In some indefinable way the black face thus flashed upon me shocked me profoundly. It was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge half-open mouth showed as big white teeth as I had ever seen in a human mouth. His eyes were blood-shot at the edges, with scarcely a rim of white round the hazel pupils. There was a curious glow of excitement in his face.
Dr Moreau is one of the earliest mad scientists in sf history, and possibly the first to experiment on living creatures via surgery (Frankenstein‘s subjects are dead, at least when he starts working on them). It’s one of Wells’ early huge successes, published in 1896, the year after The Time Machine and the year before The War of the Worlds. The plot is rather basic – protagonist is shipwrecked, and ends up on an island where Dr Moreau is engaging in horrendous experiments to instill humanity into animals; it all goes wrong, Moreau is killed by his creations, and only the narrator escapes to tell us (and, scarred by the experience, he ends up fearing his neighbours in a passage reminiscent of Gulliver after the Houyhnhnms). It’s short and taut; the central point is laid on pretty thick, but not for very long; the thrust of the story is a critique of the idea that science will inevitably improve life for us all (and if anything it is Moreau, the villain, who is identified with imperialism). You can get it here.
This was both my top unread book acquired last year and my top unread sf book. Next on those lists are Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and, stretching a point, Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by James Finn Garner.
Sun, 11:14: RT @ottocrat: I strongly agree with @acgrayling (& disagree with @IanDunt) on this: voting is a civic duty & should be obligatory, citizens…
Grooming-talk starts with greeting-talk. Weather-speak is needed in this context partly because greetings and introductions are such an awkward business for the English. The problem has become particularly acute since the decline of ‘How do you do?’ as the standard, all-purpose greeting. The ‘How do you do?’ greeting – where the correct response is not to answer the question, but to repeat it back, ‘How do you do?’, like an echo or a well-trained parrot13 – is still in use in upper-class and upper-middle circles, but the rest are left floundering, never knowing quite what to say. Instead of sneering at the old-fashioned stuffiness of the ‘How do you do?’ ritual, we would do better to mount a campaign for its revival: it would solve so many problems.
“Grooming” here means the human equivalent of the behaviour of great apes, who groom each others’ fur by way of polite greeting. Fox wittily dissects the behaviour of the English in 400 pages of anthropology, concluding that it all comes down to social dis-ease, with reflexes of humour, moderation, and hypocrisy, an outlook based on empiricism, Eeyorishness and class-consciousness, and values including fair play, courtesy and modesty. She enlarges on her concept of social dis-ease:
It is our lack of ease, discomfort and incompetence in the field (minefield) of social interaction; our embarrassment, insularity, awkwardness, perverse obliqueness, emotional constipation, fear of intimacy and general inability to engage in a normal and straightforward fashion with other human beings.
Since the author herself is English, the book falls firmly into the acceptable discourse of being self-deprecatingly funny. The most enjoyable chapters are perhaps those on pets and hobbies – I now begin to understand DIY. She is even self-deprecating about her own discipline: “social science can sometimes almost be as insightful as good stand-up comedy.”
Of course, I am not English myself, but I am not unfamiliar with them (having married one), and as a close observer for several decades, I think Fox has nailed a number of characteristic behaviours beautifully. I would love to read a similarly sympathetic and close observation of the Irish or the Belgians. For now, well worth getting.
Finally in December [1945] he managed to persuade the owner of a large dilapidated building on the Finchley Road in London to rent him two rooms. A friend of my mother describes it well, ‘After the war they rented a flat in Swiss Cottage on a stretch of the Finchley Road opposite the old Odeon and close to the famous pub. In those days there was a row of substantial detached houses, each with what had been stables, but then converted into garages with flats above. I remember a very rickety staircase inside the garage up to the flat, and the intriguing fact that the bath was in the kitchen, with a large wooden cover serving perfectly as a table during the day. I envied them living there so close to the bright lights, and the fact that they had such a relaxed ‘bohemian lifestyle’ which included going out for breakfast when they felt like it!’
Slowly working through the published biographies of Doctor Who crew and cast, and it's time to look at Patrick Troughton, possibly the most versatile actor to take on the role as a regular, and certainly the only one to appear in a Oscar-winning film (as the Player King in Olivier's 1948 Hamlet, which also features Peter Cushing as Osric; John Hurt is in A Man for All Seasons which won the Oscar for Best Film in 1966, and of course Peter Capaldi shared the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film in 1994). The author is one of Troughton's many acting descendants, his third child Michael, who actually appeared in the 2014 Christmas special Last Christmas as Dr Albert Smithe.
It must be very difficult to write about a father like Patrick Troughton, who was loving but physically distant. Troughton's own life was full of much human drama, which we must largely infer from Michael's childhood memories and his father's preserved correspondence. Soon after Michael was born in 1955, Patrick left his first wife, Margaret, for another partner with whom he had another three children; at the point that he decided to take on the Doctor Who role, he was in the middle of a brief and ultimately unsuccessful reconciliation with Margaret, played out to a certain extent in front of the children. At the same time there was a third partner in the mix. He married someone else entirely in the mid-1970s. He said to Michael, years after the final split with Margaret,
‘I needed change. Things have to change all the time for me I’m afraid, that’s the way I am made. I am sorry if I hurt you.’
Reminiscent of one of his first lines as the Doctor: "Life depends on change and renewal."
He seems to have been a man who broke many hearts, but continued to take his emotional commitments to all his lovers and children very seriously, but always suffered from the pressure of generating enough income to meet his financial obligations to his two families, which eventually ground him down; he had his first heart attack at 58, and died of another at a convention eight years later. (Incidentally the circumstances of his death are clarified here, and are much less exciting than we had been led to believe.)
There is quite a lot here about Troughton's approach to acting, including his early education ain London and New York. He is on record (sometimes contradictory) about his philosophy of theatre, particularly on how it defined his own sense of personhood:
My father was a complex man but one thing was very clear – he had to act. He once confessed to me, whilst working together on an episode of the seventies TV nursing drama Angels, that acting was part of his being, something he had to do rather than had chosen. He likened the process of inhabiting another character in performance to ‘a drug-like craving that seemed to keep my whole self in order. I can’t imagine my world without it. It sparks me with life.’
This craving for multiple identities perhaps played out in his complex private life, and even his approach to being an ex-Doctor Who, where he embraced the American convention circuit once he had discovered it, but was much less visible in the UK, where he wanted to avoid typecasting for the sake of future acting work. He would no doubt be pleased that IMDB ranks The Omen as his most notable performance. There's not much on politics here (Troughton fought in the second world war, where he became noted for wearing a tea-cosy; he was contrarian for the sake of it in argument). Interestingly, there is more on religion: Troughton was deeply hostile to organised Christianity, boycotted one son's wedding service and was dismayed when another decided to get ordained.
It's a more lively book than Jessica Carney's biography of her grandfather, William Hartnell, because Troughton had a more lively life, and Doctor Who came in the middle of his career rather than at the end (chapters 7, 8, 9 and 10 out of fifteen total). It scratches one's itch of curiosity about its subject, while inevitably leaving you wishing you knew more. Well worth getting.
(Next up, if I can find it, is Directed by Douglas Camfield by Michael Seely; if I can't find it, I'll turn to Robert Holmes: a Life in Words by Richard Molesworth.)
Fri, 10:45: RT @ivadixit: One of the best things I’ve read this week has been 11-year-old Violette’s letter to the @NewYorker about a Jill Lepore story…
Collecting the first four issues of Alan Moore's Providence series, itself apparently both prequel and sequel to his Neonomicon (which I haven't read) and very much tied in to the Lovecraft mythos (with which I am familiar but not expert). It's the story of Robert Black, a young New York journalist in 1919, Jewish and gay and hiding both, who travels to Rhode Island to investigate a mysterious cult. (But this is not our 1919, exactly.) Each of these four issues ties to a specific Lovecraft story – "Cool Air", "The Horror at Red Hook", "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and "The Dunwich Horror"; I knew the last two but not the first two.
As you expect with Moore, it's a layered text with many knowing references to 1919, 2015, Lovecraft and occultism in general, not to mention sexuality and race. I don't think I had come across Jacen Burrows before, but he successfully conveys 1919 both in our reality and when the moments of Lovecraftian horror come. I enjoyed it but did not really get into it enough to feel that I want to get into the rest of the series, when Moore's Jerusalem is sitting on my shelves looking at me.
I picked this up on a whim, but am amused to find that the publishers now insist that it will never be reprinted and second-hand copies are going for $100 dollars or more on Amazon. So that turns out to have been an unexpectedly sound investment, and I am open to reasonable offers for my own copy.
This was my top unread graphic novel in English. Next on that list is even more Lovecraftian, Ian Culbard's treatment of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
Dann had wanted to leave the Centre – leave the past – because of the weight of sorrow on him, which he believed he understood. It was natural. Of course he was bereft, but he would get over it. He had no intention of subsiding into unhappiness. No, when he got walking, really moving, he would be better. But he had not got into his stride, his rhythm: it was what he needed, the effortlessness of it, when legs and body were in the swing of the moment, a time different from what ruled ordinary sitting, lying, moving about – never tiring. A drug it was, he supposed, to walk like that, walking at its best, as he had done sometimes with Mara, when they were into their stride.
I hadn't realised while reading that this was a sequel to a book I haven't read, Mara and Dann, so was judging it more on its own merits. (People who have read Mara and Dann generally seem to think that it was better.)
The setting is a post-apocalyptic world where Europe is covered by melting ice sheets, the Mediterranean has dried up but slowly starting to fill again, and the remnants of humanity are trying to hold onto and maybe rebuild civilisation. Dann is thrust into a leadership role despite his bad health, and, surrounded by his companions of the title, is drawn into a quest to save a library of knowledge from the old days. The prose is terse, but the setting and the characters conveyed effectively, Dann's personal drama very closely linked to the question of what will happen to the cultural heritage now under threat from the changing climate. It's also fairly short. You can get it here.
This was the top unread book on my shelves acquired in 2011. Next on that list is The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering.
Tue, 12:56: RT @GuitarMoog: Only 19 months after the EURef 10 mths after Art50 4 mths after pleading for sufficient progress 2 mths after getting it 14…
Tue, 16:05: RT @irishwol: On the light of what’s going on with the @ireland account this week, it’s time to re-retweet this thoughtful piece. https://t…
Tue, 18:24: RT @EvaMaydell: As a Bulgarian I can only welcome the Commission’s #WesternBalkan Startegy. The EU has a role to play in our nearest neighb…
Wed, 08:36: This is just horrible. Robin Day was such a git. Well done now-Baroness Fookes for dealing with it. And thanks to B… https://t.co/DiD2UTF33S
She pulled a pained face at Piotr, standing to her right. He gave a tiny shrug, used to the heat, Benny imagined. She wasn't quite sure how he'd wangled being out here with her on her first 'walkabout', but it was (only vaguely) reassuring to have a familiar face there.
I rather dropped off my blogging of Who-related books last year, but I intend to fix that this year. As I work through them, this is the next in publication order of the Bernice Summerfield books by Big Finish, in this case a novel by Mark Michalowski. The setup is the rather usual framing narrative of Benny getting summoned to a planet on which there are funny things going on, ending up with everyone trapped in a base under siege, but I thought there were a couple of very good wrinkles to it, in particular the biological cycle of the alien tree/giant hamster symbiotes which are responsible for the trouble, and the internal politics of both aliens and humans which make a bad situation worse. Also mercifully short. Worth a look.
Next in this sequence is Parallel Lives, a collection of three novellas, the first by my old friend Rebecca Levene, and the other two by Stewart Sheargold and Dave Stone.
Mon, 15:50: RT @gjeraqina: Only Serbia and Montenegro will get a feasible timeline for #EUmembership by 2025. Other Western Balkans countries will get…
Mon, 18:53: RT @randyfmcdonald: Today, on the 5th of February, 2018, is the first day that the #BerlinWall will have been down longer than it was up. (…
Mon, 21:12: RT @timjudah1: I could not understand why so many Greeks say there cannot be a deal with FYROM if Macedonia is in the name when they have r…
Tue, 09:45: Lovely to hear Belfast accents from the two young women having breakfast at the next table!
Tue, 10:45: RT @IanDunt: It is astonishing that today – today – Cabinet is deciding on its *opening pitch* to Brussels for the future relationship.
Mon, 08:55: RT @joncstone: The Berlin Wall has now been down as long as it was up, 10316 days. Today’s front page of Berliner Zeigung https://t.co/jTOk…
The Berlin wall was erected on 13 August 1961. It was breached on 9 November 1989, after 28 years, 2 months and 27 days (10315 days, to be exact). Counting forward another 28 years, 2 months and 27 days (or just 10315 days, you get the same answer) takes us to tomorrow, 5 February 2018.
Below is the blog entry I posted on the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Wall, in 2009. Since then, I have continued to enjoy visiting Berlin; and I always pay my respects to the Wall and its memories, for me and for many others.
The day the Wall fell, I split up with my girlfriend. She had moved to a different city, and the long-distance thing wasn't working; I went to visit her that Thursday evening, and we had an intense conversation over drinks and pizza, vaguely aware that people were staring at the television screens but assuming it was some sports event. By the time we had worked out that we had both reached the same conclusion about the future of the relationship, I had missed the last train; we went back to her place, I slept on the couch and got up early to go home. And then I bought a newspaper and discovered that while one (short and mostly sweet) chapter of my life was ending, the world had changed forever.
I first went to Berlin in 1986, over the long weekend of German Unity Day which was then on June 17, hitch-hiking there with a friend who I was working with in Heilbronn way off in the southeast. In those days Berlin was a slightly hippyish enclave (the hostel we stayed in was very hippyish and slightly threatening) on the front line of the Cold War. The inner German border remains the most vigorously fortified frontier I have ever seen. We went east as well as west (by tram to Frieedrichstraße), and took pictures of the Brandenburg Gate from both sides which I guess I must still have somewhere; I went to an eastern bookshop and made the mistake of referring to "Ost-Berlin" (rather than "Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR"). At that point the Wall had been up for almost 25 years and looked like it would remain a lot longer.
I went back with Anne in 1992. It was utterly transformed, of course. I cried as we walked through the Brandenburg Gate, which had appeared so utterly blocked by historical circumstance and concrete fortification only a few years before. The west of the city had found a new security and confidence, a strong sense of liberation; the east was still shell-shocked by defeat. The transport system, now unified, charged considerably less to former easterners buying tickets. The frenzy of new build was just getting going but the momentum wasn't yet there. Since then I've been back perhaps half a dozen times. Earlier this year I took an afternoon to retrace the Wall, helpfully marked out by bricks in the road. It remains a fascinating city for me, and every time I go I find something new.
The BBC has a handy list of walls that remain, including two of which I have direct experience (Belfast and the Green Line in Nicosia) and another which I work on (the Moroccan berm closing off the illegally occupied part of the Western Sahara). Just as the Berlin Wall disturbed me in 1986, any restriction like this disturbs me now. Robert Frost wrote "Something there is that doesn't love a wall"; his New Hampshire boundary markers were threatened by natural forces, perhaps elves, built by old stone savages. The conflict-built walls of the world are also perpetually under threat from the erosive force of history. And a good thing too.
Sat, 16:05: RT @AlastairMcA30: For an assignment, I asked some of my terminal paediatric palliative care patients what they had enjoyed in life, and wh…
Sat, 18:05: RT @13sarahmurphy: Given Rees-Mogg’s truly dark performance on #r4today digging down on his lies and accusations, this article by Parris in…
Sat, 19:50: “She was twenty-five and looked it, and so there was no longer any need for her to try to be attractive.” (Gone With The Wind.) Wow.
Sun, 10:45: RT @kevinhorourke: With an important difference: HMG is choosing this status for the UK. No one forced them to leave EU or seek transition.…
Gone With The Wind won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production of 1939; for once, I have actually seen two of the other Best Picture nominees, Ninotchka and of course The Wizard of Oz. It won another seven competitive Oscars and two honorary ones, a sweep that was not exceeded for decades. I have actually seen two other 1939 films, which makes this by far my best year up to now – back in the early 1980s the BBC showed the Basil Rathbone The Hound of the Baskervilles and the less memorable The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
IMDB has this at the top of its 1939 list on one system, The Wizard of Oz winning on the other. Adjusted for inflation, Gone With the Wind is the top-grossing film of all time (narrowly ahead of the original Star Wars), and also apparently holds the record for cinema tickets sold in (at least) both the USA and the UK. (I can’t find figures for Ireland. Incidentally, the first ever cinema in Ireland was owned and operated by James Joyce, subsequently better known for other things.) Here’s a trailer.
I’m going to note here a couple of actors who are back again from other recent Oscar winners. I’ll get to Clark Gable later, but here’s Eddie Robinson as Scarlett’s aunt’s enslaved coachman, having been Rheba’s boyfriend Donald in last year’s You Can’t Take It With You. They have tried to age him up, not with total success.
And here’s Henry Davenport as Dr Meade, having been the night judge in You Can’t Take It With You and also the Chief of Staff of the French army in The Life of Émile Zola. I don’t know if there are other actors who managed to be in the Best Picture winner in three or more successive years; I’ll keep counting.
To get the most important bit out of the way: Gone With The Wind is racist and gives a positive account of slavery. This is made absolutely clear with the film’s opening statement.
The war is entirely portrayed as a struggle to preserve a whole romantic and chivalrous way of life, which is doomed because of its failure to invest in its own defence. Both Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes spot early on that the war will be lost; nobody ever states out loud that the reason for the war was slavery. All the Northerners are bad guys. All the black characters are happy in their relationship with their white masters. Most of them are disarmingly stupid (a particular shout to Butterfly McQueen, who must have been gritting her teeth as she delivered Prissy’s lines).
Apparently the NAACP were consulted on the script, and advised against the use of the word “darkie” instead of “nigger” and that the Ku Klux Klan should not be explicitly referenced (as they are in the book), so it could have been even worse. And also on the plus side, Hattie McDaniel was the first ever black actor to win an Oscar for her performance as Mammy, though she was of course excluded from the film’s launch in Atlanta and the role itself is not exactly liberating.
(Incidentally, Barbara O’Neil plays Scarlett’s mother despite being only three years older than Vivian Leigh.)
The second worst thing about the film is that it is simply too long. The book was of course hugely popular, and its many fans would have wanted servicing. Six of the twelve early Oscar-winners I have seen so far were based on books and another on a short story (two of the other five were adapted from stage plays, the remaining three were original material). Gone With The Wind deviates least from the printed original, and is the poorer for it. Its very length was part of the reason for its fame, of course, but it could easily have lost an hour and been better. The first half has a tremendous impetus as the Old South disintegrates, but once the war is over, the narrative thrust has gone, and we slip into a series of somewhat disconnected episodes from post-war life, ending with Rhett’s dramatic rejection (which one can anticipate from his very first scene). I think the last scene misses the target; surely Rhett has made the right decision, to leave Scarlett, and her fantasy that she can get him back (after their atrocious behaviour to each other during the marriage) is indulged a little too much.
The incidental music is great, but again just a little too much – I watched the full version with overture, intermission and end music, and actually the overture is a bit of a disappointment as overtures go.
Like Cimarron, we have the interesting case of a text that is racist but also somewhat feminist. A lot of this is tied up in the character arc of Scarlett and her three marriages. She starts the film as a very silly teenager, with an appalling crush on poor Ashley, who marries someone else on a whim (and is quickly widowed). But at the halfway mark, she transforms herself into a powerful economic operator in her own right, and it is here that she is at her most sympathetic – she depends on her second husband’s money to start her business, but it’s absolutely clear that she is the one making the decisions. Then the arc curves down again when she finally gets together with Rhett and it doesn’t work out; and at the end she is fantasising about his return to a marriage that she herself was never fully committed to. Basically, she does better, and the audience is encouraged to identify with her more, when she is not being hassled by the men who have led her society to war and disaster. Sure, a lot of the other women characters are stereotyped, but most of the men are gallant cardboard cutouts as well. And anyway Scarlett’s story is the story; one of IMDB’s glorious factoids is that Leigh’s 2 hours, 23 minutes and 32 seconds on screen is the longest ever performance to win an Oscar. (She was the second youngest winner of Best Actress at the time, and is still the tenth youngest out of 90.)
And that brings us to the one of the film’s core strengths: the very watchable smouldering chemistry between Vivien Leigh as Scarlett and Clark Gable as Rhett. (Some credit for this also belongs to the script, which was attributed to Sidney Howard who won an Oscar for it; sadly he was killed in a farming accident before shooting even started.) We’ve had Gable twice before, in It Happened One Night and Mutiny on the Bounty, and he was good in both of those, but he is excellent here, as a rogue who rises to the occasion when challenged. Here he has very strong support from Leslie Howard as Ashley and Olivia de Havilland as Melanie.
We should shout out to Olivia de Havilland, who at the age of 101 is the only surviving lead from any Oscar-winning film of the 1930s.
I have a couple of quibbles – Leslie Howard, at 46, is really too old to be Ashley, supposedly one of the neighbourhood kids, not much older than Scarlett (who is explicitly sixteen at the start of the film); he is also way too English, and indeed the white Southern characters generally fail to have very Southern accents. This is the one scene where all four leads appear together, when the women are tending Ashley after Rhett has brought him back from the definitely-not-Ku-Klux-Klan raid.
Finally, the film looks absolutely gorgeous. Of course, it’s obviously California rather than Georgia, from the vegetation and the landscape; and Margaret Mitchell objected that Tara was far too elegant; in the book is was “built according to no architectural plan whatever, with extra rooms added where and when it seemed convenient”. These are minor quibbles. The landscapes and architecture are beautifully realised but never get in the way of the human story; we go intimate and close, we pull out to look at the bigger picture, and in particular, as conflict loomed on the other side of both oceans, we see the horrors of war. We’ve had two outright war movies so far (Wings and All Quiet on the Western Front) and one where war was a distant but fatal prospect (Cavalcade); here we don’t have a single battle scene, but a stark contrast between the gung-ho young warriors who set off to battle and the (rather few) casualties who return. Rhett’s pragmatic rather than patriotic approach turns out to be the right way to go, and Scarlett succeeds when she adopts the same strategy.
I had not seen this before, and of course I doubt that it will ever be on general cinema release again, but it is just about worth the four hours of my life it took to watch (plus time to write this review).
Next on the list is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, where I have actually read the book, if a long time ago.
(Still reading the book – will report on it in due course.)
An attempt to keep the continuity of the updated Famous Five books from last year, this is not so much a one-joke book as a no-joke book, the Famous Five being kept in a jail which resembles an immigration holding centre by the combination of the Secret Seven and evil cousin Rupert. Not really recommended but you can get it here.
Thu, 13:13: RT @BrigidLaffan: The best that #UK can hope for is to ‘be wounded not broken’- sleep walking comes to mind. A ruling class incapable of r…
I admit it; I’m a complete Rebus addict. I had missed that there was a new Rebus novel out, but someone kind got it for me for Christmas. (I prioritised Christmas presents in my reading this month, and actually finished this two weeks ago – my blogging is some way behind my actual reading.)
It’s another good one. There is a combination of a dubious next generation criminal leader, with aspirations to become the next great Cafferty, with a cold case from the 1970s which suddenly starts warming up again. There is the micro-geography of Shandwick Place. There is tension between Rebus himself, pathologist Deborah Quant (his current girlfriend), his former sidekick and now successor Siobhan Clarke, and their competitor /colleague Malcolm Fox. My complaint is that the eastern European bad guy, mixed up in Edinburgh business, doesn’t get a lot of page time. But it is all very satisfying; good guys win, bad guys lose. You can get it here.
~7,300 pages
7/26 by women (Hirshfield, Fox, Haddam, Setterfield, Woolf, Lessing, Piercy)
1/26 by PoC (Khadra)
2/26 reread (The Fall of Hyperion, Who Killed Kennedy)
Reading now Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell A Tangle Of Fates, by Leslie Ann Moore
Coming soon (perhaps): He, She and It, by Marge Piercy The Universe Between, by Alan E Nourse Toast, by Charles Stross Planesrunner by Ian McDonald Hoger dan de bergen en dieper dan de zee: kroniek van een migrant, by Laïla Koubaa
"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones", by Samuel R. Delany Seventeen Equations that Changed the World, by Ian Stewart Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift So, Anyway…, by John Cleese Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, by James Finn Garner Julian, by Gore Vidal Free Radical, by Vince Cable Contes Fantastiques Complets, by Guy de Maupassant The God Instinct by Jesse Bering The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov Wit, Wisdom and Timey Wimey Stuff – The Quotable Doctor Who by Cavan Scott Doctor Who Storybook 2009 by Keith Temple Parallel Lives, by Rebecca Levene, Stewart Sheargold and Dave Stone Torchwood: Rift War by Ian Edgington
Tue, 12:56: RT @campaignforleo: In recent weeks many people, mainly men, have spoken about the personal journeys they have been on. We should remember…
Wed, 05:11: RT @danobrien20: BREAKING: European economy grew at its fastest rate in a decade last year and strong momentum continues across the contine…
Wed, 10:35: RT @BCNI2018: We are re-posting this link to our Revised Proposals Report which gives a full explanation of the rationale behind the Revise…
Getting back to the Big Finish plays I have bought but not written up, here are four First Doctor stories featuring the surviving original companion actors, released back in 2014. All but one of these is directed by Ken Bentley.
Domain of the Voord, by Andrew Smith
I think the only previous attempt to bring back the Voord (from The Keys of Marinus) was a story in the 1966 Doctor Who Annual. (Apparently they have returned again since 2014, in both comics and audio; and there are references to them being pitted against Irish Wildthyme in the Death Zone on Gallifrey.) Here Andrew Smith has provided them with a rather good and interesting background and origin story, which goes some way to explaining their need to invade. There’s a great soundscape depicting the unlucky planet that is the subject of their intentions, and William Russell and Carole Ann Ford give Ian and Susan the full welly (and also sub for Hartnell and Hill). However I found the plot in the end a bit creaky – in particular, the absence and then the return of the Doctor and Barbara was a bit handwavy. Fan opinion seems sharply divided on this one: I thought it was decent but not excellent.
The Doctor's Tale, by Marc Platt
Now it’s William Russell and Maureen O’Brien, in a pure historical story of the Crusaders type, visiting the little-known interregnum between the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV in 1400. Alice Haig is very endearing as Richard’s very young queen, Isabella, and Gareth Armstrong gets to be Chaucer. But I felt the script came down too heavy on the religion and politics of the day, basically endorsing the Lollards as the good guys and the Church (embodied by John Banks as Bishop Arundel) as the baddies. In my home town, kids still get beaten up for being perceived to be on the wrong side of that argument.
The Bounty of Ceres, by Ian Potter (directed by Lisa Bowerman)
Apparently the first time Peter Purves and Maureen O’Sullivan have worked together since they were on TV! I rather liked this base-under-siege story, with what appears to be a clumsy removal of the Doctor from the story actually turning out to work rather well in plot terms. There’s some fun continuity in that the story is set in our future but in the past for both Steven and Vicki. Julia Hills puts in a good commander, Richard Hope is an intriguingly demented Scottish scientist, and the soundscape again is well done.
An Ordinary Life, by Matt Fitton
This was my favourite of the four. Peter Purves and Jean Marsh reprise Steven and Sara, maroon in London in the 1950s (distant past for both) where they are taken in by a family of recently arrived Jamaican immigrants (played by Ram John Holder, Sara Powell and Damian Lynch). But they are not the only recent arrivals to worry about, and the bleak and constrained docklands become the place of conflict among humans and between humans and something else. Holder’s total confidence is particularly engaging.
So, in general thumbs up, with reservations about the politics of the second of these.
Mon, 20:48: RT @PabloPerezA: This year marks the 50th anniversary of the EU Customs Union. This was the video created in 1968 to announce it. #Customs…
Tue, 11:19: RT @BuzzFeedUKPol: Exclusive: The government’s own Brexit analysis says the UK will be worse off in every scenario outside the EU. A new i…
Now she looked down at the piles of pink message slips spread out across her desk and sighed. Back then, it had never occurred to her to do the obvious and apply for admission. Half a dozen students in her own high-school graduating class had been taken on as commuters, all tuition paid by the Crockett Memorial Valley Scholarship Fund. Maybe it was the fact that those students had all been from the other side of town, where houses were neat and conscientiously painted and fathers were present and meticulously sober, that had made her believe, unconsciously, that she was not qualified to be among them. Maybe it was just that, in that time and in that place, “secretary” was the job most women were taught to aspire to. Either that, or “teacher.” Miss Maryanne Veer had never suffered from the delusion that she had the talent to be a teacher.
I’ve tried twoother books in this series of murder mysteries featuring retired Armenian-American FBI agent Gregor Demarkian, and neither quite gelled for me, but I must say this worked very well – a campus mystery, where the traditionally low stakes of academic politics have escalated to murder. The mystery is carefully laid out and worked through. I did raise an eyebrow at the sexual politics of the student lifestyle, which seemed to me closer to the 1950s than the 1990s when the book is set, but perhaps I don’t know enough about Pennsylvania. Anyway, the best Haddam I’ve read so far; try it if you like.
This was the non genre fiction book which had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on that list is Baptism in Blood, by the same author, but I’m going to hold off on reviewing it until I have finished all the books I acquired in 2010.
Sat, 13:09: RT @JenniferMerode: EU not against UK negotiating trade agreements during transition, as long as not signed. General tone in Brussels is ‘…
Sat, 16:05: They were murdered for the crime of trying to keep children healthy https://t.co/QZjKKaBErB The deadly opposition to polio immunisation.
Sat, 19:30: RT @brheading: If you read anything today, please read Nick’s historical, factual and personal perspective on the issue of the repeal refer…
