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.
Current East of Eden, by John Steinbeck The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon
Last books finished The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie Doctor Who: The Mysterious Planet, by Terrance Dicks The Mysterious Planet, by Jez Strickley (did not finish) An Island Called Moreau, by Brian Aldiss “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, by Ted Chiang Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Dragon’s Teeth: Tales from North Kosovo, by Ian Bancroft
Next books The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith
Ironically it was one of the most prominent younger radicals, David Lloyd George, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer indirectly recharged the home rule project. The rejection of his 1909 ‘people’s budget’ by the House of Lords – breaking the unwritten convention that the upper house did not interfere with money matters – triggered a constitutional crisis which ended, after two narrow Liberal general election victories in 1910, in legislation to abolish the Lords’ veto power. The 1911 Parliament Act made possible not only death duties, but also Irish home rule. As the Act passed, the prime minister H. H Asquith announced that a third home rule bill would be brought forward. Enraged Tories denounced this as the result of a ‘corrupt bargain’ to keep the Liberals in power with Irish support – the budget was disliked by the influential Irish liquor trade, and home rule was the price of pushing it through. There was probably no deal as such, and the Liberals had in any case, thanks to Labour support, a comfortable majority. ‘A general understanding’ that home rule would follow, it has been reasonably suggested, was ‘surely the natural result of the long history of Liberal commitment’ to it.³ ³ P. Jalland, The Liberals and Ireland: The Ulster Question in British Politics to 1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), 29.
I very much enjoyed Townshend’s Ewart-Biggs-Prize-winning The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, so had pretty high expectations here, combined with fairly fresh memories of Ronan Fanning’s Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922. I don’t think you could read The Partition without also having read The Republic, or something similar – the story of how Northern Ireland came to be created is really a sidenote to the much bigger story of Irish independence, and Townshend has sensibly not repeated much from the previous book, which means that some important context is skimmed here.
But it doesn’t matter all that much, because this is a deep dive into archival sources and also (often neglected) contemporary newspaper accounts of the process of the partition of Ireland, which Townshend rightly puts as beginning in 1885 when the election results revealed that Nationalism was dominant everywhere in Ireland except in the north-east, and the question of how, or indeed if, Ulster could be incorporated into a future self-governing Ireland became a real one.
Map of 1885 election results from Wikipedia
One part of the book was completely new to me: the confused and violent situation in Northern Ireland, especially Belfast, as the new government under James Craig was being set up and at the same time under ineffective but visible attack by Michael Collins from the south. There was a real intermixture of Loyalist militias of varying degrees of effectiveness and state support that would hold its own with many of today’s conflicts, including the bloody ethnic cleansing. Nobody comes out of this episode well, including the British government which was wilfully ignorant of events in Belfast, Derry and the border counties.
The last chapter, not surprisingly, looks at the history of the Boundary Commission, which started late and badly. The chairman was a South African judge, but from the imperialist side; the Northern Ireland government refused to appoint its commissioner, so London imposed a journalist who of course leaked proceedings to Craig; and the Irish Free State nominated Eoin MacNeill, the confused academic who had unsuccessfully countermanded the Easter Rising in 1916, by now Minister for Education.
Townshend spends some time wondering why Cosgrave did not instead appoint Kevin O’Shiel, who was an expert on boundaries and constitutions, but I think the answer is clear: MacNeill had the political heft and was actually an elected member of the Northern Ireland Parliament (though he never took his seat), whereas O’Shiel (despite his best efforts) was a mere political adviser. MacNeill, however, was thoroughly outmanoeuvred by the other Commissioners and secretariat, and only managed to exert some control of the process by resigning just before the report was due to be published, thus torpedoing the entire exercise. (I believe another book published this year is even more critical of him.)
Nationalists like to find villains for the crime of partition, but the fact is that Nationalist leaders failed to grasp the fact that the Ulster situation was a very serious impediment for their political project. Townshend doesn’t go into it, but much Nationalist rhetoric and indeed behaviour was intentionally offensive to those who they claimed as fellow citizens. Parnell, as a Protestant landlord himself, rather adopted the zeal of the convert, and no Nationalist leadership figure had credibility among Unionists. In the later stages, I think that Redmond missed a trick here, and in other respects, by refusing to accept a Cabinet position – it would have been tough going, but he would have had the threat of resignation in his dwindling armory. I very much agree with Townshend’s conclusion:
Almost nobody wanted it; but any implication that a better arrangement was possible, and somehow squandered through haste and carelessness, would be misleading. The intensity of Unionist hostility to home rule presented a political challenge of exceptional difficulty. Once Joseph Chamberlain had talked of a separate parliament for Ulster, it would have needed a major reconstruction of nationalist ideas to make a unitary home rule arrangement viable. That adaptation was not made, or even attempted, mainly because nationalists were doomed to believe that any resistance within Ireland to home rule was illusory. Even amongst others, partition was never embraced with enthusiasm. It was a negative concept, connoting at best failure, at worst abuse of statesmanship.
Townshend also looks briefly at why neither power-sharing nor UK-wide federalism could have flown. My own reflection on those points is that nobody ever suggested guaranteed positions in Irish government for the Unionists, at least not until the creation of the Free State in 1922 (when Collins basically gave them what they asked for, most importantly short-term over-representation in the new Senate). And the notion of ‘Home Rule all round’ failed to recognised the asymmetry between Irish demands on the one hand and Scottish and Welsh aspirations on the other. (And indeed between Scotland and Wales. Bear in mind that devolution was rejected by a 4 to 1 majority in Wales in 1979, and scraped through by just under 7,000 votes out of over a million cast in 1997.)
I don’t think this is a book for beginners, but those who already know a bit – even a lot – about the period will find some very interesting new information. You can get The Partition here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2021, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon, ed. Ian Whates, and Het lijkt Washington wel: Hoe lobbyisten Brussel in hun greep hebben, by Peter Teffer.
Jakob: You make it sound as though they’re being kind! I mean, what sort of choice is that – a life in prison or a quick, painless death?
Two more Twelfth Doctor comics, both by George Mann, featuring one-off (well, twice-off) companion Hattie, who is recruited during the first story and then gets to do the second story before going home in time for the next band rehearsal.
George Mann is not my favourite writer, and I found the title story here typically under par – an interesting concept, of a society based on a huge twisted metal structure in space, but let down by an implausibly hidden secret at the heart of it, and also a sudden yet inevitable betrayal at the end. Of course it’s nice to see the Capaldi Doctor doing music, but that was the best thing about it.
The second story, “Playing House”, was a bit better – the Doctor and Hattie encounter a family who are unwittingly storing a disintegrating TARDIS which is dangerously warping their reality. There were still some bits that didn’t really add up, but it hangs together as well as most Who.
The art by Mariano Laclaustra and Rachael Stott is very good.
This is true of democratic leaders as well, but in a democracy it is harder to achieve results. A prime minister is not a president, let alone a prince. He cannot govern by himself, however good he is. He has no separate democratic legitimacy, and government in Britain is collective. The prime minister depends for his power on the support of the members of his party in Parliament, and at any moment they can get rid of him (although the Labour Party is notably more loyal than the Conservative Party and has never got rid of a leader in anger but always waited for them to resign even when the price of leaving them in place is disastrous electoral defeat).
This is a general memoir about the art of government under Tony Blair by Jonathan Powell, who was his chief of staff for the entire 1997-2007 period, and is now the National Security Adviser to Keir Starmer. It’s the second of three books about Powell’s time at the top, the first being about Northern Ireland and the third about war, especially Iraq, so those important subjects are downplayed here.
Powell takes one of Machiavelli’s aphorisms as the anchor point for each of the twelve chapters, but doesn’t let it constrain him; each of the chapters is a fairly disciplined musing of 18 to 36 pages on a particular aspect of governance and power. There is very little here about formal mechanisms of office, apart from the tactics of cabinet reshuffles; there is more about the architecture of Number Ten, and a lot – really a lot – about how awful Gordon Brown was. (For a redemptive take on Gordon Brown, listen to David Tennant’s podcast interview with him.)
Powell is of course defensive about the overall record of the Blair government, and writing just after the 2010 election he doesn’t see the disasters of Brexit and Boris Johnson coming down the road. This makes his admissions of error all the more interesting. One that I had completely forgotten, but that he comes back to several times, so it clearly was traumatic, was the disastrous speech made by Blair to the Women’s Institute in 2000. Part of the problem was that despite the efforts of his despairing staff, Blair was both undisciplined and micro-managing in the process of writing major speeches. Nine times or more out of ten, he got away with it, but on that day in Wembley, he didn’t.
One of the interesting chapters was on the role of spin and the media. It’s clear that no British government will ever undertake the necessary reforms of the media outlined by the Leveson Inquiry (which reported after this book was published). The major media are simply too powerful and politicians too scared of them. It would take a cross-party alliance between government and opposition, prepared to face down bullying and dirty tricks from unaccountable billionaires, and it’s just not going to happen.
One institution that Powell doesn’t have much time for is the monarchy. The Queen comes up twice, once in the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, where Blair intervened to tell the clueless Royals what to do; and again when Blair and his team are invited to the royal barbecue in Balmoral – but Powell and his partner are shunted off the scene, because the Queen did not want an unmarried couple visibly present. It’s unusual and frankly refreshing to find a memoir from the top of the British government that treats the Royals with anything other than awe-struck deference. Again, this was published in 2010, with more than ten years of the Queen’s reign left to go. (One wonders what other monarchy stories Powell was persuaded to leave out.)
Anyway, this was a lot more interesting than I had expected, and I’ll look out for the other two books in the sequence. Meanwhile, you can get The New Machiavelli here.
I realised to my dismay that I had skipped Zambia back in August, when it should have been between Malawi and Chad. I had done all the calculations, just failed to write the post and skipped from its neighbour to the more northern country. I’ll restore it to the correct order in my list of countries at the end of the post.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Zambia.
The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness
Delia Owens
3,249
221
The Garden of Burning Sand
Corban Addison
3,575
152
Beautiful Blackbird
Ashley Bryan
788
603
The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream
Christina Lamb
832
254
This week’s winner, Mrs Pollifax on Safari, is the fifth in a series of novels about a grandmother who gets recruited by the CIA for a series of unlikely missions, in this case preventing the assassination of the President of Zambia. (Who in real life died in 2021, aged 97, though he had given up power after losing elections thirty years earlier.) I read a couple of them when I was a teenager, but not this one.
The second placed book on my list, The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2020, and worthily so in my view. It is the top book set in Zambia by a Zambian writer.
I am not completely sure about Beautiful Blackbird, by Ashley Bryan, but it is heavily marketed as being based on a Zambian folk tale, so I have included it.
I disqualified a bunch of books. Several were by Alexandra Fuller, who has spent a lot of her life in Zambia; but looking through the summaries of her memoirs, as far as I can tell Scribbling the Cat is the only one where the majority of the book is set in the country, and I disqualified Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Leaving Before the Rains Come and Travel Light, Move Fast. All great titles though.
Wilbur Smith’s When the Lion Feeds seems to be mainly set in South Africa, or at least as much there as Zambia. Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone by Martin Dugard includes the territory of what is now Zambia as part of the story, but I think less than half. The same – I think, but I have not checked fully – for Out of Darkness, Shining Light, by Petina Gappah, which is about the transportation of Livingstone’s remains to the coast, and I think is more in what’s now Tanzania.
A couple more covered more African countries than just Zambia, including Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo and China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa by Howard W. French.
Normal service will be resumed next week with Zimbabwe, followed by Guinea (Conakry), Benin and Rwanda.
Second paragraph of third story in The Casuarina Tree (“The Outstation”):
Now the prahu [boat] appeared in the broad reach. It was manned by prisoners, Dyaks under various sentences, and a couple of warders were waiting on the landing-stage to take them back to jail. They were sturdy fellows, used to the river, and they rowed with a powerful stroke. As the boat reached the side a man got out from under the attap awning and stepped on shore. The guard presented arms.
Second paragraph of third chapter of The House of Doors:
‘I have read your book, Mr Willie,’ said Ah Keng.
I enjoyed both of the previous books that I read by Tan Twan Eng – The Garden of Evening Mists and The Gift of Rain. Like The Gift of Rain, his latest, The House of Doors, is mainly set in Penang, which is a place of fascination for me as it is where my grandparents met and my father was born. As I started The House of Doors, I realised that it rather depends on knowledge of Somerset Maugham, one of many well-known writers whose works I had never read, so I got hold of The Casuarina Tree, his collection of short stories set in Malaysia, and finished it before I finished The House of Doors (it is slightly shorter).
The Casuarina Tree, published in 1926, is not one of Maugham’s best known books – it’s not in his top twenty according to Goodreads or even in his top forty, according to LibraryThing. But it is set in Malaya after Maugham’s visits there in 1921 and 1925, six short stories of between 34 and 45 pages each, with a prologue and afterword. They are all about expats with dreadful secrets, whose character flaws may become public or may remain hidden, with the moral depravity of the English brutally exposed as a result of contact with the human and physical geography of Malaysia.
The most successful of the stories is “The Letter”, based on the real case of Ethel Proudlock who shot and killed her English neighbour who, she claimed, was attempting to rape her. But they are all effective, brutal vignettes of colonial life.
Supposedly Maugham became persona non grata in Penang because too many of the episodes that the stories are based on were recognisable. That sounds like a marketing myth to me – they may just not have liked him very much. Anyway, you can buy The Casuarina Tree here, though it’s easy to find for free on the internets.
There is one person who pops up both in The House of Doors and in my grandmother’s memoirs of Penang a few years later, the lawyer Hastings Rhodes, who was the state prosecutor in Ethel Proudlock’s trial in 1911 and then hosted my grandmother for dinner just after she and my grandfather got engaged in 1927. She reports that “Hastings Rhodes drove me home and professed to be heart-broken at my engagement, but I took that with several grains of salt.” He was recently divorced, and the same age as my grandfather, and died unexpectedly in 1929.
The House of Doors is about Lesley Hamlyn, living in an unsatisfactory marriage with her husband in Penang in 1921, and hosting her husband’s old schoolfriend Willie Somerset Maugham and his secretary/lover Gerald Haxton, while also looking back on her own friendship with the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen ten years before, and coming to the realisation that both she and her husband are emotionally involved with Chinese men. There is a framing narrative set in South Africa, and Ethel Proudlock’s murder trial gets a look in too.
There is a lot here, and I didn’t think that Tan Twan Eng juggled the balls of plot and character as well as in his other books. When a story is based on real events, authors sometimes let their imagination get fettered by the historical record, and I felt that had happened here. Oddly enough Maugham, the person about whom most is known, comes across as the most well-rounded of the characters, while Lesley, the ostensible protagonist, felt a bit flat to me. But other people seem to like it, so perhaps I was just in the wrong mood. You can get The House of Doors here.
In Gweedore the crisis was exceptionally severe. A total collapse in the demand for seasonal laborers—the “tattie-hokers” who went en masse to harvest potatoes on Scottish estates—had left most families without a supplementary income, forcing them to buy goods on credit from local shopkeepers. Some of these acted as the district’s bankers—the hated “gombeen men,” who were regarded by the community as money-grabbing usurers. They, too, were refusing further loans. From Dublin a certain amount of aid was being organized by two influential private charities; in London a group of Quakers who had provided relief during the Great Famine stepped in again. One was led by a gentle, white-whiskered philanthropist named James Hack Tuke, who set off for Donegal at the beginning of March.
On 6 May 1882, the newly appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, arrived in Dublin for his first day in the job. In the evening, as he was walking from Dublin Castle to his official residence in Phoenix Park, Thomas Henry Burke, the Permanent Under Secretary who also had an official residence in the Park, spotted him from his own carriage and dismounted so that the two could have a chat as they covered the last few hundred metres to their homes on foot.
They never made it. Seven members of The Invincibles, an extremist Irish nationalist group, surrounded them and stabbed them to death with surgical knives. They had been planning to attack Burke for weeks, and did not even know who Cavendish was, but did not want to leave the red-bearded chap alive as a witness. The attackers were driven away in a cab whose driver rejoiced in the nickname “Skin-the-Goat”; he pops up in person in Chapter 16 of Ulysses as the keeper of the cabmen’s shelter at Butt Bridge where Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom get their heads together before going back to Bloom’s house for cocoa. (That’s not the only reference to the 1882 murders in Ulysses; James Joyce would have been three months old at the time, but they cast a long dark shadow.)
With all due respect to Lord Mountbatten and Kevin O’Higgins, the Phoenix Park murders were the most dramatic political assassinations ever to take place in Ireland – the victims were the British government minister responsible for Irish affairs, and the most senior civil servant in the Irish administration. On top of that, Cavendish and his wife Lucy were very close to her aunt and her aunt’s husband, who happened to be the prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone; Cavendish, whose father was the Duke of Devonshire, had been Gladstone’s private secretary for several years, and more or less ran the Treasury between the Liberals winning the election in 1880 and his appointment to Ireland in 1882. As for Burke, he was the most visible and most senior Catholic in the Irish government, and it was not until twenty years after his death that another Catholic got the job of Permanent Under Secretary.
The timing of the murders could not have been more disastrous in the delicate dance of British policy and Irish nationalism. The dominant Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell had been released from prison only a couple of days before, and Cavendish had been sent to Dublin by Gladstone with a mandate to try and find reconciliation with the Nationalist Party and the Irish Land League, which had mounted a highly successful civil disobedience campaign against the (often absentee) landlords and against the British state, bringing attention to the dire economic situation of Irish tenant farmers. They had introduced a new word to the English language, after a land agent in County Mayo who was ostracised by the local community, to the extent that local shopkeepers refused to sell anything to him or his household: the unfortunate Captain Boycott.
The immediate effect of the murders was cataclysmic. Parnell’s reaction to the news was that he must resign from politics entirely, though he was dissuaded by Gladstone among others. Nationalist politicians condemned the murders, but of course for the English (and Scottish and Welsh) public, there was a seamless connection between Nationalist parliamentary activism and the assassinations. And in fact it turned out that several of the Invincibles were also senior officials in the Irish Land League. Several years later, The Times published letters apparently from Parnell which seemed to endorse the murders, though these were dramatically proved to be forgeries.
Superintendent John Mallon of the Dublin Metropolitan Police narrowly missed being on the scene of the murders himself, and pursued a dogged investigation of the crime. From good old human intelligence, he already had a good idea who the leading members of the Invincibles were, and interrogated them all until two of them confessed, one of them James Carey, the leader of the gang. The other five Invincibles were all hanged, including the two who had actually carried out the stabbing. The getaway driver, Skin-the-Goat, was imprisoned for sixteen years but emerged in time to make his appearance in Ulysses.
There was a grim postscript to the grim story. Carey, the informer, was given a new identity by the British government and sent off to make a new life with his family in South Africa. On the boat he made friends with one Patrick O’Donnell, a Donegal man from Gweedore. When they arrived in South Africa, O’Donnell saw an account of the Invincibles trial in an English newspaper which included a recognisable portrait of Carey, even though he had subsequently shaved his beard off. O’Donnell, who was politically motivated but seems not to have had any direct connection with the Invincibles, realised that his new friend on board was in fact the notorious informer, went back to the boat and shot Carey dead. (Most of the passengers seem to have brought their own guns with them.) He was convicted of murder and hanged. Carey’s fate was then used by Arthur Conan Doyle in the fourth, and worst, of the Sherlock Holmes novels, The Valley of Fear.
Julie Kavanagh is best known as a historian of ballet, but she has turned in a great piece of work here, not only going to the well-plumbed depths of British official sources, but also delving deep into the Invincibles and their structure, as far as one can trace it given the relative lack of written records and the mutability of some of the protagonists’ names. One unusual source that she uses extensively is the correspondence of Queen Victoria, who was deeply interested in the Irish situation, and of course hostile to the Nationalist agenda. There is one odd glitch where she starts to explore why O’Donnell was tried in London rather than South Africa, but fails to put in the actual reason why it happened that way. Otherwise this is a very readable account of a very dramatic (but nowadays overlooked) historical event. You can get The Irish Assassins here.
One last note relating to my Cambridge days. The unfortunate Lord Frederick Cavendish and his wife Lucy had no children. She dedicated the rest of her life (another four decades) to the promotion of girls’ and women’s education. Forty years after she died, her great-niece, Margaret Braithwaite, was one of the founders of a new Cambridge college for postgraduate women students, especially those from under-represented and non-traditional backgrounds; and the new college was named after Braithwaite’s great-aunt. During my not very successful tenure as Deputy President of Cambridge University Students Union, I was assigned Lucy Cavendish College as one of my liaison responsibilities. I always vaguely wondered who it was named after, and now I know.
This was my top unread book in the rapidly dwindling pile of those acquired in 2021. Next up is The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend.
Yet just as the books of the Tanakh reveal the process of creative responses to disappointment when they refocus prophecy, rethink the afterlife and steadily enrich their meditation on God’s purposes, there is much to recover from the history of second-century Christianity. It is a period in which Christian communities recovered from their trauma and reshaped themselves for new circumstances. We can gather enough fragments of evidence to show how radically diffetent from the first-century Christian groups the later Christian Church came to look: it created a canon of Scripture, credal statements and an institutional clerical ministry for its community life. The closing of the canon involved the exclusion of much of the apocalyptic literature which had formed the matrix of Judaism in the time of Jesus and his first followers; but the process was slow, and Christians never quite forgot this body of texts, or the climate of thought that it had created.
I enjoyed two previous books by Diarmaid MacCulloch, his magisterial History of Christianity and his collection of essays on the Reformation, All Things Made New. I’m sorry to say that this left me rather cold and I abandoned it after fifty pages. The problem is that the Bible itself is not about silence as such, and delving for what is said and meant about silence seems to me to be looking for something that isn’t really there; still more so when we get to the early Christian church and many patristic and earlier writings that I am unfamiliar with. MacCulloch is entitled to write the book that he wants to write and that his core readership wants to read. You can get Silence: A Christian History here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine.
Current Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
Last books finished Mean Streets, by Terrance Dicks Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon, ed. Ian Whates Our Song, by Anna Carey Paradise Towers: Paradise Found, by Sean Mason and Silvano Beltramo 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 Doctor Who: The Well, by Gareth L. Powell
Next books Doctor Who: The Mysterious Planet, by Terrance Dicks An Island Called Moreau, by Brian Aldiss “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, by Ted Chiang
This is the start of my new project, to read at least one book by each of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who was not a white man, in order. I am bracing myself for Kristin Lavransdatter in a couple of rounds, but the process starts gently with Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940) of Sweden, who in 1909 became the tenth winner but the first woman, and also the first Swede, to get the award, “in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination, and spiritual perception that characterize her writings”
Purity and simplicity of diction, beauty of style, and power of imagination, however, are accompanied by ethical strength and deep religious feeling… what makes Selma Lagerlöf’s writings so lovable is that we always seem to hear in them an echo of the most peculiar, the strongest, and the best things that have ever moved the soul of the Swedish people. Few have comprehended the innermost nature of this people with a comparable love… Such an intimate and profound view is possible only for one whose soul is deeply rooted in the Swedish earth and who has sucked nourishment from its myths, history, folklore, and nature. It is easy to understand why the mystical, nostalgic, and miraculous dusk that is peculiar to the Nordic nature is reflected in all her works. The greatness of her art consists precisely in her ability to use her heart as well as her genius to give to the original peculiar character and attitudes of the people a shape in which we recognize ourselves.
Perhaps it comes across as a little defensive of the Swedish Academy for having chosen one of their own. By contrast, Lagerlöf’s own speech is attractively humble, regretting that her late father was not present.
Anyone who has ever sat in a train as it rushes through a dark night will know that sometimes there are long minutes when the coaches slide smoothly along without so much as a shudder. All rustle and bustle cease and the sound of the wheels becomes a soothing, peaceful melody. The coaches no longer seem to run on rails and sleepers but glide into space. Well, that is how it was as I sat there and thought how much I should like to see my old father again.
I was first put onto Lagerlöf by my distant cousin Frederic Whyte (1876-1940), who wrote about her in his 1926 memoir A Wayfarer in Sweden. On his recommendation, as it were, I read and enjoyed Gösta Berling’s Saga and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. Of her other books, The Emperor of Portugallia had the most raters on Goodreads and Jerusalem the most owners on LibraryThing, and both are short, so I decided to read both (but was only partially successful, as I will explain).
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Emperor of Portugallia is:
Det var Erik i Fallas hustru, som skulle bära barnet till dopet. Hon åkte till prästgården med den lilla flickan i sina armar, och Erik i Falla själv gick bredvid kärran och körde. Den första vägbiten ända fram till Duvnäs bruk var ju så dålig, att den knappt kunde kallas för väg, och Erik i Falla ville vara försiktig, då han hade det odöpta barnet att köra för.
It was the wife of Eric of Falla who was to bear the child to the christening. She sat in the cart with the infant while Eric of Falla, himself, walked alongside the vehicle, and held the reins. The first part of the road, all the way to Doveness, was so wretched it could hardly be called a road, and of course Eric had to drive very carefully, since he had the unchristened child to convey.
Published in 1914, five years after Lagerlöf had got her Nobel Prize, it is about a tenant farmer who is devoted to his daughter; but when he falls on hard times, she goes to Stockholm to work. It becomes obvious to everyone in the village that she has become a sex worker in the city; her father at first is in denial, and then suffers a mental breakdown, believing himself to be the Emperor of Portugallia and his absent daughter his princess. There is a somewhat glurgy ending, but the rest is interesting enough. It is exactly the sort of thing that the Swedish Academy would have had in mind in celebrating the pious and honest people of the countryside, oppressed by the landowners but supported by the Church. I did not think it was especially deep, but there is nothing very wrong with it. You can get The Emperor of Portugallia here.
Having (as I thought) finished Jerusalem, and checking out the plot points on Swedish Wikipedia, I was alarmed to realise that I had only the first of the two parts of the novel, published respectively in 1901 and 1902. (I also had intended to read the earlier book first, but I got that wrong too.) None of the English translations available in ebook format seems to include the second part of Jerusalem – I suspect that they have all been scraped from Project Gutenberg, which has only the first half. So my review is of the first half of the book only.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Jerusalem, is:
– Vad ska det där bli till? sade mor Märta.
“What’s all that for?” asked Mother Martha.
It’s another portrait of a changing society in rural Sweden, which I did not find as compelling as The Emperor of Portugallia – too many people with similar names, and the narrative skips through a couple of generations perhaps a little too easily. But the last few chapters, showing a fringe Christian cult gaining control of most of the population and then brainwashing them into moving from Sweden to Jerusalem, are well done. In the second volume, which I wasn’t able to get hold of, apparently they get to Jerusalem and have a really hard time. Claes Annerstedt’s Nobel ceremony speech, quoted above, raves about Jerusalem, but I think more about the second part than the first. You can get the first part of Jerusalem here.
The rural Swedes moving to Jerusalem are a genuine historical episode; they joined up with the American settlers whose legacy is the very pleasant American Colony Hotel to the north of the Old City.
Anyway, I think that in retrospect, there were much more interesting things going on in literature in 1909 than Selma Lagerlöf, but she is a logical enough laureate if you’re interested in the kind of literature that the Swedish Academy was – bearing in mind that the previous laureates were Sully Prudhomme, Theodor Mommsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Giosuè Carducci, Rudyard Kipling and Rudolf Christoph Eucken.
Next in this sequence of mine is the winner of the Nobel Prize four years after Selma Lagerlöf – Rabindranath Tagore, who got the award in 1913. I shall be reading his poetry collection Gitanjali.
In Prypiat, the person with the greatest stake in the success of the conference was Vasyl Kyzyma, the fifty-four-year-old head of the construction directorate that was charged with building the power plant. As far as power and prestige went in the city of Prypiat, Kyzyma outshone Briukhanov [Viktor Bryukhanov]. Whereas the latter lived in an apartment building, though a prestigious one, Kyzyma and his family occupied one of four cottages built in a city that was supposed to have no cottages at all. When the Ukrainian party boss, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, visited the site of the power plant in the mid-1970s, he was so impressed with the young director of construction that he ordered his aides to ensure Kyzyma’s election to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet. That would not only raise Kyzyma’s salary but also boost his prestige and independence from local party and state officials. In 1984 Kyzyma was given the highest Soviet award—Hero of Socialist Labor. Briukhanov, despite being elected a delegate to the party congress in Moscow, was still waiting for that kind of recognition.² ² Vladimir Vosloshko, “Gorod, pogibshii v 16 let,” Souz Cgernobyl’; January 24, 2002, www.souzchernobyl.org/?section=38cid=148.
This is a tremendous chronicle of the nuclear accident of 26 April 1986 (my nineteenth birthday), looking at the sets of choices made both at leadership level in the Soviet Union and at management level in the Chernobyl reactor itself, and at the role played by the catastrophe in the subsequent fall of Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The accident itself could certainly have been prevented on the day had the engineers realised the actual state of the nuclear reactor before running tests on it; but the reactor was badly designed in the first place, and the accident it had not happened at Chernobyl Number 4, it would have happened somewhere else.
Plokhy tells the story through the engineers and officials who were closest to the action, and it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for the men, and one or two women, who suddenly found themselves dealing with the unthinkable.
One thing that particularly struck me was that the engineers in the control room simply did not know what had happened after the first explosion. The two trainees, Aleksandr Kudryavtsev and Viktor Proskuryakov, were sent to try and lower the control rods by hand cranks into the reactor core, but of course it had exploded so they came back with nothing but fatal doses of radiation. (I have been telling the interns in my office that we won’t be asking them to do that, but they do not seem completely reassured.)
What looked like industrial rubble lying around the reactor was actually highly radioactive debris, that the fire fighters and other rescue workers pushed past or moved aside with no protection at all. It is astonishing that only a few dozen people are known to have died from the direct effects of radiation exposure on the day, though of course the public health impact continues to the present. Checking the record, I find that the two women who are known to have been direct victims were both police guards in their fifties who stayed on watch all night as the reactor burned.
The political effect of the accident was immense. The tensions between the Soviet central authorities, responsible for the reactor, and the Ukrainian republic’s government, responsible for the clearing up, escalated and never recovered; Chernobyl was a crucial step in the disintegration of the USSR. But even before that, the removal of the electricity generated by the whole complex from the Soviet grid was a critical blow for the struggling industry of the entire Union; and more important, the failure of the Soviet state to take the most basic steps to ensure the survival and health of its own people killed off its legitimacy, as brutally chronicled by Svetlana Alexievich.
Jen put her hand on hims forehead then over hims eyes to close them.
Those who were at Novacon in 2021 may remember the launch for this book; I sat beside Chris Priest, probably the last time I saw him, listening to the author’s partner (one Bernardine Evaristo) talking through the creative process. Evaristo made it clear that she would be much more inclined to sign copies of her own books for people who had bought Howul, which is entirely fair. It took me almost four years, but I have now got around to reading it.
Folks, it is a wee treat. It’s set in a degenerate post-apocalyptic society in what used to be North Wales – probably if I knew Wales better I could be very specific about the settings – where resources are scarce and the artefacts of the past, including tinned food, are feared and revered. Howul is forced to leave his home village, where he was the last in a long line of healers, and goes on a journey exploring the country nearby. Much is not as it first seems, including as it turns out his own home.
Howul’s future dialect is reminiscent of Riddley Walker (which I read when I was a teenager), but it’s not derivative, and the book as a whole goes in quite a different direction. There is a well-developed sense of place and social structure, and some useful thoughts about truth and fiction which give this short book a strong heft. Shannon worked on it for over a decade, and I feel it paid off. You can get Howul here.
This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2021, and the sf book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on both of those piles is Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon, edited by Ian Whates.
Second paragraph of third section of main body of text:
La frénésie qui avait suivi la Liblration s’estompait. Alors les gens ne pensaient qu’à sortir et le monde était plein de désirs à satisfaire sur-le-champ. Tout ce qui constituait la première fois depuis la guerre provoquait la ruée, les bananes, Ies billets de la Loterie nationale, Ie feu d’artifice. Par quartiers entiers, de la grandmère soutenue par ses filles au nourrisson en landau, les gens se précipitaient à la fête foraine, à la retraite aux flambeaux, au cirque Bouglione où ils manquaient être piétinés dans la bousculade. Ils se portaient en foule priante et chantante sur la route pour accueillir la statue de Notre-Dame de Boulogne et la reconduire le lendemain sur des kilomètres. Profane ou religieuse, toute occasion leur était bonne d’être au-dehors ensemble, comme s’ils voulaient continuer de vivre collectivement. Le dimanche soir, les cars revenaient de la mer avec de grands jeunes gens en short qui chantaient à tue-tête, grimpés sur le toit à bagages. Les chiens se promenaient en liberté et s’accouplaient au milieu de la rue.
The frenzy that had followed Liberation was fading. All people thought about was going out, and the world was full of desires that clamoured for immediate satisfaction. Anything that comprised a first time since the war provoked a stampede – bananas, fireworks, National Lottery tickets. Entire neighbourhoods, from elderly ladies propped up by their daughters to infants in prams, flocked to the funfair, the lantern parade, and the Bouglione circus, where they narrowly escaped being crushed in the melee. They took to the road in praying, singing crowds to welcome the statue of Our Lady of Boulogne and walk her back the following day over many kilometres. They never missed a chance, secular or religious, to be outside with other people, as if they still yearned to live collectively. On Sunday evenings, the coaches returned from the seaside with tall youths in shorts clinging to the luggage roofs and singing at the top of their voices. Dogs roamed free and mated in the middle of the streets.
One of Ernaux’ best known books, this is even more firmly autobiographical than most of her work, telling her personal story against the backdrop of politics and society in France – or is it the other way round? While on the one hand it gives the sense of a stream of consciousness flowing over seven decades, on the other it is punctuated by descriptions of photographs and moments of emotion and sex, bringing the personal to the political and vice versa. At the start I had a few moments of huh, I’d better look that incident up, and then later it was more hah, I remember that happening too; I felt that someone my age could write a book like this that I would enjoy even more, though it would be 27 years shorter. I felt fully immersed and engaged. The book is also mercifully short. Recommended. You can get The Years here.
This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is, believe it or not, The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Cambodia.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
Loung Ung
53,058
2,414
The Rent Collector
Camron Wright
57,712
718
In the Shadow of the Banyan
Vaddey Ratner
21,825
1,091
Never Fall Down
Patricia McCormick
12,254
737
The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine
Somaly Mam
8,739
510
When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge
Chanrithy Him
4,980
461
The Disappeared
Kim Echlin
3,752
409
Children of the River
Linda Crew
1,986
752
I’ve had a number of countries in this list with a particular national trauma that dominates the literature about them, but I think Cambodia is unusual in the proportion of such books written by actual Cambodians rather than well-meaning Americans, and which are set in the middle of the horror rather than in its aftermath. You could find that depressing, but I find it rather admirable.
This week’s overall winner, First They Killed My Father, is a first-person account from a child’s point of view of the violence meted out by the regime on pretty much anyone. Its historicity has been challenged, but it clearly carries an emotional punch.
This week’s Goodreads winner, The Rent Collector, is unfortunately by an American writer trying to imagine the situation of poor children in Phnom Penh, and doesn’t sound as good. I scores remarkably well on Goodreads relative to its LibraryThing ownership.
I disqualified only one book this week, Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So, which is set among the Cambodian diaspora in the USA.
I have allowed the passage of years to distract me from my quest of watching every Oscar-winning film, and realised that with the 100th Academy Awards coming up, I had better get my list completed. So I found some time in September, mainly on Eurostar, to watch Oppenheimer, which won Best Picture in 2024; and then some more time, mainly in China, to read American Prometheus, the book that the film was based on.
As well as the Best Picture award, Oppenheimer won six other Oscars: Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor (Cillian Murphy in the title role), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr. as Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score. The Hugo for that year went to Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves and the Ray Bradbury Award to Barbie.
The other films up for Best Picture were American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Past Lives,Poor Things and The Zone of Interest. I have seen Barbie and thought it was better; I started but could not be bothered to finish Poor Things. The only other 2023 film that I am sure that I have seen is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. I certainly intended to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny but I cannot remember doing so. I was the Hugo administrator that year and things were busy – I still haven’t seen the Hugo winner, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves, though everyone tells me it is great. IMDB users rate Oppenheimertop film of 2023 on one scale and 4th on the other. So (spoiler) my negative take below is a minority report.
Here is a trailer:
None of the cast seems ever to have been in Doctor Who. The many returnees from previous (and one future) award-winning films include the star himself, Cillian Murphy, who was in Inception as Robert Fischer, the chap whose dreams are infiltrated by Leonardo di Caprio and friends.
Matt Damon, the Nice Soldier General Groves here, was in Hugo/Bradbury winning The Martian as the protagonist, and was also the police mole in Oscar winner The Departed seventeen years earlier.
The gorgeous Florence Pugh is Oppenheimer’s lover Jean Tatlock here; the following year she was Princess Irulan in Dune Part 2.
David Krumholz is Oppie’s friend Isidore Rabi here, and was the hacker Mr Universe in Serenity.
David Dastmalchian is anti-Communist Lewis Borden here, and was very briefly Piter de Vries in Dune Part 1. I also know him as Gurathin in Murderbot.
At the end we have Christopher Denham, who is Klaus Fuchs here and (looking a bit older in a film made twelve years earlier) played fugitive American diplomat Mark Kijek in Argo.
Slightly cheating, as he does not speak in the earlier film, but Kenneth Branagh, impressive as Niels Bohr here, is in a crowd scene in Chariots of Fire.
And one more to note – Richard Feynman is played by Jack Quaid, better known (to me anyway) as Boimler in Star Trek: Lower Decks.
In case you somehow did not know, it is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who set up the scientific base in New Mexico where the first atomic bomb was developed in the 1940s; framed by the narrative of how he lost his security clearance in 1954 due to his pre-war associations with Communists (including his lover and his younger brother); itself framed by the 1959 Senate hearing in which Oppenheimer’s earlier persecutor, Lewis Strauss, was denied nomination as U.S. Secretary of Commerce. The punchline is that the supposedly little-known John F. Kennedy casts the crucial vote against Strauss.
So, all in all: I did not like this film. I thought it was dreadfully slow; the two different hearings were chopped up confusingly; I didn’t get why we were supposed to care about Lewis Strauss; I thought Cillian Murphy’s acting in the lead was one-note; and there was an awful lot of men talking to each other to explain what was going on, with occasional breasts. The music is intrusive and tells us what to think, because the acting generally doesn’t.
The writing hangs particularly heavily in the hearing scenes, where the script leans too much on the official transcripts. This rarely works. Writers should use creative freedom to depart from the historical record and come up with words that work for their actors and for their production team. The story of Oppenheimer’s security clearance is scandalous and dramatic, and the official record alone does not really do it justice.
There is a particularly silly moment early in the film where Oppenheimer stuns his American friends by giving a lecture in fluent Dutch. Except that the words spoken by Murphy are not Dutch at all; he may perhaps be making an effort to pronounce what someone wrote in his script, but it has only the most distant of resemblances to the real language. Half an hour with a voice coach could have sorted that out; I refuse to believe that no native Dutch speaker was available to the production team.
I will admit that the landscapes are wonderful, and I also thought that Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, Tom Conti as Albert Einstein and the two lead women, Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, lifted the scenes that they were in. But I was left baffled by the reverence that IMDB users, and Oscar voters, clearly had for this film. In my list of Oscar winners, I’m putting it in 82nd place out of 96, more than five sixths of the way down, immediately below A Beautiful Mind (a similarly disappointing biopic) and above No Country for Old Men (which shares a desert setting and unpleasant and unconvincing male characters).
Not for the first time, I found that the book the film is based on, American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is much much more to my taste. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
In mid-September 1925, he boarded a ship bound for England. He and Francis Fergusson had agreed that they would meet in the little village of Swanage in Dorsetshire, in southwest England. Fergusson had spent the entire summer traveling about Europe with his mother and was now eager for some male companionship. For ten days they walked along the coastal cliffs, confiding to each other their latest adventures. Though they had not seen each other for two years, they had kept in touch through correspondence and remained close.
This is an excellent top-to-toe biography, starting with Oppenheimer’s immigrant parents who moved to New York and became rich and finishing with his comfortable exile in Princeton, with refuge in the Caribbean, and the subsequent deaths of his wife and daughter. There were two particular points about his background that helped the whole story make sense for me. The fact that his family was rich meant that Oppenheimer never really had to worry about money, and that perhaps encouraged a lack of responsibility in some ways. But the philosophical foundation that he learned at an early age from his parents’ adherence to the Society for Ethical Culture pushed him in the opposite direction, to be aware of the moral consequences of his actions, especially when they affected the lives and even more so the deaths of many.
His fascination with the desert is brought out in the film, but less so his fascination with riding, which seems to have been an obsession from an early age. The ins and outs of his relationship, and Lewis Strauss’s, with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton are also a very important element of the story, taking it beyond the question of national security to in-fighting in the academic world, where Oppenheimer usually defeated the less gifted Strauss – but not always.
The book also gives a much more rounded picture of Kitty Oppenheimer, who had been married three times before ending up with Robert, and was actually German by birth. She claimed to be related to the Belgian royal family, which sent me on a genealogical wild-goose-chase (in short: I don’t think she was). She was also a serious professional botanist in her own right; and an alcoholic. The film hints at some of this but the book reveals much more.
At 900 pages, it has the leisure to examine the accusations levelled against Oppenheimer in detail, and also to look at the motivations of his accusers from a distance of decades. One of the best lines in the book comes from, of all people, Albert Einstein, who when told of Oppenheimer’s security clearance problems said, “The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him—the United States government.”
It took me quite a while to get through – helped by two overnight flights to and from China last month, and two three-hour internal flights while I was there – but unlike with the film, I felt that my efforts were justified. You can get American Prometheus here. (I will also say that, judging by the front cover, Murphy does a great job of working up his physical resemblance to Oppenheimer.)
I had not realised it until earlier this year, but it is apparently conventional wisdom that Oppenheimer was the basis for Shevek, the protagonist of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. He was a close friend of Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, Ursula Le Guin’s parents, in Berkeley in the 1930s, and she must have observed his complex love life, emotional distance and scientific genius at close hand.
One more Oscar-winning film to go – this year’s Anora.
Last weekend I did small trips to two different chapels in the depths of Flanders. On Saturday afternoon, I biked the 7.8 km over to the Chapel of St Theresa on the provincial frontier between Bierbeek and Hamme Mille.
Photograph taken in April when the weather was better.
It was built in 1930 by the Van Der Elst family in gratitude for the miraculous healing of one of their children, and dedicated to St Thérèse of Lisieux. I’ve known about it for years. These days it mostly sits at the side of the road with cars zooming past, but last Saturday it was opened for Mass celebrated by the two priests of Bierbeek and Hamme Mille, with a congregation of about eight, plus two musicians playing the viola da gamba.
The point of the ceremony was to bring together people from both sides of the linguistic frontier, which runs just south of the chapel, and the priests alternated between Dutch and French in the ritual.
There’s a relatively new small sculpture by our local artist Ad Wouters above the door.
Inside I found tokens of gratitude to St Theresa, and a sleeping bat.
I used to be quite devout, but I would no longer describe myself as a practicing Catholic. However I think that sometimes if you want to celebrate connection between communities across geographical distance and time, the traditional ways can be a right way of doing that, and I enjoyed the symbolism of a communal mystic meal shared between the representatives of the different villages speaking different languages, organized by the foundation which now looks after the chapel.
The next day, I had promised F that we would go and take B out for a drive and a walk, and I found a new sight to see nearby (well, 25 minutes’ drive from B) in the village of Helshoven. Built in 2019, it is known as the floating chapel, “de zwevende kapel”, though as you first approach it, it’s not quite clear what’s going on. I had not told F in advance, so the look on his face, when he realized why it is called the “floating chapel”, was priceless.
B as usual took it in her stride.
Its official name is Helsh(ea)ven, a pun on the village name of Helshoven. It’s made with wood from the trunks of cherry trees, but of course the human eye interprets it as solid stone. The creator, Frits Jeuris, explains it in English on his own website; but it stands for itself really.
In case you want to explore for yourself, the St Theresa Chapel is at 50.8008 N, 4.7090 E (though you are unlikely to find it open) and Helsh(ea)ven is at 50.7915 N, 5.2667 E (and it is never closed).
The Emperor Constantine prepares for a decisive battle against his rival Maxentius.
A chunky 250-page history of one of the world’s most contested cities, taking us from Biblical times up to the present day (2022), and telling the story from the perspective of an 4000-year-old olive tree on the Mount of Olives outside the Old City. There are a lot of facts here, some of which I knew and some of which I didn’t. The two that particularly jumped out at me as new were the destruction of the Mughrabi Quarter in 1967 and the destruction of the al-Aqsa minbar in 1969. This is a location where political violence has never been monopolised by one side.
A review by Roy Schwartz of the American Jewish Historical Society accuses the book of blatant historical bias, though to be honest I expect that a review from the other side might make similar complaints in the other direction. Schwartz has very reasonable grounds, however, to complain that most of the modern-era Jewish characters are depicted with hooked noses. Vincent Lemire is a well-known French historian of Jerusalem, and he should have restrained his artist colleague Christophe Gaultier from stereotypes. The graphic novel format is not ideal for delivering facts, but it should not distract from them either.
Gelon was friendly with him, and one day he took the old fella aside. This was some years back, before the war and before Desma had run off, when their boy, Helios, was still alive, though barely. Anyway, Gelon asked if Helios would see the year out. Now the old fella looked thoughtful. After a long pause, he said if Gelon could get him an ox, he’d soon find out. Gelon, being poor, said he couldn’t afford an ox. Okay, well, what about a sheep? Even a lamb would do? Gelon said he’d try. That night he stole a lamb from Alberus’ farm, brought it to the prophet. The prophet told him to be at Dismas’ the next evening, and he’d tell what he’d found. Then he bowed, took the lamb under his arm, and stumbled off into the night.
This book got rave reviews in some quarters for its depiction of ancient Greek society in Syracuse with Dublin accents. I found it brutal and not at all funny, and drifted off after seventy pages. You can get Glorious Exploits here.
‘Steenbergen in het bos’ of later ‘Vaalbeke ten wauwere’, gelegen aan het lagere en moerassige deel van het Kouterbos (later aan de vijvers), behoorde als een leen van de heren van Heverlee tot de 15de eeuw toe aan de familie van Spontin.² Dat verschillende heren invloed hadden in een bepaald gebied is te begrijpen in de verhoudingen van het middeleeuwse leenstelsel van leenheren en leenmannen. Nadien erfden verschillende families de bezittingen van Steenbergen of verkochten ze verder. De hertogen van Arenberg verwierven de bossen rond het gebied van de heren van Steenbergen door het huweliik van Charles van Arenberg met Anne van Croÿ, na het overlüiden van haar broer die geen erfgenamen had (1612). De heerlikheid bleef in handen van de heren van Steenbergen.³
“Steenbergen in het bos” (Steenbergen in the forest), or later “Vaalbeke ten wauwere,” located on the lower, marshy part of the Kouterbos (later on the ponds), belonged to the Spontin family as a fief of the lords of Heverlee until the 15th century. That different lords held influence in a given area is understandable in the medieval feudal system of lords and vassals. Subsequently, various families inherited or sold the Steenbergen estates. The Dukes of Arenberg acquired the forests surrounding the area of the lords of Steenbergen through the marriage of Charles of Arenberg to Anne of Croÿ, after the death of her brother, who had no heirs (1612). The lordship remained in the hands of the lords of Steenbergen.
³ Mertens, E. p. 60; lijst van de heren van Aarschot, Bierbeek en Oud-Heverlee: de Croÿ en Arenberg
This was the other lovely local history book (after @Wouters Wondere Wereld) that I picked up during one of the lockdown breaks in 2021, a nicely illustrated chronicle of the small resort area 2 km south of our house, known as “Het Zoet Water”, ie “The Sweet Water” or “The Fresh Water”. Currently the ponds are drained stretches of mud waiting for a municipal refreshment; the whole area is already the most touristy spot in our commune, and has perhaps potential for more.
It’s a short punchy book with lots of photographs, looking at the history and economics of the once isolated community, and the influence of the Dukes of Arenberg in its development. At one point the houses around the ponds became a local hotbed of Protestantism (these things are relative), but most of the heretics were firmly persuaded to move to America. Later, the development of one of Belgium’s first amusement parks brought in capital and even a royal visit from the excited young Prince Philippe in 1964 (he is now our king). With the decline of the amusement park (due to growing expense and competition) the Zoete Waters has settled back on providing a playground for children and a showground for artworks, along with a number of decent restaurants which we duly patronise. If you follow me on social media, you’ll have seen my occasional posts of Christmas services from the Baroque chapel of Our Lady of Steenbergen, tucked into the woods just beside the lake.
Current The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition Our Song, by Anna Carey Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon, ed. Ian Whates Mean Streets, by Terrance Dicks
Last books finished The Twist, by George Mann et al The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend
Next books Paradise Towers, by Sean Mason and Silvano Beltramo Het lijkt Washington wel: Hoe lobbyisten Brussel in hun greep hebben, by Peter Teffer East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
“Two Hearts” was next in my list of joint Hugo and Nebula winning fiction, having taken the Hugo for Best Novelette in 2006 and the Nebula in the same category in 2007 (though that was the Nebula for 2006). Before reading it, I thought, well, I had not actually read Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn before, so maybe I should read it first and see what I thought?
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Last Unicorn is:
The unicorn was gray and still. “There is magic on me,” she said. “Why did you not tell me?”
Reader, I hated it. I found it the worst kind of sentimental glurge. The dissonance of calling the wizard Schmendrick is one more false step on top of the teeth-grinding saccharinity of the rest of the story. I lasted not much more than fifty pages. I’m sorry, I know it’s a much-loved classic, and perhaps I am a bitter ageing man, but I could not take it.
“Two Hearts” does not have internal sections, so here is the third paragraph.
But it didn’t ever eat children, not until this year.
Back in 1968, Beagle published his classic fantasy novel, The Last Unicorn. I have never read it, nor have I seen the film made some time back (apparently very successful, though Beagle did not profit much from it) and so I expected this follow-up novella (written almost four decades later!) to leave me pretty cold. In fact, it had entirely the opposite effect: I was totally captured by the lyrical and moving story of a king’s last quest, told through the eyes of a young girl, in a fantasy world where Bad Things Happen but you can hope for Good to have a partial victory at the end. Perhaps I am just getting sentimental in my old age, but I loved it.
Again, I must be getting bitter as I get older, because I really didn’t like it this time. Perhaps my teeth were still on edge from reading The Last Unicorn.
The estates of “The Wild Geese” were seized and sold or given to Protestants, and penal laws were introduced forbidding Catholics to hold office or to serve in the armed forces. Father’s land at Leixlip had only been rented of course, but the new tenants seized our stock and equipment and I was reduced once more to buying malt to keep the brewery going.
A few years ago I wrote about Christian Davies, commonly call’d Mother Ross, who was born in 1667 and lived as a woman in Leixlip and Dublin until her husband was conscripted into the army, and then herself joined up, living as a man for many years, until she was eventually discovered and became a bit of a celebrity. This is not a terribly good novelisation of the story (indeed, the original account that we have supposedly received from Christian herself is something of a novelisation), but I was on a long plane flight and short of other things to read, so I pursued it to the end.
A couple of beats that I really felt were missed: the author has rather a tin ear for the dynamics of the relationship of southern Irish Protestants to the United Kingdom, and I winced several times as his characters simply got it wrong. And from Christian’s own memoirs, it’s pretty clear that she had several enjoyable relationships with girlfriends while living as a man and ostensibly still looking for her husband; Lloyd simply doesn’t take her there, and instead invents a back-story of sexual assault in Ireland. Not really recommended. You can get Mother Ross here.
About the author: “Geoff Lloyd was born in 1928, served on the lower deck in the Royal Navy (postwar), spent most of his career in the UK Civil Service, moving around the British Isles. He travelled widely in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India and retired to Portugal. His interests include music, history, and travel. He has written eighteen novels, three plays, short stories, etc.” I won’t be seeking out more of his work, but I admire his energy, if he is still with us.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Partition, by Charles Townshend.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Ecuador.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Galápagos
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
87,317
8,121
Wish You Were Here
Jodi Picoult
281,521
2,100
Through Gates of Splendor
Elisabeth Elliot
31,697
3,556
The Old Man Who Read Love Stories
Luis Sepúlveda
29,251
1,780
Shipped
Angie Hockman
71,391
555
Shadow of the Almighty
Elisabeth Elliot
11,200
2,245
End of the Spear
Steve Saint
12,308
1,078
Natural Selection
Elin Hilderbrand
61,553
126
This week’s winner, Vonnegut’s Galápagos, is one of four books on the list which are set on or around the eponymous islands. Unlike Wish You Were Here, Shipped and Natural Selection, it is not a contemporary novel about relationships, but a gloomy post-apocalyptic reflection on the end of humanity. Wish You Were Here, which is far ahead on Goodreads but well behind on LibraryThing, is set during the pandemic and so has a certain post-apocalyptic element too. Notable that Shipped and Natural Selection score really well on Goodreads and much less well on LibraryThing.
Three of the other four books on the list are about the life and legacy of Jim Elliott, an American missionary who was killed by annoyed indigenous people in 1956. The two by his widow score particularly well on LibraryThing, less so on Goodreads. Luis Sepúlveda is from Chile, so unfortunately none of the top eight is by an Ecuadorean writer. The top book by an Ecuadorean author set in Ecuador is Jawbone, by Mónica Ojeda.
I disqualified four books. The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, by Zoraida Córdova, gave me the most trouble, but in the end I concluded that more than half of it is set in the USA where Orquídea’s four children live. As we have seen previously, The Old Patagonian Express, by Paul Theroux, covers several countries. The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, is about the immigrant experience in the USA. Everything Here Is Beautiful, by Mira T. Lee, is set in the USA and Switzerland (one of the main characters has an Ecuadorean boyfriend).
Coming next: Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Guinea (Conakry) and Benin – we’ll be back in Africa for a bit.
I could hot desk in the open plan area, as Arthur had suggested, but then I wouldn’t have such luxuries as shelves for my client files, or a permanent noticeboard, or a drawer to keep spare pens and Post-it notes in. Even sharing with Kawan Baik was better than that.
Another contemporary romance (following on from The Friend Zone Experiment), this has two young British Asian lawyers in London gradually figuring out their destiny, while also navigating the perils of white patriarchy in their profession and the ethics of dodgy political assignments. There are some glorious moments, including a particularly gruesome wedding chapter. The ending surprised me; I didn’t expect the characters to go (literally) there. Again, you know where the story is likely to end up emotionally from roughly page 3, but the journey is gripping and very entertaining. You can get Behind Frenemy Lines here.
Belinda stepped outside the time machine, feeling her pumps scrape against a pavement that her feet did not belong on.
The episode that this novelisation is based on was broadcast on Easter Sunday this year, and I wrote:
Lux was the episode shown at Easter and I watched it with other fans in Belfast. The basic concept of yet another ancient deity emerging – which turns out to be rather easily defeated – didn’t appeal to me, and the acknowledgement of segregation felt a bit by-the-numbers, but I loved the episode’s fanservice, reminiscent of The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who. Everyone’s favourite episode is Blink, right?
James Goss has picked this up and run with it, and turned in another cracking novelisation (following City of Death, The Pirate Planet and The Giggle). It’s a story with several epic shifts of scale – the small-minded tableau of a Florida town, the big imaginative expanse of the fans’ cramped living room, and the superhuman struggle between the Doctor and a rogue god. The fourth-wall-breaking scenes of the Doctor and Belinda with the fans, Hasan, Robyn and Lizzie, are really excellent, and I found I had something in my eye at the end. As usual with this writer, recommended. You can get Doctor Who: Lux here.
Bumping this up from a social media post I made a couple of weeks ago: I came across a fascinating article, “Tolkien, Sayers, Sex and Gender”, by David Doughan, which looks at the possible reasons why Tolkien disliked the work of Dorothy L. Sayers. He says in a letter of 31 May 1944 to his son Christopher:
I could not stand Gaudy Night. I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet. The honeymoon one (Busman’s H.?) was worse. I was sick . . .
Doughan says, in the abstract of his paper:
Tolkien’s expressed “loathing” for Dorothy Sayers and her novels Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon is remarkable considering that Sayers is generally considered to belong to the same milieu as the Inklings. Possible reasons for this are the contrast between the orthodox Catholic Tolkien’s view of male sexuality as inherently sinful, requiring “great mortification”, and Sayers’s frankly hedonistic approach. Another reason may be Sayers’s depiction of an independent Oxford women’s college getting by successfully without men, and her representation of marriage as a source of intellectual frustration for creative women.
Indeed, Sayers was very friendly with Tolkien’s friends C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and is sometimes seen as an honorary member of the Inklings. But there is no evidence that she and Tolkien ever met, even though they graduated from Oxford in the same year (1915) and were both first published in the same volume of Oxford Poetry (also 1915).
In fairness to Tolkien, he doesn’t say that he hates all of the Lord Peter Wimsey books; he says that he particularly hated Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon, the last two books of the thirteen, but that the series had “attractive beginnings”. People who are bigger Wimsey fans than me tell me that they also hate Busman’s Honeymoon, so it’s a point of view which reasonable people can take. (For a counter perspective, Busman’s Honeymoon has the highest reader approval rating of any of the individual Wimsey novels on Goodreads, with Gaudy Night second.)
Doughan speculates that Tolkien’s dislike of Gaudy Night is because it showed a successful Oxford college run by women, and that Tolkien felt uncomfortable about such a scenario. Personally, without having gone into the details, I think this argument fails on two grounds. I have not read Gaudy Night myself, but again people who are bigger Wimsey fans than me tell me that it’s very much about internal rivalries and poisonous academic politics, rather than portraying the women’s college as a feminist utopia. I think it’s more likely that Sayers’ satire of the collegiate snakepit hit too close to home for Tolkien, and made him uncomfortable.
A very stupid person told me on social media (in a comment now deleted) that Tolkien simply hated and feared women. This is just rubbish. On women’s education, Tolkien’s record is actually rather good. A few years back, I came across this fascinating snippet in John D. Rateliffe’s essay, “The Missing Women: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lifelong Support for Women’s Higher Education”:
A vivid glimpse into Tolkien as a teacher of women can be found in the biography of Mary Challans, better known by her pen name, Mary Renault. Renault’s biographer notes that Tolkien had tutored women from St. Hugh’s while working at the OED and describes the impact of Tolkien’s return from Leeds on Renault and her fellow students at St. Hugh’s in these terms:
the women at St. Hugh’s […] had every reason to be grateful for his return. He was a conscientious lecturer, offering al-most double the statutory hours in order to ensure that his students, female as well as male, covered the entire subject. Indeed, he was unusual in being notably sympathetic to women undergraduates.
We don’t have any contemporary references by Challans to Tolkien during her undergraduate days (1925–28), although we know she was obsessed with all things medieval at the time and that long afterward her letters exchanged with her old college roommate, Kasia Abbott, make “frequent references to their old teacher Tolkien”. And that, when asked about him more than sixty years later, Kasia described him to Renault’s biographer as “darling Tolkien”. We don’t have any correspondence between Tolkien and Renault, unfortunately, but we know that Tolkien and Renault admired each other’s fiction; he singles out The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea for special praise and mentions receiving “a card of appreciation” from Renault, describing it as the piece of fan mail that had pleased him the most.
Considering just how much reader correspondence Tolkien received, to single out the postcard from Mary Renault / Challans as “perhaps the piece of ‘Fan-mail’ that gives me most pleasure” is a very strong statement indeed.
A couple of people suggested to me that perhaps Tolkien and Sayers had had an unsuccessful romantic encounter as students at Oxford, which then poisoned his perception of her forever. I think this is unlikely for several reasons. First of all, Tolkien actually says that he liked the earlier Wimsey books, and that his aversion to both books and writer developed later, possibly even as late as Gaudy Night; so he was not carrying an old grudge over three decades. Second, it’s totally plausible that Tolkien and Sayers, at different colleges and studying different subjects, would simply never have had occasion to meet as undergraduates.
Third, Tolkien was (as far as we know) obsessed with Edith Bratt throughout his Oxford years, and Dorothy L. Sayers’ not entirely successful love life as an undergraduate is also well chronicled in her own records. Of course, that doesn’t exclude some unrecorded disastrous attempted flirtation – or even a non-romantic yet enduringly bitter exchange of very different intellectual and/or political views – but Sayers in particular was pretty open about her past life, and doesn’t ever seem to have mentioned Tolkien in correspondence, even when he became famous (which was long after she did).
Sometimes people just don’t get on with each other, even if they have friends and interests in common, and sometimes later analysts can learn from the interaction, and sometimes there is not much there there; and I tend to feel this is one of the latter cases.
Brian (narrating): I just want to go… get this thing started.
I’ve really enjoyed Burns’ weird stories in the past, and I’m sorry to say that I didn’t find this one as much to my taste, perhaps because it is not as weird. Brian, the protagonist, is a teenager who is obsessed with classic films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Last Picture Show, and also with his friend Laurie. He stumbles around rocky outcrops, both physical and emotional, and doesn’t quite manage to get where he needs to go. It’s OK as a coming of age story, but I wanted a bit more. You can get Final Cut here.
Next on my pile of unread comics in English is Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown.
“And my cells won’t renew in space. What would be the point? I’d only suffocate all over again.”
Another in Cutaway Comics’ explorations of unseen parts of Doctor Who history, this goes behind the backdrop of both The Three Doctors and more importantly Underworld. It is about the difficulties of the Minyan princess Malika, who tries to prevent Omega from destroying the planet Minyos and then leads a further attack on him from the planet Draktria in the fourth of four parts. I found it a rather right-wing narrative; Malika and her family have been elevated against the common people of Minyos by superior technology supplied by the Time Lords, and the rebellion of the Minyans against their oppressive rulers is stoked by Omega and an evil populist politician. The Draktria chapter is straight from the playbook of great powers recruiting loyal but doomed native troops from the colonies. The writer does not seem conscious of the tropes that he has put into the story… The art is generally good but Ridgway doesn’t always get his characters’ faces consistent.
You can get Omega here, along with a DVD and an audio version starring Brian Blessed; unfortunately I don’t have those as I bought it from the Cutaway stall at Gallifrey One.
Current The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend
Last books finished Jerusalem, Part 1, by Selma Lagerlöf Silence: A Christian History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch (did not finish) The Casuarina Tree, by W. Somerset Maugham The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge and the Murders that Stunned an Empire, by Julie Kavanagh The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng The New Machiavelli, by Jonathan Powell
Next books The Twist, by George Mann et al Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon, by Ian Whates East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
