Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) Hollow Places, by Christopher Hadley The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien
Last books finished The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang Authors of their Lives, by David Gerber Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis Sunstone, vol 3, by Stepan Sejić
Next books Eden Rebellion, by Abi Falaise The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow
According to historian Branden Little, approximately 120 American relief committees were operating in 1914, including organizations such as “Father De Ville’s Milk Fund for Belgian Babies; the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee… King Albert’s Civilian Hospital Fund… the Belgian Relief Fund; the Belgian Relief Committee; and the Commission for Relief in Belgium.”
A few months ago I was showing off the delights of Leuven a friend who has recently moved to Brussels, and challenged her to guess which American president has a square named after him in the city. If you don’t already know, I confidently predicted, you won’t get it in your first ten guesses. I was right. The story of how future president Herbert Hoover co-ordinated the delivery of food to occupied Belgium during the First World War is not well known outside this country, and indeed is a fading memory even here.
This book is a brief but detailed history of the effort an amazing triumph of non-governmental diplomacy and organisation, with food bought in the UK and distributed to the Belgians (and northern French) living under occupation. Hoover had to fight turf wars with other American do-gooders, and establish clear demarcation with the Belgian relief committee about how the distribution was to managed; but those issues pale into insignificance in comparison with the need to get the British and Germans to allow the effort to proceed in the first place despite being locked in vicious war.
The Germans come out as the bad guys, no matter how you look at it. When the Commission for Relief in Belgium complained to the military governor that German soldiers were mistreating their staff, he refused to believe them and sent one of his own men to observe the situation on the ground. The undercover German soldier was beaten up, arrested and jailed by his own comrades who refused to believe his story.
A small team of young Americans, mostly young men, supervised the relief operation on the ground. The recruitment process was basically any Rhodes scholar, or other upper-class white male American student in western Europe, who spoke decent French (as most well-educated Westerners did in those days). That obviously meant that the ‘delegates’, as they were known, were mostly from the northeastern white elite, especially since they were paid a very meagre stipend on top of expenses so that those from a less wealthy background could not afford to do it.
But it reminded me of the OSCE and other international staff who I knew in Bosnia when I was working there immediately after the war of the 1990s, people who were recruited as much for availability as for expertise, whose main role was really to demonstrate the continuing commitment of the international community to the country. It’s not such an awful thing. Going back to the First World War, my grandmother’s elder brother, Lyman C. Hibbard, volunteered not in Belgium but with the ambulances of the American Field Service in France, and was awarded the Croix du Guerre for it.
The author himself is the grandson of one of the American delegates and the Belgian industrialist‘s daughter who he fell in love with, but he doesn’t let that colour the story, which relies on the copious documentation in English. He has laudably put a lot of his source material online for wider use. However, I see only two books in French and two in Dutch out of eighty in the bibliography.
One other point that is not mentioned: the captains of Belgian industry who were able to marshal local resources as part of the effort had made most of their money from exploiting the Congo.
Anyway, it’s a short and digestible book about a quietly heroic moment of history, which is not well enough known. You can get it here.
This is Erivansky Square in the city which was then known as Tiflis, photographed in the 1870s.
And this is Freedom Square in Tbilisi, Georgia, photographed by me this afternoon.
I’m pleased that I was able to stand in almost the same place as the photographer from 150 years ago – note the City Assembly building on the left, and the mountain crags visible down Giorgi Lionidze Street – but the photographer of the 1870s had the advantage of height, maybe on a platform or from the window of a now-vanished building.
On 26 June 1907, this square was the scene of a massive act of Bolshevik terrorism, organized by Stalin and Lenin and executed by Stalin’s Armenian mate known as Kamo. 241,000 roubles were stolen, and dozens of people killed and injured in a bomb and gun attack on the stagecoach transporting money from the main post office to the bank headquarters. The banknotes’ serial numbers were all recorded, so it turned out to be impossible to cash them in Russian banks, and when the Bolsheviks tried cashing them in other European cities in January 1908, they were all detected and most of them were arrested.
Maxim Litvinov, a future Soviet foreign minister, was one of those arrested in January 1908, and expelled from France where he had been living. The French however ruled that the crime was political and refused Russia’s extradition request. Litvinov went instead to stay with his sister, Rifka Levinson, who lived at 15 Clifton Park Avenue in North Belfast. He hung around Belfast for two morose years, smoking cigars, climbing Cave Hill and occasionally teaching Russian at the Berlitz language school. It is rumored that he also worked as a traveling salesman for his brother-in-law’s clothes business, covering the whole of Ireland,
He then moved to England ,where he stayed until 1918, ending his time as the diplomatic representative of the revolutionary government and addressing that year’s Labour Party Conference; he also married Ivy Low in 1916. Back in Moscow, he rose through the ranks, serving as foreign minister of the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1939 and then ambassador to the USA from 1941 to 1943. I doubt that he ever went back to Belfast.
Freedom Square is exciting again these days – it is the centre of the current wave of anti-government demonstrations. But more on that in a future post.
“No woman?” he asked in consternation. He was beginning now to be accustomed to these conversations with her in which her part was little more than a movement of head or hand, or at most an occasional word dropped unwillingly from her wide mouth. He had even come to feel no lack in such conversing. “But it will be odd with only two men in the house!” he continued. “My mother had a woman from the village. I know nothing of these affairs. Is there none in the great house, no old slave with whom you were friends, who could come?”
The best-selling novel of the early 1930s, telling the story of Wang Lung, a Chinese farmer who goes from poverty to wealth, his two wives, his evil uncle, and his various children, one of whom is disabled and requires full-time care (as did one of the author’s own children). I am sure that there are many errors of detail, but its heart is very much in the right place, confronting its American and European readers with a vast and ancient culture where the foreigners are probably the bad guys, and where power is shifting rapidly away from the old rulers. I found it gripping and efficiently written. You can get it here.
It would be interesting to know how it is regarded in China, if at all. Its Chinese Wikipedia entry has just a dry plot summary. (Japanese Wikipedia discusses the possibility that it was written as anti-Japanese propaganda.)
The book itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 on the back of this and its two sequels. It bubbled to the top of three of my lists simultaneously – top book acquired so far this year, top unread book by a woman and top non-sf fiction. Next on those piles are The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne (though I may not get all the way through it, it sounds rather dull); The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin; and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong.
Not a big surprise for the top spot here. There is a myth that Albert Camus was goalkeeper for the Algerian national football team. This is not true; there was no Algerian national football team until the war of independence, and while it’s true that the teenage Camus was goalkeeper in the 1930s for the junior team of Algeria’s top club, Racing Universitaire d’Alger, he had to give it up when he contracted tuberculosis at 18. Football clearly had a lasting effect on him though.
Quite a lot of books had to be excluded here because, despite their authors’ Algerian origins, the books themselves are largely or entirely set elsewhere, if anywhere at all. The Confessions of St Augustine are more in modern Tunisia (and Italy). Camus’ The Fall is set in France and the Netherlands, and his The Myth of Sisyphus is a non-fiction piece with no specific geographical setting. So is Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The Roman-era author Apuleius was born in Madaurus in the province of Numidia, but his best known work, The Golden Ass, is set in what is now modern Greece.
And Yasmina Khadra’s two top books, Swallows of Kabul and The Attack, are set in Afghanistan and Israel respectively. Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night, which is set in Algeria, just missed the cut and is ninth on the ranking.
I’m allowing The Eight by Katherine Neville, although it sounds like a very silly book. Apparently the more modern of the two timelines is firmly moored in Algeria. I am not tempted to find out for myself. And five of the six short stories in Camus’ Exile and the Kingdom are definitely set in Algeria, so that’s good enough for me. And the first two of the three stories in the initial Rabbi’s Cat album are in Algiers.
The numbers here did show a big cultural difference for one writer in particular: Ahlam Mosteghanemi, whose two top books Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses have been ranked by a massive 25,290 and 19,812 Goodreads users respectively, in fifth and sixth place by GR stats, but they are owned by only 92 and 41 LibraryThing users, so they fell some way below my cutoff when I multiplied the two together. She sounds like a really interesting writer.
I have been chasing an odd little pair of footnotes in the family genealogy. My great-great-grandfather had seven sons, five of whom died during the Napoleonic wars (including Thomas Whyte). The oldest, Charles John Whyte, died in November 1803 leaving a pregnant wife; their son, also Charles John Whyte, was born in February 1804. In the usual course of things, the family estates would have gone to the younger Charles John after his grandfather; but in December 1804 his mother remarried a much older Protestant Englishman with indecent haste, and the Whytes disinherited the baby Charles John Junior, who was being brought up as a Prod.
Despite this unpromising start, not to mention the well-publicised travails of his older sister Letitia, Charles John Whyte Junior did well. He enlisted in the 95th Regiment of Foot and rose to the rank of captain; he married a young widow in 1832 and settled in Spanish Point in County Clare (later the home town of President Patrick Hillery); and they had seven sons and three daughters, all of whom survived childhood (with perhaps one exception, as we shall see) and about half of whom have living descendants, some of whom I have met.
The oldest three of the seven sons went into the army, and the next two into the navy. The younger of these two was Joseph Whyte, born in Limerick on 12 October 1840. On 10 January 1856, three months after his fifteenth birthday, he enrolled in the Royal Navy with the rank of Master’s Assistant, and was assigned to H.M.S. Sappho, which left Portsmouth in March 1856 with orders to fight the slave trade off the West African coast.
The Sappho, under command of Fairfax Moresby (whose father of the same name is more famous), intercepted and seized three American ships in 1857, and liberated hundreds of slaves. However the owners and crew of the first to be seized, the Panchita, successfully argued that they really weren’t involved in the slave trade and just happened to be hanging around the African coast at the time; Congress passed a resolution condemning the British actions against it and Moresby was reprimanded by the Admiralty and reassigned, with H.M.S. Sappho to Australia.
They never got there, or at least not to landfall. Sappho left the Cape of Good Hope on 8 January 1858 and was seen by another ship at the western end of the Bass Strait, not far from Melbourne, on 18 February. This would have been only a couple of days sail from the ultimate destination, Sydney. But as the months went on, there was no trace of the Sappho, and eventually it was concluded that they were lost in a storm soon after they were last seen; and the 147-odd crew were all declared dead, including 17-year-old Joseph Whyte.
The fate of the Sappho is still a topic of interest to Australian historians. Its wreckage has never been found, but the Bass Strait is fairly shallow, so if that is where it did meet its fate, it should be a good target for scientific investigation. See more about it here.
Joseph Whyte was the sixth of his parents’ ten children. The youngest, Frederick Whyte, was born on 8 July 1852, when his older brother was not quite 12, and was 5 when the Sappho disappeared. We don’t have a lot of detail about Frederick’s life. He qualified as a Master Mate in June 1873, the month before his 21st birthday, and he signed on as Able Seaman with the SS Baroda in May 1874. The Baroda was one of the ships of the Liverpool-based Brocklebank Line; it was built in 1864 by the then recently founded Harland and Wolff in Belfast.
The only other record I have of Frederick is from twenty years later, when he was serving as Third Mate on the SS Hydarnes, also a Liverpool ship with the Houston Line, which specialised in an express weekly steamship service from Liverpool to Buenos Aires. All of the Houston Line’s ships had names beginning with H; in 1897 the other were the Hellenes, the Hesperides, the Heliades, the Heraclides, the Hellopes and the Hippomenes. The name Hydarnes is unusual here because it’s actually Persian; all the rest are obviously Greek.
The SS Hydarnes
On 27 February 1897, the Hydarnes set off on its usual run to Buenos Aires, with a crew of 43; and, like the Sappho thirty-nine years earlier, it never arrived. The usual sailing time would be around a month, so it was probably not until April that people would have started to worry. But there is nothing that can be done; they were gone, without a trace. Assuming that the ship sank in mid-ocean, the wreckage is thousands of metres below the surface and will probably never be located.
It’s a bit surprising that Frederick Whyte left no further official bureaucratic trace than this in the 44 years of his life. One of the other brothers (as it happens, the other naval recruit) had died in the meantime, but the other four all married and had children, as did all three sisters. (The pioneering gynaecologist Gladys Sandes was the granddaughter of the oldest sister). Perhaps a physical investigation of the archives in Liverpool will tell me what Frederick was doing between the Baroda and the Hydarnes. Perhaps he had good reason, now lost in history, to cut off links with the rest of the family.
I don’t know how often shipwreck was a cause of death for Irishmen in the second half of the nineteenth century; but I also don’t know of any other cases in my extended genealogy, and it’s an odd coincidence that the only two should be brothers in the same generation, my second cousins twice removed. When the Hydarnes sank, Kitty Hawk was still six years in the future, but for all its inconveniences, I suspect that air travel is much safer all round.
First off, I have pretty much dropped off WeChat over the course of the year. My mornings are bleary-eyed enough without also thinking about posting last night’s blog post to a new audience, and I wasn’t really getting much traction. My 122 WeChat friends, I love you all (well, apart from you obviously) but I’m a very occasional visitor these days.
Bluesky (2.6k followers, 1.6k following) is the clear winner for me of the current microblogging platforms. There has been a massive shift towards it from both sf fans and Irish/EU political commentators, which are two of my core areas of interest, and I seem to have featured in a few ‘starter packs’ so my follower count has rocketed over the last few weeks. I’m definitely getting more engagement there than on any of the others right now. It’s also rather easy to block or mute people you really don’t want to engage with, whereas Twitter/X has made that more difficult. My one big complaint is that there isn’t yet a good way to auto-post from WordPress to Bluesky, whereas all the others make it easy. There is a simple auto-poster, but it posts only your featured image and the title of the post and summary as a caption to that image; it’s not very flexible though it does work.
X/Twitter (8,059 followers, 5,044 following) is still a place where I need to be keeping an eye on things, because the American commentariat has not yet made the jump to elsewhere. I’m doing a series of meetings next week with half a dozen US foreign policy specialists, and some Europeans who are in that area too; all of them still have X/Twitter accounts, most of them fairly active. I think the day will come when Elon loses that community also; for now I’m monitoring but not really engaging, and in return the engagement rate on my posts has dropped off a cliff – usually 200 views if I am lucky, which is 0.25% of the accounts who theoretically follow mine.
Mastodon (780 followers, 673 following) is a bit too much like hard work, the Linux of the microblogging world. As I have commented before, it’s almost impossible to find new and interesting content; you have to hope that you sample the content firehose at the right moment and see the good stuff as it passes by. (And when I have brought this up before, Mastodon advocates tell me proudly that it’s deliberately designed that way.) I did get a massive take-up there of the IKEA product name meme last weekend, but I think I had a couple of strategic boosters working to my advantage.
Threads (526 followers, 909 following) is also low on my list for continued engagement. The thing I really hate is that the default display is the algorithmically chosen feed; while that’s not as bad as it once was (there was a time when I was being shown exclusively content about illness, bereavement and divorce) I still want to see the stuff chosen by me rather than by the computer. There are a few people who I follow there who are not on other platforms, but otherwise I’m at the X/Twitter stage of monitoring without much enthusiasm.
Instagram (1324 followers, 2908 following) remains a fun place to post fun pictures. I like the fact that it crossposts to Facebook and Threads. I don’t expect much more from it. I have a mini-project of posting interesting art on Thursdays, which I usually then share on other platforms as well.
Facebook (4898 friends, another couple of hundred followers) remains a place where I catch up with my extended community, sometimes at greater length. The algorithm is getting worse though, and more variable. Too often I find myself logging on and scrolling through advertisements and community clickbait in order to reach actual content from actual friends. (And when I say ‘too often’, I mean ‘once or twice a week’, which is once or twice too many.) And sorry, no, I am not going to watch yet another video.
Finally, LinkedIn (7626 connections, also many more followers) is becoming more and more of a professional necessity, which is astonishing given that it is the oldest of the lot. (LinkedIn dates from 2003 – compare Facebook 2004, Twitter 2006, Instagram 2010, WeChat 2011, Mastodon 2016, Bluesky 2019, Threads 2023.) It is the one platform which has managed to shift user behaviour to a different sort of content production. Granted, a lot of it is “what a fantastic job I have working for such a fantastic company”, but I’d rather have relentless (if insincere) positivity than relentless (and impassioned negativity. And I find it useful for other purposes.
So, as I said last year, LinkedIn is the surprise winner so far of the decline of Twitter, as far as I am concerned; though Bluesky is chasing hard, and as soon as the American commentariat realise that they can switch platforms, the final collapse will happen.
As for the future of this blog: I am looking with interest at the various paid models. My most important audience here is myself, but I do miss the glory days of Livejournal when I could have dozens of comments on an interesting post. Maybe those days are gone, whatever the platform; but I miss them.
‘I couldn’t possibly,’ said Peri politely. ‘I’m still full after our lunch.’
Second last of the Sixth Doctor books that I read in 2015 and failed to blog at the time. To be honest, I didn’t get much out of this; the Doctor and Peri land on a planet where Autons are re-enacting the dramas of 1980s soaps, a cultural phenomenon that I’m not especially invested in. It turns out that the Nestene Consciousness is the offspring of Shub-Niggurath from the Lovecraft mythos. There are some fun nods to other parts of the Doctor Who canon. One for completists. You can get it here (at a price).
Next up: Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Beyond Utopia: The Dystopian Capitalist Society in Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863)”, by Murielle El Hajj):
At first sight, the reader thinks that Paris in the Twentieth Century depicts a utopian aspect of the Parisian society in the twentieth century. Verne opens the novel with a portion of the Parisian populace heading to the metro stations from where local trains will take them to Champ-de-Mars. It was August 13, 1960: The Prize Day at the Academic Credit Union. The latter and the age’s industrial aims were “in perfect harmony” (Verne 1996, 21). However, this ideal state of society, where no distress prevails and where no one is unhappy or hopeless seems to be just an illusion. The reader deduces the declination of society, and even its dehumanization, underlining a dystopian world controlled by tyrannical governments and facing environmental disasters.
A collection of ten short essays on futuristic science fiction, a topic which I also enjoy reading and writing about, all rather academic and unfortunately imperfectly edited; the English is clunky in places, and I was startled to read that “Victoria Butler” wrote Parable of the Sower.
But the essays, all written in the shadow of COVID for this 2022 collection, are all decent enough looks at specific works, some of which I know and some of which I don’t:
French writer Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s The Year 2440 (1771)
Argentinian writer Leopoldo Antonio Lugones Argüello’s short stories collected in Las fuerzas extrañas (1906)
Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century, unpublished until 1994
Martin Robinson Delany’s African-American freedom novel Blake; or the Huts of America (1859-1862)
Two Russian works of the early Communist era about human-animal hybrids: Alexander Belyaev’s novel The Amphibian Man (1928) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella Heart of a Dog (1925)
The great French sf writer René Barjavel, especially his 1943 novel Ravage / Ashes, Ashes
For the four essays where I already knew the source material, the authors gave me new insights (the Orwell chapter perhaps the weakest), and all of the other chapters succeeded in making me want to read the works they were about, with Blake and the long-lost Verne sounding the most attractive. I was sorry though that in their analysis of successors and imitators of Edward Bellamy, Majed Al-Lehaibi and Bernard Montonori don’t mention Oesterreich im Jahre 2020!
(Fewer than a dozen nuclear weapons, small ones, had been used in twelve years of war. A large one had destroyed Atlanta, and although the Ngumi denied responsibility, the Alliance responded by giving twenty-four hours notice, and then leveling Mandellaville and Sao Paulo. Ngumi contended that the Alliance had cynically sacrificed one nonstrategic city so it could have an excuse to destroy two important ones. Julian suspected they might be right.)
Next in my sequence of joint Hugo and Nebula winners. When I first read it in 2002, I wrote:
Julian Class and his lover Amelia Harding are physicists at a Texas university in 2049. Julian is also a part-time conscripted soldier, fighting ten days a month in the Central American front of a war between the developed world and the developing world, but doing his fighting by remote control as the brains of a military robot. He and his platoon are linked by a neurological modification known as “jacking” which enables them to share each others’ sensations, experiences and memories. He is also the part-time narrator of the book, which drops into third person now and then, giving the impression that his memories have been assembled by a later editor to make a coherent whole. Haldeman used a slightly similar presentation in his earlier The Long Habit of Living and I first came across this technique used to devastating effect in the books based on the TV series Yes, Minister! and Yes, Prime Minister! In this case, of course, it helps the author get around the problem of a first-person narrator who has suicidal impulses; by dropping into the third person now and again we readers are kept guessing as to whether or not the narrator makes it to the end of the book (cf. Podkayne of Mars, Flowers for Algernon.)
When Haldeman writes in the foreword to Forever Peace that it examines some of the problems of his earlier novel, The Forever War, “from an aspect that didn’t exist twenty years ago”, one of the problems in question must surely be the evolution of humanity towards the day “when violence towards another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh”, to use the words of Martin Luther King quoted in the first pages of the book. The aspect that (I guess) didn’t exist in 1974 is the concept of nanotechnology and by extension the whole set of ideas about the human/computer interface associated with the cyberpunk movement, which came to the fore in sf only in the 1990s. It transpires that those who have been “jacked” with other people for more than two weeks become “humanised”, incapable of deadly violence against other human beings. Julian and Amelia (who for various reasons are both excluded from being affected in this way themselves) decide that this is a Good Thing and conspire with their friends to get the entire command structure of the US military modified in this way.
There is a second conspiracy, one which they are working against. It turns out that the vastly ambitious particle physics experiment Amelia has been working on has the potential to end the universe (or at least the solar system) by replicating the conditions of the Big Bang. A millennialist conspiracy within the higher reaches of the US government decides that the end of the world would be a Good Thing and resolves to thwart Amelia’s efforts to prevent the experiment from being carried out. Various agents are sent to stop them, including a memorably sexy female assassin. But the good guys triumph just in time. Some find the idea of such conspiracies at high level in the US government unconvincing. Well, first of all, it’s a novel, and novels contain things which are not true but make a good story. Secondly, I’ve been sufficiently involved in shedding light on various Balkan conspiracies involving the highest levels of government that little can surprise me any more.
The future war in Central America is between a developed world fighting largely by remote control, and an indigenous population absorbing most of the casualties; from the 1997 perspective, this must have seemed a reasonable extrapolation from the 1990-91 Gulf War, and indeed Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001 were largely fought on that basis. Haldeman even has a massive, one-off attack on a major American city, though it’s nuking Atlanta rather than jumbo jets in New York. The descriptions of the conflict are graphic, on a par with Lucius Shepard’s Life In Wartime, and the narrative is particularly gripping as the assassin closes in on our heroes towards the end. As a novel, it works. The portrayal of Julian’s suicidal impulses and emotional confusion is convincing, and we the readers can see what is really going on for Amelia through his perceptions. The fact that neither main characters is able to share in the jacked consciousness of the newly enhanced humanity is rather poignant. The final couple of pages, describing the victory of the good guys, are perhaps a little too rapid, and when we first encounter those who have already been “humanised” in their North Dakota hideout, I found the scene rather reminiscent of the decaying scientists in the 1983 Doctor Who story Mawdryn Undead, which slightly spoiled it for me. But in general, I felt the tone was more mature and the ending more plausible, if the style a little less raw, than Haldeman’s earlier Hugo and Nebula winner, The Forever War.
One of the least successful aspects of Haldeman’s earlier book is its portrayal of a pacifist end-state for the human race. The Big Idea of Forever Peace is that this pacifist end-state can be achieved by technological intervention; through the sharing of our common humanity via “jacking”. Now, the idea that the Next Big Step in human evolution will involve a fundamental shift in consciousness is quite an old one, with honorable antecedents in Olaf Stapledon and George Bernard Shaw up to Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Greg Bear’s Blood Music. The angle is still an unusual one. I was reminded a bit of Frank Herbert’s minor novel, The Santaroga Barrier, where the hero begins by rejecting the prospect of a new form of human consciousness but end up eagerly participating. Forever Peace‘s biggest flaw, as a novel examining issues of humanity and morality, is that it lacks an examination of the ethics of forcing major (and risky) brain surgery on people to bestow on them the benefits of the evolutionary leap forward.
Coming back to it twenty-two years later, I feel that it has not aged especially well. The waging of war remotely, and the attached civilian horrors, perhaps resonate with today’s atrocities in Ukraine and Gaza, though of course these are being largely waged by drone and missile, with deployment of human troops a smaller part of the story than was the case fifty years ago (though still very important). We can see now that Haldeman’s anthropomorphic soldier robots are militarily unnecessary.
And who would have thought that rather than conspiracy theorists in government needing to hide their activities from the authorities, they would actually be getting cabinet-level appointments from the incoming president of the United States?
And the woman assassin at the end is just a little bit too homicidally competent to be true.
Anyway, you can get it here. Next up is “The Ultimate Earth”, by Jack Williamson.
Usually in these entries I go through the other Hugo and Nebula contenders for that year, but this was in the odd period when the Nebulas seemed to part company with quality control. I wrote at the time (though I think my views have shifted a bit over the last two decades):
Since the Nebulas changed their eligibility criteria to allow novels to be considered two years running, the number of works winning both Hugo and Nebula has decreased quite dramatically. Between 1966 and 1996, 15 novels and 34 shorter works pulled off the double, ie on average more than one each year, in each case winning Hugo and Nebula for different years but awarded in the same year. Since 1996, one novel (Forever Peace) and one shorter work (Jack Williamson’s “The Ultimate Earth”) have managed to win both awards, in both cases for the same year but awarded in different years. [We now know that in fact “The Ultimate Earth” kicked off a new sequence of joint wins, but that wasn’t knowable in December 2002 when I wrote this.]
It seems quite clear that, for whatever reason, the profiles of the sf likely to win each award has diverged. My own experience is that the Nebula Award final ballot is not very useful for me in identifying novels that I would like to read, and two of the three awards for Best Novel made since Forever Peace are, in my humble opinion, completely incomprehensible.* The Hugo shortlist, on the other hand, always includes several books that I already own and I usually enjoy tracking down and reading the others; and while I may disagree with three of the four Hugos for Best Novel awarded since Forever Peace I can at least understand what the voters saw in them.** Perhaps there are SF readers out there for whom the Nebulas in recent years make sense, but I have not heard from any of them.
* For the record: I consider The Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler, to be a comprehensible and worthy winner of the Nebula Award for 2000, though had I been voting I would probably have gone for George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings or Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division. I cannot say the same for Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, which beat both A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold and Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson for the 2001 award. And while the 2002 shortlist is generally uninspiring, with the singular exception of George R.R. Martin’s superb A Storm of Swords, I simply cannot comprehend the award going to Catherine Asaro’s The Quantum Rose, with its awful stereotyped romantic lead characters and contrived attempts to link the plot to quantum mechanics.
** The Hugo Award I agree with was the 1999 one to To Say Nothing Of the Dog, by Connie Willis. For 2000 I’d have picked A Civil Campaign or Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon over A Deepness in the Sky, for 2001 Ken MacLeod’s The Sky Road or George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords rather than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and for 2002 Bujold’s Curse of Chalion rather than Gaiman’s American Gods, but I’ll admit that it’s a close call in all three cases and I certainly respect the judgement of those who voted the other way.
There were no novels on both the relevant Hugo and Nebula final ballots other than Forever Peace; it beat the following year’s Hugo winner, To Say Nothing of the Dog, for the Nebula. That year’s Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo winner was Contact; there was no SFWA equivalent.
Back to a different sequence of Eleventh Doctor graphic stories, this unites a one-shot, where Rory’s spam emails come alive in the Tardis,with a three-parter, where the Doctor, Amy and Rory get mixed up with the police investigation of Jack the Ripper. It’s a bit dubious, frankly, to adapt the very real femicidal atrocities of the Ripper murders for a Doctor Who story and to make an anthropophagic alien the secret killer. Doctor Who doesn’t go to the Holocaust, or even Ireland much, and this isn’t so very different.
But Tony Lee (as usual) captures the characters well, and the first bit with living spam emails is sheer fun; and the Ripper story is superbly illustrated by the art of Tim Hamilton, who I don’t think I had otherwise come across, but I shall definitely look out for now.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang Authors of their Lives, by David Gerber
Last books finished Marriage, by H.G. Wells Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones Creed Country, by Jenny Overton The Force of Death (audiobook), by Andrew Lane The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin Aelita, by Alexei Tolstoy
Next books When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama
Every morning, day breaks over the mudflats, covered in osprey corpses and unexpected bluish reflections, as if a hundred will-o-the-wisps of the wrong colour were advancing over the watery surface. The smooth flat mirror of the mudflats shines indigo: fluorescent, freakish, wrong. From their beaks, and from sores on their chests and bellies, there pours a tainted viscous liquid that resembles watery gelatine, odourless and sticky to the touch.
I got this collection back in 2019 when one of the stories, ‘Kingfisher’, was on the BSFA shortlist. I wrote then of “Kingfisher”:
A very different, grim story of a relationship breaking down in a near future world where we have had environmental catastrophe and yet middle-class struggle against harsh economic reality continues, as does the battle against patriarchy. Vividly realised and tautly told.
It got my second preference (my first pref went to Time Was, by Ian McDonald, which won).
The collection as a whole addresses human relationships in the coming environmental apocalypse, and does that from an impressive variety of different angles. (There are a couple of exceptions but this covers most of them.) I was hooked with the very first story, “Orange Dogs”, set in a devastated Cambridge where books have almost vanished and babies come with huge difficulty. It’s a tremendous short body of work, containing more than half of Womack’s short fiction to date (and she has another collection coming out). You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next up is What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah.
Second paragraph of third section (English only, I don’t have access to the Dutch original):
‘I want to know all about it. I want to learn who they were, the nobodies who no one was ever interested in. I want to find out how he was as a person, whether he hated, whether he loved, what his weaknesses and his strength [sic] were. I want to learn to understand that person, who, like so many others, was exterminated as a nobody?’ She looks surprised. Suddenly she gets up. Her hands come to life in the overfull secretary [sic]. Documents, photographs, letters, it is all mixed up but she blindly finds what she is looking for and sits next to me with her small collection.
This is the story of Fritz Pfeffer, known to the world as Dussel the dentist, who shared a bedroom in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam with the diarist Anne Frank for twenty uncomfortable months from November 1942 until they were arrested in July 1944 and sent to their deaths. (Fritz Pfeffer died in Neuengamme that December, Anne Frank in Belsen probably in February 1945.) I have written before about the editing of Anne’s original words about him, here and here; I think even her biggest fans (and I count myself as quite a big fan) would need to admit that her writing about him does not show her at her best, and it’s actually rather redeeming to read about him in his own terms.
Fritz Pfeffer was from Gießen in Hesse (all eight of the fugitives in the Achterhuis were born in Germany, including both Frank girls). He was born in 1889, moved to Berlin in 1912 and opened a dental surgery there, served in the First World War, married in 1926, had a son in 1927 and divorced in 1932. He met Charlotte Kaletta (1910-1985) in 1936; she too was divorced, with a son, and although her background was Christian, her ex-husband and therefore her son counted as Jewish.
They fled together to Amsterdam after Kristallnacht in 1938, and Fritz’s son went to his brother in England and survived the war. A twist of Dutch law meant that Fritz and Charlotte could not marry; as they were German citizens, the Netherlands was not willing to let them break German law. She did marry him retroactively in 1950, with effect from 1937, but of course he had been dead for several years by then. Fritz’s mother had died in 1925, but his father and both his sisters, and Charlotte’s ex-husband and her son, all died in the Holocaust as well. It’s another grim story among so many millions.
I really hate to say it, but this is actually a terrible book. Nanda van der Zee, one of the Netherlands’ most controversial historians, decided to write it not as non-fiction but as a fictional interview with Charlotte (who had died two years before the Anne Frank House researchers came across the papers, so van der Zee never actually met her). We therefore don’t know what details are true and what are van der Zee’s creative licence. On top of that, the English translation of van der Zee’s original Dutch text, and of Fritz’s own letters to Charlotte in German, is clunky and tin-eared. We do at least get the original German text of those letters, so if you have the linguistic skills (or access to a translation engine) you can draw your own conclusions. Fritz’s German was awkward but fluent, like most repressed professional men of his time. (Anne mercilessly mocks his Dutch in the Diary.)
At the end of the book, van der Zee gives her fictional version of Charlotte a peroration about the evil of war, but this rather misses the point (though let me be clear that war usually is evil): it was not war that killed Fritz Pfeffer, Anne Frank and five of their six companions – it was the rulers of the country where they were born, declaring that they were not fully human and that they deserved only death. While the war certainly did not help, it was another result of Fascism, which was the ultimate cause of both the war and the genocide. It seems to me very strange that van der Zee chose to take a different, and demonstrably wrong, line.
On the positive side, a bunch of photos are included, mainly from Fritz’s earlier life but a few from Charlotte’s. There is one picture, and only one, of the two of them together, on a boat probably in the Netherlands in 1939 or 1940. She looks blissful; he looks pretty content too, and has a good cigar slipped between his fingers. From the number of clothes they are wearing, it was a cold day though a sunny one; they must have provided their own warmth for each other.
It is awful to think of Charlotte living another four decades, knowing that the man she loved had spent his last year and a half in the Netherlands sharing uncomfortable space with a resentful teenager – whose side of the story then became world famous, to the extent that a comic actor got an Oscar nomination for playing him for laughs in the film. She had at least had regular letters from Fritz during his time in the Achterhuis, but sadly they have not survived. I am glad that we now have some access to Fritz’s past, though it could really have been presented much much better than it is in this book.
I found this cheap and remaindered at a book fair, and I can’t find anywhere on the Internet that is actually selling copies of the English translation. If you really want to look for it, the ISBN is 905911096X. The Dutch original is also out of print (and is not cited as a source by the Anne Frank House) but you may be able to get it here.
This was the shortest book on my unread shelves acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells.
I happily disqualified The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, because apart from being rubbish, only the very first part is set in Spain. But that was the only one – the majority of The Sun Also Rises is set in Spain rather than France. Sadly, Arturo Pérez-Reverte didn’t quite make the cut (with The Dumas Club).
When I did this exercise in 2015, the top four books were the same in the same order, though The Shadow of the Wind was then top on LibraryThing (after The Alchemist) and second to The Sun Also Rises on Goodreads; now it is the other way round.
I’m glad that Homage to Catalonia features; it is one of my favourite non-fiction books and I retrospectively made it my Book of the Year for 2014. I was talking to a Catalan friend a few weeks ago who told me that he had not even heard of it until he found it on the shelves of a friend he was staying with in Ireland, at the age of 20; now of course he is as big a fan as I am.
Next up: Algeria. The top book set there will not be a big surprise.
NB: This post is not in any way meant to be a guide to the situation in Kosovo, which I have written a great deal about in other places and at other times; it is a record of a road trip that I took last week, with a few reflections based on my previous experiences and stealing from Brian Aldiss’s 1965 books, Cities and Stones.
I was back in Kosovo last week for only the third time since independence, and the first time in five years, last week, and took Monday afternoon off to visit some parts of the country I had not been to before: the Gračanica monastery near Prishtina, the ruins of the Roman city of Ulpiana nearby, and Kosovo’s second city, Prizren. (I took a few photos back in 2006 as well.)
I was armed with two important tools. The Bradt Guide to Kosovo is co-written by my friend Verena Knaus, and was really helpful; and the Maps.Me app has brilliant downloadable maps for when you run out of data allowance, as long as you think ahead and download them before setting off (many thanks to the Hertz rental office at the Grand Hotel for suggesting that).
Gračanica monastery, just south of Prishtina, is in the Serbian-inhabited enclave of the same name. It’s really quite spectacular (and I was very lucky here and later with the sunlight). The inside is covered with vivid frescoes dating from the 15th century, truly breathtaking. Brian Aldiss again:
…it comes as a surprise to motor into the grubby little village of Gračanica and find in its centre one of the most harmonious of Byzantine monastic churches. Gračanica, by a miracle, is well-preserved, although work is going on to restore it inside and outside. Outside it is the loveliest of all monasteries except Dečani . It is square, and its central cupola is surrounded by four smaller cupolas, with much curved roofing to accentuate their upward sweep. The walls are of blocks of stone interleaved with brick, forming an harmonious and pleasing pattern.
When Brian Aldiss went in 1964, the scaffolding for the restoration works rather spoiled his view of the frescoes; sixty years later, we have unconstrained access to these remarkable colourful narrative stories, which fill every almost square centimetre of the interior. Taking photos of the frescoes is forbidden, and I can’t remember how I obtained this image. Wikipedia has a great selection of them.
Brian Aldiss described the surrounding settlement of Gračanica as a “grubby little village”. These days, it is the closest of the ethnic Serbian enclaves to Prishtina, less than 10km from the centre of the capital. The traffic was terrible and it took me over half an hour. Gračanica is bustling (no longer little, and not too grubby), filled with Serbian flags and political posters, and a more recent monument, a statue of semi-mythical Serbian warrior Miloš Obilić just outside the monastery. The 2004 riots in Kosovo were sparked here, so I was struck by the lack of any particular air of menace – indeed, teenagers were thumbing lifts on the road out of town, which suggests a lack of existential threat. Two weeks before, a senior Serbian diplomat had told me that Serbs in Kosovo are living under inhuman conditions; I did not go to the north of Kosovo on this trip, but the people of Gračanica seemed OK to me.
None of the youngsters would accept my offer of a lift, not because they didn’t trust me, but because I was only going as far as the ancient Roman ruins of Ulpiana, less than 2 km from Gračanica. I reflected that I’ve done quite well for Roman remains in the former Yugoslavia, with Ljubljana, Sremska Mitrovica, Stobi and an unblogged visit to Doclea north of Podgorica in 2022.These are nicely laid out with explanatory signs. There were only two other tourists there. (No Brian Aldiss quote – only minor excavations had happened by 1964.) It was rebuilt by Justinian after an earthquake in 527; so there are ancient Christian buildings built on top of the more ancient pagan ones destroyed in the quake.
Rather than double back to Prishtina and take the highway, I decided to take the mountain road past Lipljan, Shtime and Suva Reka. The road west of Shtime was spectacular but a bit hair-raising – though not as hair-raising as our drive in 2006. As in 2006, I came across a roadside monument, this time to casualties of the 1999 war, and a lot bigger – dominating the road junction at 42.438627, 20.922865. They were killed on 10 May 1999, and again I have found nothing in English about the incident; it was just after NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and after the murder of Kosovar political leader Fehmi Agani, and many other awful things were happening in the neighbourhood.
And so I arrived in Prizren, which is nicely framed by the mountains. Brian Aldiss stayed for four days; I stayed for two and a half hours, until the light started fading.
Adiss described it as “a quiet little city of twenty-six thousand inhabitants, full of Turkish houses, red tled roofs, and mosques, and pleasant waters flowing everywhere.” The population is now more like 150,000, but the rest is still true. I tried to find Verena’s top recommended restaurant for lunch, the Besimi – Beska, but got confused and ended up at her second recommendation, the Fish House, where I had a nice whole grilled trout for 7 euro. (I found the Beska in time for a cup of coffee before I left.) The Fish House is right beside the baths, which are currently being restored but looked great in the sunlight.
The main tourist attraction is the Museum of the League of Prizren, telling the story of the Albanian nationalist movement of the 1870s which called for autonomy for Albanians in the Ottoman empire, but was eventually suppressed by the Turks. Verena and her co-author give it a very good write-up in the Bradt Guide, so I was disappointed to discover that it is closed on Mondays. To be honest, my time was short so it may be just as well – hopefully it is not the last time I will be in Prizren.
Note the large number of Albanian flags, which were not restricted to the museum complex but were flying all over Prizren, perhaps in the run-up to Albanian Flag Day which was three days later. There were a few Turkish flags as well – Prizren has a 5% Turkish minority and it is one of the official languages of the municipality.
After the museum, the big draw is the Sinan Pasha Mosque, which looked lovely outside and pretty good inside as well.
Prizren is a centre of activity for several Dervish orders; I looked into the courtyard of a tekke, and noted the fresh water flowing through it (there is a lot of fresh water in Prizren), and the neatly placed shoes of the dervishes by the building on the left, but I didn’t go in.
There is some interesting more modern public art as well; I didn’t get the title of this piece but the juxtaposition with the minaret of the Arasta Mosque tickled my fancy. (There are some much less interesting statues of fallen heroes on the other side of the square.)
More ephemerally, the Christmas decorations were going up in the Shadervan, the main square (in a city that is 96% Muslim these days). The bar on the corner on the left is called the Gatsby, and across the street is the Hemingway.
Brian Aldiss wrote after his visit sixty years ago,
It is not by the isolated monuments but the effect of the town as a whole that one remembers Prizren. Open gateways give glimpses into those jealously guarded Turkish walled gardens, most of which still look pleasant and inviting. This fact, and the sweet smell of the town, are owed to the abundant water supply. One of the most pleasant features of Jugoslavia generally is the number of wells and springs and waterfalls and rivers with which it abounds. In Prizren there is a lovely little spring in the Maraš Gardens, close by a massive and prehistoric-looking tree.
The tree and the spring are still there.
The light was almost gone by now, however, and I took the highway home, reaching the Hertz office just before it closed at 6pm. I know where to go next time.
NB: This post is not in any way meant to be a guide to the situation in Kosovo, which I have written a great deal about in other places and at other times; it is a record of a road trip that I took in 2006, with a few reflections based on my previous experiences and stealing from Brian Aldiss’s 1965 books, Cities and Stones.
I was in Kosovo last week, for the first time in ages – probably my dozenth visit overall, but only my third since independence in 2008. I had the idea that I could do some then-and-now photographs showing how much things had changed since my early visits – I first went in 2000, the year after the war – but didn’t manage (and haven’t yet managed) to dig those pre-digital era photos out of the attic.
However I did find something else in my archives, photos from a trip to Kosovo in early 2006, two years before independence while it was still under UN rule, with the captions that I had posted to a Livejournal gallery intending to write a blog post which I never got around to. So, better late than never, here’s the gallery of my visit to Kosovo almost 19 years ago, with my original captions and commentary from today. My photos from last week’s visit will follow.
It looks like I must have flown into Prishtina and then driven to Macedonia for some reason – the main road was closed so we crossed the border via a mountain track. It was not actually snowing, but it took forever. On the way back north we just went the long way round through Tetovo, which was much safer.
View down the twisty mountain track (the main road to Macedonia from Kosovo was closed by a landslide so we tried driving over the top of the mountains; stupid idea)Another view down the twisty mountain track
I am trying to work out which track this could have been. The online maps show an alternate route across the border from Viti to Brodets, and the satellite pictures of the crossing point at 42.225384, 21.371863 look similar to the photos above. But who knows?
I haven’t recorded whether the memorial to Aqim Selmani below was on the mountain road or seen on the other route the next day, but the latter is more likely, as much more of the fighting in 2001 was in the Tetovo area and the terrain looks less challenging. I found a clearer picture of the memorial on Facebook which shows his dates of birth and death as 4 April 1964 and 5 August 2001. Another source gives the date of his death as 5 August rather than 6 August. I have not found specific reference to the incident in which he was killed anywhere. The peace agreement that would end the conflict was on the verge of being signed over that August weekend in 2001, and the fighting was over only a couple of days later.
A small memorial of the 2001 conflict on the Macedonia/Kosovo border (on the way back into Kosovo we came by a more sensible route)
Close-up – the light was bad for details; putting photographs on tombstones is universal in the Balkans, whether Muslim, Orthodox or Catholic
The next day, we headed over to the west of Kosovo, and specifically to the Visoki Dečani Monastery. While I captioned the next picture as showing Montenegro, a check of the map suggests that the mountainsides visible here are on the Kosovo side of the border, though the frontier does run along the top of the range; but more crucially, it’s the border with Albania not Montenegro.
At the edge of the Kosovo plain, the mountains of Montenegro look down on us
The Visoki Dečani Monastery is one of the most important places for the Serbian Orthodox Shurch, and protection of its heritage was one of the sticking points in negotiation around the future status of Kosovo. I don’t remember if there were extra security checkpoints on the way in, and we probably would not have been allowed to take photos as they were. Perched in a steep-sided valley, it’s rather charming. Brian Aldiss wrote:
Of all the churches in Jugoslavia, Dečani seens the most lovely. Certainly it is the richest, and the air of serenity with which it stays among its surrounding dormitories, halls and orchards is impressive. Dečani looks eternal. It is a century older than Magdalen College, Oxford, two centuries older than Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was built when the medieval Serbian state was prospering… I wanted to stay near Dečani and visit it every day.
In 2006, the charm was offset by the tension over its future in a potentially independent Kosovo; which of course is why I was there.
View of Dečani monastery in its valleyEntrance to the monasteryThe monastery church
A much younger me with Sava Janjić, who is the best known personality in the monastery. He became the abbot in 2011, five years after we met.
Fr Sava (the “cyber-monk”) and visitor, in front of the iconostasisPlaque commemorating repairs to the church funded by the Ottoman Sultan in 1883 – Fr Sava snorted, “A big plaque for a rather small repair!”Ancient frescos (perhaps dating from the 14th century) in Dečani
A couple of photos of iconography in Prishtina, first Ramush Haradinaj being the KLA leader and prime minister who had surrendered to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague a year before (he was acquitted twice, and returned as PM in 2017-2020); and then Ibrahim Rugova, leader of Kosova before the conflict and president after, who had died just a few weeks before my 2006 visit – I also went to pay my respects at his grave, but we did not take photos there.
Ramush Haradinaj is still there…
…but Ibrahim Rugova isn’t
Finally we went to the battlefield where it all began, the Gazimestan where Slobodan Milošević gave his infamous 1989 speech which blew the starting whistle for the subsequent conflicts. I haven’t been in touch with my former colleague S for years, but I saw A in Kosovo last weekend where he entertained me for dinner with his wife and daughters (born some time after 2006), and M passes through Brussels frequently.
The memorial to the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, built in 1953, on a slightly misty day; with my colleagues S, A and MS and A try to make sense of the official explanation of what happened in 1389
The Slovaks, with support from the Czechs, guard the Gazimestan memorial
Sometimes countries can split up amicably; and sometimes not
It’s OK to take pictures of the flags, just not of the military installations.
Non-genre 7 (YTD 32) The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins La piège aux maris, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) Les débuts de la forgeronne, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck The Harvey Girls, by Samuel Hopkins Adams Marriage, by H.G. Wells Creed Country, by Jenny Overton
SF 5 (YTD 81) The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling Lost Objects, by Marian Womack Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 30) Synthespians™, by Craig Hinton Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman
Comics 4 (YTD 32) The Ripper, by Tony Lee The Nikopol Trilogy: A Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap, by Enki Bilal The Nikopol Trilogy: Cold Equator, by Enki Bilal
6,400 pages (YTD 64,300) 8/26 (YTD 110/262) by non-male writers (Riehl, van der Zee, Rattazzi, Buck, Overton, Womack, Wynne Jones, Herron/Redman) None (YTD 26/262) by a non-white writer, for second month running – rather poor of me 5/26 rereads (The Moonstone, Forever Peace, Creed Country, Synthespians™, The Nikopol Trilogy: A Bedlam of Immortals) 259 books currently tagged unread, down 8 from last month, down 79 from November 2023.
Reading now Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin Authors of their Lives, by David A. Gerber
Coming soon (perhaps) When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis Eden Rebellion, by Abi Falaise The Aztecs, by Doris V Sutherland Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells M Leuven Collectie Schilderijen, by Lorne Campbell The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling The Crown of Dalemark, by Diana Wynne Jones Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis “The Ultimate Earth”, by Jack Williamson The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde
One of the Peshawar Club’s discreet manservants had slipped the calling card under the door. As King read, he fended off the soft rounded warmth that pressed to his back, and the hands that reached teasingly around his body and tried to undo the bath towel wrapped about his waist.
Warning: this is a long piece, and a lot of it is pedantic whining.
This is the last of the science fiction novels that I found set in 2025 (and published before 2005), though I have a graphic novel coming up still. It’s also the longest of them, and the one in which 2025 has diverged the most from our own history. In this timeline, Europe and North America were devastated by meteorites in 1878, and the British Empire has resettled in India, with the royal family adopting a syncretic version of Anglicanism and Hinduism (Islam is a religion of the provinces and fringes) and ruling a polity anchored by South Africa at one end and Australia at the other. They are on friendly terms with France/Algeria, where the Napoleonic dynasty has resumed power, and threatened by the Russians, who have become devil-worshippers and cannibals based in Central Asia. China and Japan have united and are distantly threatening. Technology has developed to roughly steampunk level rather than anything more sophisticated.
Our heroes, a happy band of protagonists including the heirs to both the British and French empires (the latter is meant to be a surprise but it’s signalled pretty much from the start), with a diverse crew of warriors and a magically talented Russian defector, are battling to prevent the Russians taking over which would obviously be a Bad Thing. Starts with a fridging, then lots of steampunky combat and action, finishing with several perilous passages on an airship over Afghanistan, in the spirit of Kipling and Flashman. It’s an alternate world where the ruling classes happily bicker about who gets to rule, and where men are real men and allow women to be intellectuals too if they want. The obvious three couples all get together at the end. (Also, the Peshawar Lancers of the title are barely in the story at all.)
It’s all meant to be great fun, but several things really annoyed me about this novel. Stirling is determined to show off to us how much research he has done; but a little learning can be a dangerous thing. In Chapter 2, we have the following passage:
The younger man whispered to his companion in Bengali: “How can we trust this cow-murdering winebibber, my teacher? Even for a Muslim and outcaste, he is vile.”
The older man flicked a look at Ignatieff’s face to make sure he hadn’t understood—Bengali and Hindi were closely related—and the Okhrana agent beamed uncomprehending friendship.
He spoke both languages perfectly, of course.
Bengali and Hindi are not closely related. They are from different branches of the Indo-Aryan language group, Hindi from the Central subgroup and Bengali from the Eastern. In these enlightened days, you can actually ask an online translation engine to give you Bengali and Hindi versions of the phrase “How can we trust this cow-murdering winebibber, my teacher? Even for a Muslim and outcaste, he is vile.” The results are completely different:
Bengali
Hindi
আমরা কিভাবে এই গো-হত্যাকারী ওয়াইনবিবারকে বিশ্বাস করব, আমার শিক্ষক? এমনকি একজন মুসলিম ও বহিরাগতদের জন্যও সে জঘন্য।
इस गौ-हत्यारे शराबी पर हम कैसे भरोसा कर सकते हैं, मेरे गुरु? एक मुसलमान और बहिष्कृत व्यक्ति के लिए भी वह नीच है।
Is gau-hatyaare sharaabee par ham kaise bharosa kar sakate hain, mere guru? Ek musalamaan aur bahishkrt vyakti ke lie bhee vah neech hai.
There is some similarity between the words for “cow-killer”, “gō-hatyākārī” in Bengali and “gau-hatyaare” in Hindi, and also between the words for “Muslim”, “musalima” in Bengali and “musalamaan” in Hindi, which perhaps is an indication that you shouldn’t mutter insults in a language that you’re not sure your interlocutor doesn’t understand. But otherwise, you’re probably safe using Bengali in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, which is where this scene is set.
Stirling may have got confused between Bengali and Urdu, the languages of the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (now just Pakistan) respectively. Urdu is very similar to Hindi, to the point that ‘closely related’ may not convey the relationship strongly enough. However his fictional Angrezi Raj seems to have lost most of its Urdu speakers.
And these languages are not obscure – Hindi and Bengali have the fourth and fifth most native speakers in the world, after Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English. I can’t imagine anyone writing, for instance, “The older man flicked a look at Sanchez’s face to make sure he hadn’t understood—Spanish and English are closely related.”
One can make the excuse for Stirling that online translation services were not available when he was writing the book. But encyclopedias certainly were, and you will find no encyclopedia that gives you reason to think that Bengali and Hindi are mutually intelligible. It’s fairly clear that he did not offer the draft for review to anyone with actual first-hand knowledge of Indian languages.
On another point, my eyebrows rose sharply in Chapter 23, when “Cassandra started wolfing down a fiery chicken Marsala”. No she didn’t. Marsala sauce, with an ‘r’, is made with the sweet wine of the same name and is not ‘fiery’. Masala, with no ‘r’, is a general term for an Indian spice mix, but usually not an especially hot one. If it is hot, its name is usually qualified with a particular set of ingredients, a ‘vindaloo masala‘ for instance.
And another thing: it’s a pet peeve of mine with other writers too, but the treatment of Russian is very inconsistent. Пожалуйста, “please”, is given as “pajalsta”, and Спасибо, “thank you” as “spacebo”; if I were being phonetic, I’d use “pazhal’sta” and “spasiba” to convey how they are actually pronounced by real Russian speakers, but usually in English writers use the standard transliterations, “pozhaluysta” and “spasibo”, even though they are a bit misleading. Yet at other points Stirling does use the standard transliteration, for example in Chapter 10 where we have the exchange “Govorite-li vy po-russki?” / “Da, govoryu. Kto vy takoy?” – “Do you speak Russian?” / “Yes, I do. And who are you?” If we were being phonetic, the first two vowels in говорите and говорю sound much more like short ‘a’ than short ‘o’, and the exchange is rather stilted anyway – “Vy govorite po-russki?” / “Da, a vy kto?” would be much more idiomatic. Though we are told it is the “High Formal mode” of Russian, for what that’s worth.
Incidentally the Russian-speaker is wearing a burqua rather than a burqa, and the military caste of India are the Kyashtria rather than the Kshatriya. Again, anyone who actually knows anything about Asian cultures will pick these up immediately.
These things do matter. If you are writing about other cultures, especially if you are writing in English about formerly colonised cultures in an alternate history where they have stayed colonised, it is important to show respect by getting at least basic language and cookery facts right.
Sorry to whine. Other readers, better informed on India than I am, have commented on other mistakes in the book, but those were the ones that jumped out at me.
I know that this book is beloved by many readers, but I’m afraid that I am not among them. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un, again):
The Normans were at this time the foremost race in Christendom. Their courage and ruthlessness had made them conspicuous among the rovers from Scandinavia who ravaged Western Europe. Their sails had been the terror of both coasts of the Channel, long before they conquered and settled in Gaul. But – unlike the previous Scandinavian warriors – the Normans were not content to remain seafarers. They became landsmen. And in land warfare, they cast aside the weapons of their forefathers and learnt to handle the weapons of their newly-won land with greater prowess than they had ever been handled before. They had archers with bows carrying death at a distance; they had cavalry clad in mail armour, and armed with long lances and glittering kite-shaped shields. In the province of Normandy they founded a mighty state, which gradually extended its influence over the neighbouring provinces of Brittany and Maine. And, without laying aside that dauntless valour which terrorized every land from the Elbe to the Pyrences, the Normans rapidly acquired all, and more than all, the knowledge and refinement which they found in the country where they settled. They established internal order. They adopted the French tongue, in which Latin was the main element, and raised it to a dignity and importance which it has never lost. French literature became the glory of the civilized world. They embraced Christianity and adopted the feudal doctrines of France which they worked into some sort of a system. They adopted their own form of architecture, the romanesque. They were chivalrous, these Normans; indeed, with them began the age of chivalry. Unlike other Germanic peoples, they renounced brutish intemperance; their polite luxury presented a striking contrast to the coarse voracity and drunkenness of their Saxon and Danish neighbours. The Norman baron displayed his magnificence, not in huge piles of food and hogsheads of strong drink, but in large and stately edifices, rich armour, gallant horses, choice falcons, well-ordered tournaments, and wines chosen for their flavour rather than for their intoxicating power. They were dignified in their bearing and well-spoken. They were born orators as well as born lawyers, just as they were born soldiers. For before all else they were soldiers. Their conquests extended to Southern Italy and Sicily on the one hand, and to the British Isles on the other.
I have been trying to find out about the author of this book. Thanks to the genealogy websites, I have determined that his full name was Brian Boteler Fitzgerald, that he lived from 21 January 1908 to 20 July 1977, that he was the son of Lord Henry Gordon FitzGerald (1863–1955) and Inez Charlotte Grace Casberd-Boteler (1871-1967) and the grandson of the 4th Duke of Leinster, and that he married Elizabeth Dorotea Maud Brocklebank Fleetwood-Hesketh (1914-1992) on 28 July 1936 when he was 28 and she 22. I don’t find any record that they had children. In addition to this book, published in 1951, he published four other Irish history books in 1949, 1950, 1952 and 1954, and a few more edited volumes of letters later in the 1950s, all relating to the Fitzgerald family, so a rather concentrated period of writing activity in the middle of his adult life. I have no record of anything else that he did at any other time in his career. He was born, married and died in London, but clearly wore his Irish heritage proudly.
This book is the work of a very enthusiastic and energetic romantic, dedicated to proving the proposition that the Fitzgeralds are the key factor in Irish history for more than four centuries. It’s actually a proposition that most would agree with, but by focussing on one family’s history, you can lose sight of what else is going on. In particular I’d have liked to get an understanding of the relationship between the Fitzgerald lands and the Pale/Butler territory on the one hand, and the more Irish districts on the other.
It’s also misleading to suggest that the Fitzgeralds’ rule of Ireland was the basic pattern of Irish government consistently from 1189 to 1603. It was perhaps the default, but there was no automaticity and the right of English kings to intervene was clearly accepted by all concerned. The peak of the Kildare Fitzgeralds’ power comes at the very end of the period, when Henry VII is forced to accept their continued rule in Ireland after Bosworth Field because he has no alternative; but the collapse of that power in the 1530s came very swiftly, which suggests that it did not have such deep foundations after all.
I was surprised to learn that the Fitzgerald family trace their origins to the Gherardini family of Tuscany, based in Florence from 1100, whose most famous member is probably Lisa del Giocondo, to use her married name (though that is not how she is best known). This link seemed really fanciful to me, but the book has documentary evidence from both sides indicating that the Gherardini accepted that the connection was there. To me it’s fairly clear that the mythology of the family begins with Gerald of Wales, who was the son of one of the daughters of Gerald FitzWalter, the best documented originator of the dynasty, and I don’t quite see the timelines adding up.
Still, it’s full of details about the entire period of Irish history from 1170 to 1603, and although it’s partisan, it wears its heart on its jacket and is rather endearing. You can get it here.
This was the very last of the books that I acquired in 2018 which I managed to clear from the unread shelves, ten months after I did the same for the last of my 2017 acquisitions. The full list so far, since I started tallying this way eight years ago, is:
There are 26 books on my unread shelves which I acquired in 2019, and 11 of them are by H.G. Wells, so there’s going to be a fair bit of minor Wellsiana coming up. I’m starting with:
The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee (shortest)
Lost Objects, by Marian Womack (sf that has lingered longest unread and isn’t by Wells)
What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah (top book on LibraryThing which isn’t by Wells)
Marriage, by H. G. Wells (top book on LibraryThing which is by Wells)
Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, by David A. Gerber (non-fiction that has lingered longest unread)
Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien (non-genre fiction that has lingered longest unread and isn’t by Wells)
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long’un, about a list of the havens of Ireland; this paragraph alone has many more words than the document it is describing):
The list’s comprehensiveness is impressive, considering that it was likely drawn up in the early Tudor period, a time when knowledge in England of Ireland’s geography, most especially of the west and north-west, was limited. In the commonplace book of Christopher Cusack, sheriff of Meath – a copy of which survives from the early sixteenth century but which contains disparate material which is probably much older – there is a geographic description of the island of Ireland in which its most southerly and northerly points are aligned against St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and Dumfries in Scotland, respectively. Here, it was inaccurately stated that Ireland was larger than England: ‘Irland should be mor then Ingland by iiixx miles’ its author concluded.2 Later, in 1543 Sir Anthony St Leger, lord deputy of Ireland, offered Henry VIII a detailed description of Ireland’s havens – ‘The more parte of the notable havons of Ireland’; but he named only thirty-seven, and was quick to point out those havens which lay within (or near) the Irishry and which were, in effect, beyond royal control.3 It was only in Elizabeth’s reign, as Tudor rule extended throughout the island, that a greater awareness of such geographical detail was achieved in governing circles, and mainly through the increasing use of maps.4 This is evident, for example, in the well-known, and richly detailed, maps of Ireland drawn in the 1560s by Laurence Nowell and John Goghe.5 When these are compared with the crude ‘Cotton’ map of Ireland drawn in the 1520s – this drawing represents the earliest known attempt under the Tudors to map the island – and a later Italian map of Ireland from 1565 – in which Dublin and its hinterland are plotted too far south, and Sligo is depicted as lying north-east of Donegal – the new-found superiority of English knowledge of Ireland’s geography and topography becomes immediately apparent.6 Of course the act of listing havens, and ultimately plotting them on maps, did not conjure these locations into being. For centuries Englishmen and Irishmen had relied on local knowledge to move about the country, by land and by sea, without a reliance on lists of places or maps. Lists of places, such as that included in the Hatfield Compendium and on maps, were not intended to replace local knowledge. Rather they represent an effort to impart some of this local knowledge to those unfamiliar with Ireland, so allowing them to measure and to visualize that which they could not see first-hand. 2 TCD MS 594, fo. 36. The description in Cusack’s commonplace book is nearly identical to the undated and anonymous ‘Geographical account of Ireland’, which was placed in the year 1514 in the State Papers of Henry VIII: TNA, SP 60/1/5, fo. 7 (see also below, p. 138). 3 Havens of Ireland, 6 Apr. I543, TNA, SP 60/11/2(1), fo. 15. St Leger provided a brief description of each haven: ‘Dublyn, a badde haven. Wicklowe, but a crecke’. 4 William Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory: a geography of colonial and early modern Ireland, c.1530-1750 (Cork, 2006), ch. 1. 5 ‘General description of England and Ireland’, c. 1564, BL, Additional MS 62540, fos 3v-4r; ‘Hibernia: insula non procul ab Anglia vulgare Hirlandia vocata” , 1567, TNA, MPF 1/68. 6 The well-known ‘Cotton’ map is reproduced in Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory, pp 40-1. Bolognino Zaltieri’s 1565 map of Ireland, published in Venice, is a copy of Sebastiano de Re’s 1558 map of Ireland. The former is reproduced in S.G. Ellis, ‘The Tudor borderlands, 1485-1603’ in John Morrill (ed.), The Oxford illustrated history of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford, 1996), pp 66-7. See also the Elizabethan effort to set out the depths of some of the harbours in Munster: the depths, anchorages etc., of the harbours of Ireland, 21 Apr. 1567, BL, Cotton MSS, Titus B XII, fo. 482.
Coming at the Tudor period, and Ireland specifically, with the tools of the historian rather than the literature scholar, this is a deep analysis of a 15-folio manuscript preserved in Hatfield House, by two of the top writers on the period. The manuscript includes eight short documents, all about different aspects of Ireland in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the most substantial are a potted history at the beginning and a set of Ordinances for Ireland at the end, though it’s not clear if these last were ever put into effect.
The Hatfield Compendium was clearly written for a newly appointed Tudor official with a senior role in the government of Ireland, and the authors spend a large part of the book examining the very poor state of knowledge of Irish affairs in England throughout the Tudor period. The overthrown Yorkists had had much better links than their Lancastrian predecessors or Tudor successors – not mentioned here, but Richard of York, before he gave battle in vain, was the chief governor of Ireland for over a decade and launched the 1460 campaign to retake England from there.
Henry VII came to throne only vaguely aware of his nearby realm, and devoted significant effort and personnel (though not a lot of money) to getting a grip on it. Maginn and Ellis are able to trace the information in the Hatfield Compendium both backward and forward, looking at how it was created to satisfy the needs of the king and his senior advisers for data about a rather unknown place.
The book then traces the story through the ending of the Fitzgerald dominance and the beginning of surrender and regrant, and the definition of the kingship of Ireland (rather than lordship as it had been since Henry II), through the policies of successive underfunded chief governors appointed by Henry VIII.
Taking a step back, it strikes me that when the English court thought of Ireland, they really meant the Pale and a few outposts under government control (loosely defined), and the areas under the control of the greater magnates, the Butlers and Fitzgeralds; about half of the island, under the control of the Irish clans, just didn’t feature in calculations except as a source of trouble and potential fodder for land grabs. It’s a normal enough paradigm for this sort of conflict between a well-armed but under-informed military and a hostile and well-dug-in population; one thinks of Israel v the West Bank and Gaza, but there are plenty of other parallels.
Quite a short book, but with a lot of good stuff in it. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third essay (“The Tudor Court: Dust and Desire”, by Thomas Betteridge):
This discussion is in two parts. The first section will examine a number of mid-Henrician responses to the court, including Wyatt’s courtly lyrics, while the second part will look in detail at the work of Skelton. This chapter will argue that the Henrician court paradoxically exists in its purest state in the work of Skelton before this court starts to emerge as a coherent institution during the 1520s and ’30s. In Magnyfycenceand The Bowge of Courte, Skelton creates a Henrician court before the avant la lettre [sic], a spectral court that haunted the real thing, not as a hidden secret but as dust, detritus, as a material reminder of the court’s consistent failure to achieve its fantasy of itself.²
² Slavoj Žižek comments that “object petit a is the reminder that can never be sublated [aufgehoben] in the moment of symbolization. So not only is this reminder not an ‘inner’ object irreducible to external materiality— it is precisely the irreducible trace of externality in the very midst of ‘internality,’ its condition of impossibility (a foreign body preventing the subject’s full constitution) which is simultaneously its condition of possibility. The ‘materiality’ of this reminder is that of the trauma which resists symbolization.” Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 90-135, 117, emphasis in the original.
A collection of essays on how the court actually functioned under the Tudor monarchs, apparently papers from a conference in 2004. The two editors and the other six contributors are all English literature scholars, and I must say I find it interesting that I’m getting quite a lot of value from the literature end of analysis of the Tudor period. The first three essays are about Henry VIII and humanism as deployed at court; the other five are about Elizabeth I, and the standout for me was Peter Sillitoe’s piece on the royal progresses, both their limitations and their achievements in terms of projecting royal power. But there is lots of other good stuff to chew on. No mention of Ireland though. You can get it here (for a price).
Current Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) Marriage, by H.G. Wells The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher
Last books finished The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck Yanks Behind the Lines: How the Commission for Relief in Belgium Saved Millions from Starvation During World War I, by Jeffrey B. Miller Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah Ascension of the Cybermen & The Timeless Children, by Ryan Bradley The Nikopol Trilogy: A Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal The Harvey Girls, by Samuel Hopkins Adams The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap, by Enki Bilal The Deep State of Europe: Welcome to Hell, by Basil Coronakis The Nikopol Trilogy: Cold Equator, by Enki Bilal
Next books When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al Authors of their Lives, by David Gerber The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang
Ah. Actually this is rather difficult. The book is broken up into four sections, one of which is further subdivided:
Prologue (6 pages)
The Story: First Period (170 pages)
The Story: Second Period (249 pages split into eight Narratives)
Epilogue (6 pages split into three parts)
Each of these sections and narratives is in turn split up into many sub-sections. But I don’t usually count prologues, so I’ll take the second paragraph of the third sub-section of “The Story: First Period” as my sample text for the book. It is, appropriately enough:
Penelope’s notion is that I should set down what happened, regularly day by day, beginning with the day when we got the news that Franklin Blake was expected on a visit to the house. When you come to fix your memory with a date in this way, it is wonderful what your memory will pick up for you upon that compulsion. The only difficulty is to fetch out the dates, in the first place. This Penelope offers to do for me by looking into her own diary, which she was taught to keep when she was at school, and which she has gone on keeping ever since. In answer to an improvement on this notion, devised by myself, namely, that she should tell the story instead of me, out of her own diary, Penelope observes, with a fierce look and a red face, that her journal is for her own private eye, and that no living creature shall ever know what is in it but herself. When I inquire what this means, Penelope says, “Fiddlesticks!” I say, Sweethearts.
I had read this a very long time ago: one of the very first mystery novels in English, about the disappearance of a mystical jewel, with train timetables. drug addicts, religious fanatics (both Christian and non-Christian), peculiar medical conditions and suicidal love. Our copy is an ex-library edition which Anne acquired many years ago, with an enthusiastic introduction by no less than Dorothy L. Sayers.
What makes the book so memorable is that the story is told from many different points of view, and the first two are both very vivid – the old family servant, who believes that all wisdom can be found in Robinson Crusoe, and the crazy Christian relative, who annoys all the other characters. There is then a fine momentum which carries you through to the end.
It’s not without its flaws. The actual solution to the mystery resembles one of Agatha Christie’s more implausible schemes. The dead maidservant is a surprisingly good writer for someone of her background. Also, given that the jewel was stolen from the Indians by the British in the first place, it might have been better to save all the trouble by just giving it back to them early on; but then I guess you would have no story. Still, I was entertained, and you can get it here.
This was the book on my shelves with the most LT owners that I have not previously reviewed online. (Apart from children’s books, and books by Terry Pratchett.) Next on that pile, on a rather different note, is The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis.
See here for methodology; I am excluding books unless at least 50% of them is actually set in Uganda, and I had real trouble deciding with some of these, so it’s a list of ten rather than the usual eight.
I should say also that I am a little fascinated by Uganda because my father taught history at Makerere University in Kampala from 1959 to 1961, and I went there myself in 2010 and found the corridor where his old office would have been. (When he left, his successor was Bethwell Ogot, who is still alive.)
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
Kisses from Katie
Katie Davis Majors
33,774
1,253
In a Free State
V.S. Naipaul
5,111
1,140
The Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
4,196
949
A Girl Is a Body of Water
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
7,723
418
All Our Names
Dinaw Mengestu
4,827
472
Daring to Hope: Finding God’s Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful
Katie Davis Majors
6,371
265
Kintu
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
4,121
397
The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl’s Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster
Tim Crothers
3,052
287
Beatrice’s Goat
Page McBrier
722
1,188
We Are All Birds of Uganda
Hafsa Zayyan
5,665
112
So, I am not sure about In A Free State, by V.S. Naipaul, because the original publication with that title is a collection of shorter pieces, the longest of which is also called “In A Free State”, is set in Uganda (not named but clearly intended) and has also been published as a standalone. I suspect that the shorter piece is less than half of the original collection (with is otherwise set elsewhere) and I suspect that most of the owners of a book with that title own the collection rather than the standalone, but I am sufficiently unsure to include it above with this caveat.
Both All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengistu, and We Are All Birds of Uganda, by Hafsa Zayyan, are split between Uganda and another country (the UK and the USA respectively) and I have not been able to detect if the Ugandan content is more or less than 50% of the book in either case. So again, I’ve included them on the above list with this caveat.
Unfortunately the top spot for books set in Uganda, on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, still goes to a literal white saviour narrative. It’s a long way ahead on Goodreads, and also leads if by a much narrower margin on LibraryThing. At least Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, who is actually Ugandan, gets two books on the list.
Books excluded without hesitation: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch (set in Rwanda); The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński (set in Ethiopia); At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe, by Tsh Oxenreider (set in many countries); Aftershocks, by Nadia Owusu (set in many countries); This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from around the World, by Matt LaMothe (set in many countries); Walking the Nile, by Levison Wood (set in many countries) and A History of Burning, Janika Oza (centred on Uganda but my sense is that less than half of the book is actually set there).
I should have mentioned before that I saw Jodie Whittaker live on stage three weeks ago in London, performing the title role in The Duchess, an adaptation of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, in the Trafalgar Theatre. Tickets were surprisingly inexpensive, and in fact I was ushered (ushed?) to a better seat on arrival as the evening had not sold out. (By comparison, tickets for David Tennant playing Macbeth the same night were going for literally ten times as much.)
I was not familiar with The Duchess of Malfi, except that I knew it was the source for a the titles of novels by P.D. James and Stephen Fry. So I can’t comment on whether or not the Trafalgar Theatre production improved on the original. It was a play of two halves; the first part setting up the widowed Duchess falling in love with her steward, and concealing this from her jealous brothers, with various conspiratorial subplots; and the second part in which almost everyone gets horribly murdered.
I felt that the cast were having a lot more fun in the second half, where they were getting killed and doing the killing, or both in a couple of cases; the first half had a lot of declaiming. There is a lot of serious material there about gender and power, but the graphic violence (and the virulent graphics) rather overwhelmed my intellectual appreciation of the play’s themes.
Jodie Whittaker dominated the scenes that she was in – and he character is one of the first to be murdered horribly, but then haunts the stage in a lingering afterlife. There was a glorious moment when one of the other cast members dried on the word ‘lycanthropy’ – Jodie W just said it to her, and they carried on with the scene; I bet the other actor was mortified in the dressing room afterwards, but these things happen.
None of the other cast had names that I recognised, though I see one of them (Joel Fry) was in Game of Thrones. The two that stood out to me were Elizabeth Ayodele as Julia, who is bonking most of the men, and Hannah Visocchi, who silently provided most of the music on a variety of stringed instruments. Having said that, Jude Owusu as Bosola was almost the only character who actually has an arc, and performed it well.
Second paragraph of third document (a letter from Pope Alexander III to Irish bishops):
Inde est utique quod nos ex vestris litteris intelligentes quod per potentiam karissimi in Christo filii nostri H[einrici] illustris Anglorum regis qui divina inspiratione compunctus coadunatis viribus suis gentem illam barbaram, incultam et divine legis ignaram suo dominio subiugavit, ea que in terra vestra tam illicite committuntur, cooperante domino, incipiunt iam desistere gudio gavisi sumus et ei qui iamdicto regi tantam victoriam contulit et triumphum inmensas gratiarum actiones exsolvimus, prece supplici postulantes ut per vigilanciam et sollicitudinem ipsius regis vestro cooperante studio gens illa indisciplinata et indomita cultum divine legis et religionem Chritiane fidei per omnia et in omnibus imitetur et vos ac ceteri ecclesiastici viri honore et tranquillitate debita gaudeatis.
Hence it is that – understanding from your letters that our dear son in Christ, Henry, illustrious King of England, stirred by divine inspiration and with his united forces, has subjected to his dominion that people, a barbarous one uncivilized and ignorant of the Divine law, and that those evils which were unlawfully practised in your land are now, with God’s help, already beginning to diminish – We are overjoyed and have offered our grateful prayers to Him who has granted to the said King so great a victory and triumph, humbly beseeching that by the vigilance and care of the same King that most undisciplined and untamed nation may in and by all things persevere in devotion to the practice of the Christian faith, and that you and your ecclesiastical brethren may rejoice in all due honour and tranquillity.
NB that Curtis and McDowell give only the English translation; I found the Latin original here.
I was rather glad to find that this book was given by my grandmother to my grandfather, as a present for his 64th birthday. (It’s his handwriting, I think, not hers.)
Published by Methuen in 1943, the previous year, it’s exactly what it says on the cover, an assemblage of important Irish historical documents from Laudabiliter to the 1921 Treaty and its immediate aftermath. It includes some classic texts that I would had never thought of seeking out for myself – the Statutes of Kilkenny and Poynings’ Law, for instance.
Inevitably the Anglo-Irish relationship is covered much more closely than any other topic, and it is hardly surprising that the well-documented Dublin Castle / London perspective provides a lot of material. But there are a couple of moments where the Irish nationalist voice is heard too – we get Hugh O’Neill’s declared war aims from 1599, and less than half a century later the agenda of the Confederation of Kilkenny in 1642.
This book was printed in 1943, and I see a copy of the 1977 reprint going for £46 on Amazon right now; otherwise I don’t think you’ll get it easily anywhere. This was my top unread book acquired in 2018; next (and last) on that list is The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald.
Die weiten Wälder, von Wiesen unterbrochen, bieten Tausenden genußreiche Gelegenheit, sich zu ergehen und dem Ballspiel, Cricket oder Lawn tennis zu huldigen, wozu die Erfordernisse reichlich vorhanden sind. Es ist ein Aussichtsthurm hier und in einer Stunde etwa kann man auf herrlichen Wegen den Hermannskogel erreichen, auf welchem auch ein uralter Thurm steht, dessen Entstehungsgeschichte der Castellan erzählt. Wir legitimirten uns in der Wirthschaft auf dem Kahlenberge mit der Anweisung des Tullner Beamten und wurden mit allem versorgt. Wir ließen Zwirner telephonisch benachrichtigen, daß wir gleich nach dem Mittagstisch nach Payerbach fahren wollten, um die herrliche Nacht auf dem Schneeberg zu verbringen. Man versah uns, als wir aufbrachen, mit einer Tasche, in der wir die nöthigsten Reiseerfordernisse und Mundvorrath mitnahmen, und wurden ersucht, Tasche und Reiserequisiten in Tulln abzugeben, von wo sie wieder gelegentlich zurückgebracht würden.
The wide forests, dotted with meadows, offer thousands of enjoyable opportunities to relax and to play ball games, cricket or lawn tennis, for which the equipment is readily available. There is a lookout tower here and in about an hour you can reach the Hermannskogel by following some magnificent paths. There is also an ancient tower on top of the Hermannskogel, whose Castellan will tell you the story of its origin. We checked in at the inn on the Kahlenberge with the approval of the official from Tulln, and were provided with everything. We had Zwirner notified by telephone that we wanted to leave for Payerbach right after lunch to spend the night on the Schneeberg. When we left, we were given a bag in which we took the most essential travel supplies and provisions, and we were asked to hand in the bag and travel documents in Tulln, from where they would be returned in due course.
Translation by me
I wrote about this 1893 novel when doing my write-up of 2020 as portrayed in science fiction, but thanks to a DeepL subscription, I have only now got around to actually reading it. I wrote previously, having skimmed the German text:
Here Julian West from Looking Backward and a friend from another utopian novel of the time visit a future Austria, which has successfully maintained the Hapsburg monarchy and aristocracy andat the same time adopted most of the socialism of Bellamy’s novel. Austria is part of a European Union (that phrase isn’t quite used) which stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals, but does not include England.
It is quite a short book – 200 large print pages in the most recent edition – with typically ponderous nineteenth-century German sentences with long subordinate clauses which even DeepL struggles with. The premise is that by 2020, Austria – and when we say Austria, we mean the entirety of the Hapsburg Empire as it was in 1893 – has long been a Communist utopia under a constitutional monarchy, thanks to the wise reforms enacted by Franz Josef II and his heir Franz Ferdinand when he in turn came to the throne. (In reality, Franz Ferdinand was a petulant bigot who loved killing animals, and if he had ever come to the throne he is unlikely to have ruled in an enlightened manner.) Everything is tightly regulated by the authorities and everyone loves this because society has been made perfect. Money has been abolished, and so has smoking.
Most modern reviewers remark on the future arrangement of European politics in the book, which is actually dealt with rather rapidly, in two as-you-know-Bob moments of exposition, the first in Chapter 7:
Austria no longer has an army, as a disarmament treaty has long existed in Europe; but it maintains a very important naval defence force. [NB that this is the Austria which controls Trieste and Rijeka.] All the Continental states, which in the east are fully protected by Russia in return for subsidies and seconded personnel, have agreed on a coastal defence alliance and maintain not only coastal fortifications but also a strong navy, partly to protect themselves against England, which has been driven out of all seas and islands from Gibraltar to the Red Sea, and partly to protect themselves against the predatory states in Argentina and China, from where piracy is shamelessly practised.
A more extended description in Chapter 13 explains that the European Union (as I said before, not quite given that name) depends on regional security as well as internal disarmament:
Turkish rule had been completely abolished and Russia had taken over Asia Minor and Arabia, Italy Egypt, France the area from Egypt to the western border of Algiers, Spain the entire west of northern Africa. The peoples of the Balkan states had formed four independent Christian empires under the sovereignty of the Emperor of Austria, who was also in command of the navy and coastal defence.
…We consider that there is no danger of the Union breaking up, as the German Confederation once did, and provision has also been made to ensure that Union law can develop in line with the times. We hope that England will soon be compelled [gezwungen] to join the Union, and for the still distant future we may well assume that the whole of Asia will be won over to the collective principle, and then Europe, Asia and Africa, which in reality form only one continent, will be united into a single confederation of states.
A lot to unpack here, perhaps more than these few paragraphs are actually worth, but I’ll just note that there is no reference to Islam anywhere in the book.
The other thing that surprised me was the book’s take on women and sex. The population has been kept under control and dispersed around the countryside – Vienna has only 3,500 inhabitants – and reproduction is controlled by the sinister and all-powerful Women’s Curia, a body which includes all women over the age of 18. Only a few women are allowed to have babies, for good old eugenic reasons. Women who give birth to illegitimate children, ie without permission of the Curia, are either forced to permanently wear a garment of shame covering their face and body, or graciously allowed to emigrate to Africa. (Nothing is said about the consequences for the fathers.) The Women’s Curia legislates and enforces all of this, and it is portrayed as a Good Thing.
I’m scratching my head to think of another sf novel, or even another novel, where pregnancy is treated quite so neurotically. Brave New World, perhaps; but in that case there are (almost) no pregnancies at all, human reproduction having been mechanised.
Having said that, it’s clear that there is a lot of sex happening in Neupauer’s future Austria, and his protagonist Julian West has several close encounters and one definite score with the lovely Giulietta. Nothing is said about how the large amount of sex doesn’t then lead to large numbers of babies, but perhaps we are meant to read between the lines of the unspoken activities of the Women’s Curia. The book ends with a long letter from Giulietta to Julian, in which what isn’t discussed is perhaps more interesting than what is.
Second paragraph of third chapter (with embedded quote):
In his comments on the Ruddymane episode Upton cites the View where Spenser, in his inventory of Irish customs supposedly inherited from the Scythians, refers to Irish war-cries: ” … at theire ioyninge of Battell they likewise Call vppon theire Captaines name or the worde of his Auncestours As they vnder Oneale crye Landargabo, that is the bloddie hande which is Oneles badge” (Spenser 1949, 103). Although Upton is right to make this connection with the Red Hand of Ulster his interpretation of the episode is unconvincing:
This wicked witch had slain the parents of young Ruddymane, the bloody-handed babe: —plainly alluding, I think, to the rebellion of the Oneals, whose badge was the bloody-hand, and who had all drank so deep of the charm and venom of Acrasia that their blood was infected with secret filth. [emphasis as original] (Upton 1987a, 378)
Given that the episode is about the seduction of “The gentlest knight … the good Sir Mordant” (2.1.49.8-9) it is strange that Upton should think it is the Native Irish O’Neills who have been infected. If Upton’s reading of the allegory is correct then we might ask what group or individual Acrasia is meant to represent and who or what has infected the blood of the O’Neills.
Just to warn you that there are a number of Irish history books working their way through my bookblog at the moment, as the tail-end of my 2018 purchases and some recent academic acquisitions come together.
This is a book-of-a-PhD-thesis, a genre that I’m sympathetic to; it takes the Faerie Queene as its core, and looks also at other writing by Spenser and his contemporaries, teasing out particularly what is said about women and gender identity, and how this relates to Spenser’s understanding of Ireland and the Irish. Spoiler: Spenser was not very convinced of the good points of either women or the Irish. There’s also a particularly good chapter on Spenser’s take on the wild Irish landscape. Substantial stuff which I’m not really equipped to judge more thoroughly. You can get it here.
