Just published today, this is the latest of the short Who ebooks published by Puffin for the 50th anniversary. It being August, it is the Eighth Doctor’s turn, in a brief but effective tale of body horror: a flesh-absorbing alien attacks a small American town, and the Doctor and a hastily acquired Asian-American companion must deal with it. Decently constructed and with sufficient callbacks to The Movie to reassure that this is meant to be part of the same continuity. (No detectable callbacks to the other Eighth Doctor books/comics/audios though.) Scarrow is apparently a rising YA writer, and on this basis I would look for more of his work.
August Books 24) Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston
Strongly recommended to me by sashajwolf, and very much worth reading. Hurston combines the research instincts of the anthropologist with the communication skills of a born story-teller, and looks in detail at local cult practices, especially regarding the undead, in Jamaica and especially in Haiti. It was especially interesting to reread this the week that Doonesbury reran the plot sequence where Duke becomes a zombie in the service of Baby Doc Duvalier, written fifty years later. Whether or not Gary Trudeau was aware of Hurston’s research, she has fundamentally informed the English speaking world’s take on zombies. Quite apart from that, it is a fantastic book, perhaps a little optimistic in the description of the status of American women, but otherwise very much taking Jamaica and Haiti on their own terms and in their own words. There are about twenty pages of musical transcriptions of traditional Haitian chants to the various deities.
Really it’s worth remembering that the supposedly well-ordered pantheons of European and Asian theologies all were in practice probably a lot more like the chaotic deities of Haiti which Hurston chronicles so well. What strengthens people’s belief isn’t really the intellectual coherence of their religious practice, it is how well it works to channel communal and social experiences which are difficult to deal with otherwise, and to give a sense of reassurance that the grottiness of this world may not be all that there is. Hurston conveys the Haitian experience of religion and belief very well.
I have to again complain about the presentation of the P.S. edition. The table of contents promises a foreword; there is none. There is an afterword by Henry Louis Gates, and then an after-afterword by Ishmael Reed which I suspect is the foreword misplaced. But the publishers really ought to have ensured that the contents page actually coincided with what is in the book.
August Books 23) Eleanor, Countess of Desmond, by Anne Chambers
I think this may have been Chambers’ first book, before her best selling biography of Grainne O’Malley, the pirate queen. It is journeyman stuff; there is no very clear differentiation between other people’s research, Chambers’ own findings, and her speculation about Eleanor’s mind-set as she witnessed the collapse of her husband’s mini-kingdom in south-west Ireland and the political shape of the island was changed forever. I could have done with a bit more on the bigger picture, and perhaps also some reflection of the plentiful research that has been done on women in sixteenth-century Ireland.
Eleanor was a contemporary of my ancestor Sir Nicholas White, and I was hoping that he might put in an appearance. He is just offscreen twice – they came within spitting distance of each other on 17 June 1580, White being part of the punitive expedition sent deep into Desmond territory that summer; and in 1592-93, Eleanor was tending to her sickly son held captive in the Tower of London while White was slowly dying there. they must have met up on the battlements occasionally to discuss old times, not that it did either of them much good. Chambers doesn’t mention him anyway, which is fair enough.
August Books 22) The A.B.C. Murders, by Agatha Christie
I have to say that after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I was getting a bit dismayed by the Christie formula, and wondering how many more genteel tales of homicide I could take. But The A.B.C. Murders is a cut above any of the other Christies I have recently read, apart from the superlative Ackroyd.
There are several very attractive points to the book. First, the case takes Poirot and Hastings out of their usual socio-economic comfort zone: three of the four murders are in lower middle class or working class settings, and Christie largely reverses her usual view of the universe where poor people are normally invisible. Second, the fact that the villain sets the story up as a battle of wits with Poirot from the start of the book gives it a completely different dynamic: it’s not a case of Poirot inserting himself into someone else’s tragedy, instead he is dragged into a nefarious plot from the very beginning, and it is a little gratifying to see him lose the initiative (though of course we cheer when he regains it). And finally, the speculation on the mind-set of the serial killer, in a novel written and set in the mid 1930s, reminds us that this is a topic of horrified fascination that has been around for a long time. Oh yes, and the plot is well constructed and the solution reasonably fair.
This was one of the ones I had read as a teenager and had fond memories of; and I was not disappointed to return to it.
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Peril at End House | Lord Edgware Dies | Murder on the Orient Express | Death in the Clouds | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | The Moving Finger | Crooked House | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party | Sleeping Murder
August Books 21) The Dalek Project, by Justin Richards, ill. Mike Collins
A rather decent standalone Eleventh Doctor adventure, in which he gets drawn back to the First World War where the basic concept of Victory of the Daleks is brought into an arms race plot where the evil pepperpots have persuaded arms manufacturers on both sides to construct the great new fighting machines; shades also of three great Troughton stories, The War Games and the two Dalek ones, repackaged for a new generation with Justin Richards’ lucid prose and Collins’ superb art. It doesn’t take the Doctor anywhere terribly new but retreads old ground with confidence.
August Books 20) The Best of Tardis Eruditorum, by Philip Sandifer
All of Sandifer’s essays are available on his blog, and all of them will eventually be available in book form as well; but for people like me who find the blog pieces a bit long to digest in the usual format, and want to find the good bits, this is a very useful selection – with each essay prefaced by some introductory thoughts about how they fit into the project and into his life.
This basically has two essays for each of the first eight Doctors, and one each for Nine and Ten. The latter two, on Rose and School Reunion, are among the best in the book (though the rhetorical impact of the Rose piece is stronger if you know Sandifer’s style); the other pieces which were new to me and caught my attention specially were the ones on The Movie and Mary Whitehouse.
The full list of essays here (and I won’t link to them all) is The Web Planet, The Tenth Planet, The Enemy of the World, The Mind Robber, The Claws of Axos, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, The Brain of Morbius, Mary Whitehouse, City of Death, Earthshock, Terminus, Attack of the Cybermen, Doctor in Distress, Paradise Towers, The Curse of Fenric, White Darkness, The Movie, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Rose and School Reunion. Worth noting that this includes three Cybermen stories, no Dalek stories, two novels, two pieces on music and an excellent attack on conservatism. I don’t know if this will be available again in future but I’m glad to have snagged it while it was going.
Bechbretha
At a garden-party in Hillsborough, County Down,
ten or more summers ago
a swarm of bees
rolled all its thingamy
into one ball
and lodged in the fork of a tree.
There was mayhem.
A few of us had the presence of mind
to grab another canapé
and hold on to our glasses of wine.
Mostly, though,
there was a mad dash for Government House.
Once inside, I found myself
smack up against Merlyn Rees
who was hugging his breasts
like a startled nymph.
I’m not sure what possessed me
to suggest he ask Enoch Powell
over from Loughbrickland.
I suppose that when I think of bees
I think of a row of hives
running up the side of an orchard
in Loughbrickland,
and then I think of Enoch Powell.
Believe it or not,
Merlyn took me at my word
and dispatched an equerry
to make the call.
I was stifling a chuckle
at the notion of Enoch Agricola
(and half-remembering how those hives are fake)
when the equerry slunk back
and whispered something in Merlyn’s ear.
They both left the room.
Now that I had the floor to myself
I launched into a small meditation
on Loughbrickland.
I described the ‘brick’ in Loughbrickland
as ‘a stumbling block’
and referred to Bricriu Poison-Tongue
of Bricriu’s Feast.
Then I touched on another local king,
Congal the One-Eyed,
who was blinded by a bee-sting.
This led me neatly to the Bechbretha,
the Brehon judgements
on every conceivable form
of bee-dispute,
bee-trespass and bee-compensation.
My maiden speech was going swimmingly
and I was getting to my point
when a cheer went up
and everyone crowded to the windows.
A man in hat and veil
(whom I still take to have been Enoch Powell)
had brushed the swarm into a box
and covered it with the Union Jack.
Try as I might to win them back
with the fact that 90 per cent of British bees
were wiped out by disease
between 1909 and 1917
I’d lost them …
Merlyn had chosen this moment to reappear
through a secret door
in the book-lined wall
(which raised a nervous laugh
among the Castle Catholics)
and, not to be outdone,
called for order as he reached
into his mulberry cummerbund.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is the very handkerchief
that Melmoth the Wanderer
left at the top of the cliff.’
ten or more summers ago
a swarm of bees
rolled all its thingamy
into one ball
and lodged in the fork of a tree.
There was mayhem.
A few of us had the presence of mind
to grab another canapé
and hold on to our glasses of wine.
Mostly, though,
there was a mad dash for Government House.
Once inside, I found myself
smack up against Merlyn Rees
who was hugging his breasts
like a startled nymph.
I’m not sure what possessed me
to suggest he ask Enoch Powell
over from Loughbrickland.
I suppose that when I think of bees
I think of a row of hives
running up the side of an orchard
in Loughbrickland,
and then I think of Enoch Powell.
Believe it or not,
Merlyn took me at my word
and dispatched an equerry
to make the call.
I was stifling a chuckle
at the notion of Enoch Agricola
(and half-remembering how those hives are fake)
when the equerry slunk back
and whispered something in Merlyn’s ear.
They both left the room.
Now that I had the floor to myself
I launched into a small meditation
on Loughbrickland.
I described the ‘brick’ in Loughbrickland
as ‘a stumbling block’
and referred to Bricriu Poison-Tongue
of Bricriu’s Feast.
Then I touched on another local king,
Congal the One-Eyed,
who was blinded by a bee-sting.
This led me neatly to the Bechbretha,
the Brehon judgements
on every conceivable form
of bee-dispute,
bee-trespass and bee-compensation.
My maiden speech was going swimmingly
and I was getting to my point
when a cheer went up
and everyone crowded to the windows.
A man in hat and veil
(whom I still take to have been Enoch Powell)
had brushed the swarm into a box
and covered it with the Union Jack.
Try as I might to win them back
with the fact that 90 per cent of British bees
were wiped out by disease
between 1909 and 1917
I’d lost them …
Merlyn had chosen this moment to reappear
through a secret door
in the book-lined wall
(which raised a nervous laugh
among the Castle Catholics)
and, not to be outdone,
called for order as he reached
into his mulberry cummerbund.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is the very handkerchief
that Melmoth the Wanderer
left at the top of the cliff.’
by Paul Muldoon, first published in Meeting the British (1987)
Links I found interesting for 22-08-2013
- Far too late and quietly the party sort of says the right thing about David Miranda and Schedule 7
Lib Dem fail.
- 8 Real Spies And Actual Bad Guys Who Got Shorter Sentences Than Bradley Manning
No comment.
- Can You Solve Slate’s Gerrymandering Jigsaw Puzzle?
Democratic engineering.
- Lessons From Coalition – The Two Biggest Problems: Betrayal and Betrayal
Alex on the Lib Dems.
Wednesday Reading
Current:
Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston
The Crown of Dalemark, by Diana Wynne Jones
Eleanor, Countess of Desmond, by Anne Chambers
The A.B.C. Murders, by Agatha Christie
Last books finished
[Doctor Who] The Dalek Project, by Justin Richards
The Best of Tardis Eruditorum, by Philip Sandifer
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie
Resistance, by Anita Shreve
[Doctor Who] The Dalek Generation, by Nicholas Briggs
Far North & Other Dark Tales, by Sara Maitland
Far North, by Marcel Theroux
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, by Hergé
Next books
Royal Assassin, by Robin Hobb
Rebus's Scotland, by Ian Rankin
The Tunnel at the End of the Light, by Stefan Petrucha
Books acquired in last week:
The A.B.C. Murders, by Agatha Christie
August Books 19) The Mysterious Affair At Styles, by Agatha Christie
Written in 1916, set in 1917, published in 1920, this was Agatha Christie’s first murder mystery and also the first novel starring Hercule Poirot – already described as old and a refugee from occupied Belgium, yet with another fifty years of detecting ahead of him. It’s a little rough around the edges – in particular, the narrator’s infatuation with one of the suspects is a bit overdone – but as John Curran says in the foreword to my edition, it has a lot of the ingredients of Christie’s future success in place: “an extended family, a poisoning drama, a twisting plot, and a dramatic and unexpected final revelation.” Still, I suspect its popularity rests on its crucial place in the chronology of the Christie canon and on a couple of decent screen adaptations rather than on general quality. I had read it as a teenager but completely forgotten any of the details.
My edition also includes the deleted original version of the final scene, where Poirot would have unfolded the solution while testifying in court; Christie’s publisher told her that this was too implausible (this, in a novel with time-travelling robots a Martian invasion three different people accessing strychnine the day the victim decides to change the terms of her will) and she opted instead for the grand revelation scene in the drawing room for which she was to become famous. It’s also notable that the story is illustrated with maps and handwriting samples, to add verisimilitude, a bit reminiscent of the way we are told that Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is a montage of our hero’s own photographs; there’s probably a micro-study to be done of how and why Christie moved away from that technique.
This is the fifth most popular of Christie’s novels on LibraryThing, and the fourth starring Poirot, but only the first in which the perpetrator(s) of the crime are actually handed over to the police and judicial system at the end. And for all that Christie is seen as the poison queen, this is also the first which solely features poisoning – Roger Ackroyd is not poisoned, nobody in Death on the Nile is poisoned, and the victim on the Orient Express is drugged but done away with by more physical means. I shall keep tracking these statistics (if I keep up my Christie reading).
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Peril at End House | Lord Edgware Dies | Murder on the Orient Express | Death in the Clouds | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | The Moving Finger | Crooked House | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party | Sleeping Murder
August Books 18) Resistance, by Anita Shreve
Top ten books available in English tagged “Belgium” on LibraryThing:
King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild
The Sorrow of Belgium, by Hugo Claus
The Lady and the Unicorn, by Tracy Chevalier
Villette, by Charlotte Brontë
Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Travel Guide: Brussels, Bruges, Ghent & Antwerp
Resistance, by Anita Shreve
The Angel Maker, by Stefan Brijs
Asterix in Belgium, by René Goscinny
The Folding Star, by Alan Hollinghurst
The Misfortunates, by Dimitri Verhulst
Fear and Trembling, by Amélie Nothomb
It will be apparent that I am working very slowly through the fiction on this list. (Cloud Atlas comes in at #12, by the way.) Resistance is quite a decent wartime romance, American pilot inevitably has a secret love affair with the woman who saves him, and some quite interesting dynamics around the villagers, with everyone’s loyalty open to suspicion, especially with the (graphically described) brutality of German reprisals. I did not feel completely satisfied with the Belgianness of the setting, but I suppose it is a fair try from an American writer writing for an American audience who is interested in aviation rather than Belgium.
August Books 17) The Dalek Generation, by Nicholas Briggs
Very nice to get a book by the bloke what does the voice of the Daleks, which is actually about the Daleks, autographed by him including the word "EXTERMINATE", which you have to imagine being read by Briggs doing his Dalek voice.
As with a number of the recent Who novels, this is aimed at a slightly younger readership, with the Doctor's co-adventurers being three children rescued from a spaceship by him after their parents' death (no novel with Clara yet, as far as I know, although she has been on the show since April, or perhaps longer depending how you count). I was very interested to note that, like Malorie Blackman's The Ripple Effect published last month, The Dalek Generation presents a situation where the Daleks are perceived as a force for good rather than evil, with the Doctor frustrated in his attempts to warn against them. I do wonder if this is a subtle (or maybe even unsubtle) hint about a storyline we can expect for the two episodes due to air later this year.
That apart, it's quite a different story from Blackman's; it's clear to the reader from the first chapter that the Daleks really are evil here, but the story of what they are looking for, and how the Doctor and his traumatised young friends thwart their plans in the face of a wilfully ignorant totalitarian society which won't believe them, is nicely convoluted and also evocative of various previous Who stories. If you are happy to adjust for the target readership, it is very enjoyable.
It is interesting that although there has been no Eleven-on-his-own TV story (unless you count Closing Time) there have been several books and audios now featuring neither Amy nor Clara. This does give the writers a chance to demonstrate their skill in catching the nuances of Matt Smith's portrayal, but I'm not really a fan of the Doctor-on-his-own stories. They can sometimes work very well – indeed, The Deadly Assassin is one of my personal favourites – but the interaction between Doctor and regular sidekick is an important part of the show's dynamic, and should be omitted sparingly, if at all.
August Books 15) Far North, by Sara Maitland; 16) Far North, by Marcel Theroux
I was tickled by the thought of two books with similar titles by rather different authors to the extent of deciding to read them at the same time. They are, however, very different in format. Sara Maitland offers a series of short stories and vignettes, reworking various classic themes including various fair stories; Marcel Theroux’s novel is a post-apocalyptic tale of survival against the odds in Siberia after civilisation has collapsed.
Yet they do have something pretty fundamental in common: both are told from a female perspective. All of the Maitland stories are narrated by women either in first person or very tight third; Theroux’s first person narrator, Makepeace, is one of the few survivors of a wave of American settlers to arrive in Siberia just before things changed forever.
Maitland’s stories are good, and exemplify her English take on magical realism, but I found myself more engrossed in Theroux’s single narrative. He isn’t really known as a genre author, so I was hoping that he would do something a bit different with the post-apocalypse theme. He didn’t really – he advocates a general well-rooted suspicion of authority, plus some well-worn sexual clichés – but it is well enough done as it is.
The Theroux Far North was up for the Clarke award a few years back, but lost (fairly) to The City & The City, whose author is a fellow alumnus of Clare College Cambridge – indeed Marcel Theroux and I were exact contemporaries as undergraduates, though the only time I remember talking to him at any length was as I moved into a house in Eltisley Avenue that he was moving out of immediately after graduation. I may try some more of his work. (I am already a Sara Maitland fan.)
August Books 14) Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, by Hergé
Even the most enthusiastic Tintin fan must admit that this, the first of the Adventures of Tintin, is one of the least impressive of the entire series. (The best order to read them is probably to start with Cigars of the Pharaoh and go through to the end, and then go back to read the first three for completeness.) It's not just the monotonous propaganda of Le Petit Vingtième's anti-Communist agenda, or the crudity of the artwork; it's also the way in which Tintin escapes from every threat by simply beating up the Soviets (at one point taking on five armed guards and defeating them almost unscathed). The climax, where he finds the secret bunker where Lenin Trotsky and Stalin have stored the wealth they have stolen from the Plain People of Russia, reminded me of the opening scene from The Naked Gun, only much sillier and executed more earnestly and much less competently (the bunker is located under a fake haunted house).
For all that, there are some points of interest. For the Tintin fan, it is notable that Snowy / Milou contributes a running commentary for the reader's benefit, a role he rather lost in later books. Some of the individual frames show the latent genius of the 22-year-old artist (one in particular foreshadows the cover of The Black Islandvery last frame Hergé ever drew of him, where he is faced with the prospect of being frozen into a clear plastic block as a sculpture).
It's also worth reflecting that when the police in Berlin give Tintin a hard time, this isn't yet the Nazi regime, which was still four years in the future; but the German occupation of Belgium was little more than a decade in the past, and Belgian troops were still in the Rhineland, occupying a strip from Aachen to Kleve, an would not leave for another year. Tintin does get a hero's welcome at the iconic Tempelhof airport in Berlin on his way back, but it is a case of mistaken identity. In the last frame he arrives at the equally iconic Gare du Nord on Place Rogier in Brussels, demolished half a century ago, to general rejoicing. I don't think there is a single speaking female character in the book.
Links I found interesting for 16-08-2013
- How are those with mental health problems treated by @Atos?
More on the British govt’s war on the disabled.
- How could Atos class such a sick man as fit for work?
A case from Lancashire.
- Man collapsed but still ‘fit for work’
A case from Derbyshire.
- My First Work Capability Assessment
@simplicitly gives a first-hand account.
- Former Darlington nurse in fitness to work dispute
Another report, from County Durham.
August Books 13) Eater of Wasps, by Trevor Baxendale
The wasps surrounded him, settling on his face and hands. He yelled and brushed them away, felt the inevitable stings on his hands and his fingers.
More were flying around his head, crawling in his hair and on his neck. He stumbled over a kitchen chair and fell to his knees. The air was full of insects, his ears filled with their agitated noise.
They were after him. It was deliberate. Rigby knew it.
A very effective tale of body horror here, with some similarities in central theme and historical setting to the later TV story The Unicorn and the Wasp but without the Agatha Christie bits and with more killer aliens. The Doctor is starting to behave all unsympathetically, though, and veers closer to cruelty than I would like. However the two companions, Fitz and Anji, have plenty to do and the wasps themselves are tremendously well visualised, as is the village which appears normal but is concealing horror and abomination.
August Books 12) The History of The Hobbit, vol 1: Mr Baggins, by John D. Rateliff
Having finished the History of Middle Earth series, I have made a start on the two-volume History of The Hobbit which I acquired a couple of years ago. It is actually rather good – as well as following through the manuscript changes (of which the most unsettling is that Gandalf was originally the name of the dwarf leader we know as Thorin Oakenshield; the wizard of early drafts was Bladorthin), Rateliff has taken the time to chase down the history of various elements of the story of The HobbitThe Hobbit was affected by and in turn affected the other writing Tolkien was engaged in at the time, some of which became The Silmarillion and some of which only saw light in The History of Middle Earth. Note also that Laketown is the only culture in Middle Earth which is clearly rooted in the Western European medieval period which was Tolkien’s own specialisation, and its Master is the only speaking character in the entire corpus who has won an election. Looking forward to the second volume now.
Links I found interesting for 15-08-2013
- E.B. White explains why he wrote Charlotte’s Web
‘A book is a sneeze.’
- Humanities! Science is not your enemy, it’s a friend who owes you money
1) Steven Pinker; 2) UK higher education policy.
- A-levels day: 10 mistakes parents make when reacting to results
"If you want to destroy my life just tell me to my face."
- EU birth certificates myth swallowed whole by the anti-European press
UK minister lies, story swallowed whole by journalists.
Wednesday reading (a little late)
Current:
Far North & Other Dark Tales, by Sara Maitland
Far North, by Marcel Theroux
Resistance, by Anita Shreve
[Doctor Who] The Dalek Generation, by Nicholas Briggs
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, by Hergé
Last books finished
[Doctor Who] Eater of Wasps, by Trevor Baxendale
The History of the Hobbit, vol 1: Mr Baggins, by John D. Rateliff
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, by Jeanette Winterson
Shakespeare's Planet, by Clifford D. Simak
Shakedown, by Terrance Dicks
The Gods of Pegāna, by Lord Dunsany
Standing in Another Man's Grave, by Ian Rankin
The Monsters and the Critics, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie
Proportional Representation in Ireland, by James Creed Meredith
Next books
Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston
The Crown of Dalemark, by Diana Wynne Jones
Eleanor, Countess of Desmond, by Anne Chambers
Royal Assassin, by Robin Hobb
Books acquired in last week:
The Gods of Pegāna, by Lord Dunsany
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie
Helen Waddell, by Felicitas Corrigan
August Books 11) Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, by Jeanette Winterson
When I left the infant school in disgrace for burning down the play kitchen, the headmistress, who wore black tweed because she was in mourning for Scotland, told my mother that I was domineering and aggressive.
I was. I beat up the other kids, boys and girls alike, and when I couldn’t understand what was being said to me in a lesson I just left the classroom and bit the teachers if they tried to make me come back.
I realise my behaviour wasn’t ideal but my mother believed I was demon possessed and the headmistress was in mourning for Scotland. It was hard to be normal.
I haven’t actually read any of Winterson’s fiction, and I realise that this autobiography is meant to be read by those who already know Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, but I really enjoyed it anyway. The first two thirds are about her childhood in Accrington, brought up by her adoptive parents, her abusive mother a deeply pious member of the Elim Pentecostal Church who had the teenage Jeanette exorcised for being gay, and her own efforts to escape the cultural shackles of her family to study in Oxford. It is tough and frank about sex, class, religion and parenting, and also very funny in places.
The final section is much less funny; it is the account of how she traced and got to know her birth mother, written much more as an emotional diary than as a procedural account (though the bureaucracy is clearly pretty infuriating). It is a story that surely fascinates us all, whether or not we have direct experience with adoption or long-lost family members. The ending of the story is pleasingly undramatic, given the intensity of feeling that got us there.
Winterson comes across as an intense driven personality, possibly rather difficult in person, but certainly very interesting to know. And the book, in its two unequal parts, is very readable.
Top unread non-fiction:
Peleponnesian War | Innocents Abroad | Terre des Hommes | The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Race of a Lifetime / Game Change | Proust and the Squid | The Tipping Point | Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl | Elementary Forms of Religious Life | Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man | History of Christianity | History of the World in 100 Objects | A Room of One’s Own | Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? | The Last Mughal | Reading the Oxford English Dictionary | Jane Austen | Homage to Catalonia | The Road to Middle Earth | Essence of Christianity | The Strangest Man
August Books 10) Shakespeare’s Planet, by Clifford D. Simak
He stopped dead in horror. Affixed above the door was a human skull, grinning down at them.
Carnivore saw him staring at it. “Shakespeare bids us welcome,” he said. “That is Shakespeare’s skull.”
One of Simak’s typically low-key stories, with lots of interesting ideas – the central character has been in cold-sleep for a thousand years, and is the only living human survivor on a ship whose central computer merges three people’s personalities; Shakespeare’s Planet itself is the end point for a network of poorly understood interstellar transport tunnels, where the only intelligent creature mildly regrets eating the human known as Shakespeare a while back; periodic psychic shock hits everyone left alive every now and then; a woman turns up from Earth to investigate, but the situation s resolved by inhuman and incomprehensible forces. It’s a bit like a combination of Red Dwarf with the end of A Handful of Dust. Not especially memorable but quite typical of Simak’s style.
August Books 9) Shakedown, by Terrance Dicks
This New Adventure is an expanded novelisation of a 55-minute video made in 1994 and starring Jan Chappell (Cally from Blake’s 7) as the captain of a space yacht whose crew includes Carole Ann Ford (Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter), Sophie Aldred (Ace), Brian Croucher (the second Travis from Blake’s 7) and Michael Wisher (the original Davros) as well as a guy who can’t act. The setting of the video is HMS Belfast which actually does rather a good job of conveying the cramped quarters of a small spaceship; the Sontarans and Rutans are (apparently for licensing reasons) a bit different to what we saw on the screen in Old Who, but well enough realised for a low-budget production; the worst bit about it is the guy who can’t act trying to be Sophie Aldred’s lover, and the second worst is the somewhat stereotypical roles given to her and Ford, but these are survivable flaws.
The novel compresses this to 60 pages in the second half of a 270-page book, apparently a partial sequel to
August Books 8) Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie
…it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.
Another of the great Poirot novels that I had not previously read, here we have a nicely classic situation of a series of killings on a tourist steamer in Egypt, with the people who might reasonably be suspected of the first murder on emotional grounds ruled out from the start; the solution depends a bit on good luck and excellent planning, and while Christie has given us the same information that she gives Poirot, it is a little implausible (though not quite as implausible as Orient Express). It is noticeable that, once again, Poirot enables an ending where natural justice rather than the Egyptian state has the last say.
It is also noticeable that, apart from one engineer, none of the steamer’s crew is even named, and the actual Egyptians are barely identified as people at all; the cast includes a stereotypical German doctor and a leftist revolutionary who is not what he seems; there are two old ladies with different embarrassing secrets; there is a slightly subdued romantic subplot involving minor characters. The Nile settings are described competently but not in detail. I am a bit surprised that this novel is quite so popular; I guess the various screen adaptations will have helped.
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Peril at End House | Lord Edgware Dies | Murder on the Orient Express | Death in the Clouds | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | The Moving Finger | Crooked House | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party | Sleeping Murder
50 SF Novels That Everyone Should Read
List from here. As usual, I have bolded those I have read, italicised those I started but did it finish (in this case, series where I have not read every book), and struck through those I bounced off. Also links where I have reviewed the books (or at least some of te series) online.
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
The Lord of the Rings trilogy [sic], J.R.R. Tolkien
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Gormenghast series, Mervyn Peake
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
Kindred, Octavia Butler
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny (Odd not to list the entire series)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The City & The City, China Miéville
The Once and Future King, T.H. White
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Zone One, Colson Whitehead
The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
The Time Quartet, Madeleine L’Engle
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
The Female Man, Joanna Russ
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson
Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Dune Chronicles, Frank Herbert
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Neuromancer, William Gibson
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
The Foundation series, Isaac Asimov
Discworld, Terry Pratchett (Yes, I have read all 45 novels)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Among Others, Jo Walton
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard
Witch World, Andre Norton
Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
Little, Big, John Crowley
The Dragonriders of Pern series, Anne McCaffrey
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Patricia C. Wrede
The Castle trilogy, Diana Wynne Jones
The Giver, Lois Lowry
I confess I have not heard of Colson Whitehead or Lois Lowry, and I have not read anything by Charles Yu or Patricia Wrede; does anyone have any particular thoughts on those writers? The others on the list which I have not read are all works I plan to get around to, or at least sample, by authors with whom I am familiar.
August Books 7) Standing In Another Man’s Grave, by Ian Rankin
‘I’m saying Rebus got results the old way, without seeming to earn them. He did tat because he got close to some nasty people in a way you couldn’t. This is what you’re good at, Malcolm.’ He tapped the desk. ‘Rebus specialises in something a bit different – doesn’t necessarily make him the enemy.’
Rebus is back; though retired from the police, he is helping out at a cold-case unit as a civilian contractor, and remains as determinedly individualistic as ever. In this story his determination to identify and track down a serial killer by whatever means necessary is a uncomfortable contrast with the structures and systems of the modern force, which Rankin suggests has lost sight of the ethical forest for the procedural trees; the story is at least as much about Rebus’ relationship with his former workplace as about the crime. An excellent addition to the series.
August Books 6) The Gods of Pegāna, by Lord Dunsany
The King said unto the prophet: “O Prophet of All the gods save One, shall I indeed die?”
And the prophet answered: “O King! thy people may not rejoice for ever, and some day the King will die.”
And the King answered: “This may be so, but certainly thou shalt die. It may be that one day I shall die, but till then the lives of the people are in my hands.”
Then guards led the prophet away.
And there arose prophets in Aradec who spake not of death to Kings.
This is another book available in its original format online, complete with illustrations by S.H. Sime. It is quite a remarkable achievement, a short collection of fantasy vignettes illustrating a new pantheon, led by the always-capitalised creator god MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ, who has fallen asleep and must not be woken (which may sound familiar); the people of Pegāna, and their prophets, have a very uneasy relationship with the various deities.
Both J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft, teenagers when it was first published, claimed to have been inspired by The Gods of Pegāna and one can see the links, though of course they took it in quite different directions. (Lovecraft also mentions Sime’s art, and one can see its influence in Tolkien’s drawings too.) Looking at it from the other direction, you can detect the influence of W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, both of whom Dunsany would ave known well, along with perhaps some elements from his mother’s cousin Sir Richard Burton. But Dunsany took all of these and made his own secondary creation; I don’t think it is mch of an exaggeration to say that he helped set the tone for a whole genre.
August Books 5) The Monsters and the Critics, by J.R.R. Tolkien
A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.
This is a collection of seven lectures by Tolkien, of which I think I had previously read only “On Fairy Stories” and “A Secret Vice”. As always, they are an interesting insight into how his mind worked, or at least how he wanted us to think it worked. The more academic pieces (in particular the second, “On Translating Beowulf”) are somewhat moored in academic controversies of their time, which may or may not have subsided by now and which in any case I am not close to. But the title piece rises above that to give an argument for appreciating Beowulf as a real story with serious monsters, rather than just a source for scholarly discussion on vaguely related topics, and that is the point made in the vivid metaphor of the man who built his tower on inherited land.
The other highlight for me, even as a non-Welsh speaker, is the lecture “English and Welsh” urging those with an interest in the history of the English language not to ignore its nearest geographical neighbour. He makes the same general point made much later by McWhorter, that English shares a significant substratum with Welsh (and he is very insistent that it is Welsh/British rather than the Goidelic languages), though interestingly uses a completely different set of linguistic/grammatical clues to McWhorter in making the argument. So there may well be something to it.
“On Fairy Stories” has quite a lot of information about Tolkien’s views of other works of fantasy literature, ancient and modern; it is a bit less successful at setting up an analytical framework for looking at fairy stories as a whole (Farah Mendlesohn seems to me to have a more useful and more widely applicable approach), but again he makes a convincing emotional appeal to treat the stories first and foremost as stories for an intended audience, rather than for anything else. His valedictory address, at the end of the book, is an amusing but somewhat rambling justification for wandering off the point for most of his career, but in fact a commitment to an aesthetic of narrative seems to have been precisely the point, one which he successfully communicated through both his fiction and his non-fiction.
Wednesday Reading
Current:
Standing in Another Man's Grave, by Ian Rankin
The Monsters and the Critics, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The History of the Hobbit, vol 1: Mr Baggins, by John D. Rateliff
Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie
Proportional Representation in Ireland, by James Creed Meredith
Last books finished
[Doctor Who] The Wages of Sin, by David A. McIntee
Kraken, by China Mieville
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie
Next books
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, by Jeanette Winterson
Shakespeare's Planet, by Clifford D. Simak
Far North, by Sara Maitland
[Doctor Who] Shakedown, by Terrance Dicks
Books acquired in last week:
Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie
Dalek I Loved You (50th Anniversary edition), by Nick Griffiths
Dining With The Doctor, by Chris-Rachel Oseland
Who & Me, by Barry Letts
Tardis Eruditorum Vol. 2 – Patrick Troughton, by Philip Sandifer
VWORP!, by Earl Green
The Best of TARDIS Eruditorum, by Philip Sandifer
Here's One I Wrote Earlier, by Peter Purves
Blue Box Boy: A Memoir of Doctor Who in Four Episodes, by Matthew Waterhouse
Self Portrait: My Journey as an Actress, Wife and Mother in the Swinging Sixties, by Anneke Wills
The Big Finish Companion, Volume 1, by Richard Dinnick
The Big Finish Companion, Volume 2, by Kenny Smith
LT unread books tally: 436.
August Books 4) Proportional Representation in Ireland, by James Creed Meredith
Under the single transferable vote system there is every inducement to vote for a crank, and he generally manages to amass a considerable number of late preferences. For most of us are cranks when probed as deep as a ninth or tenth preference.
James Creed Meredith is one of those neglected figures in Irish history who managed to play a important role in several fields of intellectual endeavour (including science fiction), as well as setting up the legal system of the nascent Irish state, ending his career as a member of the Supreme Court from 1937 to 1942. In 1913, he turned his talents to the question of electoral systems for a devolved legislature in Ireland. The Home Rule Bill then being discussed provided for an all-Ireland Parliament with a 164 member House of Commons and a 40-member Senate; I confess that I was utterly unaware of the electoral arrangements prescribed, which were that the Senate should be entirely nominated at first and then elected by proportional representation from the provinces, and that the House of Commons would be elected from constituencies of a variety of sizes, with those electing three or more members (nine seats with 31 MPs) doing so by proportional representation (incidentally the multi-member seats were mainly urban, and the smaller districts rural, which – whether by accident or design – would surely have resulted in under-representation of the Left). The Irish Parliament had the power to change the House of Commons electoral system once established, but there was no such power as regards the Senate.
Meredith, a strong supporter of proportional representation over first-past-the-post (as we now call it), makes an equally strong argument that the single transferable vote is not a good system in general and that it was unsuited to Ireland in 1913 in particular. His preferred option instead is a modification of the voting system which then applied – and in fact still does – in, of all places, my adopted country, Belgium: an open list system, with the additional points that parties should be allowed to form tactical coalitions to pool their votes, and that the final seats should be allocated by Droop quota and largest remainder rather than by the d’Hondt method.
Meredith makes the point that STV is not in fact a proportional system, and that its supporters are entirely disingenuous about it effect on party politics; and much of this part of his critique remains pretty valid today, and in some respects it has been born out by Irish experience in the century since he wrote. It is undeniably true that STV encourages parties to put up fewer candidates than a list system does. It is also clear that the fewer candidates a party nominates, the greater the role of the party selectorate in choosing them. In my own Belgian village last October, four of the five parties put up a full slate of candidates for the 21 seats available, so we had 89 candidates to choose from (out of a population of just over 10,000, so roughly one inhabitant in a hundred was on the ballot paper); compare with Omagh in Northern Ireland in 2010, where there were also 21 seats up for grabs, but in three 7-seat areas with a total of 30 candidates (out of a population of just under 20,000, so one person in 600 was a candidate). In Oud-Heverlee, no party ran fewer than 5 candidates; in Omagh, no party other than Sinn Féin ran more than two candidates in any area (and the Shinners’ largest slate was five).
From the point of view of party management, open lists are pretty ideal. You have a great excuse for candidate recruitment, candidates have every incentive to work hard at getting their own personal vote out (which benefits the party as a whole) and you don’t have to worry about losing votes which transfer away at later counts under STV. It’s not surprising that reform-minded Irish politicians today tend to advocate a move away from STV to a list system (missing the point that the real problem is when you insist that government ministers must also be burdened with constituency duties).
Where I part company with Meredith is that I don’t agree that what is good for party managers is necessarily good for politics in general. I concede some of his points – including the argument that STV’s favouring of moderate candidates against the extremes is in fact a strike against its claims to proportionality (it’s a hit I am willing to take) – but it still seems to me that STV offers the voter more transparency and clarity over the process, and more influence over the result, than any list system ever can. Meredith makes much of the need to better integrate the reality of political parties into the electoral system; in fact a lot of that work has been done since 1913, with parties now registered legal entities, with certain statutory duties and obligations, in a manner undreamt of in 1983, never mind 1913.
Still, it’s a very interesting book for us psephological anoraks. I do not believe I have read a more robust denunciation of STV from the pro-electoral reform side of the debate. I suspect that Meredith, by pointing out the impracticality of province-wide elections for the Senate (including 14 for Ulster, presumably the same for Leinster) may have had one immediate effect on the Home Rule legislation – the Senate ended up in the Act as a body whose members were to remain nominated but (after its first term) by the Irish rather than the British government, making it an unabashed rubber stamp and effectively demonstrating, a century ago, that Ireland really doesn’t need a second chamber at all.
August Books 3) The Wages of Sin, by David A. McIntee
Hurrah! Another Liz Shaw story, as the Dctor, newly freed by the Time Lords, takes her and Jo for a spin. Liz being Liz, she asks to see the Tunguska Event; the Tardis being the Tardis, they arrive instead a few years later in St Petersburg just in time to get embroiled in the assassination of Rasputin (to which I have a mild family connection). As usual, McIntee’s historical research is superb and detailed, without crowding out the regular characters; I’d have liked more banter between Liz and Jo, but I enjoyed what we got, Liz as the more serious cerebral type occasionally wrong-footed by Jo’s stronger practicality; and the ethical dilemma of non-interference with history is brought home to the Doctor rather brutally at the end. Rather more (implied) sex and (explicit) violence than most Who books, but rather difficult to write a book on this topic without it.
I’m trying to think of any other “pure historical” Third Doctor story, and coming up blank, which is actually a little surprising.