I preferred The Iliad somehow to The Odyssey. There is a wider range of characters, a broader range of settings, a continuing tension between the battlefields of Troy and the realm of the gods. Indeed, I found the continuing interference by rival divine authorities in human affairs strongly reminiscent of the Balkan / Levantine instinct for explaining contemporary human politics by conspiracy theory, resorting to unseen, unaccountable forces to explain what is going on.

I’m sorry to say that my inner geek prevailed at one point: I found myself getting quite unreasonably interested in the description of Hephaistos’ mechanical devices in Chapter XVIII. Surely these are the earliest examples of robots and androids in fiction? The first description is of his mechanised tripods on wheels:

…τρίποδας γὰρ ἐείκοσι πάντας ἔτευχεν
ἑστάμεναι περὶ τοῖχον ἐϋσταθέος μεγάροιο,
χρύσεα δέ σφ’ ὑπὸ κύκλα ἑκάστῳ πυθμένι θῆκεν,
ὄφρά οἱ αὐτόματοι θεῖον δυσαίατ’ ἀγῶνα
ἠδ’ αὖτις πρὸς δῶμα νεοίατο θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι.

Alexander Pope’s translation:

Full twenty tripods for his hall he framed,
That placed on living wheels of massy gold,
(Wondrous to tell,) instinct with spirit roll’d
From place to place, around the bless’d abodes
Self-moved, obedient to the beck of gods:

Samuel Butler’s translation:

…he was making twenty tripods that were to stand by the wall of his house, and he set wheels of gold under them all that they might go of their own selves to the assemblies of the gods, and come back again–marvels indeed to see.

William Cowper’s translation:

…tripods bright he form’d
Twenty at once, his palace-wall to grace
Ranged in harmonious order. Under each
Two golden wheels he set, on which (a sight
Marvellous!) into council they should roll465
Self-moved, and to his house, self-moved, return.

But it gets better – he has robot women to do his bidding!

ὑπὸ δ’ ἀμφίπολοι ῥώοντο ἄνακτι
χρύσειαι ζωῇσι νεήνισιν εἰοικυῖαι.
τῇς ἐν μὲν νόος ἐστὶ μετὰ φρεσίν, ἐν δὲ καὶ αὐδὴ
καὶ σθένος, ἀθανάτων δὲ θεῶν ἄπο ἔργα ἴσασιν.

Alexander Pope’s translation:

The monarch’s steps two female forms uphold,
That moved and breathed in animated gold;
To whom was voice, and sense, and science given
Of works divine (such wonders are in heaven!)

Samuel Butler’s translation:

There were golden handmaids also who worked for him, and were like real young women, with sense and reason, voice also and strength, and all the learning of the immortals.

William Cowper’s translation:

Beside the king of fire two golden forms
Majestic mov’d, that serv’d him in the place
Of handmaids; young they seem’d and seem’d alive,
Nor want they intellect, or speech, or force,
Or prompt dexterity by the gods inspir’d.

Non-robot women get rather a raw deal in the Iliad. The quarrel between Achilles and the rest of the Greeks starts with a dispute over who gets to keep the captive women Briseis and Chryseis. In the funeral games for Patroclus, Ajax and Odysseus wrestle for a prize of a woman who is not named but is skilled in all domestic matters. Actually she is the consolation prize for the loser: the winner gets a nice big cauldron. (I am not making this up.) The match is declared a draw and Ajax and Odysseus are told by Achilles to split the prizes, but we are not told how they manage this (and perhaps we are better off not knowing).

Having said which, the goddesses Thetis, Athena, Hera and indeed the Trojan women, Hecuba and Andromache (and to an extent Helen) are all interesting characters in their own rights; as are most of the men, several of whom (this is hardly a spoiler) get horribly killed off during the conflict.

I was fascinated by the continuous tension between praise and horror of combat. It’s clear to me that Homer’s articulation of the warrior’s code of honour lies rhetorically behind an awful lot of subsequent eras’ jingoism and exhortation of young men to die stupidly. The battle scenes are pretty gory and get a bit repetitive, but there are moments of real power. Yet at the same time he is clear about the other side: moves towards peace-making are clearly a Good Thing, though torpedoed by human incompetence and divine malice; the last chapter has grieving Priam confronting Achilles over the body of his son Hector.

Anyway, I’m very glad I finally read this.

To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, when we salute women in technology and science, I thought I should flag up a few female Irish scientists who appeared in my long-ago doctoral research.

Mary Ball (1812-1892) discovered the underwater stridulation of the Notonectidæ

Mary, Countess of Rosse (1813-1885) was a pioneer in photography and also an accomplished amateur blacksmith

Mary Ward (1827-1869) was a popular science writer (how to use your microscope and telescope) who was unfortunately also the first person to be killed in a motor vehicle accident (probably), and the great-grandmother of Lalla Ward who played Romana II in Doctor Who.

Agnes Clerke (1842-1907), originally from Skibbereen, wrote a number of works on astronomy and cosmology including her Popular History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century for which today’s historians of science are still grateful

Lady Margaret Huggins (1848-1915), the daughter of a Dublin solicitor, became a pioneer of astronomical spectroscopy in partnership with her husband, Sir William Huggins (1824-1910) at their home in Tulse Hill

Matilda Knowles (1864-1933), researcher of lichens

Jane Scharff, née Stephens (1879-?) researcher of sponges, forced to leave scientific research when she married her boss

Mabel C Wright (née MacDowell), early 20th century geologist and naturalist, who helped pioneer the use of sphagnum moss as an antiseptic dressing

Phyllis Ryan (mid-20th century), professional chemist who interestingly kept her own name despite being married to a rather conservative politician

Máire Brück (1925-2008), astronomer who helped me with research into some of these.

During research in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington I was thrilled to find and read correspondence from Marie Stopes, though rather boringly about botany rather than contraception or eugenics.

I didn’t realise this, but apparently our Prime Minister writes haiku and posts them on his blog:

http://hermanvanrompuy.typepad.com/haiku/

Rough translation of the most recent:

I can’t reproduce the full sense of “verrijzen” (which normally means “resurrect”) in translation, but you get the idea.

This second season is generally solid stuff, with none of these stories being duds, and the Doctor and Lucie getting on with developing a working partnership now that they are no longer being pursued by the Head-Hunter and entangled with the Time Lords. I particularly enjoyed The Zygon Who Fell To Earth.

We have a decent start in Dead London, by 2000AD stalwart Pat Mills, which has our heroes land in a city whose different historical periods are rubbing up against each other. Lots of rather good audioscaping of the various eras. I was not quite satisfied that we sorted out reality from mental constructs adequately in the end, but the ride was fun.

Max Warp was also moderately good fun, with Graeme Garden guesting as a Jeremy Clarkson character whose equivalent of “Top Gear” is at the centre of tensions in a delicately balanced peace process. Which makes more sense than at first sounds. I have never knowingly watched Top Gear but I still enjoyed it.

Brave New Town was my second favourite of these: we start off in what appears to be an English village which is mysteriously repeating the events of 1 September 1991. The answer to the mystery turns out to involve Uzbekistan and Autons, with guest appearances from Adrian Dunbar and Derek Griffiths; another solid piece from Jonathan Clements.

Well, one of my wishes has been fulfilled: Barbara Flynn is in The Skull of Sobek as a peculiar nun, which means that all four of the doctors of A Very Peculiar Practice have now done at least a little Who. It’s a good piece about hidden skulls, crocodiles (which terrify Lucie) and bizarre rituals, with a slightly silly ending which is more or less in keeping with the spirit of the story.

The next in sequence is Grand Theft Cosmos, but I listened to it in January.

My favourite of these second season plays: we have the return of Lucie’s aunt Pat, but also Stephen Pacey (Tarrant from Blake’s Seven) as her husband Trevor, the eponymous Zygon Who Fell To Earth, and Tim Brooke-Taylor of the Goodies as the Zygon second-in-command. It’s a really fun tale of nostalgia both for and in the 1980s; I loved every minute of it.

I was least satisfied by the season finale, the two-parter Sisters of the Flame / The Vengeance of Morbius. The basics are good, taking up the story of Morbius and the Sisters of Karn, and following on from the Gallifrey depicted in the previous Eight/Lucie season, with a strong showing by Nickolas Grace as the guest baddie. But there wasn’t really enough story for a two-parter; and I thought it was a bit feeble not to allow Lucie some closure on her relationship with the Doctor. The ending is a pretty massive cliffhanger, apparently resolved earlier this month. I shall report back.

I’m just back from a few days of work in Cyprus, but decided to take yesterday exploring the Karpass peninsula, the long thin panhandle of the northeast of the island. (Top marks, by the way, to Sun Rent A Car who fixed me up with an efficient Fiat Panda for €23 for a generously measured 24 hours.) My work keeps me in Nicosia, with occasional evening excursions to Kyrenia, and I wanted to see a bit more of the island.

I started off by exploring the ruins of Salamis, a ancient city on the east of the island north of Famagusta (St Paul visited). The ruins are pretty overgrown but the theatre survives:

and there is the occasional exposed trackway:

and a very few scraps of mosaic:

To my delight I caught sight of some local wildlife – can you see it?

It’s a stellion – handsome creature, isn’t it!

The apostle Barnabas came from Salamis and the former monastery where he is reputedly buried is nearby:

The interior is now a museum:

The coast immediately north of Salamis is getting very touristy: lots of new build development, lots of posters advertising property (all in English); I bought some petrol at Boğaz where the dual carriageway ends (and I’ll come back to that later) and proceeded up the peninsula. I decided that I would simply press on to the very tip of the island, to see what I could see. I was hoping that I would catch sight of some of the Karpass peninsula’s most famous wild animals, and my hopes were rewarded:

The donkeys are apparently their own subspecies. Not terribly wild, but not terribly inclined to talk to humans either (which is understandable). This is the closest I got to one, but of course the sun was in the wrong place:

The peninsula as a whole is incredibly lush and fertile compared to the rest of the island. I suppose it must have a favourabvle microclimate – it can’t just be donkey droppings!

Near the tip of the island is the monastery of Apostolos Andreas, which is busy with worshippers – mainly Greek Cypriots who I suspect had come up the same way as me, though there are some remaining Greek Cypriot villages in the peninsula.

I drove right to the tip of the island, the mound in the middle of this picture:

The road took me past this magnificent beach, apparently also a breeding ground for turtles (though this was the wrong time of year). I changed into my trunks and got my feet wet, but the water was not yet quite warm enough to entice me for a dip (notice how empty it is):

Having picked up a rather late lunch at the Blue Sea Hotel, I decided I had time for one more sight: Kantara (or Candara) Castle, which guards the entrance to the peninsula. It’s a long way up, and the buildings are pretty ruined:

But the views from the top are fantastic – here looking northeast along the peninsula which I had spent the day exploring:

and here looking southeast down to Famagusta and the bay:

At this point it was time to head back to Nicosia, to return the car and meet up with a friend (who had spotted that I was in Cyprus from my Facebook updates). But I realised to my horror that the little Fiat’s fuel tank was almost empty – the needle right down at the end of the red zone. And I was at the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. I checked with the warden at the castle, who confirmed that the nearest petrol station was the one I had filled up in earlier at Boğaz, 18 km (11.5 miles) away. I had no choice; I set the car going downhill as gently as I could, and tripped the meter on so that I could monitor how much fuel it was using. I was really impressed – by the time I trickled into Boğaz, my average usage coming down from the castle was 2.8 litres per 100 km, which equates (as I learn thanks to Facebook) to almost 100 miles per gallon. I was also very relieved, and put in far more than enough fuel to get me back to Nicosia. I was about half an hour late returning the car, but that was as much due because of my difficulties in grappling with the weirdness of the street layout. And Sun, as I said before, were flexible.

So, strongly recommended, but it’s quite a long day out – I left Nicosia at 8 am and didn’t get back until 6.30. But in the summer one could take longer over it by exploiting the late evenings (and, if so inclined, starting early in the morning).

If you do an image google on Agron Buxhaku, one of the candidates in today’s Macedonian presidential election, you’ll see the first link is this picture from my livejournal scrapbook. He’s a good friend of mine, but is currently lying about fifth out of seven candidates in the polls. Another friend, Nano Ružin, is apparently going to come sixth out of seven. I also know (but do not especially like) Ljubomir Frčkoski who is second or third in the latest polls. The election will certainly be won by Gjorgje Ivanov who is backed by the main party in the government – probably not today but in a runoff two weeks from now against Frčkoski (who is the candidate of the main opposition party).

What’s interesting is that a lot of the polls suggest Frčkoski is under serious pressure for the second place in the runoff from an ethnic Albanian candidate, Imer Selmani, the leader of a new party called Demokracia e Re (which means “New Democracy” in Albanian). Doug Muir has blogged about this elsewhere; I’ll just add that my experience has been that Macedonian opinion polls tend to overstate the support of all Albanian parties, so I suspect he won’t make it, and even if he does Ivanov will will the run-off against either of them. But in any case it’s a significant kick in the teeth for my mate Agron’s party, which since he co-founded it in 2002 has won the majority of Macedonia’s Albanian votes (as long as the elections were done fairly).

There is one woman candidate, Mirushe Hoxha, a university professor who has never stood in an election before but is being backed by the oldest of the three ethnic Albanian parties. She is currently running seventh out of seven.

I’m sorry that Nano and Agron are likely to lose, but as long as the former Interior Minister Ljube Boškoski doesn’t make it to the second round, I’ll be happy. It is just over seven years since the mysterious Raštanski Lozja affair, for which nobody was ever successfully prosecuted (and Boškoski was not prosecuted at all). It would also be a good thing if the elections are conducted with less violence than last year’s parliamentary vote.

It also doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things. The outgoing President, Branko Crvenkovski, who moved up to the top spot after his predecessor was killed in a plane crash, has discovered to his dismay that the job left him pretty impotent; he is almost indecently eager to return to the leadership of his own party and, he hopes, the job of Prime Minister after the next parliamentary elections. President Ivanov will have an enjoyable five year term making speeches and attending conferences, but it’s unlikely that the average observer of international politics will register his name much.

I had forgotten just how good this is. Its 200 pages far outshine all later (and mostly longer) invasion-of-Earth stories (or even just disaster stories like The Stand). It feels so very fresh, one of the basic plots of science fiction being written for the first time. Yes, of course it’s strongly reliant on tales of human wars, both those set in the contemporary late nineteenth century and those set in the (then) near future; but this chilling sentence – of mildly dodgy grammar but impeccable pace – in the first paragraph makes it clear that this is not about the Germans:

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

In the earlier chapters, there’s a fixation with circumstantial detail – especially of the geography of Surrey – which gives the whole narrative an immediacy which is curiously intensified as the conflict goes on and fewer and fewer characters get names – “the artilleryman”, “the curate”, and rather oddly to today’s reader, “my wife”. (And “my brother”, though his lady friends, the Elphinstones, do get names.)

So much here is reminiscent of later stories and indeed of history – the rescue of the English refugees by small boats from the rest of Europe is an odd inversion of Dunkirk; the tripods pop up in John Christopher; the gas warfare waged by the aliens against London was soon to happen in real life.

Anyway, a really excellent, short read.

A book that ties in with two of my projects, Sir Nicholas White who was educated in London in the 1540s and died in the Tower in 1592, and of course Shakespeare. Picard has written several other books about London in different eras, but none the less makes her material here sound entirely fresh. There is a mass of detail on most aspects of London life, and I understand much better the role of institutions like the foreigners’ churches and the city companies; plus I have more on my reading list for the moment when I crank my research on White up a gear. Unfortunately she doesn’t say much on the two subjects I most wanted to read about: the court (though this does come up in discussion of clothes) and the Irish in London – I think I spotted precisely one mention, of an Irish woman who died and whose children were therefore supported by the parish. On the other hand she has plenty of entertaining asides, the majority of which are buried in the endnotes (yet another book which irritatingly does not have footnotes), including numerous reminiscences of Tanganyika in the 1950s, some of which are even relevant to Elizabethan London.

Driving up and down the peninsula yesterday I had the chance to enjoy a couple of the recent Companion Chronicles which I had somehow missed.

The Darkening Eye is a prequel to last year’s Seventh Doctor audio, The Death Collectors, which introduced us listeners to the Dar Traders, an alien race who are the eponymous collectors. Here we get the full early Fifth Doctor crew encountering them along with an undead assassin; none of it really made sense, to be honest, people keep getting stabbed and the ending of the framing narrative (Nyssa reminiscing to a patient on Terminus) didn’t make a lot of sense.

But it’s really lifted by Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, doing a pretty good take of Davison’s Doctor, Janet Fielding’s Tegan and even Matthew Waterhouse’s Adric, as well as almost all the other characters. There are a satifying number of references back to Season 17 18 (thanks, ) – dwarf star alloy, Traken, dimensional problems, etc. The plot is no worse than several of the TV stories she appeared in (though I still don’t get the Dar Traders).

William Russell’s return in character as Ian Chesterton gives him the record for Who performer of longest standing (though Carole Ann Ford is due to regain that title later in the year). Transit of Venus is a two-hander with Ian Stoddard playing Joseph Banks, and William Russell playing everyone else, after the Tardis appears on board the Endeavour in 1774 and promptly disappears again along with Susan and Barbara. It is set immediately after and (despite the historical setting) ties in very closely with The Sensorites, which for my money is the worst story of the very first TV season so it’s a bit mysterious that both Big Finish and (via the Ood) New Who have chosen to revisit it.

Most of Transit of Venus is really good – a decent picture of life on board the ship, with a certain sense of loyalty to the early historical series, and a great portrayal by Russell of an increasingly frantic Ian, as well as most of the other characters. Unfortunately the build-up of the first 90% of the play is seriously blunted by a really stupid ending.

So, two plays with somewhat imperfect scripts which are both very much lifted by the guest star.

This is a collection of papers from a 2007 conference in Famagusta; I am one of the contributors (though on Kosovo and Macedonia rather than Cyprus). The standout papers are by Nathalie Tocci, reviewing the EU’s role in failing to reach a solution up to 2004 and since; Georg Ziegler of the European Commission, which I’m sure he would rush to assert contains nothing new but does pull together the crucial EU documents and policies; and Maria Hadjipavlou, analysing how the opening of the Green Line in 2002 has affected perceptions – not always positively. Some of the material is now out of date because of the renewed talks process. Two of the contributors, Alexander Lordos and Erol Kaymak, have in fact just finished a new opinion poll which will be published in the next couple of weeks.

Of Heinlein’s four or five Hugo-winning novels (Double Star, Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and retro-Hugo-winning Farmer in the Sky) this probably is the best. (Reserving judgement on TMiaHM as I haven’t re-read it yet.) Which I not to say that it’s a perfect piece of work. The things that make a lot of Heinlein’s later work deeply annoying are all here – the cringingly awful dialogue, the gender stereotyping, the know-it-all Author’s Voice character – but somehow not as bad as they later became; the targets of his humour in politics, religion and society are fairly well chosen and to a certain extent still relevant; and Valentine Michael Smith is actually rather fascinating as a concept – we’re in the territory of Candide and Rasselas, but with Martians offstage. Heinlein must have been a bit surprised that his libertarian parable spiced up with sex and aliens became popular with the counter-culture of the later sixties, but readers do not always take away what writers think they are bringing to a work.

It’s striking that I don’t think I have even heard of, let alone read, any of the other 1962 nominees (Dark Universe by Daniel F. Galouye, Sense of Obligation/Planet of the Damned by Harry Harrison, The Fisherman/Time Is the Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak and Second Ending by James White).

…if you’re a Classic Who fan, and you’re not reading , I have to ask you why not?

I guess I was just not in the mood for this. I found the archaic language tedious, the moral dilemmas artificial and not very interesting, and the portrayal of Puritan society unrealistic; I also was repelled by the author’s lengthy autobiographical digression about working in the custom-house at the start. Well, one more nineteenth-century classic that I will never have to pick up again…

Hot off the BF website, it’s the latest of their audio plays, The Chaos Pool in which the Fifth Doctor, human tracer companion Amy, and her sister and rival Zara close in on the last segment of the Key to Time. Actually the real star of this is Lalla Ward, who makes a triumphant return; it’s not at first clear how or even if this will tie into the Gallifrey series of audios starring her, Louise Jameson and (in part) Mary Tamm, but it’s all tied up satisfactorily at the end, including an explanation for Romana’s regeneration in Destiny of the Daleks. Purists may object to the fate (or even the portrayal) of the Black and White Guardians, but (as I said in my review of The Destroyer of Delights) I saw it as a rather innovative move by Big Finish to reinvent two essentially rather boring stock characters. While I enjoyed the performances of Ciara Janson and Laura Doddington in the other Key 2 Time audios, this was the first to be recorded and they were still finding their way. The plot is suitably convoluted and enjoyable, though I didn’t really grasp the point of the Teuthonians, and you couldn’t really recommend it to anyone who hadn’t already heard the first three Key 2 Time stories.

In honour of the national festival, I’ve produced this list of books about Ireland which I have reviewed on-line. This is not a reading list for Irish studies – I ran through most of that when working on my PhD. But I hope some of you will find some points of interest here.

Non-fiction

Medieval history
**** A History of the Black Death in Ireland, by Maria Kelly
***½ Malachy, by Brian Scott – biography of the 12th-century saint

Sixteenth century
****½ Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470-1603 by Steven G. Ellis – best of three on the period
**** Contested Island: Ireland 1460-1630, by S.J. Connolly
***½ Sixteenth Century Ireland, by Colm Lennon

Seventeenth century (and on)
**** The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates, by Des Ekin – how the population of a Cork village were sold to Algiers in 1631
**** Battle of the Boyne 1690, by Padraig Lenihan
**** Science, Culture and Modern State Formation, by Patrick Carroll – science and the state in the 17th and 18th centuries
****½ Belfast, c. 1600 to c. 1900: The Making of the Modern City, by Raymond Gillespie and Stephen A. Royle – found this fascinating

Nineteenth century (and on)
***½ Scholars and Rebels, by Terry Eagleton – intellectual life in nineteenth century Ireland
***** Home Rule: An Irish History 1800-2000, by Alvin Jackson – draws some interesting parallels
**** The Independent Irish Party, 1850-9 by John H Whyte – my father’s first book
**½-**** Four biographies of Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh
**** Parnell – The Uncrowned King of Ireland: His Love Story and Political Life, by Katherine O’Shea – biography of leading Irish political figure by the woman who loved him
**** A Bachelor’s London: Memories of the Day before Yesterday, 1889-1914, by Frederic Whyte – autobiography of a distant cousin of mine; some Irish content
***** Lost Railways of Co. Down and Co. Armagh, by Stephen Johnson – does what it says on the tin

1916
****½ Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, by Charles Townshend – comprehensive account
**** Dublin Castle and the 1916 Rising: The Story of Sir Matthew Nathan, by Leon Ó Broin – looks at one senior official’s experience
**** Slide Rule: An Autobiography, by Neville Shute – the novelist’s father was in charge of the GPO
**½ From Behind a Closed Door: Secret Court Martial Records of the Easter Rising, by Brian Barton – relies too heavily on its source material

The Troubles
***** Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea – heart-rending and complete
***** Making Sense of the Troubles, by David McKittrick and David McVea – excellent overview of What It All Meant
***** The Elusive Quest: Reconciliation in Northern Ireland, by Norman Porter – on the importance of reconciliation, and how to get there
****½ Troubled Images: Posters and Images of the Northern Ireland Conflict from the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, ed. Yvonne Murphy, Allan Leonard, Gordon Gillespie and Kris Brown – fascinating collection of visual images
***½ Endgame in Ireland, by David McKittrick and Eamonn Mallie – chronology from 1984 to 2001.
*** Northern Ireland: A Political Directory, 1968-1999 by Sydney Elliott and W.D. Flackes with John Coulter – previous edition of essential directory

Other 20th century
***½ What If? Alternative Views of Twentieth-Century Ireland, by Diarmaid Ferriter – less interesting than it sounds

Literature
***½ The Star Factory, by Ciaran Carson – literary memoir of growing up in Belfast
***½ More Real Than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts, edited by Donald E. Morse and Csilla Bertha – scholarly essays

Fiction

Non-sf
****½ Improbable Frequency, by Arthur Riordan and Bell Helicopter – Myles na gCopaleen and Schrödinger
****½ The New Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction, edited by Dermot Bolger and Ciaran Carty – short stories by new writers
**** A Game of Sharopened Knives, by Neil Belton – De Valera and Schrödinger
**** Odd Man Out, by F.L. Green – base for the classic film
***½ Green Shadows, White Whale: A Novel of Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland, by Ray Bradbury – uneven but interesting

Science Fiction
***½ The Secret Visitors, by James White – aliens in Portballintrae
***½ The Green Gene, by Peter Dickinson – you can tell they’re Celts by their skin colour
*** The Rising of the Moon, by Flynn Connolly – women fighting repression in a future theocratic Ireland
*** Darkness Audible, by Graham Andrews – short shories with linking narrative
** Masters of the Fist, by Edward P Hughes – the only fertile man in the post-Holocaust world gets to impregnate all the women of the village

Fantasy
***** The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien – my favourite of his writings
***** Thud!, by Terry Pratchett – not explicitly about Northern Ireland but it’s not difficult to work it out
****½ The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson – classic fantasy, though the Irish setting is rather incidental
**** At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien – generally regarded as his masterpiece
**** The Prize in the Game, by Jo Walton – interesting Cuchulain treatment
**** Master of Earth and Water, by Diana L. Paxson and Adrienne Martine-Barnes – Finn MacCool treatment
**** The Hounds of the Morrigan, by Pat O’Shea – good fantasy novel, for younger readers
**** The Compleat Enchanter, by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt – last section is another Cuchulain yarn
**** Preacher: Proud Americans, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon – vampire’s eye view of the Easter Rising
***½ Emerald Magic: Great Tales Of Irish Fantasy, ed. Andrew M. Greeley – fifteen fantasy stories, most published here first
***½ Gossamer Axe, by Gael Baudino – time-travelling rock musician rescues her girlfriend
***½ Red Branch, by Morgan Llewellyn – yet another Cuchulain treatment
*** Too Long a Sacrifice, by Mildred Downey Broxon – more time-travelling, from ancient times to the Troubles
*** Most Ancient Song, by Kenneth C. Flint – unexceptional fantasy novel
*** Carolan’s Concerto: a toast to the three sacred pastimes of old Ireland: Music, Storytelling and Whiskey, by Caiseal Mór – Celtic Mist
**½ The Meeting of the Waters: Book One of the Watchers Trilogy, by Caiseal Mór – more Celtic Mist

Along with my various other reading projects I’m slowly working through Gibbon, who may not be a laugh a minute but has a surprising number of jokes. I was struck by his conclusions regarding climate change, which are more or less along the right lines if not quite for the right reasons:

Some ingenious writers have suspected that Europe was much colder formerly than it is at present; and the most ancient descriptions of the climate of Germany tend exceedingly to confirm their theory. The general complaints of intense frost, and eternal winter, are perhaps little to be regarded, since we have no method of reducing to the accurate standard of the thermometer the feelings or the expressions of an orator, born in the happier regions of Greece or Asia. But I shall select two remarkable circumstances of a less equivocal nature. 1/. The great rivers which covered the Roman provinces, the Rhine and the Danube, were frequently frozen over, and capable of supporting the most enormous weights. The barbarians, who often chose that severe season for their inroads, transported, without apprehension or danger, their numerous armies, their cavalry, and their heavy wagons, over a vast and solid bridge of ice. Modern ages have not presented an instance of a like phenomenon. 2/. The reindeer, that useful animal, from whom the savage of the North derives the best comforts of his dreary life, is of a constitution that supports, and even requires, the most intense cold. He is found on the rock of Spitzberg, within ten degrees of the Pole; he seems to delight in the snows of Lapland and Siberia; but at present he cannot subsist, much less multiply, in any country to the south of the Baltic. In the time of Caesar, the reindeer, as well as the elk and the wild bull, was a native of the Hercynian forest, which then overshadowed a great part of Germany and Poland. The modern improvements sufficiently explain the causes of the diminution of the cold. These immense woods have been gradually cleared, which intercepted from the earth the rays of the sun. The morasses have been drained, and, in proportion as the soil has been cultivated, the air has become more temperate. Canada, at this day, is an exact picture of ancient Germany. Although situated in the same parallel with the finest provinces of France and England, that country experiences the most rigorous cold. The reindeer are very numerous, the ground is covered with deep and lasting snow, and the great river of St. Laurence is regularly frozen, in a season when the waters of the Seine and the Thames are usually free from ice.

My first reaction is, I wish I could write like that; and my second is to note the usual bigotry against the “savage of the North” with “his [not her] dreary life”. But apart from that, it is a passage with interesting resonances.

Of course, Gibbon is probably unaware of the Gulf Stream warming northwestern Europe (Benjamin Franklin described it a few years later, in 1786). It’s also fairly clear to the modern reader that human destruction of their habitat alone is enough to drive the reindeer and elk beyond the Baltic, rather than the trees providing some sort of continental cooling effect as Gibbon seems to believe. Like Gibbon, I do wonder a bit if the cold was exaggerated by Roman writers – he footnotes Ovid describing frozen lumps of wine being served at dinner, but I would observe that the Danube was a cold place for Ovid in more ways than one, and he was also a master of figures of speech.

Data are few and dubious, but the “Little Ice Age” generally described as having lasted from about 1500 to 1850 seems to have let up – and warmed up – specifically at the time that Gibbon was writing. It’s not at all clear if this took Europe back up to the temperature levels of the first or second century, though. Yet his fundamental conclusion, that the major cause of climate change was anthropogenic and related to environmental exploitation, is well ahead of his time, even if the details are mostly wrong.

This is a collection of short stories, all but two of which are set in contemporary Ireland, by new Irish writers none of whom I had previously heard of (apart from one, Eileen Brannigan, who I went to school with in Belfast). The whole collection is rather a good perspective of life in Ireland today, and reminds me a bit of the way Frank O’Connor depicted the very different Ireland of the 1920s and 1930s in his stories – indeed, one or two here seemed to have direct resonances with his work, and all are in his shadow.

I wouldn’t want to push that too far, though. The difference with O’Connor and his time is that this collection has much less writing about work and religion, and much more openness about dysfunctional relationships – between men and women (now that we can admit that sex happens outside marriage, and that marriages do not always last for life), and between men (mostly) and alcohol. Sixty years ago, Michael McLaverty was able to write a funny story about the schoolteacher making poteen under the nose of the authorities; it’s difficult to imagine anyone writing a funny story centering around alcohol now.

There is another recurrent dysfunctional relationship, that between the Irish and the countryside, which kills (bodily or spiritually or both) the viewpoint characters of several of these pieces (including in Eileen Brannigan’s story). Where the writers of the mid-twentieth century were a bit suspicious of modernity and romanticised the rural virtues of the past, the writers of the early twenty-first seem to have gone the other way; the country is a dangerous, unforgiving, lonely place, and we humans mess with it at our peril.

The two least successful stories are the two set outside the present day – a vignette on the execution of Erskine Childers which can’t quite decide if it is drama or documentary, and an sfnal piece written as a far-future scholarly analysis of a nude picture of Pamela Anderson rescued from the ruins of Los Angeles, which is not as good as the description makes it sound (and that is not saying much). The others are all excellent.

I do have one fairly serious gripe with the presentation. It is not made clear what relationship these stories actually have with the Henessy Literary Awards. Apparently they were all first published in the Sunday Tribune, and thus were also somehow eligible for the Hennessy process, but I think the editors, Dermot Bolger and Ciaran Carty, could have spared a couple of sentences to clarify what the set-up is.

I’ve had this one on the shelves for ages, and eventually it bubbled to the top of not one but two of my reading lists simultaneously. I have previously read both War And Peace and Anna Karenina, and I think the first thing to say is that Resurrection is an easier read – shorter, for a start, and with fewer characters who also appear to have fewer variations in their names. The thirty-something Prince Nekhlyudov, who is Tolstoy here as Levin is in Anna Karenina, is serving as juror in a murder trial when he recognises one of the defendants as the girl he seduced ten years before. She is wrongly convicted, and Nekhlyudov’s consciousness and conscience are suddenly activated with respect to the horrible injustices of the penal system and of Russian society as a whole. He follows her to Siberia in an attempt to compensate her.

The social commentary is biting and convincing, and the account of life with convicted criminals and revolutionaries pretty vivid, and likewise his commentary on elite attitudes and behaviour. It’s unfortunate that Nekhlyudov, the viewpoint character, is rather a bore. His decision to marry Katusha seems based much more on what will make him feel better about himself, rather than any attempt to discern what her needs may be. (She never seems very keen on the idea, even before she meets Simonsen.) One feels that, rather than try and write a character with a story, Tolstoy has put himself into the book as a commentator on society. I’m sure it caused quite a stir among his fans in the 1890s, but the ideas that prisons might be unpleasant places or the judicial system imperfect are hardly news to today’s reader. (Are they?) Nekhlyudov’s sudden discovery of these facts seems rather artificial.

Whatever its flaws, though, it’s prettuy digestible and might be a good jumping-off point for readers who haven’t otherwise tried Tolstoy.

So, as Fianna Fáil abandoned the ragbag of right-wingers with whom they sat in the European Parliament in order to join a major group, the British Conservatives are doing the opposite. (Hat-tip to Tim Roll-Pickering, who unlike most Tories actually understands Europe and thinks, in my opinion a bit wishfully, that this won’t last.)

I was unimpressed with the last Doctor Who story I read with a Chinese setting, but David McIntee has done a lot better here, with the Doctor and Romana I drawn aside from their quest for the Key to Time to deal with the legacy of the Doctor’s Victorian theatrical adventures in 1937 Shanghai, where Chinese and Japanese factions and agents are competing over various assets which turn out to include Mr Sin, a nuclear reactor and an attempt to divert Magnus Greel from his fate. Several pleasing nods to continuity, and I think he captures the Baker / Tamm / Leeson dynamic rather nicely as well. One of the better Missing Adventures.

Doug Muir at A Fistful of Euros informs us that Yunus-Bek Yevkirov, the new President of Ingushetia, was also the leader of the March on Pristina in 1999.

One can lead a column to Pristina every day, but of course here in the republic, things are far more difficult.

Alexandra Bell and Ben Loehrke on Democracy Arsenal compare missile defence to snake oil (which I think is a bit unfair on snake oil):

… technology that does not work against a threat that does not exist…

Henry Farrell on Crooked Timber defends the European Parliament:

…complaints about the self-importance and amour-propre of MEPs seem to me to really miss the point.

On a lighter note, Maria Farrell, also on Crooked Timber, muses on kissing:

I do a fair bit of cheek-kissing and hugging, both socially and at work, probably more than most but not unusually so (I haven’t had any complaints yet).

Finally, back to Henry again who has advice for prospective graduate students.

I’m running out of actual BF Who audios to listen to, but there are still a few spinoff series to get through.

I have enjoyed all of Mike Tucker’s previous audios (The Genocide Machine, which brought back the Daleks; Dust Breeding, which brought back the Master and Caroline John; and The Stone’s Lament, which was the best of the second Benny series), so it’s disappointing to report a relative dud. Bringing Benny to a small world caught between Sontaran and Rutan lines is intrinsically a good idea, but I personally got lost between the real people and Rutans pretending to be Benny and Bev, and also between the various factions of Rutans. A good idea wasted.

Quite a long time back I enjoyed but wasn’t overwhelmed by The Dark Flame, to which this is a sort-of sequel. The Draconian Rage brings Benny to the Draconian emperor in a fairly straighforward story of conspiracies and court politics, with alien civilisation subjected to a different alien threat, and it is told well – though poor Benny is subjected to gruesome torture, from which she bounces back rather unrealistically fast.

For the first time ever, I have to mark a BF audio down quite severely for poor production values. The Poison Seas brings Benny back to the world of The Secret of Cassandra to visit an old friend who happens to be a Sea Devil colonist. Unfortunately the Sea Devil characters are almost incomprehensible thanks to their distorted sibilant voices, and their computer is completely impossible to make out. The plot seemed OK, and Jenny Livsey as human conspirator Carver showed promise, but the annoyance of not being able to hear half the dialogue properly made this in places quite an unpleasant listening experience.

The whole of this series relies pretty heavily on continuity, both with Classic Who and with previous audios. Death and the Daleks is, as I understand it, the audio sequel to a Bernice spinoff short story collection, Life During Wartime, in which the Braxiatel collection has been occupied by a military regime called the Fifth Axis which appears to be led by Benny’s father. It is greatly to Paul Cornell’s credit that despite the fact that the audio starts effectively in the middle of the story, it is pretty easy to pick up what is happening, even with excursions back to Heaven and various nods to Braxiatel continuity. It’s a pretty good account of Daleks, their unwitting human puppets, resistance under occupation, and Benny’s personal history coming back to meet her. I think I would have liked it even more if I had read Life During Wartime, which does make me wonder if it is a good idea to build cross-media continuity so strongly into the narrative.

So in summary, The Draconian Rage is recommended for those with strong stomachs; Death and the Daleks for those who don’t mind catching up with a bit of continuity; and the other two not really recommended at all.

Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.
(Decline and Fall, chapter VII)

…about two thirds of you who answered the previous poll didn’t have the faintest notion what I was on about.

A relatively sympathetic article revealing the answer is here. The Guardian, God bless them, are spinning this story as the British rightwing press being outraged for the sake of outrage.

But I’m afraid this is part of a pattern in the last few days: Hillary Clinton presented her Russian opposite number, Sergei Lavrov, with a gag “Reset” button which had the word “reset” in both English and Russian. Except that the Russian for “reset” was a) spelt wrong and b) in the wrong alphabet anyway.

Come on guys. I was overjoyed when you won; please pay attention to the tiny details. They matter.

I was in Berlin earlier in the week, and decided to trace the route of the Wall through the centre of the city. It’s quite easy to do: from this site I discovered that there was a convenient corner of it near my hotel where the Kommandantenstraße meets the Axel-Springer-Straße, and followed it westwards along the Zimmerstraße, past Checkpoint Charlie, through the Niederkirchnerstraße, up the Stresemannstraße to the Potsdamer Platz, then along the Ebertstraße to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. Basically my route lay to the left from the lower right of this map, and then up the left side:

Almost everywhere it’s pretty easy to follow. This is from near the start of the trail on the Zimmerstraße, looking west:

And this is at the end of that leg, looking east along the Niederkirchnerstraße from the Stresemannstraße:

Here it is snaking across the Potsdamer Platz (strictly speaking this may be the nearby Fontane Platz):

Here’s the view north along the Ebertstraße to the Brandenburg Gate (the sun had come out by now):

Here it is snaking around the Brandenburg Gate (off this line of vision to the right; the Reichstag in the background):

And here we are looking south from the Reichstag to the Brandenburg Gate (the sun having gone in again):

And you can just see it here in the road in front of the Gate:

From these lines in the road, which cars casually park on and drive over, it is almost impossible to imagine what the wall meant to those of us who are old enough to remember the Cold War. What seemed then an immovable barrier has been reduced to a few bricks at street level. It still seems incredible to me.

There is one short stretch still standing on the Niederkirchnerstraße, here looking “West” (actually south-west from this angle) to the Martin Gropius Building, museum and exhibition hall whose entrance was basically blocked by the Wall for many years. (NB the graffiti is post-’89: this was the “Eastern” side of the wall.)

And this is the same stretch looking “East” (really northwest) to the new Berlin parliament building. (Notice absence of graffiti, no doubt all chipped off by souvenir hunters in 1989 or shortly thereafter.) Here it forms part of a permanent open-air exhibition called “The Topography of Terror” to mark the site of the SS and Gestapo headquarters. Hitler’s bunker was a few blocks further north.

The wall skirts a number of other interesting structures. Here is what is left of Checkpoint Charlie, looking southeast past the old US guard post to the Checkpoint Charlie museum (which I went to a few years back; it’s pretty impressive).

The old sign is still there too:

Up near the Reichstag is this little memorial to those who were killed trying to cross the Wall.

The restored Reichstag is remarkable:

The new Chancellery building less so:

Everything in Berlin is well sign-posted – this was the end of my walk:

The most impressive of the memorials occupies a full block between the Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

I recommend you go and see for yourself.

This is a collection of sixty or so speeches made by Graham Watson MEP since he became leader of the Liberal group of members of the European Parliament. I know the author, and inevitably – especially given that it’s a book of speeches – I hear his gentle Rothesay accent in my head as I read the words. (Although he is a Scot, he actually represents South-Western England. And Gibraltar.)

Speeches are odd: on the one hand, they can be pretty ephemeral, on the other hand, they can be tremendously difficult to prepare. I did one in Berlin myself yesterday, addressing diplomats and academics from Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, South Africa, India, China and Indonesia. The topic was one that I have thought about quite often, and talked about occasionally, but had never had to marshall my thoughts on before, let alone present them before an audience of complete strangers. I had a sleepless night on Saturday, dreaming that I would miss my plane, and a sleepless night on Sunday, dreaming that the speech would go badly. In the end I think it went OK – it was in the German foreign ministry, where you can easily work up the last-minute adrenalin by leaping in and out of the paternosters. I’ll probably write it up here eventually – I took the precaution of recording myself on my MP3 player. (And it was tighter than I had anticipated to catch my plane this morning as I caught up on lost sleep from the two previous nights. I was in no danger of missing the flight, but did miss breakfast.)

Graham Watson’s speeches are all much shorter – the longest of these can’t be more than a quarter of an hour, the shortest are parliamentary interventions where MEPs are speaking against the clock. Some are very specific – Russia, Gibraltar, Cyprus, the poor management of his own election campaign in 1999. Others are broader. I don’t think anyone could read the collection and come away from it with the feeling that they didn’t know what Graham Watson stands for; he’s pretty clear on his concept of liberalism, and he has obviously managed to make it appealing to large numbers of MEPs (and, hopefully, their voters); the size of the Liberal group has doubled under his leadership, without his dialling down his own rhetoric in any way, and continues to pull in recruits.

Graham has announced that while he is running for re-election to the European Parliament, he will stand down as leader of the Liberal group after seven years and will instead pitch for the position of President (ie Speaker) of the parliament as a whole. It’s a bit of a long shot, but I would like to see him get it.

I thought on first reading it that this was one of the less successful of the Harry Potter books, and my prejudices were confirmed re-reading it now. It’s rather marking time between the scene-setting of volume 1 and the big reveals of volume 3. It’s also marred by the poor world-building of the politics of wizardry – the nature of the power relationships between the Minister for Magic, Lucius Malfoy, Dumbledore and the Weasleys’ father is never made very clear or credible. It seems extraordinary that no action beyond sidelining Dumbledore is taken after the outbreak of petrifactions, and even more extraordinary that the fraudulent Gilderoy Lockhart is allowed to remain in his job for a week, never mind three terms. Do the parents of Hogwarts pupils not care about their children being turned to stone, or set exam questions on their teachers’ autobiographies?

(One other niggle: given that Harry is so rich, why doesn’t he upgrade the Gryffindor Quidditch team’s broomsticks and get Ron a new wand?)

There are two saving graces to the book, though. The first is the diary – an artifact that seduces poor Ginny to do evil, that maintains Voldemort’s secret original identity. It’s a very creepy betrayal of intimacy. (Of course, if your diary is a Livejournal, it talks back to you in many voices…)

The other is the key moral message of the book that bigotry is wrong. It’s not only the nastiness of cheap insults like “Mudblood” and “Squib” and the consciousness of wizardly privilege; there’s also the moment when Harry inadvertently exposes himself as a Parseltongue, and his reputation plummets. It’s character-building for him, and hopefully thought-provoking for those readers who may not previously have had to think much about prejudice and privilege.

Anyway, Azkaban next, which is my favourite of the series.

< Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire | Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | The Tales of Beedle the Bard >

Masters of War is the latest in the BF Doctor Who Unbound series of audios, featuring David Warner as an alternate Third Doctor. I decided that before listening to it I would give the first Warner!Doctor story, Sympathy for the Devil, another go. I must say I appreciated its strengths even more two years on, with the Warner!Doctor / Gatiss!Master relationship sonewhat eerily mirrored by that between Nicholas Courtney’s failed Brigadier and his arrogant successor (played by David Tennant).

Unfortunately I didn’t think Masters of War matched up. There are some excellent performances – Terry Molloy as Davros, Courtney as the Brigadier, Briggs as the Daleks, Amy Pemberton as one of the Thals – but there’s a bit of a gap at the centre as Warner doesn’t quite seem to know what hs Doctor is really doing. The plot, too, disappointed – it’s a great idea, taking the Doctor and Brigadier to a post-Genesis Skaro where Davros parted from the Daleks on his own terms – but the key to the story turns out to be some rather dull all-powerful aliens manipulating Thals, Kaleds and now Daleks, and the plot has a lot of standing around getting bombed or shot at. It’s not actually awful, but it is average where it could have been excellent.