper knife mechanically in the depth of the volume: your reading has not yet reached the end of the first chapter, but your cutting has already gone far ahead. And there, at the moment when your attention is gripped by the suspense, in the middle of a decisive sentence, you turn the page and find yourself facing two blank sheets.
I had never attempted this previously, but it was one of the books I liberated from Ireland during the summer. It’s a surreal narrative where the sequentially numbered chapters, told in the second person, tell the story of investigating a fictional country and language which have disappeared, interspersed with the opening passages of a dozen fictional novels that tie into the narrative. I think it required more concentration and attention than I was able to give it during my commute and other travels, but at least it was fairly short. You can get If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino here.
This was my top unread sf book; next on that pile is Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Haiti.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Island Beneath the Sea
Isabel Allende
46,230
2,717
Breath, Eyes, Memory
Edwidge Danticat
31,110
3,114
The Comedians
Graham Greene
10,038
2,893
An Untamed State
Roxane Gay
19,695
1,053
Libertie
Kaitlyn Greenidge
15,751
857
Krik? Krak!
Edwidge Danticat
9,653
1,326
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
C.L.R. James
7,433
1,676
The Kingdom of This World
Alejo Carpentier
8,185
1,355
Quite a close result at the top, with Isabelle Allende’s tale of slavery in Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Island Beneath the Sea, sufficiently in the lead on Goodreads to beat Edwidge Danticat’s best known novel, the coming of age story Breath, Eyes, Memory, which however had the lead on LibraryThing. I was not quite sure about Breath, Eyes, Memory, part of which is set in New York, but as far as I could tell the majority of it is on Danticat’s native island. Danticat has two books on this week’s list; Krik? Krak! is a short story collection.
I disqualified five books. Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, is a biography of the doctor Paul Farmer, who worked also in Peru and Rwanda. Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is told in flashback from the narrator’s later life in Haiti, but the setting of the majority of it is the USA. The Black Count, by Tom Reiss, is about the father of Alexandre Dumas, who was born in Saint-Domingue but moved to Paris as a teenager. American Street, by Ibi Zoboi, is about the immigrant experience in the USA. And The Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat again, is set across the border in the Dominican Republic.
This was one of the easier countries to rank – on the whole, users of LibraryThing and Goodreads are in agreement about which books are relevant to Haiti.
I’ll end the year next week with my adopted home country, Belgium, and will start 2026 with Jordan; followed by Haiti’s neighbour, the Dominican Republic, and then the United Arab Emirates.
This is the middle volume of a planned trilogy about early twentieth century Belgian detective Hendrikus Ansor, who Solves Crime. In this case he is brought in by Princess Clémentine (I wasn’t sure if she was a real historical person, but she was) to investigate mysterious deaths – apparently suicides – in the eastern resort town of Spa, which has given its name to an entire way of life.
Ansor obviously owes something to a later fictional Belgian detective, not least his magnificent moustache, but he’s a well-rounded if not always likeable character here, and the classical buildings of Spa and the royals and other celebrities are lovingly depicted by artist Olivier Wozniak. The mood of the book depicts a Belgium morally corroded by the reign of Leopold II rather well. I found the plot a bit convoluted, but I suppose that’s normal enough for a detective novel. It’s a nice one to have on the shelf. You can get Spa 1906 here.
The kitchen crew filled plates with scrambled eggs, scones, and fresh fruit for Renzie and Tuck. They seated themselves in the stark unadorned room that served as the dining commons.
Michaela Roessner won the John W. Campbell Award (as it then was) in 1990 on the strength of her first novel, Walkabout Woman; Vanishing Point was her second novel of four. She was actually first well known as an artist who produced quite a lot of SF illustrations in the first half of the 1980s. She doesn’t seem to have published any new fiction since 2011. I picked this up at Eastercon in 2022 in order to try a new woman writer.
I’m conscious that my last few reviews on here have been somewhat negative, so I’m, glad to say that I thought Vanishing Point was rather good. It is set in California, thirty years after the mysterious vanishing of ninety per cent of the human race. A small community of researchers based in the Winchester House (or something very like it) is trying to work out what actually happened. A woman scientist from farther east joins them after a dangerous trek across country. They are beset by fanatics who think that the Vanishing was the Christian fundamentalist Rapture. Everyone is suffering post-traumatic disorientation and survivors’ guilt. It’s all very nicely and credibly put together. I see a couple of reviewers complaining that the science doesn’t make sense, but really, it’s all handwavium anyway, isn’t it?
In past years I was able to do detailed analysis of my social media impact, using stats from Facebook, Twitter, etc etc. Nowadays, they have all hidden the statistics from the casual user, but on the flipside I have very good stats for this blog thanks to Jetpack. This ranking probably isn’t going to change in the next 12 days, so these lists are based on year-to-date as of today, 19 December.
1) Top 2025 blog posts, written in 2025
I’m doing two more brief sections, but these are the ten blog posts published this year that got the most hits.
1.10) Reforming the WSFS committee elections (26 July)
This was a topic that had been close to my heart for some time: I was, and am, concerned that under current rules, a single faction with less than majority support could nonetheless win all the seats on offer in the WSFS internal elections. This year’s elections dramatically illustrated the problem when the leading candidate endorsed two other candidates and they won all three available seats between them. In an ironic twist, that leading candidate was, er, me.
One of two posts in the top ten which were not about science fiction, this picked up on a couple of significant points that I had not seen properly covered elsewhere, including Pope Leo’s choice of regnal name.
1.8) 2025 Hugo final ballot: Goodreads / LibraryThing stats (6 April)
This is a post I do every year, running the Hugo final ballot through the numbers of the Goodreads and LibraryThing websites. This year, the books with the highest reader ratings on both systems won Best Novel and Best Graphic Story or Comic, and the Lodestar Award was won by the book with the highest LibraryThing ratings; but Best Novella went to a dark horse.
1.7) The Baby in the Park, a consolidated account (25 October)
My top non-science-fiction-related post of this year; I had written this story up previously, but in two different posts, as I discovered different parts of the process in 2020-21, and was able to solve the mystery of the parentage of a baby born in 1917 who turned out to be my second cousin once removed. This post pulled the whole story together into a single account.
My traditional dig into the voting numbers. Several categories were very close, and under the old rules, Best Editor Long Form and Best Fanzine would have been No-Awarded.
1.3) What science fiction predicted about 2025 (1 January)
My annual post looking at books and films which are a) more than twenty years old and b) set in the current calendar year. There were a lot for 2025, which is of course a nice quarter-century number. Spoiler: there will be a lot fewer for 2026.
1.2) Pronouncing the names correctly at the Hugo ceremony (23 August)
This year’s massive Hugo scandal was the mangling of the names of finalists at the Hugo ceremony, which I took personally as I had been involved with gathering information for the convention about how the names should be pronounced, which the convention then ignored. The presenters subsequently apologized, asserting that their carelessness should not be seen as a lack of care. Hmm.
1.1) How Christopher Priest wrote for Doctor Who, and what happened next (21 June)
This turned into one of my best performing blog posts ever, a recounting of my correspondence with Chris Priest soon after I got to know him in 2007, about the events of twenty-five years before when he was commissioned twice to write Doctor Who stories which were never made. I suspect that my post was picked up by Doctor Who fandom, and also to a lesser extent by fans who knew Chris.
2) The top old blog posts of this year
Those were the top blog posts which were written in 2025. However, a lot of blog posts from previous years are still performing very well. The top five of these are as follows:
2.5) The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney (1 August 2024)
This is my third most viewed book review from any year – I think because Heaney himself is very prominent, but this play is not one of his more widely reviewed works. I would not be surprised if this piece has ended up on some college reading lists.
2.4) Rauf Denktaş, a Private Portrait, by Yvonne Çerkez (21 November 2022)
This is my second most viewed book review on this site. I don’t think either my review or the book is exceptional in quality, but Denktaş was a very big fish in his not very big pond, and this account of his side of the story is not widely available – at least, not as widely available as my review.
2.3) Beijing: the Forbidden City, and people wearing pretty dresses (19 October 2023)
I am proud of this post, which consists of photographs taken on the very first day I ever spent in China, in 2023. The Forbidden City itself is stunning, and the custom of local women dressing up in historical costumes on a Sunday is charming. This and the posts on The Cure at Troy and Rauf Denktaş had fewer views than the post about sf set in 2025, but more than the post about the 2025 Hugo statistics.
2.2) The multiplication of descendants of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (12 February 2023)
This is another post that I am proud of, simply tracking in raw numbers the increase over time of (known) descendants of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. I wrote it in early 2023 and predicted that their number of living descendants would pass the 1,000 mark in the following twelve months, and would pass 1,024 probably in 2025. I have not checked to see if either of these milestones was met on schedule.
2.1) William Wordsworth, Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline (12 April 2023)
My top post of the year written in a previous year, and I suppose also my top book review since it’s framed as a review of two monographs about the subject. I am honestly a bit surprised by its popularity, though, the story of Wordsworth’s French daughter didn’t impact much on his life or indeed on hers; he fled revolutionary France leaving his pro-monarchist lover behind with their unborn baby, and they subsequently met only twice, though relations seem to have been mostly civil. I was charmed to get a nice message recently from one of Wordsworth’s 5x great-grandchildren through Caroline and her great-great-grandson Emmanuel Hublot.
These two posts on Wordsworth’s daughter and the descendants of Vic and Al got more views than the Hugo pronunciation post but less than Chris Priest on Doctor Who.
3) The top book reviews of 2025
I actually think of this blog as mainly book reviews with some other cultural and political commentary, so while I’m pleased that the latter gets plenty of clicks, I’m a little sorry that the contemporary book reviews don’t do quite as well. My top five book reviews from 2025 were:
3.5) My Secret Brexit Diary: A Glorious Illusion, by Michel Barnier (13 September)
Not purely a book review, also an examination of the marriages of two very significant science fiction figures (who both married much younger American women).
3.1) I Who Have Never Known Men aka The Mistress Of Silence, by Jacqueline Harpman (24 January)
Glad to say that I was an early adopter of this surreal but grim story by one of Belgium’s great writers. I think it’s a great book.
Four of the above five were published in the first quarter of the year, which makes me suspect that for the book reviews at least there’s more of a slow constant burn of attention.
I think that’s enough analysis for now. At least it’s reassuring that in this age of micro-attention spans, the longer form still has its plcae.
This is another bande dessinée that I acquired at the Brussels comics festival, the first of five volumes about the life of Princess Charlotte of Belgium, later Empress of Mexico. This volume takes us from the death of Charlotte’s mother in 1850 to her installation in Mexico in 1864, from the age of 10 to the age of 24, including the first years of her marriage at the age of 17 to the Archduke Maximilian, younger brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I.
Monarchy has many flaws, and not least is its impact on the actual royals, who are shown here as trapped in a gilded cage of privilege. Maximilian is a womaniser who is sterile because of venereal disease. Napoleon III is a sleazebag. Charlotte is rather obviously a Princess Di figure in this story, though history suggests that she was more assertive. The characterisation is a little stiff but you always know who is who.
Speaking of history, the story here has some serious omissions. It is implied that Maximilian’s term as viceroy of northern Italy was ended by the Battle of Solferino in 1859, which kicked the Hapsburgs out of Lombardy and Venice, but in fact he had been sacked by his brother two months earlier for being too liberal. Also historically Maximilian spent an awful lot of time pursuing his personal interests in Brazil, leaving Charlotte stranded on Madeira, and that simply isn’t mentioned here.
I don’t think I’ll bother with the rest; Charlotte is a tragic historical figure, but in the end her story is marginal to the real sweep of history, and while it’s OK not to let the facts get in the way of a good story, it’s important not to get too far away from them if you’re telling a historical tale. If you want, you can get Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1 here.
Current The Moon of Gomrath, by Alan Garner The Enigma Score, by Sheri S. Tepper Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss
Last books finished The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu (did not finish) Elidor, by Alan Garner The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham A Wrinkle in the Skin, by John Christopher Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee Doctor Who: The Adventures After, by Carole Ann Ford et al
Next books Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews
This is an adaptation of the story of Ness from the Ulster Cycle, ending with the birth of the future king Conchobar Mac Nessa. I picked this up at Eastercon, supporting an Irish creator of whom I hadn’t previously been aware, and of course I am always interested in treatments of Irish mythology.
The concept here is interesting enough – always up for a spunky girl warrior, who takes revenge on the bad guys when her royal father is unable to mete out as justice. But I’m afraid I wasn’t a fan of the art – red monochrome sketching, where I found some of the characters difficult to distinguish and a few more colours would have helped me to follow the plot a bit more. Apparently there is also a sequel covering the Cattle Raid of Cooley, the much more famous part of the Ulster Cycle. If I see it in passing I’ll probably get it.
“Yes, I know . . . well, it’s not an exact science . . .” the familiar voice explains, anxious but assured. “There’s variation in every breed . . . yes, I know. Understood.”
I am familiar with Chuck Tingle’s short fiction, but this novel is a step in a different direction; Rose, our protagonist, lives in a Christian cult somewhere around Montana, but is neurodiverse and gay, and also infested with satanic flies. Camp Damascus, run by her church, is a gay conversion camp which is secretly being run for the benefit of demons.
The book’s heart is in the right place, but the execution isn’t quite there. Gay conversion camps are of course evil, but in the real world they are not actually demonic, and I would rather have the religious zealots exposed for their vicious lack of compassion and failure of empathy than just make fun of them for worshipping the wrong supernatural being. And Rose’s emotional journey zigzags a bit, with the One Who Got Away emerging rather late in the plot. Work in progress, I feel. You can get Camp Damascus here.
Kathy: Are you leaving? Driver: I’m taking a client to Kilwood
I have hugely enjoyed the Aldebaran cycle of bandes dessinées by Leo (Luiz Eduardo de Oliveira) and thought this might be worth a try. The story is by Leo and Rodolphe (Rodolphe Daniel Jacquette) and art by Bertrand Marchal. I had not realised that it’s actually the start of a fourth series of albums about the adventures of Kathy Austin, a British secret agent at the end of the 1940s; previously she has visited Kenya, Namibia and the Amazon.
Here she goes to Scotland to visit the house that she has inherited from her aunt, only to discover that it has been badly damaged by a fire and that her aunt’s suspicious death has not been investigated properly; incidentally there are Soviet agents and alien artifacts hanging around too.
It would be very easy for a (mostly) French creative team to slip into stereotypes here, and I’m glad to say that they have avoided it at least with regard to the humans of Scotland, with a reasonably sensitive depiction of rural and small-town folks dealing with Kathy’s return from years away. The landscapes are beautifully done, with Kathy brooding in front of a loch on the cover. The first four of the five in this series are out, and I’ll work through them. You can get Scotland, Épisode 1 here.
I mentioned under Sudan that I had excluded four books which scored highly on both LT and GR, but appeared to be set in what is now South Sudan: A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park; They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky, by Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak and Judy A. Bernstein; Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo; and Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins. I checked as far as I could, and all four of those seem to indeed be set mainly south of the line.
I note that there is a character in the novel Acts of Faith who is very obviously based on Emma McCune, the subject of the biography Emma’s War. I never met her myself, but I know many people who did, and she clearly left her mark. If she had lived, she would be turning 62 in a few weeks’ time, and she would have been all over the political processes of the last thirty years, probably for better rather than worse.
Five of the other six books are about the terrible experiences of the Lost Boys, child soldiers conscripted into the Sudanese war in the 1990s, who then managed to escape to other countries and rebuild their lives. This week’s winner, A Long Walk to Water, combines such a story with the story of a girl in a tribal village in South Sudan who must keep her family supplied with water; her story on its own is the eighth of the books listed here.
I disqualified loads of books, starting with What is the What by Dave Eggers, another book about one of the Lost Boys, but as far as I can tell mainly set after the protagonist gets out of his home country. Also, some people seem to confuse South Sudan with South Africa when tagging their book collections.
The top book by a South Sudanese woman is Hopeless Kingdom, by Kgshak Akec, but it is mainly about the emigration experience. A near miss in several respects is Ghost Country, by Fatin Abbas, which is set in a fictional version of the disputed Abyei and whose author is from Khartoum.
This is the last African country for a while, and the last African country on the list of the six that I have actually visited myself. We’ll leap across the Atlantic next to Haiti, then back this side for Belgium, then Jordan, then back over again to Haiti’s neighbour the Dominican Republic.
Menschen, gierig nach dem Gewinn von Sekunden, stürzten zu ihm herein und, Stockwerke höher, tiefer wieder hinaus. Keiner achtete seiner. Der eine, die andere erkannte ihn wohl. Aber noch deutete niemand die Tropfen an seinen Schläfen anders als gleiche Gier nach dem Gewinn von Sekunden. Gut, er wollte warten, bis man es besser wußte, bis man ihn packte und aus der Zelle stieß: Was nimmst du uns den Platz weg, Lump, der du Zeit hast? Krieche die Treppen hinunter oder die Feuerleitern …
Persons, greedy to gain a few seconds, stumbled in with him, and stories higher, or lower, out again. Nobody paid the least attention to him. One or two certainly recognised him. But, as yet, nobody interpreted the drops on his temples as being anything but a similar greed for the gain of a few seconds. All right – he would wait until they knew better, until they took him and threw him out of the cell: What are you taking up space for, you fool, if you’ve got so much time? Crawl down the stairs, or the fire escape…
Every year since 2020 I’ve done a round-up blog post detailing what science fiction has been set in the year to come. There is surprisingly little for 2026. Literally the only sf novel that I have found which is entirely set in that year is Metropolis, published in 1925 by Thea von Harbou. Even there, I didn’t find anything in the text of the book that explicitly references the year; but people have been writing that it is set in 2026 since soon after publication, so I am guessing that the original blurb may have said so.
The film and book have the same plot, which is not surprising as von Harbou wrote them both. A future heavily industrialised city depends on the labour of the underclass. Freder, the son and heir of the city’s founder Joh, falls in love with Maria, a women from the depths; meanwhile Rotwang, the city’s chief inventor, creates a robot version of Maria which incites the workers to rebellion. After near-disaster, the robot is destroyed and Freder reconciles his father with the workers.
I may have been unlucky with the translation, but I found the novel rather clunky and not at all subtle; of course it’s firmly rooted in the political ferment of the Weimar Republic, and it’s about von Harbou’s hope that social upheaval could be contained by a grand bargain between workers and rulers, provided that they avoid the snares of populism. This was not of course what actually happened in Germany, and the workers don’t actually seem to get much out of the grand bargain; the rulers are still the rulers at the end of the book. Earnest but not super well executed. You can get it here.
The film has the same plot, but the plot is not the point: under Fritz Lang’s direction, it’s a cinematic masterpiece, even if the version we have is stitched together from the surviving theatrical release and off-cuts found in Argentina. The activation of the robot Maria is the iconic scene, but almost all of it looks brilliant – the vast machinery, the city-scape, the crowd scenes of the workers, the fleeing children, the erotic frenzy of the posh chaps at the night club, the climactic battle on the roof top. The sophistication of the special effects sets a standard that was rarely equalled for decades after. And Birgitte Helm is unforgettable as the two Marias.
I watched it on my iPad in three chunks – during my recent trip to Montenegro – but I would happily pay to see it on a big screen, and I am inclined to seek out some more of von Harbou and Lang’s collaborations.
Second frame of third story (“Gotcha”, adapted by Ray Zone with art by Chuck Roblin):
This is one of a series of seven albums published in 1992-93 by Byron Preiss, where various artists were asked to do illustrated versions of various Bradbury stories. Here there are six adaptations of five stories: “The Aqueduct”, “The Veldt”, “Gotcha”, “Homecoming” and two different versions of “There Will Come Soft Rains”, each with a short introduction by Bradbury himself.
The standout adaptations for me are Timothy Truman‘s “The Veldt” and Wally Wood‘s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (originally published in Weird Fantasy in 1953; the others are all original commissions for this book); but actually Bradbury was such a good story-teller that it’s hard for a competent artist to go wrong with one of his stories, and Bruce Jensen‘s “The Aqueduct”, Chuck Roblin’s “Gotcha” and Steve Leialoha‘s “The Homecoming” are all good.
On the other hand, the other adaptation of “There Will Come Soft Rains is by Lebbeus Woods, best known as an architect, and is remarkable for having illustrations which bear almost no visible relevance to the story. An odd choice, but Byron Preiss, the overall editor, is clearly marching to his own drum. Truman, Woods and Wood are named on the front cover.
Occasionally this involves being physically or verbally abused, but mostly it involves paperwork.
I see a mixed reaction to this, the ninth of the Rivers of London series, but I rather enjoyed it. The title and the chapter headings are references to Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch, and the plot background for the book includes the historical Spanish Inquisition. There is a mystery involving a strange magical being, and also Peter Grants infamous ex Leslie; there are seven rings that need to be found; there are plenty of cultural references; there is an excursion to Glossop, not far from where I was last month; and there is the imminent birth of Peter and Beverley’s twins. I found it very satisfactory and entertaining. You can get Amongst Our Weapons here.
Current Elidor, by Alan Garner The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee
Last books finished Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon Adventures in Space, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Yao Haijun Time Trials Volume 1: The Terror Beneath, by George Mann et al Hallowe’en Party, by Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, by Agatha Christie Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda
Next books Doctor Who: The Adventures After Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu
Thus, the physical brain, though it cannot create such sensory appearances, is a prime factor in their characterization, and, for that reason, an important factor in whatever process it may be that causes them to appear.
This was quite a big hit when originally published (I have the fairly definitive third edition of 1932). Sober-minded aeronautical engineer John William Dunne believed that he had established scientifically that dreams can sometimes be precognitive alerts to things that are going to happen to the dreamer, and he has many Einstein-like diagrams to demonstrate his theory of time travel. Nobody has been able to replicate his experiments independently, and it seems more like a demonstration of the human brain’s ability to find patterns from random stimuli. It’s not very exciting either, but you can get An Experiment with Time here.
This was my top book acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is Leviathan, by A.G. Riddle, one of the Clarke Award backlog.
Before the rite begins, the tribal elders dunk the ants into an herbal brew. Not to agitate them, but to anesthetize them. The agitating part comes later, after the sleeping ants are handwoven into a pair of gloves made from leaves and palm fronds. When the ants wake up, they’re angry and ready to attack whoever is wearing those gloves—a fact the young boys know all too well. During waumat, each boy must put on these gloves and face the pain as their first step to adulthood.
A straightforward book looking at the psychological benefits of and anthropological rationale for religious rites, particularly rites of passage, and arguing, contra the New Atheists, that people who practice a religious faith often end up mentally healthier for it. This is pretty much where my own prejudices are as well, so I found little to argue with.
DeSteno should for completeness have looked a bit more at how and why religious beliefs go wrong. There are plenty of sectarian conflicts around the world where the protagonists themselves believe that religion is a strong factor, whatever the underlying roots may be. And we see the poisonous effect of extreme religious views in the USA today.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelf. Next up on that list is Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar.
Second paragraph of third essay (“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”):
Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dali’s life, from his earliest years onward. Which of them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do.
I picked this up while at Novacon (in the wonderful Scrivener’s bookshop) and then left it behind in a taxi when I had almost finished it. Luckily the internet is to the rescue, and it wasn’t difficult to fill in the gaps online. I give links below to the online Orwell archive, though I am not sure of the extent to which it has been authorised by the Orwell estate.
It is stunning to be reminded just how good a writer Orwell was. He applies his ethical and moral standards to all sides, and eloquently deconstructs the hypocrisy of the Left as well as the evil of the Right. There are ten essays here and each of them deserves a short note of its own.
“Decline of the English Murder“, the title piece, from 1946, is about the media coverage of real-life murder cases, the public reaction to them, and the extent to which the war had brutalised public discourse.
A detailed account of an execution in a jail in Burma, effectively and efficiently conveying the horror and pointlessness of the situation.
A very vivid, short piece.
“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” is an excoriating review of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, pointing out Dalí’s many moral failings as described by the artist himself. The takeaway line is,
One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.
“How the Poor Die” is about Orwell’s experiences in a city hospital in Paris, and the uncaring and unsympathetic approach of the staff. He doesn’t blame France as such, but the nineteenth-century traditions of healthcare.
“Rudyard Kipling” examines Kipling’s creative genius and defends him against T.S. Eliot’s charge of Fascism, while deeply regretting his imperialist apologetics.
For my own part I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him. The one thing that was never possible, if one had read him at all, was to forget him.
“Raffles and Miss Blandish” contrasts the gentleman thief Raffles in the stories published between 1898 and 1909 by E.W. Horning, with James Hadley Chase’s novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish. I must say I was astonished to learn that James Hadley Chase’s literary career had begun so early – his last book was published in 1984. I have not read any of his books, and after reading Orwell’s blistering review of his first one, I don’t feel I need to.
“Charles Dickens“, at 62 pages, is the longest piece in the book, taking up almost a third of its length. Orwell clearly loved Dickens’ writing but was also alert to its flaws: “his greatest success is The Pickwick Papers, which is not a story at all, merely a series of sketches; there is little attempt at development — the characters simply go on and on, behaving like idiots, in a kind of eternity.” He criticises Dickens for his portrayal of working-class and poor characters, and for his conservative attitude to social change, but still finds much to praise.
When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.
“The Art of Donald McGill” looks at the genre of bawdy seaside postcards and finds a lot to like about them. Orwell was a moralist, but he had a sense of humour.
In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill’s could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers’ windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.
By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.
He applies the same critical apparatus to English and Celtic nationalism as to German and Japanese, and lumps in both Stalinism and Trotskyism as well. I found it a very thought-provoking commentary on bigotry and prejudice, and the mind-set that leads to them.
Finally, “Why I Write” was again a piece that I had read before. It was good to read it after nine other essays, pulling the whole thing together,
An interesting bit of self-reflection, available here, in which Orwell starts by describing his own artistic growth, and then the impact of politics on his thoughts and words. But he finished with a description which I recognise from some writers who I have known:
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
This collection was put together by Penguin in 1965, though the title has also been used for other Penguin collections with different content. You can get this one here.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Tunisia.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Salammbô
Gustave Flaubert
6,550
2,059
Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization
Richard Miles
4,664
938
The Ardent Swarm
Yamen Manai
8,352
315
The Tremor of Forgery
Patricia Highsmith
2,833
622
Benny and Omar
Eoin Colfer
895
301
The African Quest
Lyn Hamilton
475
204
The Italian
Shukrī Mabkhoūt
2,737
26
The Pillar of Salt
Albert Memmi
459
155
Well, there are a couple of names on that list who I did not expect to see. But it’s a fair cop; both Patricia Highsmith and Eoin Colfer have put their protagonists in Tunisia for the whole book.
There is a real schism between LibraryThing and Goodreads here. Normally the ratio between the two is somewhere around ten or twenty GR raters for every LT user. But the books above by non-Tunisian writers score surprisingly well on LT – the ratio varies from 2.3 (The African Quest) to 5.0 (Carthage Must Be Destroyed). And a phenomenon I had previously observed, that Goodreads scores very well among Arabic speakers and LibraryThing very poorly, is dramatically illustrated here: The Italian, by Shukrī Mabkhoūt, has over a hundred times as many raters on GR as owners on LT.
This week’s winner is Salammbô, a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert set around 140 BCE during one of the wars between Rome and Carthage. It was his next novel after Madame Bovary and was followed by Sentimental Education. It sounds a bit melodramatic but was clearly popular enough at the time, and indeed now.
This week’s Goodreads winner is a 2017 novel, The Ardent Swarm (originally L’Amas ardent), by Yamen Manai, a Tunisian writer based in Paris. It is about a rural bee-keeper who goes to the city looking for answers to what is happening to his hives, and finds revolution in full flow when he gets there. It is only 174 pages and may well be worth a look.
I hesitated a bit about the eligibility of Carthage Must Be Destroyed, by Richard Miles, as it clearly covers the whole Carthaginian Empire, which at its peak covered all of North Africa apart from Egypt and chunks of Spain, Corsica, Sicily and Malta. But I decided in the end that it probably focuses enough on the territory which is now in Tunisia to be eligible.
I disqualified fourteen books for various reasons, too many to list them all. The only one I’m going to call attention to is The Muqaddimah, by the fourteenth-century writer Ibn Khaldūn, full name Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Khaldūn Al-Hadrami, the introduction to his seventeen-volume history of the world, which is pioneering in its approach to historical verification and to sociology.
Next up is South Sudan, the last African country for a while, and also the first country that I have actually visited since the Netherlands back in September. After that will come Haiti, lovely Belgium and then Jordan.
I went to Montenegro last weekend, maybe for the tenth time in my life; I was attending a conference of the European Movement, and indeed moderated the last panel of the day. On Friday evening I was settling into the pre-drinks for the conference dinner when a discreet cough alerted me to the arrival of President Milatović, less formally dressed than I was.
I realise that unfortunately it looks like there is a straw flask coming out of my head, but that’s life.
The first time I went to Montenegro was in January 2002, where I got invited to the Economics Faculty‘s Christmas party (Christmas is in January in Montenegro). The entire international diplomatic community of Podgorica was there, I think all three or four of them. I also attended the first independence day celebration for about ninety years at the presidential palace in July 2006. At last week’s conference, the opening dinner on Thursday was attended by at least a dozen full ambassadors. Times change.
On the Saturday, I had a late-ish departure and decided that it was about time that I visited the ancient capital of Cetinje (pronounced TSET-in-yeh, [t͡sětiɲe]), where the Prince-Bishops ruled during Montenegro’s independence. Unfortunately it turns out that all the museums except one are closed at weekends, so I mostly took pictures of the outsides of buildings and other public art. Next time I’ll try and come on a weekday.
Court Church in Ćipur, founded 1480, rebuilt 1890Cetinje Monastery, founded 1482, rebuilt 1704, also formerly the centre of governmentThe government building built by Prince-Bishop Petar II Petrović-Njegoš in 1838 and named ‘Biljarda’ after his favourite game. Unfortunately not all that photogenic as it is wide and low.The Blue Palace, built in 1884 as a residence for the heir to the throne, now one of the President’s official residences.The 1910 Government House, now the National MuseumThe former French embassy, built 1909-10, now part of the Central National Library. There is a vicious rumour that the architect Paul Guadet actually intended the plan for the French embassy in Cairo and there was a postal confusion, Research indicates that this is not actually true.The old British Embassy, built 1912, now the town music academy. When Montenegro eventually became independent again in 2005, the UK’s initial representative in Podgorica was a local hire, a friend of mine who is now the Governor of the Central Bank.Coincidentally, the only museum that was open on a Saturday was the one run by the Central Bank, the Museum of Currency which records the many denominations that have been used in Montenegro over the millennia. Montenegro now uses the euro.Statues of a woman and a man in traditional costume outside the Ministry of Culture headquarters. I was not able to find the date or artist.1983 monument to Ivan Crnojević, founder of the city (sculptor Anto Gržetić) 2013 monument by Dimitrije Popović, “To the Glory of Njegoš’ Thought”, commemorating Petar II Petrović-Njegoš2022 statue of Princess Xenia Petrović-Njegoš, also by Dimitrije Popović
As you can tell, it was also a rather grey day, and I think Cetinje will reward a longer visit on a weekday when the sun is shining. But as I wove back down the mountains in my taxi back to Podgorica, the views were pretty stunning.
My usual approach to excerpting fails with this book for reasons that I’ll explain, so I’m taking the attitude that, contra the old saying, more is more.
Second paragraph of third chapter of “The Mannerheim Symphony”:
Should I go on with it? Would Sinnikka hate me if she knew I was reading something so far below her ideals? Would she not rather that I was undergoing torture?
Second paragraph of third chapter of “The Impossible Smile”:
Sweat stood out on his forehead, like grease on a bit of dirty vellum. As he spoke, he held a beaker of bitter-tasting liquid to Wyvern’s lips, letting it slop down his chin while he concentrated on what he was saying. With the sense of urgency harrying him, he had not unlocked the bands around Wyvern’s throat and ankles; but instead of standing over him, he now knelt before him.
Second paragraph of third chapter of “Equator”:
Rain pelted down his neck. His light tropical suit would be soaked in no time. A taxi slowly overtook him, splashing his legs.
I picked this up in excitement at Eastercon in 2022, glad to find a Brian Aldiss book that I had not already read – and then realised that in fact I knew it under its other title, Cracken at Critical, and had read and lost a copy, soon after its original 1987 publication.
It is an intriguing book. The main framing narrative has the title “The Mannerheim Symphony”, and the narrator is a famous Finnish composer, in a Hitler-won-the-war universe, who discovers a dead young woman by the roadside and has to negotiate with his suspicious wife and a police detective who is possessed by a reindeer. So far, so weird.
In the dead woman’s belongings, he finds two short science fiction stories apparently written by her father, Jael Cracken, and reads them. The joke is that the two stories are in fact real Brian Aldiss stories from 1958 and 1965, and one of them was originally published under the pseudonym Jael Cracken.
The first, “The Impossible Smile”, has a telepathic protagonist trying to find allies and avoid enemies in a transitional dictatorial regime between England and the Moon. There’s a flavour of Alfred Bester about it, but it also has some very Aldiss twists.
The second, “Equator” (originally published as “Vanguard from Alpha”) has Earth dealing with immigration from humanoid aliens, mainly in a vividly depicted Sumatra. There are more chase scenes and a beautiful alien babe, and a memorable climax in a vast mechanical setting.
A lot of readers think that the whole thing is rubbish. I don’t; it’s a guilty pleasure for me, Aldiss returning to his early work and repurposing it for the needs of two or three decades later. The haunted police detective is a little jarring, but the composer trying to distract himself from his unfaithfulness to his wife by escaping into science fiction… well, let’s just say that Aldiss knew what he was writing about.
And there are some passages that I find very nicely done.
The solar system progressed toward the unassailable summer star, Vega. The Earth-Moon system danced around the sun, host and parasite eternally hand-in-hand. The planet spun on its unimaginable axis. The oceans swilled forever uneasily in their shallow beds. Tides of multifarious life twitched across the continents. On a small island a man sat and hacked at the casing of a coconut.
It was a step which could only have been taken by a Minister exercising Peel’s authority. With the single exception of Corn Law repeal, his ‘mastery’ over his Cabinet was said to be complete; he had ‘got them as obedient and well trained as the crew of a man of war’.¹ His purchase of Indian corn proved the decisive factor in relieving the distress of 1845-46, but the subsequent value to Ireland of Peel’s boldness, independence and strength of mind was unfortunately outweighed by his belief in an economic theory which almost every politician of the day, Whig or Tory, held with religious fervour. ¹ Peel Memoirs, II, p. 173. Parker, Life and Letters of Sir James Graham, 2nd baronet of Netherby, PC., GCB (1907), Vol. I, p. 26. Treasury Minute, December 9, 1845. Correspondence explanatory of the Measures adopted by H.M. Government for the Relief of Distress arising from the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, H.C., 1846 (735), Vol. XXXVII, p. 2. (Corr. Explan.). Greville, [Memoirs,] Vol. V, p. 16.
Like most schoolchildren in Ireland, I was taught about the famine in history classes as one of the fundamental facts of Irish history. The 1841 census found that the population of Ireland was 8.5 million; today, combining both parts, it is just over seven million. The populations of counties Clare, Fermanagh, Longford, Sligo, Tipperary, Mayo and Cavan today are less than half what they were in 1841. The populations of counties Monaghan and Roscommon are less than a third of their 1841 numbers. Leitrim’s population today is 22% of the 1841 figure. It’s a catastrophe whose impact is still very visible. The immediate impact in the 1840s is vividly shown in this map:
Cecil Woodham-Smith’s 1962 book was the first popular history book of the twentieth century to cover the whole period in detail. It came after successful books on the Charge of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale, and she later wrote a biography of Queen Victoria. She was from an Irish military family; she claimed to be descended from the Dukes of Leinster, but I have to say that my research does not support this. She was clearly a good story-teller, and Alan Bennet has a couple of funny anecdotes about her.
We were taught at school that the Famine came about as a combination of the natural disaster of a fungal infection, the potato blight, killing the crop on which most Irish people survived, and the unwillingness of the British government to provide relief for the starving population; meanwhile corn which could have fed the hungry was exported and thousands of impoverished tenants were evicted, driving the great wave of Irish emigration to the USA (and to an extent Canada and Australia) which still shapes Irish-American relations today.
A lot of this is rooted in The Great Hunger. But there’s a huge difference between reading the awful, but sanitised, version of history in my schoolbooks forty-five years ago, and reading the primary documentation that Woodham-Smith assembled. The direct accounts of the misery and squalor endured by the population are really tough reading. One cannot defend the authorities in Dublin Castle or in London on the grounds of ignorance. Indeed, the British Prime Minister wrote: “we have made it the most degraded and most miserable country in the world…all the world is crying shame upon us.”
Woodham-Smith is also very enlightening on the second prong of the received historical account, the ideological opposition of the London government to effective aid. Like most governments, of course, Sir Robert Peel and then Lord John Russell were particularly motivated by their need to keep a parliamentary majority, and Russell’s attempts to take a more proactive stance were blocked by others within his coalition. In the end, the buck stops at the top, and also with Charles Trevelyan, who as Assistant Secretary to the Treasury was the single most influential voice on maintaining laissez-faire (what we would today call libertarian) policies, which killed a million people.
I was less familiar with other parts of the story. I had vaguely clocked the fact that more people died of disease than malnutrition; but Woodham-Smith fleshes this out with details of the epidemics that swept through the devastated population, based to a certain extent on the advance of medical knowledge between 1845 and 1962. The worst of all was the effect on emigrants crammed together in unhealthy conditions on the ships going to North America, and then quarantined together when they arrived. On Grosse Isle, just off Quebec, at least 3,000 Irish immigrants are known to have died of various diseases and at least 5,000 are known to be buried. The true figures are obscure, but those numbers are bad enough.
Although the English politicians were more culpable because they were in power, Irish politicians did not cover themselves in glory either, and Woodham-Smith spends a couple of chapters looking at the failure of the Young Ireland movement and the pathetic 1848 rebellion. I admit that it’s difficult to prescribe what politicians could do as society disintegrates around them, but calling on the starving masses to seize arms against the entrenched forces of the largest army in the world probably isn’t it.
Having said all that, the book ends on a weird high note describing the visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Ireland in 1849, as a kind of coda to the whole story. The royals had a great time, cruising along the coast from Cork to Dublin and then doing official engagements in Dublin and Belfast. Woodham-Smith presents this as a huge success. I guess it was cathartic, but the direct effects of the famine continued until 1852, so the royal visit wasn’t really the end of the story as it is presented here.
Parenthesis: Victoria’s 1849 visit was the first by a British monarch since her uncle, George IV, had turned up in 1821; and only the second since the War of the Three Kingdoms in 1689-90 had seen James II and William III in direct combat at the Battle of the Boyne. Before that, only three English monarchs had set foot in Ireland during their reigns: Richard II in 1394, King john in 1210 and Henry II in 1171.
Current Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon Adventures in Space, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Yao Haijun, by Warren Pleece et al Time Trials Volume 1: The Terror Beneath, by Warren Pleece et al
Last books finished Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1: La Princesse et l’Archiduc, by Fabien Nury and Matthieu Bonhomme Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner Spa 1906, by Patrick Weber and Olivier Wozniak If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino
Next books The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda
In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore became the first writer of colour to get the Nobel Prize for Literature, “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”. It’s unusual for the prize to be awarded on the basis of a single work, but the Academy makes it pretty clear that the basis of its decision was this collection, translated into English by Tagore himself and published in November 1912, only twelve months before the Nobel Prize was awarded.
The collection has a rapturous foreword by W.B. Yeats and clearly caught the 1912-1913 Zeitgeist. Its 103 poems include 53 of the 157 in the original Bengali collection of the same name, and another 50 of Tagore’s other poems, freely translated.
Second paragraph of third poem (English version):
The light of thy music illumines the world. The life breath of thy music runs from sky to sky. The holy stream of thy music breaks through all stony obstacles and rushes on.
Second paragraph of third poem (Bengali version):
পুরানো আবাস ছেড়ে যাই যবে, মনে ভেবে মরি কি জানি কি হবে, নূতনের মাঝে তুমি পুরাতন, সে কথা যে ভুলে যাই। দূরকে করিলে নিকট, বন্ধু, পরকে করিলে ভাই।
When I leave my old home, I wonder what will happen if I die, Among the new, you are old, That is a thing I forget. You bring the distant near, friend, And make the stranger a brother.
My translation combining Google and Deepl.
I was not able to identify either the Bengali source verse of the English text above, or the English translation of the Bengali text given immediately after it.
I was somewhat bemused by the prominence that this collection of poems thrust upon Tagore. They are very strong expressions of devotion to the divine, without giving offence by supporting any one religion over another, and I found them a bit repetitive and not really inspiring. Tagore had a Hindu background, was and is very popular among Muslim Bengalis, and was writing here (well, translating here) for disaffected Christians. Perhaps I just was not in the mood.
Amartya Sen, in an essay about Tagore on the Nobel Prize website, argues convincingly that the intense but short-lived popularity of Gitanjali is not a fair reflection of Tagore’s talents. His reputation has endured in both India and Bangladesh, both of whose national anthems were written by him. Certainly I had previously read his The Home and the World, and enjoyed it much more, and I may continue my exploration.
One must also give Tagore credit as the first person on record as renouncing a knighthood awarded by the British state. He was knighted by George V in the 1915 New Year’s Honours (as were Lord Kitchener and General Haig), but after the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, he wrote to the Governor-General:
The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilised governments…
The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen.
I wrote of the two TV episodes that this book is based on:
The Legend of Ruby Sunday summoned back lots of old favourites – UNIT, Mel, the recurrent character of Susan Twist, and most of all, Gabriel Woolf – another actor over the age of 90! – as Sutekh. It looked good, sounded good, and had a good twist, but there wasn’t a lot of substance; it was running around for the sake of running around. I hoped this would be put right this weekend.
And I’m afraid it wasn’t. Empire of Death was a real mess. The visuals were superb (as we have come to take for granted, now that we are Disneyfied), and the lead performances were great as usual. I also loved the explicit throwbacks to Pyramids of Mars, one of my favourite Old Who stories.
But the plot was very weak. As soon as people started disintegrating into dust, I knew that they would all be resurrected. Why should Sutekh care about Ruby’s unknown mother? (And indeed why could he not use the available technology to find her?) What was the point of the devastated future world with one inhabitant? And I missed the explanation of the snow, and of various other things.
I do have sympathy for the narrative of finding Ruby’s parents by DNA… one part of my own real life that I have now seen brought into a Doctor Who plot; and it could have been done much worse.
Still, I had been hoping for better.
I ranked them sixth and eighth out of last year’s eight episodes,
As sometimes happens with novelisations, the written word is capable of fixing some of the flaws of the televised story. The sillier special effects are lost, thank heavens, and we do get some more background to Susan Twist and indeed to Ruby. But it remains a fundamentally messy story, privileging spectacle over substance. Not Handcock’s fault, of course: it’s a good novelisation of a disappointing story. You can get Doctor Who: Empire of Death here.
