After some very downbeat New Adventures in my recent reading, it was good to read one that deliberately and successfully played up the comedy – this often misfires for me, but in this case I was able to roll with the very alien creatures and their sinister plans while also sympathising very much with the confused new companions Roz and Chris; like them, I was never completely convinced that I knew what was going on, but it was fun and kept me engaged.‘You’ve had more experience with the man. It doesn’t always end like that, does it?’ She realized that Benny was of a sudden looking slightly nervous. ‘Does it?’
‘Um,’ said Benny.
March Books 16) Bruss. Brussels in Shorts, ed. Ilke Froyen and Piet Joostens
These are the ten winning entries of an international competition for graphic short stories set in Brussels, and specifically using the setting of the Oude Graanmarkt (aka the Vieux Marché aux Grains), a city centre square which I occasionally wander through on the rare occasions I am in that side of town.
Inevitably, the mandate was interpreted in various ways, and in fact two of my favourite pieces (Tomáš Kučerovský’s “Stereotypen” and William Goldsmith’s “De Moderne Rondeau”) both contrast the fading gentility of the central square with the European Parliament’s modernist architecture, which of course I know much better. Kučerovský (whose complaint that “I don’t really get Magritte, Brussels isn’t surreal at all”, illustrates this entry) has quite a witty deconstruction of what people think they see in Brussels. Goldsmith’s protagonist gets sucked into a historical mystery linking Brussels and Canada, a hundred years apart.
I bought the book mainly to try and improve my vestigial knowledge of comics in Flanders, but only three of the ten pieces are actually by Flemish writers; of these, the one I liked best was “De Wandeling” by Conz (Constantijn Van Cauwenberghe), in which the protagonist takes a ghostly dinosaur on the walk from the Oude Graanmarkt to the Natural History Museum. (The other two locals are Frederik Van den Stock and Steven “Stedho” Dhondt.) All good stuff though.
March Books 15) What’s Up With Catalonia?, translated and edited by Liz Castro
This is a digestible book of 35 essays about Catalonia, all written at the end of last year, which is being widely distributed by sympathisers of the Catalan cause. The two key grievances which come up again and again are the question of fiscal imbalance, where Catalonia feels that it is subsidising the manifestly unsuccessful policies of the central Spanish state, over which is has little say and for which it gets little in return; and the language issue – using Catalan in public could get you arrested not very long ago, and Madrid does little to reassure Catalan concerns on this point. There are two pieces about Europe, a snapshot of Brussels opinion by a leading MEP, and a brief but powerful piece by my old mate Edward Hugh on the political economics (or the economic politics) of Catalonia’s drive for independence. We will hear more on this subject in the coming months.Catalonia, our country, is a nation. A nation that, in order to maintain its identity and to move forward, needs tools of state. This nation has existed for many centuries. It has its own identity, culture, and language, and its own institutions. Catalonia wants to follow, and indeed must be allowed to follow, its own path.
(Artur Mas i Gavarro, President of Catalonia, in the Prologue)
March Books 14) The Castle, by Franz Kafka
Nirgends noch hatte K. Amt und Leben so verflochten gesehen wie hier, so verflochten, daß es manchmal scheinen konnte, Amt und Leben hätten ihre Plätze gewechselt.
Nowhere else had K. ever seen one's official position and one's life so intertwined as they were here, so intertwined that it sometimes seemed as though office and life had switched places.
Kafka's unfinished novel, published in contravention of his dying wishes, is generally known as The Castle in English, and indeed that is the sense in which the word Schloß is generally used in the text. But Schloß also means "lock", and it is close to Schluß which means "end" or "closure". In one of Agatha Christies barmy later novels, the hero reflects, "’What a nice word it is. A Schloss. So solid-sounding." These are the nuances one loses in translation. (Note also how Amt is translated two different ways in the quote above, neither very graceful.) Unfortunately I am not courageous enough to tackle it in the original.
The book itself was different from my expectations. I had somehow imagined a story of crushing omnipresent bureaucracy; but in fact it’s a tale of a society under constant threat from an oppressive authority which is distant and largely absent, and encountered only in baffling and frustrating ways; but its effect on the villagers is to put everyone on edge and cause ordinary relationships to be distorted, men and women both desperate to prove that they don’t care for authority and also conscious that they must buckle to it. It’s a shame that it isn’t finished, but we know where it is going and where it has been – it finishes in mid-sentence, “…mühselig sprach sie, man hatte Mühe sie zu verstehen, aber was sie sagte” – “…she spoke with difficulty, it was hard to understand her, but what she said” – and there it ends.
March Books 13) Observatory, by Daragh Carville
Jon: You can’t be in two places at once.
Nicola: I’m not. I’m in one place twice.
The ancient Observatory at Armagh has always been a place of mystery and wonder to me – I worked there for a couple of months during my gap year in 1985/86, and showed visitors Halley’s Comet through the telescope erected a hundred years earlier by J.L.E. Dreyer to round off his New General Catalogue (which gives galaxies their NGC numbers). Later, the observatory’s official historian supervised my M Phil and was the external examiner of my Ph D. It’s an important part of forming my personal approach to knowledge; and I knew it best just at the time of my life when I was getting deeply into science fiction.
So when I discovered that the Abbey Theatre had performed a play about the observatory’s history, written by Daragh Carville (who also wrote Regenerations, a play about Doctor Who set in Belfast) I knew I had to get it. It is a four-handed play, two characters being very loosely based on the Observatory’s first director and his assistant in 1799, the other two being a 1999 astronomer and her occasional lover, a historian. It’s a fairly simple plot – time-travel romance and revolutionary betrayal – but offers some space for reflection on history and place. I would encourage theatrical folks with sfnal and/or Irish sympathies to give this short piece a try; it could work quite well. (Though I winced a bit at a scene where a transit of Mercury is observed at night.)
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
Links I found interesting for 28-03-2013
- British heroes: The doctor and the spy
The Economist on Who and Bond.
- Where Are We Going?
Nic Clarke reviews Barbara Demick’s book on North Korea
- British minister quotes from Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Links I found interesting for 25-03-2013
- What will become of the May 2015 UK Parliament if Scotland votes ‘Yes’ on Independence?
Many questions, no answers.
- Tales from the Coffeeshop:The terrible price of pride and stupidity
Commentary from Cyprus.
- Top Ten Unionist Myths Debunked
A ten-minute video, very well put together.
- Nicholas Whyte, onafhankelijk diplomaat: ‘België kampt met gebrek aan engagement’
I got interviewed by one of the Brussels free papers recently.
Links I found interesting for 24-03-2013
- Jocelyn Bell Burnell
The connection between the discovery of pulsars and Joy Division.
- Mark Kermode reviews Good Vibrations
I am ridiculously excited about this film.
- Everything Will Be Fine In Just One Chote Unit
Chote is an old mate, but this is a solid critique!
- Twittergraphy
19th century telegraph code (some of this is difficult to take seriously).
- Thomas de Waal’s Five Books on Conflict in the Caucasus
The fifth is of general applicability.
The Oscar poll
March Books 12) The Spear of Destiny, by Marcus Sedgwick
‘You’re taking us to see the Vikings?’ asked Jo incredulously.
‘I know! Wonderful, isn’t it?’ said the Doctor with a grin.
For the first time this year, I am actually up to date with book-blogging. And you can’t be much more up to date than this; The Spear of Destiny was only published today, so I could hardly have written it up any sooner. The Doctor and Jo, somewhere in Season 10, are asked to investigate mysterious happenings around a spear held in a private museum, and go back to Sweden in the year 141 to find out what’s going on and to discover exactly which bearded villain is behind it all. It’s a bit reminiscent of The Time Monster, but a bit lighter (apart from the iconography of the Spear of Destiny, which is actually rather heavy stuff). Sedgwick doesn’t quite capture the TV Third Doctor, but then neither does Terrance Dicks if we’re honest, and if this wee book is a gateway to a new generation discovering that era of the show, it’s fine with me.
BSFA Short Fiction – my vote
Not going to justify these in detail, but wanted to record my thoughts anyway.
6) “Limited Edition”, by Tim Maughan
5) The Flight of the Ravens, by Chris Butler – some details rather threw me.
4) “Immersion”, by Aliette de Bodard
3) “Three Moments of an Explosion”, by China Miéville
2) Adrift on the Sea of Rains, by Ian Sales – excellent bleak alternate space race with Nazi occult McGuffin, and twist at the end.
1) “Song of the Body Cartographer”, by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz – somehow grabbed me in a way the others didn’t.
Well done to the BSFA on producing such a lovely awards book.
Things that jarred me in Chris Butler’s “The Flight of the Ravens”
“It had been almost a century since the French emperor Napoleon had obliged the Dutch to take surnames, against their own custom”
– this is protagonist Elizabeth’s inward response to learning that her acquaintance Doctor Huginn Raaf wishes to be known only as Huginn. The scene is set in 1899; Napoleon’s edict on surnames was in 1811. However it’s entirely wrong to suggest that the Dutch were mononymous before 1811; generally patronymics were used. And the reference to a legal reform of 90 years before spoils the tone. I can’t imagine anyone writing “Helena went to cast her vote, as women of her age had been entitled to so since 1928.”
“Huginn had purchased passage by horse-drawn carriage to Frankfurt, following the path of the Danube, and from there to Amsterdam.”
– in 1899 it would be a lot quicker and more comfortable to take the train (indeed, the previous chapter has an infodump about the train station in Amsterdam). I actually doubt if it was possible to find a regular horse-drawn carriage service (there are other passengers, so this isn’t a special charter by Huginn) on that route in that year. It is implied that the carriage covers the 700km from Vienna to Frankfurt in a single day, which seems utterly improbable. Also the Danube does not go all the way to Frankfurt; you would have to head north-west by Ulm at the very latest. Compare “They travelled from London to Cardiff, following the path of the Thames, and from there to Pembroke.”
“Where will you be staying?”
“In Frankfurt? A hotel called the Mercure, in the old part of town.”
– the Mercure chain of mid-range hotels was founded about 40 years ago, so would not have been available in 1899. A hotel in Frankfurt then would have been called Merkur not Mercure. Anyway the hotel to stay at in Frankfurt, then and now, is the Frankfurter Hof.
Just saying, like.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
Links I found interesting for 23-03-2013
- Syria and the United States: Intervention options on the two-year anniversary of the conflict
Non-violent options to help.
- Azerbaijan and the Council of Europe
The Economist reports this sordid story.
- Common / People – a William Shatner, Kirk & Spock slashup
Glorious (includes suggestive footage from the animated series).
- JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner by Richard Marson
Matthew Sweet’s review in the Guardian
- Peter Robinson meets the Game of Thrones team
My two worlds collide.
March Books 9) A Rag, a Bone, a Hank of Hair, by Jonathan Gash
'These aren't padpas, Doshie,' I said. 'They're tsavorite.' A tsavorite is properly green grossular, a sort of garnet discovered some seventy years ago near Kenya's National Park at Tsavo. Its lovely green lies between deep Sri Lankan emeralds and a peridot. (Tip: Don't buy a tsavorite unless it's above one carat in size.) 'Measure its single refraction, Doshie, to prove it isn't green tourmaline or green zircon. Save me a trip to London. Also, I know nothing about precious stones.'
For someone who claims over and over that he hates London, Lovejoy spends a lot of time there in this novel, which has all the rambles of the later books in the series (only three more after this, including The Ten Word Game and Faces in the Pool). At least, however, there is a core plot – with admittedly an awful lot of distraction – in which an even randier than usual Lovejoy attempts to wreak justice on those who have hounded a former lover, caused the death of her husband and threatened their son. (Whose son? Hmm.) There are some lovely Lydia moments as well – she is the most entertaining of the semi-regular characters in these books, and will get an unexpected twist in her tale in a couple of books' time – and the usual incredible detail about antiques and other issues (such as the precise distinction between a padparadsha and a tsavorite). I don't think this is a gateway book for non-Lovejoy fans, but it's an entertaining book for those of us who are.
BSFA Best Novel: My vote
Not very difficult for me to rank them:
5) Empty Space: A Haunting, by M. John Harrison – possibly jetlag while reading it, but apart from Anna Waterman I found the characters unengaging, and I had difficulty following the plots and grasping how or why they intertwined.
4) 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson – rambling and dubious but with a couple of good set-pieces.
3) Intrusion, by Ken MacLeod – a good book but quite a tough read, also tantalises with mind-blowing stuff happening off-screen.
2) Jack Glass, by Adam Roberts – a lot of clever stuff; a lot of entertaining writing; ending perhaps a bit too clever, but a good read.
1) Dark Eden, by Chris Beckett – I really liked it, subverting a lot of expectations of young hero versus conservative small society on an abandoned planet.
I'll be happy enough if any of my top three wins.
March Books 8) 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson
She was looking at the sun, now four fingers high over the jagged black horizon. “Oh my God, look at it,” she said. “Just look at it.”
Wahram tried, but it was too bright, too big.
A rambling combination of detective story, solar system travelogue, and rather unconvincing romance, this book may be the favourite on the BSFA shortlist for Best Novel, going by GoodReads / LibraryThing statistics. James Nicoll and Vandana Singh have pointed out some of its failings. I too was disappointed by it; I found myself several times looking up from the screen (reading on various combinations of iPad and iPhone) and thinking, "This narrative technique was done much better in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Who is it who wrote this book and is trying to rip off KSR's style? Oh…"
In particular, I felt that a couple of important plot points were simply badly done – the mysterious person who appears on Io quite early on, and the kidnapping of our heroine while visiting China, are both important developments which are just under-reported. Also, the policeman at the heart of the detective story element behaves in an utterly unprofessional way in terms of sharing his speculation on the crime (the destruction of a large city on Mercury, and related events) with our protagonists – it is as bad as The Terminal Experiment. As both Singh and Nicoll point out, our heroes' decision to crucially intervene in the ecosystem of Earth is arrogant and crazy, but reported in entirely positive terms. And there is a crashingly dull lecture on revolutions in the middle.
There are good bits too. There are two excellent descriptive set-pieces – the long walk through the tunnels of Mercury, and the dangerous spacewalk in the orbit of Venus – which really grabbed me. The descriptions of worlds other than Earth are vivid and engaging (just a shame about Earth then). But it's a bit of a trudge to get to those parts.
(Also, annoyingly, "Yggdrasil" was mis-spelt "Ygassdril" at several points.")
SJA first season (2007) and Time Crash
So, I reach the first full season of the Sarah Jane Adventures. Absolutely excellent stuff, and if you haven’t watched it you should. The episodes are 30 minutes long, which again is a bit awkward for my commute (two 20-25 minute trains with 5-10 mins between them); I also found I tended to want to watch the good bits again, and there are quite a lot of them.
Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? is, frankly, Hugo-worthy. As their loved ones are torn away from them, Maria and Alan successively have their world fall apart, and Jane Asher (who previously played the Doctor’s grandduaghter in the radio play “Whatever happened to Susan”) is superb as Sarah Jane’s alter ego Andrea. (F asked me, “So does that mean that Andrea had all those adventures with the Doctor instead?” I suppose so – fan-fic writers, get to it!) A really brilliant fifty minutes of television, the only puzzling thing for me being the role of the Graske. Not surprised to see that Graeme Harper directed it.
[added 2013]
It is an interesting historical note that in 1964, as the fictional Andrea and Sarah are reading about the Beatles playing Brighton, the real Jane Asher was Paul McCartney Paul McCartney’s girlfriend. For comparison, pictures of her then and of Francesca Miller playing the young Andrea:
Not a bad likeness.
I very much enjoyed rewatching all of these. In particular, it’s striking that none of the five SJA stories is very bad, and two (Gorgon and Whatever?) are really superb. There are various runs of Old and New Who where there are five consecutive decent stories (most recently before this, the run from Dalek to The Parting of the Ways which is actually six good stories in a row), but it is rare to have an entire season where even the low points are still pretty watchable. And Time Crash is an added bonus.
< The Curse of Fatal Death | The Webcasts | Rose – Dalek | The Long Game – The Parting of the Ways | Comic Relief 2006 – The Girl in the Fireplace | Rise of the Cybermen – Doomsday | Everything Changes – They Keep Killing Suzie | Random Shoes – End of Days | Smith and Jones – 42 | Human Nature / The Family of Blood – Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords & The Infinite Quest | Revenge of the Slitheen – The Lost Boy & Time Crash | Voyage of the Damned – Adam | Reset – Exit Wounds
Links I found interesting for 21-03-2013
- Freedom Fighters
A plea from Azerbaijan.
- Could you drink beer instead of water and still survive?
Answer: probably not.
- About PhDs
A different perspective.
The Players trilogy, by Terrance Dicks
“We don’t know your name either,” said Peri. She glanced at the Doctor. “At least, I don’t. My friend the Doctor seems to think he knows you already.”
“Churchill,” said the war correspondent. “Winston Churchill, very much at your service.” He looked at the Doctor. “I don’t think we’ve met before, sir, have we?”
“We will, Winston,” said the Doctor. “We will!”
This is the first of Terrance Dicks’ three novels about the Players, a mysterious race of manipulators of human history for the sake of a grand Game, reminiscent of Roger Zelazny’s “The Game of Blood and Dust” (a favourite short story of mine). Anyone who wondered why Ian McNiece’s character seemed so chummy with the Doctor back in 2010 can find the answer in this book, which is largely about the Sixth Doctor and Peri encountering Churchill in the Boer War and then in 1936, though with a brief flashback to an adventure of the Second Doctor with Churchill in 1915, in which the future prime minister is rescued from capture by the Germans.
Dicks is of the generation who knew Churchill as a genuine time-travelling hero, in that he progressed from a young officer in the British army’s last meaningful cavalry charge at Omdurman in 1898 to being the man in charge of a nuclear power. It sort of seems obvious in retrospect that Churchill and the Doctor should meet, and it’s almost surprising that it hadn’t happened on screen or page before.
The plot itself is thrilling stuff, ending in confrontation with Joachim von Ribbentrop and a direct intervention into the 1936 abdication of Edward VII, where the Doctor and Peri successfully keep history back on the right lines despite the efforts of the Players. Fun, if not profound, told in Dicks’ characteristically clear prose, and brining in plenty of references to Dicks’ other Who work – The War Games, of course, but also Dekker from Blood Harvest and off-screen references to the events of Timewyrm: Exodus. Interested readers can pick up a brand new edition, as it is one of the 11 books reissued by the BBC for the 50th anniversary.
Continuing the arc of the amnesiac Eighth Doctor, this novel actually has some similarities with The Turing Test, its immediate predecessor in the series, but I enjoyed it more (not saying much, I’m afraid). We are now in 1951, with the Players trying to resolve their Game through causing, or preventing, nuclear war. The story swirls round the Cambridge Spies, with Burgess, MacLean and Philby playing key roles and the Doctor and Peri eventually flying to Washington and Moscow to prevent the Players from working their way on the minds of Truman and Stalin, with a final emotional appeal on behalf of humanity melting their inhuman hearts. The research was clearly meticulous, but the results not all that inspiring.It occurred to the Doctor that he hated tyranny and oppression. Or was it that he used to hate tyranny and oppression? It didn’t seem to matter much any more.
Nothing did.
And finally, we dip back in continuity to an entire book set after the Second Doctor chapters of Players, in which we have a brief return to Carstairs and Lady Jennifer in the First World War, and then the Second Doctor and new Time Lord companion Serena, dipping in and out of the timeline of the Napoleonic wars, trying to prevent history from being diverted by the Players. This is all set during Season 6B (as is the Second Doctor section of Players) with the Doctor sent on mission by the Celestial Intervention Agency in order to diminish his sentence to exile and forced regeneration. It ends with the Doctor accepting the mission which we know as The Two Doctors. Lots of Napoleonic romping, particularly with the very steampunkish submarine which was indeed designed for Napoleon by American inventor Robert Fulton, though some liberties are taken with the historical timeline.The Doctor stared hard at the blank white square and concentrated. The card seemed to blur before his eyes – and suddenly he was holding a gold-edged, heavily embossed invitation card to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball.
‘Latest Agency technology,’ said Serena. ‘Psychic paper – gets you in anywhere!’
The climax comes just before the Battle of Waterloo, and one inaccuracy tweaked my Belgian sensibilities: the Doctor walks from the denouement at the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball to the Parc de Bruxelles via the Place Royale, which is rather a long way round. (The ball, as far as I can tell, was held roughly on the spot which is now the location of the car park for the City 2 shopping centre.)
It’s an interesting case of Dicks reinterpreting bits of later continuity to fit what he might have done in 1969, had he been thinking about it then; the inclusion of psychic paper (the book was published in 2005, one of the last of the Past Doctor Adventures range, and after New Who had started) is perhaps the most dramatic example. Serena is perhaps a thought experiment as to how Romana might have been done in the black and white era, and the Players themselves are an odd combination of the War Lords and perhaps the Eternals. (The Sarah Jane Adventures took the concept and tweaked it into the Trickster, who operates on a much more personal rather than historical level.)
Anyway, the three books together are a solid case of Terrance Dicks pursuing a single sfnal concept over the 1999-2005 period; if I’m still able to do that when I reach his age, I’ll be glad.
Links I found interesting for 19-03-2013
- The Island of Surpyc
Daniel Davis walks us through the Cyprus crisis, choose-your-own-adventure style.
- It’s like money in the bank
Pete Birks outlines the consequences in Cyprus.
- Nick carrying the can for the village idiot
My favourite Cypriot commentator at the weekend, blaming the Germans (a little unfairly) and the Communists (entirely fairly).
Links I found interesting for 18-03-2013
- The press is throwing a toddler’s tantrum over Leveson
Comment from a pro-Leveson journalist – hurray!
Doctor Who Season 3 (2007), second half
I actually finished these a couple of weeks ago, but am only now getting round to writing them up…
Positive points
- On the screen, the appearance of David Tennant playing a different character who happens to look like the Doctor is far more effective than the gradually revealed Mr Smith of the book
- Likewise, Jessica Hynes' performance as Joan brings far more to the concept of the Doctor's human self's lover than did the book, though age of course means she is a very different character
- Similarly, the watch rather than the cricket ball, and the Book of Impossible Things, exploit the TV format beautifully
- The Family of Blood are gloriously sinister, far more so than the Aubertides
- And basically the fact of the Doctor being human because of the threat from the Family makes much more sense than the original idea of the Aubertides just happening to home along just after the Doctor has arbitrarily decided to try the single-heart club.
Less positive points
- The fate of the Family of Blood still bugs me. The Aubertides in the book are defeated in a fair fight; the Doctor's meting out of judgement on the Family seems cruel – who made him the judge?
- The battle scene doesn't work for me. The tragedy of real life war, especially the First World War, is that the other side is human, and the linkage between fighting scarecrows in 1913 and fighting Germans in 1915 seems to me both leaden and mistaken. Frankly turning the entire school to glass would have been a better solution (though technically more difficult).
- The fantasy life-with-Joan-and-kids section is too obvious a borrowing from The Last Temptation of Christ.
- Poor Martha gets much less of a look-in here than Bernice in the book; apart from Blink it's probably her least visible episode.
In the 2008 Hugos, Blink had by far the highest number of nominations in its category (indeed the highest in any category), followed by Human Nature / The Family of Blood. The Torchwood episode Captain Jack Harkness came fifth. The only other Whoniverse episode to score in nominations was Out of Time, which was for my money the best of Torchwood's first season. I'm a bit surprised that The Shakespeare Code did not feature, but otherwise I think this was a decent take on a season which was not the strongest overall but had memorable high points. The season finale would have been too long to fit this category, and anyway is dragged down by Last of the Time Lords.
Come the actual vote, Blink had a solid lead on first preferences and with transfers from Human Nature / The Family of Blood and Captain Jack Harkness pulled ahead of the other two nominees combined for the most convincing win in any Hugo category of 2008 (the next strongest performance was John Scalzi's victory over Dave Langford and Cheryl Morgan for Best Fan Writer), and New Who's third Hugo in three years. In the count for second place, Human Nature/The Family of Blood was in the lead from the start and took the spot by a convincing margin. Captain Jack Harkness, however, finished in fourth place behind the Battlestar Galactica episode Razor. The final spot went to a fan production, the Star Trek: New Voyages episode Worlds Enough And Time (which features George Takei as a thirty-years-older Sulu).
The "with a bound they were free" transition to The Sound of Drums is a bit annoying given the buildup to the cliffhanger the previous week, but after that we are on fairly solid ground again, with Simm's Master's first appearance being much his best. Despite his obvious insanity, at this stage his intention to simply capture the Doctor and friends and do unspecified nasty things is pretty clear, and it gives the plot a terrific momentum. Apart from the regulars, Alexandra Moen is superb as Lucy Saxon, given few lines but an inescapable presence. And the continuity with Old Who's Gallifrey is terrifically pleasing, and completes a theme we've had since the start of the season (if we count The Runaway Bride as such). I found that I didn't even mind the "Here Come the Drums" song as much on rewatch; I felt it intrusive first time round.
And then, alas, we have Last of the Time Lords. On first watching, I was just slack-jawed in disbelief that such a promising setup had been so badly wasted, and unable to articulate quite why I hated it so much. This time round, I knew what was coming so was spared the crashing disappointment of the first broadcast, and actually thought it was not quite as awful as I had remembered. But that is not saying much.
Where it fails first, I think, is that the humiliation meted out to the Doctor and friends by the Master is neither funny nor interesting. There's something very skeevy indeed about making some of the most visible black characters ever in the show into slaves, and the script never quite acknowledges that. Torturing Jack Harkness is just nasty. Turning the Doctor into Dobby the House Elf is bizarre and incomprehensible, and then transforming him into Tinkerbell at the end is an appalling lapse of dramatic judgment. The story of Martha is a decent enough plot thread (and of course Freema Agyeman carries it well), and the Doctor's emotion for the Master is effective but would have been a lot more so without the previous 40 minutes, and the massive plot reset button actually comes as a relief because of the inanity of what has come before. For Martha's departure, see below.
This third season of New Who will always be the one with Blink, Human Nature / The Family of Blood, and the return of the Master, which kind of make up for the disappointments of the Dalek two-parter and the leaden finale. It's good that the high points are so superlative, because the lows of this season are about as low as you get in the Tenth Doctor era.
I know that Martha comes back in the next seasons of both Torchwood and Who, but I've been writing up other characters after the end of their first set of regular appearances so I shall give my impressions of Martha here. It struck me very forcefully that, unlike Rose, she is both sexy and brainy; she kisses the Doctor in her first episode, and is flirting with Shakespeare in her second, and is also on course to be a highly qualified professional. Unlike Rose, whose life perhaps lacked meaning until she got into the Tardis, Martha gets dragged off course by the Doctor, who takes her utterly, abominably, for granted (blinded as he is by bereavement) and only realises his mistake as she leaves him. As noted previously, she and Mickey are the only two New Who companions to leave the Tardis entirely voluntarily.
I was fascinated to sit in on one of Freema Agyeman's interviews at Gallifrey One last month. (And also delighted to get my picture taken with her.) Although I went on Sunday, she seems to have said much the same to the session attended by Karin Kross on the Saturday, to the effect that (I paraphrase) she felt Martha's unrequited love for the Doctor went too far to be entertaining or comfortable. When RTD explained to her that he wanted gritty emotional realism, she pondered the merits of a more optimistic escapism. She was also rather moving on Martha as a role model, and a lot of people seemed to suddenly have something in their eyes when she told the story of the little girl who, when asked to select a famous person to write about for Black History Week, chose Martha Jones. When Freema Agyeman played a character who was sexy and brainy, she clearly didn't have to try too hard.
< The Curse of Fatal Death | The Webcasts | Rose – Dalek | The Long Game – The Parting of the Ways | Comic Relief 2006 – The Girl in the Fireplace | Rise of the Cybermen – Doomsday | Everything Changes – They Keep Killing Suzie | Random Shoes – End of Days | Smith and Jones – 42 | Human Nature / The Family of Blood – Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords & The Infinite Quest | Revenge of the Slitheen – The Lost Boy & Time Crash | Voyage of the Damned – Adam | Reset – Exit Wounds
The Five Leaf Clover (how an Irish space trader outsmarted the Daleks)
Links I found interesting for 17-03-2013
- Rob Portman and the politics of narcissism.
The great challenge for a senator isn’t to go to Washington and represent the problems of his own family. It’s to try to obtain the intellectual and moral perspective necessary to represent the problems of the people who don’t have direct access to the corridors of power. Senators basically never have poor kids. That’s something members of Congress should think about.
- Bigger Than You Think: the Vatican and its Annexes
Strange Maps untangles the pontifical cartography.
March Books 4) Berlin – A City Divided: Chronicles, by Susanne Buddenberg and Thomas Henseler
I am personally fascinated by Berlin, and by the Wall which I saw in 1986 – I took pictures, which must be in a box somewhere, of the Brandenburg Gate both from the same position as the Holzapfel family in the extract to the right and from the other side. This book, produced by the Federal Foundation for the Reassessment of the SED Dictatorship (ie the East German regime), tells very simply five stories of people affected by the Wall – the teenage student who flees west as it is being built in order to complete her exams; the nurse at the hospital beside the Wall treating casualties (and sometimes unable to); the government official who zooms across to freedom on a rainy night with his family; the amateur photographer who gets into trouble because of his fascination with the Wall; and another teenager who gets an unexpected 18th birthday present on 9 November 1989. All, we are told, are based as closely as possible on real stories (the contemporary newspaper article about the Holzapfel family's escape is reproduced).
The relativist in me is a little troubled by the one-sided presentation of the historical narrative. I guess that for someone my age or older, it’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the hard-line Cold War rhetoric of the hawks of both sides, a division which was crystallised in Berlin. Also, my own personal experience is that one can usually resolve conflicts more effectively by trying to listen to and comprehend both sides; that was true in Northern Ireland, and in the conflicts I have worked on professionally.
But I suspect I am wrong to feel that. The East German dictatorship started life as a puppet regime, imposed by external force, and it maintained order for four decades by imprisoning its people in its own borders, before it collapsed almost accidentally; there was no residual conflict to resolve, just complete defeat. There are limits to the value of trying to understand the other fella’s point of view, and this is probably one of those cases. I wasn’t there myself, apart from a couple of hours one June day in 1986, and books like this can give one a much better feeling of what it was like to be there at the time; and even more, what it felt like to get away.
March Books 3) The Unfree French, by Richard Vinen
The first and simplest conclusion of this book is that life for most French people between 1940 and 1944 was miserable.
This is a terrifically well-researched and fluently written account of occupied France during the second world war. It is a subject where of which my previous knowledge could probably have fitted on the back of a postcard – collapse in 1940, Pétain and Laval, resistance, D-Day, don't take 'Allo! 'Allo! seriously. I had never considered the impact on France of the continuing imprisonment of the two million – two million! – soldiers captured in 1940, plus the hundreds of thousands more subsequently conscripted for forced labour in Germany even as the Nazi regime was collapsing. It was also interesting to learn about the internal ideological manœuvres of the Pétain regime, building a cult of personality as a replacement for actually exercising power and delivering services. And he reports humanely and fairly neutrally on the épuration, the retaliation by both state structures and people taking the law into their own hands, against collaborators after the Liberation.
Vinen also illustrates well a point that I often consider in my professional work – that people rarely know the full picture of what is going on, and definitely don't know the future; in the summer of 1940, it seemed entirely probable that the war might be over in a few months with a German victory; in 1944, we tend to remember Operation Overlord as the successful sweep from Normandy to Belgium that it became, forgetting that to those on the ground, the winner did not seem at all clear, and in any case pockets of Germans were left behind as the invasion swept past.
But much the most interesting parts of the book deal with the effect of the occupation on women, looking especially at those on the margins – those who fell in love with Germans, or became prostitutes, or were successful entrepreneurs in the black market, or found some other nonconformist means of survival in miserable circumstances; and they of course were most likely to be targeted in the épuration. He makes the point that we have very few first-person accounts from these sources; the odd iconic photograph which represents only one story of the many. All of it is fascinating, but some of those accounts are heart-breaking.
March Books 2) Intrusion, by Ken MacLeod
As he whizzed along Camden’s back streets and canal banks and along the edge of Regent’s Park he sometimes glimpsed the whole scene as a vast, broken woodland, the forest of London. It was like when as a lad he’d seen from the hilltop how the landscape of Lewis wasn’t moor and field and bog with outcrops of rock, but a gnarly mass of rock with a thin overlay of peaty soil. The vision of the city as a forest uplifted him. It was almost utopian, and within it he felt the bike’s smooth engineered wooden frame and handlebars as an extension of himself.
A near-future Britain, where the state’s control of ordinary citizen’s lives, extrapolated from the surveillance state and the war on terror of today, has become appallingly intrusive, with the police perpetrating acts of torture on arbitrarily chosen citizens; and the Morrison family, mulling only minor disobedience over a matter of health care, find that they must flee to Scotland where the hereditary propensity to second sight seems to take on a more robust significance.
As ever with Ken MacLeod, it’s intense and passionate, and given the society he has set up, the Morrisons’ dilemmas feel very realistic. (Though I’m enough of an idealist to feel that the UK is in fact unlikely to slip too far towards vindictively nasty totalitarianism in the way depicted here.) My biggest problem with the book is that the two most interesting things in it happen off stage at the end – the revelation of the plan of the mysterious Naxals, who are a background presence throughout the book and don’t make a direct appearance, and the epic years-long mission of Hugh Morrison’s father, about which all we discover is that it happened and succeeded. So it’s a little disappointing – a good read in general, but tantalising us with mind-blowing stuff happening elsewhere and elsewhen.
Links I found interesting for 16-03-2013
- How real is the danger of an EU collapse? My verdict: It’s receding, but the UK is the wild card
John Bruton: ‘the EU is still regarded by many in the UK as a homogeneous foreign country, not a highly diverse Union. Britain’s membership is seen more as a disposable convenience than as a long-term commitment."
- Britain’s potential exit from the EU
French, Polish and German authors reflect.
- Hostile platitudes
On dealing with the loss of an online friendship.
Can Pi3D run on anything other than Raspbian?
Answers very welcome.
Links I found interesting for 15-03-2013
- Phew
(Memo to self: avoid gym during papal conclaves)
- Twitter / thetimes: Clarification
Frank Pope ≠ Pope Francis.
- Overheard at Cambridge
Rowan Williams prefers GRRM to JRRT.