7) Campaign, by Jim Mortimore

This was the Doctor Who novel which was turned down by the BBC and which Mortimore subsequently managed to get published privately, now downloadable for free thanks to those awfully nice New Zealand chaps. There is no way the BBC could have published it – by Mortimore’s own (rather too extensively documented) account, it is about a million light years away from the novel he actually agreed to write. But it is a brilliant read all the same, though I think you would need to know who Lola McGovern and Cliff were to really appreciate it. It is the story of the First Doctor, his grand-daughter and the two people from 1960s England who travel together, in the Tardis after an adventure with Alexander the Great and several ambiguous outcomes, trying to cope with the disappearance of the entire universe outside the Ship. Mortimore takes the narrative to very peculiar structures and places, but it kept me reading.

The New Zealand edition includes both Mortimore’s authorial notes, describing his bitter struggles with his muse (incarnate as a monkey), and an account of his dispute with the BBC publishers which I think could usefully have been summarised into rather fewer pages.

6) Brussels versus the Beltway: Advocacy in the United States and the European Union, by Christine Mahoney

A somewhat technical but none the less interesting analysis of my world of work. Mahoney has conducted 147 interviews with lobbyists of different backgrounds covery 49 different issues in Washington and Brussels, and presents the results. She starts off by making the interesting point that in the US system, most legislative proposals fail to even reach a decisive vote in one House of Congress, let alone become law, whereas in the EU, once the Commission has started work on a new legislative proposal, it is very rare for it not to emerge from the complex system in some form as a new law.

Every chapter has an interesting and sometimes provocative insight from her data. One that jumped out at me was that while American lobbyists don’t very often (but do sometimes) argue to lawmakers that their constituents will care about a particular issue, this argument is literally never used by EU lobbyists, at least the ones Mahoney talked to. The fact is that even MEPs are not really accountable to voters, but rather to their political party selectorates, which are only weakly responsive to MEPs’ actual legislative activities; and other EU officials have no direct accountability to the electorate at all. So it is not surprising but it’s interesting to see it brought out so strongly.

Another point is that insider networking tactics – lobbying visits, seminars, cocktail parties – are used much more frequently by Brussels lobbyists (as I can see daily in the cafes around my office) than by their DC counterparts. Mahoney speculates that this is because of the tighter regulation of US lobbyists’ activities; I’m more inclined to feel that the more weirdly participative nature of the EU policy process, and the superior quality of catering in Brussels restaurants, are germane factors here.

Another fascinating point was that there is a strong correlation between the propensity of lobbyists to mobilise mass public support on a particular issue, and their ultimate failure to achieve their goals, on both sides of the Atlantic. I suspect this is because once you have taken your issue outside the closed circles of the epistemic community, you have almost admitted in advance that you have lost.

This is of course a world that I work in myself, though I inhabit its wilder fringes – only a very few of Mahoney’s 49 policy issues have to do with external relations, and none of those is as specific as the stuff I work and have worked on. Still, it’s interesting to see it subjected to someone else’s searching analysis. My one complaint about the book is that it gives only the barest description of the actual policy-making process; if you don’t already have a degree of familiarity with both the EU and US structures, you won’t get much out of this.

5) Burma Chronicles, by Guy Delisle

A recently published graphic chronicle of cartoonist Guy Delisle’s year in Burma with his wife (who works for Médécins Sans Frontières) and their baby son. It’s a country I know much less about than I would like. Without being patronising, Delisle captures a lot of fascinating moments – the absurdity of censorship and surveillance, the Christian heroin-addicted Kachins of the north, a stay in a monastery. He also captures a lot of the experiences of just being an expatriate with a small child which I’m much more familiar with – the admiration of locals for your foreign baby, the desperate shopping trips across the border to the neighbouring more developed capital city. A very good book; I believe Delisle has done a couple more about China and North Korea, and will look out for them.

Apparently it was all a vicious rumour. So his mother says.

4) The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett

I have bought a few books in New York, mostly for me, a few for young F; and picked this up on impulse for as she is a bit of a Bennett fan. Then this evening, with an hour and a half to spare between work and dinner, I found it slipping into my hands, and read the 120 large print pages pretty rapidly.

It is a lovely little novella about Queen Elizabeth II suddenly deciding to start reading, and the viciously negative reactions of her advisers to her new habit. There is a nice twist in the tail. I won’t say more so as not to spoil it for , but I recommend it.

By glorious chance I happen to be in New York at the moment, and watched the results coming in with friends who live uptown. I got a cab back but ran into celebrating crowds when we reached 47th St, so paid it off and walked the rest of the way to the hotel (on 29th). An amazing atmosphere, and I’m so glad I was here (and bought the T-shirt).

And I realised I’d been concentrating more on the party politics of it, but for the black people of America this is a moment of triumph. By the time the final result was called, everyone else had left the party except me and a black friend of my friends; and she was in floods of joyful tears. People who in living memory had difficulty even in voting have now elected one of their own. My son will grow up thinking it is not remarkable that America could have a black president; my friends’ baby boy, due in January, will not remember a time when there wasn’t one until he turns eight (God and the voters willing). That is what makes it such a special moment.

(And the Obama daughters will get a puppy.)

Apparently V died yesterday. I don’t make a habit of studying the lives of dictators of countries I otherwise know little about, but V shared my precise date of birth: like me, he was born on 26 April 1967. Unlike me, he was born to a young single mother in the capital of a developing country; like me he went to the local grammar school; unlike me, he joined his country’s army as soon as he had finished school, aged 18 in 1985, and rose rapidly through the ranks, to the point where he had a commanding role in the government campaign against the rebels in the east of the country.

V’s country was a corrupt single party state, and the army was exceptionally poorly supplied. Three days after his/my/our twenty-fifth birthday, on 29 April 1992, (when I was in Belfast, researching what became my PhD) he led his fellow soldiers on a protest march from the east to the capital. The government fled, and V found himself the youngest head of state in the world, in charge of a disintegrating country faced with an unwinnable civil war.

V was not a good president. He killed his political opponents in mass executions; he conscripted children as young as twelve into the army; he kept power by paying off white mercenaries with his country’s looted diamond wealth; and the rebel insurgency gained in strength, to the point where on 13 January 1996, when I was busy with the Northern Ireland peace process, debating the possibility of elections and George Mitchell’s report on decommissioning of terrorist weapons, V’s colleagues removed him from office, and themselves handed over power to a democratically elected government two months later. V fled to Britain for asylum, eventually starting (but not finishing) a law degree in Warwick University and working as a nightclub bouncer.

In 2000, the year after I had moved to Belgium, V left the UK and went back home again, living unemployed with his mother in the dismal suburb where he was born, reportedly drinking heavily and rumoured to be using narcotics. Yesterday’s news is therefore not surprising. Of the various mildly famous people who share my birthdate, two others have died, one murdered in South Africa, the other in a car accident. V’s death appears to have been from more or less natural causes, exacerbated by lifestyle choices.

I deliberately haven’t named his country up to now, because I wanted to tell the human story of someone with whom I have only the obscurest of links. But if you are interested, it was Sierra Leone, and V’s full name was Valentine Esegragbo Melvin Strasser. Not many people will miss him, but presumably his mother loved him.

Edited to add: According to his mother, this is all untrue and he is not dead after all.

2) Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, by Tony Judt

This huge (800+) page history of Europe’s last six decades has been looking at me from the bookshelf for some time, and I finally managed to get through most of it on a transatlantic flight on Saturday (I am in New York for work until Wednesday).

It is pretty impressive: a detailed account of both Western and Eastern Europe, covering in particular detail the immediate aftermath of the second world war, and then going on to survey the Cold War and post-1989 eras. In particular, I learnd a lot about the German Question – having grown up with the realities of a Federal Republic embedded in NATO and the DDR likewise in the Warsaw Pact, I had never quite appreciated the twists and turns of international policy that got to that point from the defeated and occupied Third Reich. Judt is also particularly good on the individual histories of the Soviet bloc states, especially Poland.

I was disappointed by his much more cursory treatment of some Western European countries. Belgium has the same population as Hungary, Portugal or Greece but gets much less coverage here – granted, it did not have the political transition that the other three enjoyed, but I found Judt’s treatment of the linguistic issue a bit journalistic. The same goes for Ireland (with a similar concern about his coverage of the Troubles). Judt devotes a lot of space to analysis of the personalities of Mitterand, Adenauer and Thatcher, but I don’t believe that a single Irish politician apart from Gerry Adams is even name-checked. OK, Haughey was not an international figure in the same way, but I think his story is also of some importance for Europe as well as Ireland.

In the earlier sections (less so in the closing chapters) Judt brings in interesting evidence of Europe’s state of mind by looking at the literature, music and especially cinema of the decades in question. This feeds into his recurrent theme of Europe’s difficulties with acknowledging the past in order to move on from it; he has a thought-provoking epilogue about attitudes to the Holocaust, which in almost every country (except Germany, for obvious reasons, and also Denmark, for better reasons) tends to underplay the extent of local collusion and enthusiasm for the project – almost (though he doesn’t use the word) a kind of soft denial.

In the end though I wasn’t completely satisfied with his conclusion. He doesn’t quite seem to believe in the European Union, by which I mean not only that he doesn’t seem to accept the validity of the political project (which is fair enough, if in my opinion wrong-headed) but also that he doesn’t quite seem to accept what is already there. While he is quite good on the effects of the concept of “Europe” on the transitioning states of the East, he is much vaguer on the reverse effect – what the new states bring to the EU – seeming almost uninterested, which is odd.

Even so, there is a lot of very good stuff here, and it is well worth reading.

October Books 25) Interference Book One: Shock Tactic, by Lawrence Miles
November Books 1) Interference Book Two: The Hour of the Geek, by Lawrence Miles

Hmmm. A typically rambling Lawrence Miles story, rambling in this case over two volumes, linking together his Faction Paradox concept with the truth about I.M. Foreman, and bringing in also Sarah Jane Smith as an investigative journalist to supplement EDA regulars Sam and Fitz. There are some passages of vivid writing (the Saudi prison cell, Sam’s experiments with LSD) and a fairly spectacular plot resolution, with an intricate narrative structure which I suspect actually does make sense (though I remained a little confused about the various versions of Fitz’ story). I think really one for completists only (as with almost the whole Eighth Doctor range), but engaging enough to keep my interest over both volumes.

24) Waterloo, by Andrew Roberts

I got this after reading Vanity Fair, and reflecting that it’s a while since I last went down to the battle site, which is only half an hour’s drive from us. It is a very short but very detailed account of the June 1815 campaign which sealed Napoleon’s fate. The carnage was brutal and vicious; the battle of Waterloo took place over a very small area, four kilometres by two, with the focus of the fighting being two building complexes which Wellington needed to hold long enough for the Prussians under Blücher to arrive from the east; he held one and had to abandon the other when the garrison ran out of ammunition, but it had held for long enough for the Prussians to arrive.

Roberts is excellent on the details (and there are two very good maps) but very annoying in his description of the context. The British element of the allied forces get noticeably more praise for gallantry, bravery and intelligence (when basically the crucial move in the battle had happened a couple of days earlier, when Blücher’s deputy decided to retreat north rather than east from their defeat at Ligny, and so were available to save Wellington at Waterloo). One senses that Roberts is trying to be neutral and objective, but that his heart is not in it. I did, however, appreciate his debunking of Victor Hugo’s description of the battle in Les Miserables.

The other problem with the book is that it isn’t made terribly clear why all this slaughter mattered. What if Wellington and Blücher had lost? Napoleon would eventually have been defeated by the Austrians and Russians, no doubt with the help of a revived British army of veterans from the war with America; or else (perhaps less likely) he might have settled for a restored Empire including Belgium but otherwise at peace with his neighbours. Europe in 1840 would surely not have looked very different if Waterloo had gone the other way (except, as noted, for Belgium). Waterloo put an end to Napoleon’s career, but he had peaked in 1812 and it was always going to be downhill from there. In the end, I was actually left wondering if it was all necessary.

23) Edmund Spenser, by Rosemary Freeman

This is a very slim pamphlet of thirty pages, published around 1960 as part of a series on “Writers and Their Works” for the British Council and the National Book League. I realised a little while ago that if I am serious about researching sixteenth-century Ireland, I will have to get into Spenser’s writings, especially his poetry; this booklet gave me a reasonable overview of his works, including one very important tip – don’t start The Faerie Queene by reading the explanatory letter to Sir Walter Ralegh which is printed in most editions as a preface, just get into the poem directly. I will have to tackle the original texts at some point but at least I now have a better idea of what I am getting into.

Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you’re in a non-same-sex marriage, and you don’t want it “protected” by those who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

22) The Moving Toyshop, by Edmund Crispin

Got this off Bookmooch, after reading ‘s review (in which she explores its literary antecedence of Doctor Who), and greatly enjoyed it. It is a murder mystery set in Oxford in 1938, solved by Gervase Fen, professor of poetry; the plot is convoluted and utterly implausible, but it is written with immense verve, energy and humour. Anyone who knows Oxford will appreciate the attention to local detail. (Anyone expecting a sort of prehistoric Inspector Morse will be disappointed.)

Dear job hunter,

Thanks for dropping in with your CV earlier. I have a couple of suggestions as to how you might improve it: in particular, it may not be a great idea to list “women” as one of your hobbies…

Professor Christine Bell of the University of Ulster is an old friend of mine. I knew her first when she was a clarinettist, and I played percussion, in the Belfast Youth Orchestra as teenagers; then we more or less overlapped at Cambridge; then we both ended up at QUB again; then we both got into the international arena at about the same time – I quoted her work to the president of Macedonia; she recently sent me a couple of chapters of her next book to critique.

But it turns out that I am not her only old friend.

Small world, eh?

We went to bed early last night, and incredibly were not awakened by the collective sound of fandom exploding after the news broke. Well, I’m not surprised that Tennant is leaving. He will have played the part for longer than anyone except Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, unless one allows McGann and (more justifiably) McCoy the time of the interregnums. He has been good; I wasn’t totally convinced by either The Christmas Invasion or New Earth, but since then he has pretty much got it. (My favourite Doctors are still Four, Nine and One, in that order, but it is an increasingly tough call.)

Things have changed since the days of Old Who, when the handover would be fixed up and completed in weeks or at most a few months; now we have over a year to go before we see the last of Ten.

I’m not going to get into the guessing game of who Eleven will be. Speculation at this stage is rather premature. Anyway there is the old saying that he who goes into the conclave as the next pope comes out of it just another cardinal. (Though the old saying is sometimes wrong.) I imagine the Moff will have someone in mind, and probably it will be someone he has worked with before; one could easily draw up a likely shortlist after a brief session with IMDB, but I’m not going to bother.

Instead I will note that some of the greatest Old Who stories emerged from the creative tension of the great changeover of 1974, when producer, script editor and Doctor all changed roughly simultaneously, and most particularly when the new script editor had been responsible for some of the better stories of recent years at the time. So I have high hopes for 2010.

Kung Te-Cheng, a 77th-generation descendant of the philosopher Confucius, died recently at the age of 88. Confucius lived 2500 years ago, so that allows an average of 32.5 years per generation, which I guess is reasonable if you are talking about high-status men.

2⁷⁷ is roughly 1.5 x 10²³. Estimates of the world population of humanity in 500 BC range from 100 million to 200 million. I submit that we are all descended from Confucius by one route or another; the late Mr Kung is unusual only in that his male-line descent was apparently well recorded.

20) Sunrise Alley

This book was on my mind anyway, but popped up on my reading list the other day. Didn’t take long to read (300 pages, many of them blank, large print); not as awful as some of the other Asaro books I have read, but not specially outstanding either. It’s a near-future story of artificial intelligence, including a robot so cute that our heroine falls straight in love with him. I found the portrayal of the military securocrats who get in the way pretty unbelievable, and likewise the psychology of the romance, but the questions raised about humanity and intelligence are valid enough.

I’m way out of date with my Big Finish updates. I had listened to a couple of dozen before the summer, but never got around to writing them up, and then they got displaced on my commute by the novelisations. So I’ve returned to them, pacing (for example) an act of a Shakespeare play against a Big Finish episode; also I’ve decided to work the most recent releases into my listening as well as catching up from the beginning.

Unregenerate!, by David McIntee, has Mel trying to make contact with a newly regenerated Seven, and finding herself and her taxi driver sucked into an illicit Gallifreyan research centre where Tardis brains are transplanted into the bodies of the dying. There was one particularly memorable mental image, when Mel penetrates the evildoers’ headquarters on earth and dicovers that it is merely a shell, the real business going on elsewhere. The taxi-driver is a memorable character too. But apart from that, I wasn’t wowed by the Doctor saving the day because his brain is just so special (though McCoy plays it well), and not really confident about how it all fits in to what else we know of the Time Lords.

I already wrote up The Council of Nicæa, just noting it here for completeness.

In Terror Firma, Joe Lidster has delivered a fun piece of work. Eight and his team, newly emerged (in continuity terms) from C’rizz’s native universe, are confronted with Davros and the Daleks; but the memorable bits are actually incidental characters Gemma and Samson, who turn out to have been previous travelling companions of Eight’s whom he has forgotten, and their terribly posh mother, who turns out to be the leader of the Folkestone branch of the anti-Dalek resistance. Poor old C’rizz is asked to be the new Emperor Dalek, but I guess he is getting used to that kind of thing.

Paul Sutton’s Thicker than Water takes an unusual continuity angle of visiting Evelyn Smythe after she has left the Doctor and married Rossiter from Arrangements for War: Six takes Mel to visit her, Mel having expressed interest in meeting the woman who tamed the Doctor after the unstable start to his regeneration. The actual plot is rather straightforward – emotional conflict between Evelyn and her doctor stepdaughter, with a rather minor sfnal element of alien tech captured from the Killoran invaders – but there are lots of reflections on parental and quasi-parental relationships, including a twist at the end involving a brief appearance from elsewhen in continuity. Actually rather satisfying.

Marc Platt is either brilliant or incomprehensible in my experience, and unfortunately Time Reef is more in the latter category. Thomas Brewster, who joined Five and Nyssa a couple of adventures ago, has temporarily borrowed the Tardis and flogged most of the interior fittings to a rather curious spaceship marooned on a Time Reef. The script was witty and weird, but I didn’t get enough of a handle on the means and motivation of the various players, including particularly Brewster himself. Also it really annoys me that Five is/was so indiscriminating about his travelling companions – happily sharing the Tardis with those he didn’t like (Adric), who didn’t like him (Tegan), who were actively trying to kill him (Turlough and to an extent Kamelion) and now someone who actually steals his valuable property. There are a couple of Five/Brewster exchanges which are really unbelievable.

Jonny Morris, having written Brewster into the Big Finish sequence earlier this year, now writes him out with a short but satisfactory story: life suddenly takes a shift for the better, but this perfection is not what it seems. Brewster leaves with some element of redemption, a decent end to his character arc.

In summary, Terror Firma is probably the best of these in fannish terms, Thicker Than Water probably the most approachable for the non-fan.

It’s an old ‘un but a good ‘un:

18) Winner Takes All, by Jacqueline Rayner

A Ninth Doctor novel, set in the Powell Estate and featuring one set of aliens using computer games to recruit humans to fight their war against another set of aliens. The Sarah Jane Adventures did this too, with Warriors of Kudlak; I think this version of the story is better, with a lot of development of the Powell Estate, including a viewpoint teenager, and some nice Doctor / Rose moments. I’ve found Rayner’s writing a bit hit and miss, but this was a good one.

Incidentally, I’ve noticed that on the whole the Ninth and Tenth Doctor novels with a contemporary setting are better than those with a historical or alien setting. I wonder if this says something about New Who? Or just that my sample size is small?

17) Jean Sibelius, by Guy Rickards

I was in the Hague for work yesterday, but happened to pick up this biography of my favourite composer during my lunch break (at Van Stockum, for those who know it); a handsomely illustrated Phaidon Press publication, a real bargain at €9.95.

Sibelius was a particularly long-lived composer (born 1865, died 1957) but the productive part of his career was really only from 1891 to 1926 – mind you, 34 years of production is still pretty good.

He was a real bastard to his wife and daughters, basically drinking and smoking away every mark he ever got, surviving on handouts from the Finnish state and from wealthy patrons, which he had often spent even before the cash arrived. Even a period of medically enforced abstinence from alcohol and nicotine from 1907 to 1915 didn’t improve his general spending habits. And yet… his most lasting works are those from the first half of his career – the Kullervo symphony, the First and Second Symphonies, the Swan of Tuonela and of course Finlandia – written when he seems to have been permanently drunk. (Symphonies Three and Four are the product of sobriety, but he was drinking again by the time he wrote the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh.) Then he spent thirty years agonising over the Eighth Symphony, which Rickards suspects he had actually completed in 1933 but then burned in 1945, while pretending almost to his dying day that he was still working on it (a bit reminiscent of a certain never-published sf anthology).

Sibelius was two when his father died; he grew up in an atmosphere of unstable poverty; and his sister ended up in residential care for (unspecified) mental illness. There’s obviously an untold psychiatric story here, and Rickards is rather disappointingly superficial about this – he mutters about ADD and SAD, but I think I want more substance than that – Sibelius clearly had an addiction problem, and also tended to a self-destructive perfectionism in the way he treated his own work (the lost Eighth Symphony being merely the best known case).

Rickards is particularly good on tracing Sibelius’ intellectual and patronage links with other composers, especially in his early studies in Berlin and Vienna (though there are later links with Bax and Vaughan Williams as well). And the illustrations are great, tracking the composer’s transformation from young seducer with floppy hair and trailing moustache to national monument with totally shaven head.

One of my fascinations with Sibelius is how he got folded into the politics of the time, to the point where he became a national icon. He was always a Finnish nationalist, but a Swedish speaker, yet devoted to the Kalevala legends. The period of his career exactly coincides with Finland’s national awakening and evolution to an independent state, and his music was a vital part of that national awakening – it is, after all, so very evocative of the Finnish landscape, which Swedish speakers and Finnish speakers, Red and White, had in common. That is all right until independence and civil war transform the situation; Rickards hints that the political uncertainties of the inter-war period may be part of the explanation for his three decades of silence.

Sibelius seems to have coped well with becoming a fixture on the tourism agenda of distinguished visitors in his final years. No doubt he had a few drinks with them as well. I’ll look out for more books about this fascinating and aggravating character.

16) Astra and Flondrix, by Seamus Cullen

A rather bizarre and somewhat distasteful fantasy novel: Elvish genitals come in pairs, while Dwarves have a more complex spiral arrangement (on which the male Dwarves spring across the countryside). I read to the end hoping there would be a punchline; but there wasn’t.

15) The Duke and I, by Julia Quinn

Gosh, two books cast aside in one day! This was one of the freebie e-books I got with my Palm T|X years ago (in fact I have read all the others, and enjoyed them). But two chapters of this is enough; it is romantic tosh, and insultingly inferior to Vanity Fair which I guess is one of its distant literary ancestors.

13) The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks

Got this as one of the few remaining books on this list, and gave up after page 100. It’s basically a Tolkien knock-off, with nothing much original or interesting that I could detect.