Current
The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner
Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht
Last books finished
A border too far: the Ilemi triangle yesterday and today, by Philip Winter
Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut
The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross
Next books
The Queen's Spymaster, by John Cooper
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by Stephen Fry
Second paragraph of third chapter:
She’d garnered valuable information from the Snark before–in that split second when it had paused, hovering motionless inches above the ground, computing new coordinates–she’d jumped clear and sent it on its unprotected way. Precisely where she was. Precisely what day, month, and year it was. That last had come as a shock. Memories had been swarming more thickly with every passing minute, but now she knew that even the most recent of them was more than a year old. And in the hours since she’d jumped, while she’d been trudging through the snow, she’d contemplated the burgeoning strangeness of her sense of herself.
This was part of a Humble Bundle that I got in 2016 because of various Zelazny-related items. It’s an expansion of “Breaking Strain“, a 1949 story by Arthur C. Clarke, and the first in a series of six volumes by Preuss featuring the mysterious Sparta, whose memories of her own origin are unclear and unreliable, and gets mixed up with a very weird plot involving the transport of a first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom to the planet Venus. It started a bit clunky but developed well enough and kept my attention to the end; not Great Literature but a step or two ahead of the pulp stories which it is rooted in. You can get it here. I’m not inspired to get the rest of the series though.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next on that list is Alan Moore’s Jerusalem.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
There was no way of knowing why the state of Serbia and Montenegro should take an interest in the accident, but it soon became clear that this country had kept the two victims under surveillance for a long time.
I have generally enjoyed Kadarë's work, but I'm afraid this left me rather unexcited and confused. The story is about an Albanian couple who dies in a freak car accident; we explore what they know about each other, and the woman's other loves; perhaps it's all a metaphor for the international flirtations of post-Communist Albania, but if so it's a bit clumsy and also not all that apt (post-Communist Albania has been pretty firm in its affections). If you want to try it anyway, you can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2014 (I could not find Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham, and anyway it turns out that The Accident has overtaken it). Next on that list is Sleepers of Mars, if I can find it, or Listen to the Moon by Michael Morpurgo, if I can't.
"It's not that I don't like it, Yuri. It's just not exactly snappy is it?" https://t.co/C2in0hxV2E
— John Bull (@garius) May 26, 2020
Ten weeks ago today, the Brussels St Patrick's Day reception was due to take place in the BOZAR. It's always a grand occasion, and this time was going to be particularly special; the evening was not only a celebration of Ireland's national day, but also a farewell to the Irish ambassador to the EU, Declan Kelleher, who played a key if under-reported role in ensuring that Dublin and Brussels remained tightly connected during the Brexit negotiations. Of course, there was no reception.
We've been thinking about the last bits of normality before it all hit. My last international travel was a visit to London at the end of February, finishing with a birthday party in Cambridge on the 29th and coming home on 1st March. This is surely the first time that I have spent thirteen consecutive weeks in Belgium since we moved here in 1999. (I don't think it will be another thirteen – but it may be another four or five.) The last reception I attended was the opening of an exhibition about the Croatian architect Vjenceslav Richter on Wednesday 4 March. (It's open again, if you want to go – rather good, I thought.) My last networking lunch was with a former Swiss ambassador on Friday 13 March. (An inauspicious date!) On 17 March, the last full day in the office, eight of our usual complement of forty-something were in, and we ordered a socially distant lunch. (I note that the seven colleagues in the picture below are from seven different countries, and none shares a nationality with me.)
The numbers are subsiding slowly. I noted ten days ago that the number of patients in hospitals and in intensive care were about halfway between those for 22 and 23 March. Today's numbers are just below those for 21 March. So we are heading in the right direction, but slowly – it seems to take five or six days to make up for each day of the initial surge (and of course we're now at the equivalent of the point where that surge was going really fast). Cafes and restaurants will be able to open next week, but it's not clear that it will be worth their while. Hairdressers opened last week, and I took advantage:
The issue of the day is, of course, Dominic Cummings. I will be clear – I despise the man and everything he stands for. This is the person who sabotaged Britain's participation in the largest peace project in history, and thought nothing of colluding in wicked lies in the process (the claim that the UK paid the EU £350 million a week, and the further claim that this money would go to the National Health Service if the country voted for Brexit). I wish him nothing but failure in his political career and ambitions.
It is however impossible to read his full statement and not feel some sympathy for someone in a high-pressure job facing a family crisis. Even so, it's not good enough. Most of Western Europe had to deal with lockdown, and most of us did so by respecting what we thought were the rules. We just received a note from the home where our daughters live to say that normal visiting will remain impossible until further notice. (That’s been the case since 13 March). Our experience is sad but not as awful as many others have gone through.
British senior scientific advisers Neil Ferguson and Catherine Calderwood were forced to resign for what on the face of it were rather less egregious violations of the UK's "Stay home" mantra than Cummings’ driving 425 km to Durham (and then back again to London). And his admission that he decided to test his own eyesight by getting into his car and driving another 100 km from Durham to Barnard Castle and back is, well, startling and not exactly in line with the usual guidance about eyesight and driving. Many people made agonising personal sacrifices for the greater good, and they now see Cummings having breached the spirit of the rules, and probably the letter as well, and getting away with it.
(This is much less important in the scheme of things, but Cummings also appears to have edited his own past blog entries to look as if he was more prescient about pandemics than he actually was.)
The Spectator is keeping a running tally of Conservative MPs who have called for Cummings to resign or be sacked; you can add the Chief Executive of blog site Conservative Home to the list. These are not the usual bunch of people like me who already hated Cummings’ politics. The government is visibly spinning desperately to control the damage.
Matt Hancock announces the Government will review all penalty fines issued to families while travelling during the lockdown after the Cummings furore (after being asked by a man of the cloth during the daily No10 press conference).
— Tom Newton Dunn (@tnewtondunn) May 26, 2020
This feels like an inflection point. John Major’s government was holed below the waterline by Black Wednesday in 1992, five months and seven days after he won a general election. It is five months and fourteen days today since the 2019 election. History never exactly repeats itself, but past events are often the best guidance to what will happen next.
For reasons which will swiftly become obvious, I am quoting the first paragraph of the third chapter rather than the second which is my usual practice:
As discussed in Chapter One, the last analysis of Roger’s Judicial Astrology was Nicholas Whyte’s MPhil dissertation, published in 1991. Whyte relied primarily on two manuscripts from Cambridge University Library, with some additional material from a Bodleian Library manuscript (although he identified several more), while French, who also analysed some aspects of the text, relied primarily on a transcript he had made of one of the Cambridge manuscripts.1 In what follows all twenty-two known extant manuscripts containing all or part of Roger’s Judicial Astrology have been examined, and are summarised below, and are listed in order of relevance to this thesis; A is the oldest extant manuscript and is used as the exemplar in this thesis where possible. A few folios are missing from A, and for those folios, B, which is complete, is used instead. C is also complete, and features in some of the discussions relating to analysing the manuscript. D, E, F, and G are all thirteenth-century copies and are relevant to the development of the stemma codicum discussed later. Remaining manuscripts are listed in order of completeness. A full analysis of the palaeography of the manuscripts is beyond the scope of this thesis, but a brief palaeographical analysis has been undertaken in order to identify, tentatively, the possible location and date of the earlier manuscripts and in order to identify those manuscripts that might be considered to be as close as possible to Roger’s non-extant original. In addition, those manuscripts that contain Roger’s prologue and introduction have a number of tables, some of which contain errors. Examining the manuscripts to see where errors have been copied also provides a route to determining which manuscripts are likely to be closer to the original source. Professor Erik Kwakkel of the University of British Columbia very kindly narrowed down dates for some of the manuscripts for which a palaeographical analysis had been undertaken. These analyses are covered in a later section of this chapter. Finally, an examination of the contents of the manuscripts, together with a brief survey of other texts bound within the same codex, provides some possible information about the reception of Roger’s Judicial Astrology.
1 Whyte, ‘Roger of Hereford’, p.55. Whyte made use primarily of Cambridge, University Library, Ii 1.1, ff.40r-59r and Cambridge, University Library, Gg 6.3, ff.139r-153r with additional material from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Selden Supra 76, ff.3f-19v. French had apparently transcribed Cambridge Ii 1.1, which Whyte referred to.
Long, long ago (well, the summer of 1991) I picked up a lovely project as my M Phil thesis: Roger French, a senior lecturer at the Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science had transcribed a manuscript written by his namesake and ancient neighbour, the 12th-century scholar Roger of Hereford, and wanted to do something with it. I had better knowledge of astronomy than he did, and the basics of Latin, so I picked it up for analysis. It was the most intellectually fascinating thing I have ever done, particularly at the end when I was convinced that Roger had included in the text a birth chart for Eleanor of Aquitaine. But my life moved on from medieval astrology rather rapidly after 1991, and I still regret that to an extent. Not that the other challenges I have faced have not had their points of interest, but there was something peculiarly fascinating about research which wasn’t so much pushing back the frontiers of knowledge as mapping more accurately where they used to be.
So I was delighted when a random Twitter search a few years ago turned up the information that Chris Mitchell was writing up the same book by Roger of Hereford as his PhD at Leicester University. You can download his finished thesis from here; and I did, and was happily returned to the summer of 1991 when Roger was my constant companion. There’s a bit of a revival of Roger at the moment – the German scholar Alfred Lohr has recently edited his Computus (on the calculation of Easter). One of my ambitions is to give the same treatment to Roger’s other work, an explanation of the Ptolemaic planetary theory. But that will have to wait.
Mitchell makes the argument that Roger’s Judicial Astrology (as he calls it, and I think it’s better terminology than I used in 1991) should be understood as a teaching manual, pulling together astrological lore from various sources and presenting it for students to learn from. He makes the point that the book is really rather widespread in British manuscript collections, and also to an extent in Europe, so it must have been popular among scholars. (Modern technology means that he was able to order scanned copies of the manuscripts from various European libraries without having to go there himself.)
He very thoroughly identifies the texts whose material Roger synthesised – mostly Arabic originals, which had been translated into Latin only in the late 11th or early 12th centuries. He courteously disagrees with me on several points of analysis, and I’m not going to insist that I got everything right almost 30 years ago when I was 24; his arguments are well structured and convincing in almost every case.
But I think he misses a really relevant question about the importance or otherwise of Roger’s work. How important was astrology in the late medieval period? I’m a bit sceptical. There’s very little evidence of astrology entering the mainstream of politics or of scholarly discourse in England or northwestern Europe more generally (except when people condemn it). One of the few examples is the fuss around the Great Conjunction of 1186, but Mitchell doesn’t mention it. Where are the records of other astrological practitioners? How do they compare with records of, say, medical pr mathematical writers? I’d have liked a bit more context.
And while I agree with all of Mitchell’s other points of correction to my 1991 research, I stand by my identification of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s natal horoscope. Mitchell argues that the horoscope provided by Roger is only a theoretical exercise, not meant to be linked to any real-life planetary alignment. I would counter that it’s a lot of trouble to go to for a fictional example; if Roger was really a practitioner of astrology, he would have had plenty of worked examples to hand; and sure, in theory one might be meant to cast a horoscope for the moment when a question is asked rather than the nativity of the person asking it, but I’m not at all sure how that would work out in practice.
So, more things to pursue when I have time. (Whenever that may be.) But I’m very glad that someone else has picked up the trail of Roger of Hereford, and run much further with it than I was able to.
This is the latest post in a series I started last November, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in current circumstances when we are all somewhat distracted. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
I was hugely honoured to be present at the Presidential residence in Podgorica on 13 July 2006, the last leg of a trip that had started in Skopje and continued through Prishtina with an exciting journey through the mountains to Montenegro itself. There were perhaps 300 guests. The mood was festive, everyone shaking hands and embracing. The moment eventually came when the guards played a fanfare, and then a young man began to sing the new/old nation's anthem, joined in the second verse by a young woman, without any other accompaniment, their voices trembling with emotion. For the first time in nine decades, Montenegro was celebrating its traditional independence day as an independent state. They didn't drop a beat, or miss a note. It was one of the most electrifying things I have ever witnessed. I don't have photographs, but I was given a souvenir first day cover.
The month started with a family trip to Antwerp to see the Sultan's Elephant, an extraordinary live action steampunk show. I got a few film shots of the elephant and the little girl in action:
F celebrated his 7th birthday later in the month, and actually had a party, though my contribution was to take B on a long drive to keep her out of the way.
At the end of the month we drove as usual to Northern Ireland (Anne failing to be persuaded of the merits of Fury from the Deep), but made the tough decision to leave B in Belgium under the supervision of my mother-in-law. It actually went all right, but it was a bit sad.
I managed to read 24 books in July 2006, thanks perhaps to several long land-based trips.
Non-fiction 7 (YTD 34)
The Economist Style Guide, no author given apart from one section by John Grimond
The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror, by George Soros
Café Europa: Life after Communism, by Slavenka Drakulić
Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams, by M.J. Simpson
The Belgian House of Representatives: From Revolution to Federalism, by Derek Blyth, Alistair MacLean, and Rory Watson
Under the Devil's Eye: Britain's Forgotten Army at Salonika 1915-1918, by Alan Wakefield and Simon Moody
Mr Belloc Objects To "The Outline Of History", by H.G. Wells
Non-genre 5 (YTD 12)
Eleven on Top, by Janet Evanovich
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow
The Man With Two Left Feet, and Other Stories, by P.G. Wodehouse
Sf (Non-Who) 10 (YTD 42)
Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman
The Prisoner, by Thomas M. Disch
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
The Compleat Enchanter – The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea, by L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Galactic Patrol, by E.E. "Doc" Smith
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson
The Mark of Ran, by Paul Kearney
The Lady of the Shroud, by Bram Stoker
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 7)
Timewyrm: Exodus, by Terrance Dicks
Comics 1 (YTD 2)
Buddha, Volume 1: Kapilavastu, by Osamu Tezuka
6,500 pages (YTD 29,800)
3/24 (YTD 14/97) by women
2/24 (YTD 5/97) by PoC
The one I enjoyed most was The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson's classic horror tale, which you can get here. There were a lot of other good ones, and I guess my favourite reread was Fahrenheit 451, which you can get here. I thoroughly bounced off Galactic Patrol, but you can get it here.
Slaughterhouse Five won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1973, with only three competitors – Silent Running, which I have not seen, and two TV films that I had not even heard of, Between Time and Timbuktu which is based on other works by Kurt Vonnegut, and The People, mostly based on a novella by Zenna Henderson, "Pottage". IMDB users rank Slaughterhouse Five 25th and 27th of all films of 1972 on the two systems; Silent Running does better at 12th and 18th, while the other two are a very long way down. Iwonder why there were only four finalists? The previous year with less than five was 1965 and the next was 1977. I haven't seen Tarkovsky's Solaris, but I think it has shown the best staying power of any sfnal film from 1972, despite being overlooked by Hugo voters. It's also a bit surprising that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes didn't get a look-in.
Anyway, here's a trailer for Slaughterhouse Five.
I had seen it long ago, and am also familiar with the book. A lot of people really rave about this film, whose director, George Roy Hill, went on to my next Oscar-winner, The Sting. I was not quite so grabbed; I think I can be politely positive, but not a lot more. The central character, Billy Pilgrim, is played at various ages and degrees of make-up by Michael Sacks (who dropped out of acting and went into tech ten years later). None of the other actors seems to have appeared in other Hugo-winning films, or Oscar-winners or Doctor Who, so that gives me one less thing to write about.
The plot concerns Billy Pilgrim's voyages up and down his personal timeline, including his time as a PoW in wartime Germany, experiencing the Allies bombing of Dresden, and then suburban unfulfilled family life, with a phase of being kidnapped by aliens who hook him up with a beautiful young porn actress who has his baby. I don't remember seeing a single non-white actor even as an extra in the entire film, and the few women characters are pretty but stupid (I don't think it passes Bechdel Two). I also wasn't really persuaded by 24-year-old Michaels Sacks made up to look older, and frustrated that we don't really get much sense of what Billy Pilgrim actually thinks about the bizarre things that happen to him; he is a very passive protagonist.
There are some good bits too. The horrors of war, and the alienating effect of combat on the participants, are well brought home, and there are some very nifty transition points between different parts of the timeline. Eugene Roche (who I remember as a lawyer in Soap) is great as Pilgrim's friend Edgar Derby who gets shot for looting, and Valerie Perrine is tremendously energetic as Montana Wildhack, the porn starlet. But I have to say I found it one of the less engaging Hugo-winning films I've seen so far. Still, if you want, you can get it here.
As usual, I went back and reread the book, which is quite short. Vonnegut felt that the film was a faithful adaptation, and I would agree with him there. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German Shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess.
When I last reread this in 2009, I wrote:
Rereading this classic, which combines the horrors of the 1945 bombing of Dresden with the sfnal captivity of the hero by the aliens of Tralfamadore. Having first come to Vonnegut via Cat's Cradle and The Sirens of Titan as a teenager, I wasn't really sure what to make of this. Coming to it again a quarter-century later, I have a much deeper appreciation of Vonnegut's savaging of the surrealism of war, and of how trauma throws the rest of your life into a weird perspective. But I also find his attitude to women much more annoying – at least, to the women in the main part of the story, the mothers of Billy Pilgrim's children, Valencia Merble and Montana Wildhack (and Pilgrim's daughter Barbara). Having said that, the sanest character in the book is probably Mary O'Hare from the ostensibly autobiographical foreword; and it must also be admitted that most of the male characters are pretty unpleasant too.
Anyway, I can't think of many other sf novels which take the Second World War as their subject, and this is probably the best in that rather small set.
Scanning the SF Encyclopedia entry on WW2, I think that last comment still stands – J.G. Ballard, Jerry Kosinski and Primo Levi all wrote sf and all wrote about the war but as far as I know, none of them combined the two themes at novel length. Edited to add: I have been reminded of Connie Willis’s Blackout/All Clear, which I had successfully been trying to forget.
This time around I found I appreciated Vonnegut's success in keeping the narrative pace balanced between the various parts of the story line, all of which have different climaxes at different times. I found his drawings annoying though, and I think I still prefer Cat's Cradle. Still, if you want, you can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Black Wine:
After that it did not struggle, even though its body was still as warm, its feathers as stiff and soft. Horrified at what my intervention had done, I ran away, and never wanted to go near that tree again, though it was near the path and difficult to avoid.
An intricate, interesting novel, which actually reminded me of some of Iain M. Banks’ work more than anything, with interlacing narrative perspectives in a dangerously diverse but mimimally portrayed world. There is good sex, and very bad sex, and power wielded against those who are divergent or deviant, and there is some brutal violence which I admit I found a bit of a deterrent from following the main plot. I am rather surprised that the author hasn’t written a lot more. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third section of “Travels with the Snow Queen”:
The cuff of his trousers got splashed. There were little fragments of glass everywhere. “Don’t move,” you said. You weren’t wearing shoes.
This is a subversion of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy-tale “The Snow Queen” (not the only one in sf), where the protagonist’s boyfriend is stolen by the eponymous queen and she goes on a quest to bring him back, encountering talking animals who may or may not have been humans, and subverting the original metaphor in a feminist way. It was one of Link’s first stories, bu I think it is very well done. It was first published in the very first issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the magazine edited by Link and her partner Gavin Grant, and has been reprinted in half a dozen anthologies and collections; it’s currently available online for free at Uncanny Magazine.
These were the two winners of what was then the James Tiptree Jr Award for 1998, and they are both writing of the kind that the award was surely designed to honour – both authors were very early in their careers, and Link has turned out to be reasonably prolific, if Dorsey less so. The short list was rather long, with another five short pieces and seven novels, two of which I have read – The Moon and the Sun, by Vonda McIntyre, and Sacrifice of Fools, by Ian McDonald. To be honest, the latter is one of my favourite SF novels, but I can see that it did not fit the Tiptree Award as well as the winners did.
The BSFA Award and Arthur C. Clarke Award that year were both won by Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, so I’ll move on next to Dreaming in Smoke, by Tricia Sullivan (Clarke 1999); The Extremes, by Christopher Priest (BSFA 1998); and “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin”, by Raphael Carter (Tiptree). For efficiency, I may write up all three in the same blog post.
One of the benefits of the easing of the lockdown: birdwatching made easier.
Also let’s find space for optimism.
Current
The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner
Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross
The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht
Last books finished
Roger of Hereford’s Judicial Astrology: England’s First Astrology Book?, by Chris Mitchell
The Accident, by Ismail Kadarë
Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 1: Breaking the Strain, by Paul Preuss
Next books
The Queen's Spymaster, by John Cooper
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by Stephen Fry
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The troopship was a converted “cattlewagon” made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.
When I last read this in 2003, I wrote (WARNING – SPOILERS):
William Mandella is a physics graduate, drafted in the year 1997 to fight an interstellar war against the unknown Tauran enemy. Because the battlefields themselves are light-years away, Mandella spends most of the book slipping forward into the future thanks to time dilation, and thus becoming progressively more alienated from the society which he was recruited to serve. But he falls in love with a fellow soldier (the army of 1997 and later years being gender-balanced) and despite all obstacles they get back together. The book ends with a birth announcement from the happy couple – a narrative closure which is also used by Mary Gentle at the end of her medieval fantasy war novel, Ash: A Secret History.
The sequences portraying life as a soldier, in training or in a combat situation, are gripping and unforgettable. Haldeman has put a lot of his experiences as an actual soldier in the Vietnam war into the book. William is his own middle name, and Mandella almost an anagram of Haldeman (see his interview with Spaced Out, the Australian gay and lesbian sf club). Mandella’s lover has Haldeman’s wife’s maiden name, Marygay Potter. The two colossal strengths of the book are the portrayal of the psychological experience of combat, and the depiction of the progressive alienation of the soldiers from the rest of humanity, culminating in the awful revelation that the war was basically a mistake.
As a civilian veteran of Balkan and Irish conflicts myself, I’m not unfamiliar with the psychological effects of war on the participants, and Haldeman gets it right. In a sense the protagonists of The Forever War are relatively fortunate in that there seem to be very few civilian casualties directly resulting from the conflict. Not that they see it that way, as the casualty rate among military participants is huge, and our hero gains rapid promotion merely for staying alive (though as a highly intelligent graduate he must have been officer material anyway). (Brandon Ray subsequently pointed out on rec.arts.sf.written that this isn’t necessarily so, since all the recruits were enlisted by the Elite Conscription Act.)
The military stuff seemed well thought out. I particularly liked the gimmick of the stasis field, within with electricity doesn’t work so our soldiers have to resort to edged weapons. The science behind it may well be rubbish but the military implications were sensibly developed. (And anyone who doubts that the military could possibly jump at shadows to such an extent as to wage war against an enemy that wasn’t in fact an enemy should consider such recent events as the US military’s hysterical reaction to the International Criminal Court and its bizarre fixation with National Missile Defense, a project that will cost vast amounts of money to defend against a threat that is vanishingly unlikely to transpire.)
However despite the undeniable power of the core message of the book, much of the packaging is flawed. The book begins in a world where interstellar space travel has been developed by 1997, which now seems optimistically premature to the 21st century reader. The first edition, which actually won the Hugo and Nebula awards, features a section set in a future Geneva where the UN is now based – a Geneva where the local population has suddenly started speaking German! And although there may some day be a gender-balanced army which tolerates soft drug use, encourages other ranks to say “Fuck you, Sir!” to officers, and enforces (hetero)sexual activity among its recruits, this seems as unlikely now as it must have done in 1975.
The book’s biggest problem – and this has often been acknowledged by Haldeman – is its handling of sexuality. In a year when Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, and Robert Silverberg’s The Stochastic Man were pushing the boundaries of the portrayal of sex in science fiction, The Forever War‘s take on the issue seems rather unimaginative. The 1997 army enforces one-on-one heterosexual activity, with daily rotation of partners, among its personnel, none of whom appear to be particularly upset by this. A few decades later, the entire world has become homosexual as a means of population control, which seems rather disproportionate. Mandella sticks to his heterosexual guns, and does not appear in the least tempted to try it the other way (unlike the hero of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway which also won both Hugo and Nebula, two years later).
And the ending, where our hero retrieves his lost love while the rest of the human race has surrendered its identity to a race of bisexual telepathic clones, seemed to me on first reading simply silly. I may be being unfair to the author here. Haldeman retorts in the introduction to “A Separate War”, in the Robert Silverberg-edited collection Far Horizons, that:
The Forever War does not have a happy ending. Marygay and William do get back together – the book ends with the birth announcement of their first child – but they’re together on a prison planet, preserved as genetic curiosities in a universe where the human race has abandoned its humanity in a monstrous liaison with its former enemy.
That’s all very well as an explanation (twenty years on) of what was in the author’s mind when he wrote it, but it doesn’t really come across on the printed page of the book where the happy ending appears to be the point of the narrative. And it isn’t sufficient, to this reader anyway, to justify the proliferation of homosexuality followed by the telepathic clones as a part of the metaphor for the alienation of Mandella from the rest of the human race; by today’s standards this is either naive or offensive.
To an extent we should forgive the book its anachronisms; we still enjoy Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar even though his depiction of Roman life (with clocks, hats and doublets) is rather different from ours. The flaws are real, but the passion is real as well. The Forever War is not a timeless classic, but it is a classic of its own time, and will no doubt continue to be read for its passion rather than its predictive accuracy. And after all, sf would be a very boring (and small) genre if it was actually rated on its ability to predict the future!
I can’t find whether the novel was published before or after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, but the experience of the Vietnam War of course crucially informed the Zeitgeist. I have to say that going back to it now, I found the book’s take on gender and sexuality so far off kilter that it is difficult to see past that to the intended core message on the dehumanising effects of conflict. I guess we are all better educated about sexual consent now, and while the army’s enforcement of sexual behaviour among the troops may be meant to satirically highlight the pointlessness of trying to enforce sexual abstinence, it completely misses the mark. And it’s impossible to ignore that the first step that the human race takes away from “normal” humanity is to become almost entirely homosexual. What message does that send to the LGBT community about the story’s view of their humanity? I don’t think I could recommend this to anyone starting to read SF in 2020. But if you want, you can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
One problem with our donors was that several of them were not only financiers of the process but also had interests in its outcome, whether those were pressures from past and potential investors in the DRC or concerns about the cost and availability of suitable troops to deploy as peace-keepers. Thus three of them, the USA, France and the UK, were permanent members of the Security Council and one, Belgium was the former colonial power. Within the EU, our largest donor for the first two years, some officials clearly felt it should have more say in the process. As South Africa later assumed a more prominent role, voices were raised to claim that South Africa was not entirely disinterested either: their mining companies could profit greatly from the Congo's minerals. Such pressures are of course a reality of peace-making within the framework available today. While we were resisting external suggestions which we did not feel were consistent with our brief, we were also clearly failing to inspire confidence.
Philip Winter is one of the most interesting people I have ever worked with. During my Independent Diplomat days, he was our representative in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, from late 2010, just before the independence referendum, until it all went wrong at the end of 2013. While we were colleagues he kindly presented me with a copy of this book, which was published in 2012 but written several years before. Shamefully, I have only now got around to reading it. It was worth the wait.
The Inter-Congolese Dialogue doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, though there is one for the peace agreement with which it ended. As part of the process of winding down the awful Second Congo War, in which millions lost their lives through violence and related factors, the Congolese regime of Laurent-Désiré Kabila agreed reluctantly to find a joint government structure along with the groups that it had been fighting. Kabila himself then did his best to prevent the dialogue process from getting started, but was assassinated by his own guards early in 2001. His son Joseph, then aged 29, was rapidly chosen as his successor and engaged sufficiently for the factions to find a solution acceptable to most of the parties (and eventually accepted by all of them) in April 2002. Philip Winter was hired by the British government to work as chief of staff to the facilitator of the process, the former President of Botswana Sir Ketumile Masire, and tells the inside story of a mission which initially a lot of players did not want or did not understand, and which eventually came to be the focal point of international diplomacy in the whole of southern Africa.
It's a personal account which barely scrapes the surface of the actual content of the agreement, and assumes that the reader already has significant background knowledge of the Congo conflict (which I did, mainly thanks to the work of another former colleague from those days, Gérard Prunier). However, it is a very good account of the inside workings of the process, taking very much the anthropological perspective that I find sympathetic – diplomacy revolves as much around personalities and pressure from above and below as it does on the actual substance. There are effective, brief pen-portraits of the team led by Sir Ketumile Masire (QM to his friends) and some of the other protagonists as well. One interesting aspect is that QM and most of his team (and most of the other relevant African leaders) were anglophone, while the parties to the conflict were mostly francophone. Various means were found to get around this, including that Philip's own French is good enough for diplomatic work.
The story has a conclusion, in that the parties do reach the Sun City Agreement, but not an ending, as the implementation of the agreement was far from unproblematic and lower-level armed conflict continues to rumble on. There are some very important insights. Reaching an agreement was not inevitable, and there were several moments when the whole thing appeared to be about to crash – an important factor often being the international community hinting at a lack of faith in QM personally. The mediators pushed as hard as they could for greater inclusion of women in the process, but they could not push very hard and the results on that score were meagre. Philip goes into the reasons for the successes in some detail – basically, very careful preparation for the few key meetings that took place, the first of which was in Gaborone in August 2001, a continued emphasis on African and Congolese ownership, and constant transparency and clarity with the one set of stakeholders who really mattered, the parties to the conflict.
I twitched when several other people who I know personally popped up in the narrative – François Grignon, who was a colleague of mine at the International Crisis Group and is now the UN Deputy Representative in DR Congo; Claudia Wiedey-Nippold, now a senior Africanist in the EU External Action Service; Annemie Neyts, now retired but then a Belgian government minister. There is a lovely moment near the end where Philip introduces the rest of his team, most of whom were from Botswana, to the Alexander McCall Smith novels of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. The Batswana really got into them, and actually took a break from diplomacy one afternoon to go and hear McCall Smith do a reading.
It reminded me of another book by another former colleague, Collision Course, John Norris's account of the US negotiations over the Kosovo peace agreement in 1999. There are important differences. Not least, A Sacred Cause covers a longer period of time (three years rather than three months). Philip puts himself in the picture more than John. But he is also painting a wider picture – where John was working for one of the belligerents (the USA), Philip was in a sense working for them all. A really interesting read. You can get it here.
This was the last unread book on my shelves acquired in 2012. (I read the last book acquired in 2011 last October, the last book acquired in 2010 in January last year, and the last book acquired in 2009 at the end of 2016.) This opens up my 2013 lists: Yugoslavia's Implosion, by Sonja Biserko (non-fiction in order of acquisition), Local Hero, by David Benedictus (shortest unread book acquired in 2013), The Ghost of Lily Painter, by Caitlin Davies (non-genre fiction in order of acquisition), Heaven's War, by David S Goyer (sf in oder of acquisition) and Laatste Schooldag: Verhalen, by J. G Siebelink (most popular unread book acquired in 2013).
The big family event of June 2006 was my great-aunt’s 90th birthday. Here she is with her four children (the four on the left, with her sister-in-law) and her eight nieces and nephews, including my mother (whose face is unfortunately obscured). Three of the people in the picture are sadly no longer with us, but my great-aunt is still going strong and expects to turn 104 next month. (Picture taken by my sister.)
Two of the pictures from my own camera show the guest of honour and the youngest guest, young F, and me with my siblings.
The other family birthday that month was B’s ninth. The big present was a crocodile-shaped water sprinkler, which all three children hugely enjoyed.
Here is a rare video (well, compilation of several short videos) of the three kids together, B just 9, F about to turn 7 and U at 3½:
Apart from that, I see I went to the Tun on 1 June so must have been in London, was in Thessalonica for a meeting with the SEERC later in the month, attended a Wilton Park conference, and seem to have ended the month with a visit to Paris. At work we published a report on the Preševo Valley of Southern Serbia. My Greek intern K was replaced by Macedonian E. (They both now work for the European Commission.) And I wrote what turned out to be the last of my mega-meta-reviews of that year’s Hugo finalists. (It wasn’t possible the following year, for reasons which will become clear, and by 2008 other channels had taken over.) This was also the month that I started really getting into the Big Finish Doctor Who audios.
June 2006 books
non-fiction 6 (YTD 27)
Lords of Parliament: Manners, rituals and politics, by Emma Crewe
The Story of the Salonica Army, by G. Ward Price
The Television Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, by David J Howe and Stephen James Walker
The Triumph of the West, by J.R. Roberts
The New Macedonian Question, ed. James Pettifer
The Gardeners of Salonika, by Alan Palmer
non-genre 1 (YTD 7)
See Delphi and Die, by Lindsey Davis
sf (non-Who) 6 (YTD 32)
Impossible Stories, by Zoran Živković
The Falling Woman, by Pat Murphy
Duel in Nightmare Worlds, by "B. Flackes" (W.D. Flackes)
Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov
Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 6)
Managra, by Stephen Marley
I Am A Dalek, by Gareth Roberts
Timewyrm: Genesys, by John Peel
4,700 pages (YTD 23,300)
3/16 by women (YTD 11/73)
none by PoC (YTD 3/73)
The two really good ones here are Zoran Živković's collection of short stories, which you can get here, and Emma Crewe's anthropological stody of the House of Lords, which you can get here. I found The Triumph of the West pretty pointless, but you can get it here.
The Godfather won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1972, and picked up another two – Best Actor, which was declined by Marlon Brando in protest at the treatment of Native Americans at Wounded Knee (and elsewhere); and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. James Caan, Robert Duvall and Al Pacino were all nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but lost to Joel Grey as the MC in Cabaret. There were three other categories where The Godfather lost to Cabaret, which still holds the record for the most Oscars for any film that did not also win Best Picture.
The other Best Picture nominees were Cabaret, Deliverance, The Emigrants and SounderCabaret is the only other of the nominees that I’ve seen. 1972 is not a good year for my cinematic education; I am pretty sure that the only other two films I’ve seen from that year are Slaughterhouse-Five (which I’ll get to next, as it won the Hugo) and the very odd Lee Marvin/Sissy Spacek film Prime Cut. I’d rate The Godfather as the best of them, though Cabaret is also very good. IMDB users also rank it top film of 1972 on both rankings.
Here’s a trailer.
We are in the middle of a crime wave at the Oscars at the moment, having just had The French Connection, Midnight Cowboy, Oliver! and arguably A Man for All Seasons, with The Sting and The Godfather II coming next. It’s the story of Vito Corleone, boss of a massive organised crime network, and his son Michael who eventually takes over the family business. There is an awful lot of graphic violence. It’s another story about white men. But it’s really well told – I am struck by just how different I found it to Patton, made by the same director only two years before – and I’m putting it in the top third of my list, just below Oliver! but ahead of Ben-Hur. I had seen it once before, but I enjoyed the return visit.
The major returning actor from a previous Oscar winner is Brando himself, who also won Best Actor eighteen years ago for the lead role in On the Waterfront. Here he is iconically and convincgly made up to look like a Mafia grandfather and godfather. (The actors playing his sons are between six and sixteen years younger than him.)
Another returnee from On the Waterfront is Rudy Bond, who is Cuneo here (one of the other Mafia dons), and played Moose (one of the longshoremen) in the earlier film.
Sonny Grosso, whose story was the basis for last year’s The French Connection and also appeared in it, plays to type again and is a briefly seen New York cop, but not seen clearly enough for me to put a picture here. And we have an actor from a Hugo-winning film, Sterling Hayden who is Captain McCluskey here and was General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove.
There are also a fair number of actors here who we will see again in future Oscar-winning films – not least (but not only) because the sequel comes up in two years’ time.
This is yet another film about white men, as was Patton. I was feeling ill the day I watched it, so I did not keep track as closely as usual, but I don’t think that there were many visible non-white faces and I don’t think there were any non-white speaking parts. To an extent the Italians and Jews, and even perhaps the Irish, are to be understood as non-Anglo-Saxons, but it’s not quite the same thing. Going back for another look, I did spot the stable hand who shows off the unfortunate Sultan.
The women are entirely present in terms of their relations with the men – the film obviously passes Bechdel One, in that there is more than one named female character, but I am not sure that it hits Bechdel Two (do any of them have an audible conversation with each other?) and definitely not Bechdel Three (the conversation is not about a man). Having said that, Michael’s two wives are both pretty memorable. Simonetta Stefanelli absolutely glows in her few scenes as Apollonia, and Diane Keaton’s Kay is sort of an Anglo-Saxon viewpoint character (we will of course see her again soon).
And yet, it’s a really well put together film. The plot is complex, with a lot of characters running around shooting each other, mostly in New York but also farther west and in Italy, but I found no difficulty whatsoever in keeping track of it all. The script is lucid and the cinematography adds to the story without distracting from it. “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” is an unforgettable line (used in several variations). The acting nominations were all well deserved – Brando as the title charcter, Al Pacino and James Caan as his sons Michael and Sonny, and Robert Duvall as the conigliere Tom Hagen. Brando in particular carries his character’s extra years effortlessly.
And the music is just tremendous. Here’s a vid with the orchestral suite (including most of the good bits) set to some of the Sicilian scenes from the film:
Despite its flaws, I think this is a better film than Cabaret – the characters have more depth, there is more going on and the story is told better – and it deserved the Oscar that year. You can get it here.
Next up: The Sting.
I had also read the book long ago, and went back to it for comparative purposes. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
It was a short ride, not more than twenty minutes and when they got out of the car Hagen could not recognize the neighborhood because darkness had fallen. They led him into a basement apartment and made him sit on a straight-backed kitchen chair. Sollozzo sat across the kitchen table from him. His dark face had a peculiarly vulturine look.
The book is a cracking good read. The film sticks pretty closely to the parts of the original story that it wants to tell, but there are two significant (and enjoyable) sections that are not in the film – the adventures of Johnny Fontane in Hollywood, and the back story of Vito Corleone in Sicily and his early years in New York (though I think the latter thread informs the Robert de Niro sections of the sequel film). The book has space to go a bit deeper into the political economy of organised crime, in particular the role played (or not) by the police. It’s also a bit better on the women characters (though this is not saying a lot), and has much more explicit sex than I remembered from reading it as a teenager. I can’t pretend that it’s a very deep read, but it’s a very interesting juxtaposition with last year’s The French Connection which also looked at organised crime in New York, from a rather different perspective. You can get it here.
1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
Well, we are partially back in the office. We have a strict rota – open Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; nobody does more than two days in a week; ten to twelve people each day (of a total strength of 49); only those who have actually asked to return have returned. We have proved we can work from home if we have to, the numbers are robust, but I was one of those who felt the need to recolonise our working space for general mental wellbeing.
I must say I found it very helpful to hang out with colleagues in real life rather than virtually. I am senior enough to have my own room to work from, but some of my equipment is at home and difficult to move safely, so I co-opted another desk in the open seating area and actually rather enjoyed myself. None of the people who I work with particularly closely had opted to come in this week, but that meant that I was able to get to know a couple of other colleagues a little better, including one chap who had only started as the lockdown was coming in.
We still have not been able to see our own daughters. Visits are now permitted, but under conditions that are basically unworkable (no touching, maintain 1.5 metre distance). Still, the trends are in the right direction. Today's numbers are again encouraging – 1750 in hospital, 364 in intensive care, 57 new fatalities, which are about half way between the corresponding numbers for 23 March (1883/385/78) but still some way above 22 March (1646/322/41), when the initial curve was particularly steep.
I am still in the fortunate position that anyone I know at all well who has had the COVID-19 virus has recovered or seems to be recovering. But there has been a grim toll in some people's families. One friend told me how she went straight from an international conference of health specialists in Brussels in early March to visit her mother in the UK. They both went down with the virus (which my friend reckons she caught at the conference). My friend got better; her mother did not. She's not the only person I know who has lost a close relative, but it's a particularly dreadful case.
Which brings me to today's real significance for me; it is the thirtieth anniversary of my father's death, aged 62, from a heart attack sustained while changing planes in John F. Kennedy Airport. He lingered for a few days but did not regain consciousness. At the age of 20 he had had the awful experience of seeing his own father, then aged 67, drop dead stading beside him in church. My other grandfather also died of a suddent heart attack in his sixties, and I need not spell out the conclusions that I have drawn for myself.
Whe he died, my father had just put the finishing touches to his last book, Interpreting Northern Ireland, in which he analysed the pros and cons of various ideological and methodological ways of examining the Nothern Ireland. He quipped that "It is quite possible that, in proportion to size, Northern Ireland is the most heavily researched area on earth." His first book, Church and State in Modern Ireland, set the agenda for the analysis of mid-twentieth-century Irish politics for a generation, and is still taken as a baseline for today's researchers even if they don't always agree with it.
He was not only an analyst. In a June 1971 pamphlet on The Reform of Stormont, written for the New Ulster Movement, he proposed five key reforms: proportional representation for elections, stronger parliamentary committees, more members of the Stormont Parliament, a reformed Northern Ireland Senate and proportional representation of the political parties in government. Four of these became hardwired into the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973 and later the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The Northern Ireland Senate was abolished rather than being reformed, though the suggestions survive in spirit in the Civic Forum/Civic Advisory Panel. As far as I know, my father was the first to advocate most of these ideas in the Northern Ireland context (apart from proportional elections, a discussion which is older than Partition), and I think he deserves more credit than he has received for originating them.
He would have been encouraged, frustrated and fascinated by the way the world has changed in the last thirty years. He would also have loved being a father-in-law and grandfather, and of course that is where we miss him the most. He packed a lot of love and guidance into the 23 years that I knew him, and I wish there had been more of those years.
