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.

5) Time Flies (1944)

I acquired this as part of one of my current Speshul Prodgekts; also because my father occasionally reminisced about seeing it as a teenager when it first came out. It is a very early example of an explicitly sfnal British film; I have seen it claimed as the first ever commercial movie featuring time travel a time machine – my cursory researches so far haven’t turned up any earlier example, but I’m sure someone will put me right.

The film is basically a vehicle for Tommy Handley, who ruled supreme as the best known British radio comedian of the 1940s. The script is by three standard Handley writers, Ted Kavanagh, J.O.C. Orton and Howard Irving Young (Young’s other credits, interestingly, include a 1931 play about television and a 1950 film called The Flying Saucer). This one was not a huge success, and helped kill the career of director Walter Forde and ensured that Handley stuck to radio. It was also the last film ever made by leading lady Evelyn Dall, who is one of the best things in it; apparently she is still living in Arizona, aged 90.

Handley stars as a disreputable Englishman in New York in 1943, who together with two American showbiz friends gets swept back to Elizabethan England in Professor MacAndrew’s Time Ball. There is so much here that seems like a taproot text for Doctor Who that I am really surprised not to have seen it mentioned anywhere else. Felix Aylmer, as Professor MacAndrew, is closer to Peter Cushing than William Hartnell, but the resemblance to both is unmistakeable. As the Time Ball takes off, its passengers collapse, incapacitated, just as Ian and Barbara do in An Unearthly Child. There are scenes with Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth I, which must surely have been at the back of Terry Nation’s mind as he wrote The Chase.

Having said that, this is a 1940s film, and our protagonists several times escape certain doom by breaking into song, helped by the fact that one of the local troubadours looks like jazz violinist Stéphane Grapelli (because he is jazz violinist Stephane Grapelli). I was quite impressed by the attention to scientific and historical detail in the first half of the film – MacAndrew’s mutterings about space-time curvature are perfectly respectable, and Shakespeare is accurately depicted working on Romeo and Juliet immediately after Love’s Labour’s Lost – but then they bring in Pocahontas and Captain John Smith twenty-five years too early, which rather kills any pretensions to accuracy but possibly helped it in the American market.

The film is a curio. The spell of Tommy Handley as a cult figure dissipated almost six decades ago, and today’s viewer will wonder why we are supposed to think it is funny. But anyone interested in the development of sf, especially in Britain and/or the cinema in the 1940s, should seek it out.

Quotes from the film (courtesy of IMDB)

I’m desperately sorry to hear that Pete Fenelon, who the discerning livejournal reader will have known as , died a few days ago. I can’t say I knew him well, but I enjoyed our interactions immensely; we first made contact during the Lib Dem leadership campaign in 2006, and he posted sardonic and occasionally wistful entries and comments which made me look forward to the day when we might meet, which now will never happen. A typical sample of his comments can be found here, where inter alia he teased me about liking The Curse of Peladon because it is essentially about my day job, and then remarked, “Sadly they never made Doctor Who and the Principal Engineers Of Slight Disillusionment for me.”

He was only 40.

This is an account of the death of Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, of dysentery while serving as Earl Marshal of Ireland in 1576, written a few days after the event and sent to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State. One of my projects at the moment is to research the life of the person who wrote it.

To the right honnorable my singular good L. my L. Burghley Lorde Treasurer of Englande

MY DERE GOOD LORD.

I RECEAVED by my nephewe your Lordships loving lettres, all written with your awne hande, which were more comfortable to me then I can expresse. I finde in themme a rule to direct me, and a piller wheron to stay me, besyds a confirmation of your accustomed favour towards me, whom your selfe hathe lifted upp from stumbling downe, wherof I and my posteritie shall alwaies cary a loving memory. I will not presume to prohibite your honor to write any thing to the Governor which youe shall thinke good for me ; but I suppose he hathe made choise of suche as he thinks fittest to be acquaynted with his platt : and therefore-using me but as tanquam vocatus, am to require no more, but his indifferency, and favorable acceptation of my best advise in the service of my Prince and Countrey.

Oh my good Lord, here I must, emong others advertyse your Lordship of the dolefull departure of Th’Erle of Essex, who ended this life to begyn a better the xxijth of September in the Castell of Dublin and felt his sycknes first at Talaghe [?Tallaght?] th’archebisshope of Dublins house, in his jorney towards Balhuglas [?Baltinglass?] to mete Th’Erle of Ormounde accompanyed with the Chauncelor, the last of August.

I was moche abowte him in the later ende of his sycknes, and behelt suche true tokynes of Nobilitie conjoyned with a most godly and vertuos mynde to the yelding upp of his breathe, as is rare to be sene.

Two daies before he died he had speche with me of your Lordship, and sayd he thoght he was borne to do you and your’s good. But nowe sayd he I must comytt the oversight of my son and all to him. He likewise spoke lovingly of my Lord of Sussex, with many other things which for prolixitie and otherwise I omytt to write. He doubted that he had bene poysoned by reason of the violent evacuation which he had, and of that suspicion acquitted this Lande, saying no not Tirrelaghe Lunnaghe him selfe wolde do no villany to his person. But upon the openyng of him, which I coulde not abyde, the Chauncelor tolde me that all his inwarde parts were sounde saving that his hart was somewhate consumed, and the blader of his gall empty. Suche as toke upon theme to be his phisicians, as Chaloner, Knell a preacher, and the Deputies phisician called Doctor Trever, applied him with many glisters, and therby filled his body full of winde which was perceyved : so as ether ther ignorance, or some violent cause beyonde ther skill ended his life. His fleashe and complexion did not decay, his memory and speche was so perfitt that, at the last yelding upp of his breathe, he cryed ‘ Cowradge, Cowradge. I am a soyldor that must fight under the banor of my Savior Christe.’ And as he prayed alwaies to be dissolved, so was he lothe to dye in his bed ; which made me to remember your Lordship’s tale of your Father.

Emong others he had care of my seconde son, which is all this while brought upp with the young Erle his son, without any chardge to me, bicause his mother was a Lenox. And required Mr Waterhouse to move your honor that he might still attende on his son and be broght upp with him, wherin I refer his case to your accustomed goodnes.

His Lordship comytted to my keping the patents of his creation and countreyes here : and made me one of his feoffees of Trust. I hope with the Deputie’s favour to turne those lands to a reasonable yere comoditie to his son.

I do sende your Lordship here inclosed the names of suche of Th’Erles servaunts as were abowte him in the tyme of his sycknes, and served him moste painfully and diligently ; for with respect I thinke them worthy the favor of all men.

It is doubted whate ende the deputie will make of this great sturr in Conaght.

From S’. Kathrins besyds Dublin, this last of September 1576.

Yor honors moste bounden during life

N. WHITE.

Dramatis personæ:

The writer of the letter: Nicholas White, Master of the Rolls of Ireland, also my 9x great-grandfather
The recipient of the letter: William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Lord High Treasurer of England
The man who died: Walter, Earl of Essex, who had led a failed colonisation expedition to Ulster a few years before and was now Earl Marshal of Ireland
Others, named:
          “Th’Erle of Ormounde“, Lord Treasurer of Ireland
          “Tirrelaghe Lunnaghe”, Turlough Luineach O’Neill, King of Tyrone who had defeated Essex
          “my Lord of Sussex”, Thomas Radclyffe, the Earl of Sussex
          Chaloner, Knell and Trever, incompetent doctors who killed the earl with too many “glysters” (ie enemas)
          “the young Erle”, Robert, Earl of Essex, who grew up to be a favourite of Queen Elizabeth’s and then was executed for leading a rebvellion against her
          Edward Waterhouse,Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant
Others, named by title:
          Sir Henry Sidney, “the Governor”/”the Deputie” (ie Lord Lieutenant of Ireland)
          Adam Loftus, “th’archebisshope of Dublin”
          Robert Dillon, “Chauncelor” of the Exchequer of Ireland
Others, not named:
          White’s nephew
          White’s second son, whose “mother was a Lenox”

The section of most general interest is the bit about the earl’s demise. Nicholas White knew about poisoning due to the circumstances of his own father’s death, and presumably his evidence that the earl’s death was due to natural causes was important and needed in London. His profession of affection and gratitude for Burghlety’s help is rather striking. The account of the doctors’ mistreatment of the earl is pretty chilling, though probably he was doomed anyway.

Edward Waterhouse, mentioned in the last paragraph, wrote a much more widely circulated account of the earl’s death and was crucial in building his son’s later reputation.

I’m confused by the references to White’s family. Other sources say that he had three sons, Andrew, Thomas and James, all by his first wife, who is recorded in genealogy only by her surname, Sherlock. (His second marriage – that we know of – was in 1587, long after this letter was written.) But here he says that the mother of his second son was a Lennox. More research needed.

12) Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray

I really enjoyed this. It’s essentially the story of Becky and Amelia, two girls of English high society of the Regency and reign of George IV, and what happens to them both after they leave school and marry against the wishes of their husbands’ families.

Becky is much the more interesting of the two; her adventures repeatedly lead her to personal and/or financial disaster, but she always bounces back. She is rather selfish in the way she constantly and instinctively exploits those around her, but also does have a good heart in the end. I find her one of the most fascinating characters of Victorian literature; Thackeray’s portrayal of her is sympathetic despite the harsh circumstances.

Although the book’s subtitle is “A Novel without a Hero”, that’s not quite true: the virtuous Amelia is loved from afar by her husband’s friend Dobbin, whose behaviour is pretty saintly. However his gentlemanly and honourable conduct seems a bit of a waste, since Amelia is blind to him for most of the book.

The settings of the story – London, the Crawley country mansion, Brussels, the Grand Duchy of Pumpernickel – are tremendously well realised, especially in their human landscape. I commented last week that Thackeray’s portrayal of a multi-racial London is memorable; also Amelia’s brother Jos is addicted to curries. Thackeray is of course a racist, but at least he actually has black characters.

The first half of the book climaxes at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. I could not help but compare Thackeray’s account of the battle with my memory of Victor Hugo’s version in Les Miserables. For Hugo, it’s an extended flashback to explain certain bits of back-story for Thenardier and Marius; although the battle is described with a historical precision, the really memorable scene is among the corpses on the battlefield after it is over.

For Thackeray, the battle mainly happens off-stage: his characters don’t know the outcome, and he has a brilliant sequence of chapters in Brussels preparing for the coming crisis, including the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, and then the non-combatants left behind in a city swept by rumours as the artillery fire rumbles up from the south. When I worked at CEPS, I used to go and eat my sandwiches in the Parc de Bruxelles, where Thackeray’s characters promenade.

Anyway, lots of neat touches of characterisation, lots of good circumstantial detail, and a plot that kept me reading. It’s rather long – 672 pages of small print in my Penguin copy – but recommended.

It’s happening again – spam comments from sock-puppet accounts to various old entries. Anyone else getting it? (Apart from those whose comments are being replied to.) I’m just deleting the messages and tagging them as spam.

I wondered if last week’s attack might be deliberate harassment by someone who disagrees with me politically, but now I think it is just some idiot spammer.

I’ve seen a couple of other people post on how and why they are voting in the Lib Dems’ presidential election (including one rather amusing locked entry about why the whole lot is going into the recycling bin).

I decided back in July that I was voting for Ros Scott. Her manifesto is blessed with superlative endorsements – Ashdown, Williams, Cable – but I think if she was campaigning on that alone it might not do the trick; there are very few specifics about what she would do to make the party different. But the fact is that I know what she intends to do, because she has told me; she has, she claims, spoken to 3,000 members in the last 18 months (certainly including me), and in any case her website does have a few more specifics. So my vote is safely going to her.

That left the choice of putting my second preference for Lembit or the unknown young bloke, or not using it at all. There are two very specific things I don’t like in Lembit’s manifesto, and which I think will put off uncommitted voters: the peculiar phrases: “primary colours, not pastel shades” and “support our leader and never compete with his role”. It’s not at all clear who is being attacked for either using pastel shades or competing with Nick Clegg, and it just sounds a bit weird.

However, Chandila Fernando’s manifesto is enough to let me give Lembit my second preference. Fernando is clearly a bright guy, but you basically need someone in the role of party president who has some experience of how the party ticks from the inside. Fernando doesn’t mention any actual experience in the party other than being a “seasoned campaigner” (I’ve heard that he was a Conservative until recently, and while I wouldn’t hold this per se against him, it would explain why he hasn’t many Luib Dem credentials on his CV). Lembit is charmingly eccentric but does in the end have a clue; Chandila doesn’t quite manage to score on the clue scale, so he goes third on my list.

11) Doctor Who and the City of Death, by David Lawrence

When I was reading through the Doctor Who novelisations over the spring and summer, I bemoaned the fact that all were available, in print or electronically, apart from the unofficial New Zealand fan write-up of City of Death. I spoke too soon; because back in August, thanks I believe to the efforts of Paul Scoones, it was published on the NZDWFC website. I only discovered this at the weekend, and managed to download the book and read it over today’s commute.

I think it is by some way the best of the New Zealand books. It helps that the original story is one of the best Who stories ever – the Doctor and Romana flirting in Paris, presumably about the time that the actors portraying them were falling in love; Douglas Adams at his best, concentrating on witty and sparkling dialogue rather than trying to write sf; a comic time-travelling plot about the Mona Lisa, the origin of life on Earth and the potential destruction of humanity. But Lawrence has managed a) to write it all down without sucking the life out of it and b) throw in a few extra original details which reinforce the story. So, for instance, we get an insight into that peculiar phenomenon, the marital life of the Scarlionis; he makes the Doctor/Romana relationship more Timelordish; and he has a wonderful run of opening scenes, including a moment with K’anpo on Gallifrey and a party at Leonardo da Vinci’s where the guests include Mozart, William Blake, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Dickens and Homer. Strongly recommended for all Who fans. And I’m glad to finish my reading of the Who novelisations with such a fine example of the sub-genre.

10) All-Consuming Fire, by Andy Lane

I enjoyed this tremendously. The Doctor, Ace, and Bernice Summerfield, in nineteenth-century London, get mixed up with Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson; and all five of them are then confronted with an invasion of Earth by the forces of Azathoth from the planet Ry’leh (sic). Mixing the mythoses (mythoi?) of Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft is risky, but Lane has done it very well – lots of borderline steampunk in his Victorian settings, most of the narrative told in the first person by Watson (who inevitably develops a liking for Benny), cameo appearances from Pope Leo XIII, the San Francisco fire of 1906, and the smart missiles from Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels.

Apart from the wonderful romp of the setting, Lane is also pretty smart about reinforcing our willing suspension of disbelief. Is Sherlock Holmes real or fictional in the Whoniverse? We get a rather neat answer here. On top of that, the entire narrative is nicely presented as a flashback, Benny and Ace perusing Watson’s account, and then critiquing him as an unreliable narrator.

Strongly recommended, especially for fans of Holmes or Cthulhu who may for some reason not have encountered Doctor Who.

9) The English: A Portrait of a People, by Jeremy Paxman

As you would hope from the author, this is a witty, erudite, but very readable book about the English. Anyone who has contact with English people on a regular basis should read it. It is written, of course mainly for them, but we who observe them at close quarters will be amused and perhaps enlightened by Paxman’s analysis of his own people.

I admit that that paragraph was a bit provocative. I’m not English; I have lived in England for only five of my 41 years; none of my ancestors, as far as I know, in the last 300 years was English. Of course I married an Englishwoman, and my father and his parents (one Irish, one American) were educated in England, as was I myself for the five years of my various Cambridge activities. I remember once having an earnest sherry-fuelled discussion with the Master of my college as to whether or not the Irish were foreign. Paxman’s book reminds me that the English are definitely foreign. It was very interesting as an intellectual exercise to separate out England and Englishness, to acknowledge the fact that I am an outsider to both, and to consider them as phenomena in themselves.

Having said that, I found myself in silent agreement with an awful lot of what Paxman writes about the English attitudes to history, the countryside, religion, sex, food, property and history again – so much so that I’m not going to recapitulate it, just urge you to read the book. There were just two points that jumped out at me as especially thought-provoking.

First, a rather technical historical point, and one that is not original to Paxman. The dissolution of the monasteries and Henry VIII’s breach with the Pope, it is argued, had deep effects on England’s cultural psyche; a rich mainstream (Catholic) European artistic heritage was literally destroyed forever, and the new concentration on the Word of scripture, translated into English, created the intellectual space for Shakespeare, etc, while England was unable to match the continent in the more visual arts. I suspect one could find plenty of opposing evidence if one wanted, but I sense there may be something there, and I should read more about it.

The second, more general point I picked up from Paxman’s book is this: that for many English people, national identity is not something that actually has to be considered at all. Going back again to my Cambridge days, I remember one friend from Essex assuring me, “I daon’t really ‘ave an accent!” Of course he did, but he had never thought of it in that way; he just though he talked normal, and that I talked funny. We who come from smaller, or indeed just other, countries and nations are constantly (made) aware of our origins when we are in England. Other nationalities (certainly everywhere else I have lived, including even the US) accept that they are themselves a distinct and particular group of people, and that other countries are the same; in England, we visitors sometimes feel that we are weirdly and perhaps quaintly deviating from the default state of humankind, which is only found locally.

(“Yet, in spite of all temptations / to belong to other nations / he is an Englishman! / He remains an E-e-e-e-e-e-englishman!”)

Paxman then goes on to suggest that because the English sense of Englishness (or Britishness) is poorly or even unpleasantly articulated, it becomes much more difficult to have a rational discussion of European integration. To expand his point, the Belgians, Germans, Latvians, and Portuguese all have a good idea of where they are starting from, so are less worried about and more interested in going down the European track. Going back to Paxman, the British (and that largely means English, with certain peculiar exceptions in the territory where I was born) sense of mission collapsed with economic austerity and the loss of Empire after 1945, without anything much to replace it. Yet paradoxically the civic liberal tradition which is one of England’s most admirable contributions to the world makes it almost impossible to construct a replacement national ideology. And even if that were possible, it’s difficult to see how the Scots and Welsh might buy into such a project; consider how silly Gordon Brown’s recent pronouncements on Britishness sounded, especially coming from a Scot.

Anyway, that’s what I thought. I hope none of you English people reading this are offended – I like most of you and I love some of you!

The 1991 EUROBATS Agreement.

It is such a cool name for an international treaty. It would be a great question for a quiz – “What is the subject of the 1991 EUROBATS agreement, to which 30 European states have signed up?” You could spell out the name in full and people would never guess.

Don’t lie on your CV. Really.

I’m hiring for interns again. One of the candidates who I was about to shortlist had put as their most recent employment that they had worked for a friend of mine. I checked out with my friend who said that the candidate had worked there only for a few days, not quite the six weeks of employment stated on the CV – which is otherwise quite impressive, but now I must distrust every other detail given. And I don’t have time to check those details out, so into the bin it goes.

If you lie on your CV, you will get caught. And even if you get away with it this time, it will have a corrosive effect on your ethics. How many more times will you pad out a few details, just because it looks a little better than the truth? In the field where I work, it is a small world and we all know each other. And even if you work in a less focussed field than I do, as you get farther up the tree, your lies will come back to haunt you, until you fall spectacularly.

Just tell the truth. It’s easier all round.

Paul Krugman has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. As others have noted, he is quite an sf fan; here, he takes the New York Times to task for not knowing what the TARDIS looks like.

OK, folks, where did I leave my copy of Vanity Fair that I was reading yesterday? I have read less than a hundred pages but was really getting into it, slightly to my surprise.

One aspect that particularly struck me was Thackeray’s depiction of a multiracial London, circa 1813. I can’t think of any other nineteenth century novel (or earlier) which has visible non-white characters living in England, though this may just be a reflection of my ignorance. Admittedly, Thackeray’s treatment of them is pretty racist; and yet Becky’s schoolmate is a Caribbean heiress, and the black footman is romancing one of the (white) maids without anyone worrying unduly. So it may be a somewhat unpleasant picture, but it is at least a three-dimensional one.

I saw that one of the later chapters is set in Brussels. Hope I find the book soon, so that I can report back on that too.

Edited to add: Found it! On a shelf in the kitchen. Where I am sure I had already looked. Four or five times.

8) The Ninth Doctor Collected Comics

I haven’t counted, but I guess that the Ninth Doctor probably has generated less officially sanctioned spinoff material than any of the others (and the Eighth probably the most, so far). This collection brings together the four Ninth Doctor comic strips which ran in Doctor Who Monthly from issue 355 to issue 364, plus also a story from the 2006 Doctor Who annual.

The comic strip form, at least under DWM’s circumstances, doesn’t give the writer much space to do things in – only about nine pages per installment. The two single-shot stories, “Art Attack” by Mike Collins and “Mr Nobody” by Scott Gray, both have the very simple plot of a guest character realising his destiny as a result of interaction with the Doctor, Rose and an alien menace. Two of the other three stories, “The Love Attack” and “A Groatsworth of Wit”, are by Gareth Roberts, and both are alien invasions of London at different times in the past – the 1960s and the 1590s, with the Doctor thwarting alien plots to change history (either by altering the score of the 1966 World Cup final and or by killing Shakespeare).

The standout piece is also the longest, Rob Shearman’s “The Cruel Sea”, set on a mysteriously underpopulated cruise ship on the seas of a future Mars. The plot is basically the same Doctor-and-companion(s)-defeating-evil story which has sustained Who since the Christmas of 1963, but Shearman takes the opportunity to probe more deeply into the relationship between the Doctor and Rose, and into how Rose’s life might have gone otherwise. There were also several moments in the story that could only really be done effectively in the graphic medium. (In ten years’ time, I shall dig this out for the image of the thirty-something Billie Piper to compare with the real thing.)

The DWM strips are all drawn by Mike Collins, though they vary rather in how well he captures the Doctor and Rose – oddly, I think he does it best in the second story, “Art Attack”, which he also wrote. The Annual story is drawn by John Ross.

I am a bit puzzled as to the correct bibliographical attribution of the collection. The colophon gives as editors the then DWM editors Clayton Hickman and Scott Gray, but I’ve seen Andrew Pixley’s name mentioned in online sources too. I’m sure someone can enlighten me.

When I was a teenager, I drank tea with milk and sugar. I gave up sugar in tea for Lent in 1986, and realised that it actually tasted better, so never went back to it. Earlier this year, after many grumblings at Belgian, Turkish and other catering establishments which did not provide milk to put in my tea, I suddenly realised that it tastes better without milk as well. (I might put in the odd drop of lemon juice.)

But what do you think? (I should clarify that Camellia sinensis is the scientific name of the plant which produces yer standard tea leaves.)

Rather nice footage from earlier this week, when Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter and Lakhdar Brahimi visited Cyprus to boost the peace process as part of their activity with the Elders. They start off with President Christofias in the South, then go north at the recently opened Ledra Street crossing, meet with President Talat at his residence, and then give a joint press conference at the Ledra Palace Hotel (where I have certain memories).

It’s nice to see a peace process going the right way. (The keen-eyed will spot Mabel van Oranje in the background.) (Follow-up video here, of the Elders meeting with young Cypriots.)

I am totally delighted to hear that Martti Ahtisaari has been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, "for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts". It’s quite possible that a lot of readers haven’t heard of him; he is probably best known for having been President of Finland between 1994 and 2000, but he has done numerous other important things as well – in particular, he was the UN Special Representative who shepherded Namibia to independence in 1989-90, and as such is perhaps the only person now alive who has been in charge of two different countries in two different continents. He also more recently brokered the peace settlement in the long-running conflict in Aceh, Indonesia.

I’ve known Ahtisaari since 2000, when he took on the chairmanship of my then future employers, the International Crisis Group, and so we saw each other a fair bit at Balkan events in Brussels. We also chatted then about his role in the Northern Ireland peace process. I joined ICG as director of their Balkans programme in 2002, and at our first internal meeting I quoted Shaw’s line from John Bull’s Other Island about one’s duty to Ireland, Finland and Macedonia; Ahtisaari laughed much louder than one expects from a Finn. He left the ICG board in 2004, but we stayed in contact as he was put in charge of the UN process of finding a final status for Kosovo; I remember one visit to his office in Vienna where our conversation was delayed by his trying to get his latest Nokia gadget to work (his son at the time was Nokia’s director of design strategy). Ahtisaari is fascinated by the role technology can play in helping to resolve conflict, and as well as other continuing behind-the-scenes work, he is these days most involved with his Crisis Management Initiative, which will carry on his vision into the future (he is 71).

The Nobel Peace Prize often goes to interesting people, and I’ve met several others who have won it, but this is the first time it has gone to someone I know at all well; and he richly deserves it.

6) Gossamer Axe, by Gael Baudino

I’ve been using Bookmooch to collect a few of the books on my list of sf and fantasy set in Ireland, and this one was fairly easy to track down.

The premise of the book sounds, frankly, awful. Christa, born in sixth-century Ireland but exiled to 1980s Denver, assembles an all-female heavy metal band (called “Gossamer Axe”) to blast open the mystical portals and rescue her girlfriend from the twilight realm where she is imprisoned. To do this she reincarnates her magical harp as an electric guitar.

Yet it’s actually rather good. Of course it is rather earnest about paganism, feminism and magic, but the only point where the writing is cringingly embarrassing is in the early sections where Christa is converted from Irish harp music to heavy metal. Apart from that, though, the various romantic and personality plot threads are compelling, and the Irish bits are not overdone. The whole thing is written with a genuine passion which in the end is easier to respect than mock.

It won the 1990 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Science Fiction & Fantasy, and was also chosen as one of the “top 5 gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender genre works of all time” by Gaylaxicon 2000’s “The List” panel. (I wonder what the others were?)

Has anyone else been getting a lot of comment spam, or am I being specially favoured? I’ve had over a dozen in the last couple of hours.

(Apologies if this is already a matter of discussion all over my f-list – I’m posting from my phone and haven’t checked LJ since before it started.)

We were giggling earlier about this glorious Kate Bush video:

I think her dancing must surely have been inspired at least in part by this:

Views?

I started my Shakespeare project at the end of August, and have now got through nine of the 38 plays. So I probably won’t finish this year; at this rate it will be some time in February 2009. Though I do have at least one transatlantic trip coming up, which may shorten the process.

The three best of the first quarter were (in reverse order) Richard III (would have been higher, but a bit too lengthy); The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a real discovery which I’m surprised is not better known; and best of all The Comedy of Errors, which I guess was the only one of this run that had made much impression on me before.

My least favourite was The Taming of the Shrew, where I just didn’t like the basic concept. The basic concepts in Titus Andronicus are pretty unpleasant too, but it is not being marketed as a comedy. Love’s Labour’s Lost is half decent and half incomprehensible.

I’m taking a position on the three parts of Henry VI, which is that Part 2 was written first and then Part 1, with Part 3 last. Part 2 has too much sticking closely to the history books, and feels very much like a beginner’s effort to extract drama from Holinshed. The other two parts feel more confident, and Part 3 clearly leads straight into Richard III. Indeed, Part 3 and Richard III are so much better that I rather feel Shakespeare must have been working on other stuff in between, perhaps some of the earlier comedies, or even his scene for Thomas More.

But basically, I have discovered that the reason these plays are classics is that they are (mostly) very good.

4) The Gallifrey Chronicles, by Lance Parkin

My decision to read the BBC’s Eighth Doctor Adventures in a peculiar order has brought me to the end of the line, in internal chronology, after reading fewer than a tenth of them; so I could be filling in the gaps for some time to come.

Anyway, I thought at first that this was going to be a too-clever-by-half tale of intersecting rival continuities. It’s better than that, I’m glad to say. A lot of the plot features another Time Lord exiled to Earth, who has been writing science fiction novels over the last century or so (these are the Gallifrey Chronicles of the title, a beautifully developed concept); he bears a grudge against the Doctor, and triggers an invasion of Earth by loathesome insects to get even. (I loved the idea of the insects spraying goo which doesn’t actually kill people but makes everyone else believe the victim is dead.)

There are some slightly baffling bits of continuity. I still don’t have the backstory abouit the destruction of Gallifrey (in EDA continuity, that is; I have enjoyed the Big Finish version) but it’s not as relevant to the plot as I expected. Likewise the Doctor’s adopted daughter Miranda makes an appearance, the first time I had encountered her.

This was also the first book I’ve read with companion Trix, who has replaced Anji as female sidekick to Fitz (though Anji makes a welcome cameo appearance). Trix and Fitz take advantage of the approaching end of the sequence of novels and fall in love, after travelling together for some time – I think the most overtly physical relationship between two companions in the whole extended canon before New Who, though it’s not particularly explicit and is abruptly interrupted.

The ending is not really as conclusive as you would have liked for the termination of a series of more than 70 books. Of course, this is probably Russell T Davies’ fault more than Lance Parkin’s, but it’s a bit of a shame.

Anyway, once again Lance Parkin has produced a mildly confusing if generally readable book. Once again, I find myself thinking that I wouldn’t recommend it as a starting point for anyone wanting to get into the Eighth Doctor Adventures; but I have to admit I haven’t really identified such a starting point as yet.

Today there is a general strike in Belgium in protest against inflation, demanding that the government do something or other about it in this month’s federal budget.

Being a child of the Thatcher era, who witnessed the taming of the unions in the UK, this seems to me extraordinary. While I support anyone’s right to join a trade union and to go on strike to improve their circumstances of employment, I don’t believe that the unions should be allowed to call a strike over an issue that doesn’t particularly concern their relations with their employers. The people inconvenienced by today’s strike are, on the whole, not those responsible for the recent increase in the prices of food and fuel; indeed, very few of the latter reside in Belgium, so the strike completely misses its ostensible targets.

As you know, Bob, Belgium has not only Socialist trade unions, but also Christian and Liberal unions, each organised into a separate national federation. Aha, you are perhaps thinking, the strike today is presumably called by one or two of the three sets of unions at least partly in protest against their rivals being more closely linked to the government. Well, no. First of all, the current government includes the Liberal, Christian and (Francophone) Socialist parties (the Flemish Socialists are in disarray). Second, all three national federations are supporting the strike. So the federations essentially appear to be striking against their own political allies in the government.

Or are they? I think this is really a manifestation of the cosy, collusive nature of Belgian politics. One or both Socialist parties have been in government solidly since May 1988, indeed for two-thirds of the last half-century; in that same time frame the Christian Democrats have been in government for all but the eight years of Verhofstadt’s premiership. In a political system where you can’t really vote the bastards out, indeed where layers of government proliferate so that a party, and a party leader, who lose one election can pop up again almost immediately elsewhere, the occasional general strike may be a useful safety valve to fool the workers into believing that they have more impact on the system than they really do. Of course it infuriates those of us from the ranks of the self-employed and small businesses, for whom today’s action has no obvious benefit and for whom it causes immense and (what seems to us) avoidable inconvenience. But the system has other ways of buying our allegiance.

Edited to add: I am fundamentally hostile to the idea of a general strike bringing down the entire system of government, for reasons local to my birthplace.

3) Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

I got this some time back and skimmed it rather casually; but this weekend I have taken a short break from Shakespeare to read it thoroughly. It is a tremendous achievement. I think I had read two other adaptations of the epic poem, one probably by Roger Lancelyn Greene, the other a re-telling of the story from Grendel’s point of view by John Gardner. I also saw Julian Glover recite most of it on stage in Belfast many years ago. I haven’t seen the recent film as we so rarely get to the cinema.

Heaney has tried to retell the poem in its own terms, and his recasting of the poet’s original imagery is vivid – we can almost smell Grendel and his mother, and Smaug’s hoard seems a pale reflection of the dragon which brings about the tragic end of Beowulf’s life. (Of course, Tolkien was one of the leading Beowulf scholars of the twentieth century, and there are entire sections of The Hobbit which have practically been copied from here.)

Apart from the gloriousness of the overall narrative, three things struck me, two more or less for the first time. First, it is actually an explicitly Christian poem, if in a rather weird way. Hrothgar commissions Beowulf to fight Grendel in terms that sound like God the Father sending his Son to defeat evil. Although the setting is the pagan past, the writer makes frequent allusions to Judeo-Christian concepts of destiny and virtue; the only explicitly non-Christian characters are the monsters.

Second, and related, there are numerous reflections on what makes a good king – not just the narrator’s own oft-repeated phrase, “þæt wæs god cyning!” but also discourses from various characters in the midst of the action. It practically makes Beowulf a treatise on political science, along with its many other features.

Third – and this was the point I had noticed on previous skimming of the text – is the occasional diversion of the narrative to tell some other story only tangentially related by theme or personality to the main narrative. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that it doesn’t work well for me, and I can’t believe it worked well in oral presentation (I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure Julian Glover skipped those bits in his stage show). I am inclined to think that the compiler of our version used the opportunity to fold in some other bits and pieces of epic poetry which he or she had handy, so that they would not be lost to posterity.

Anyway, this is (quite literally) epic stuff.

A few days ago I linked to a brilliant fanvid showing all the times that the phrase “What are you doing here?” or variations thereof is used in Doctor Who – including the very first words spoken in the role by William Hartnell in the first episode.

Actually it has a long and glorious literary history. In Beowulf, back in the 7th century, the very first lines of direct speech in the poem are these words of Hrothgar’s herald greeting Beowulf’s party:

Hwæt syndon gē             searohæbbendra,
byrnum werede,             þē þus brontne
cēol ofer lagustrǣte             lǣdan cwōmon,
hider ofer holmas?

which Seamus Heaney renders:

What kind of men are you who arrive
rigged out for combat in coats of mail
sailing here over the sea-lanes
in your steep-hulled boat?

or in summary

What are you doing here?

(Lines 238-241, if you want to check.)

Over the last few weekends I’ve been watching rather gradually the 2001 production of Nancy Mitford’s novels, The Pursuit of Love and  Love in a Cold Climate, which have long been favourites of mine. Things I liked: i) the music by Rob Lane (now writing for both Merlin and John Adams). ii) John Wood as Lord Merlin, a bit part character but a really memorable one. iii) the other three rather more monstrous male leads, Alan Bates as the barking mad paterfamilias, Anthony Andrews as the louche Clark Gable look-alike Boy Staunton, and Daniel Evans as the gay Canadian Cedric. iv) two of the three key female leads: Rosamund Pike as Fanny the narrator, and Elisabeth Dermot Walsh as the ultimately tragic Linda.

Love in a Cold Climate is certainly the funnier of the two books; and it would have worked really well as an ironic counterpoint to the more tragic plot of The Pursuit of Love except that I felt Megan Dodds as Polly really wasn’t up to it, and since she is such a central figure that kills the story despite the excellent performances of the male leads in that plot strand; you rather wonder what Boy saw in her. Also, I have to say that my memory of the end of the book was that there is a strong implication that Boy and Cedric have settled down with Polly’s mother as a threesome, an aspect which I missed from the TV play.

The Pursuit of Love is probably the better of the two books, but it also wasn’t terribly well served by the production; Rosamund Pike had to more or less support Fanny’s story single-handed, matched up against a series of unimpressive males (apart from her father). Having said that, the TV format perhaps shows Linda’s love-life a bit more vividly than Mitford’s original text, and some of the best scenes are when she is a) being converted to communism and b) being confronted with the Spanish civil war; and at the very end, I thought it came out just about right, with Frances Barber as the Bolter coming back into the story and providing an ironic perspective on it all, which I have to admit brought a certain moisture to my eyes as the final titles rolled.

I really wish the 1980 version, starring Judy Dench as Linda’s mother and Anthony Stewart Head as Linda’s first husband, was commercially available, but you can’t have everything.

2) The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

A friend of mine has been writing a vampire novel set in the Balkans. When I first became aware of The Historian, I expressed a friendly concern to him that his book might suffer from being in its shadow. My friend snorted derisively that his book was much better, so he wasn’t going to let it worry him. Having now read The Historian, he was right; his book is much better. I’m glad to say he now has a publishing contract, but I will leave you in suspense about it until it is actually on the shelves.

Unlike The Da Vinci Code, with which it has sometimes been compared, The Historian is not a bad book. The basic plot concerns a series of twentieth and twenty-first century researchers getting caught up with the legacy of Vlad Ţepeş, alias Count Vlad III of Wallachia, alias Dracula, who turns out to be still around in undead form. The scenery features Slovenia, Croatia, Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria (with a peculiar climax in France), and people who know little or nothing about the Balkans will probably be intrigued enough to find out more about the region; and that’s not a bad thing. The nested narratives and understated romances are rather sweet, and will appeal to the sentimental reader who wants to be made to feel they now understand a bit more about history. But there were three things that really annoyed me about it.

1) The nested narratives just don’t work. At one point we have the unnamed narrator reading her father’s account of listening to Dr Stoichev translating his joint edition with Professor Angelov of Zacharias of Zographou’s note of the dying words of Stefan of Snagov. Yet all of these people sound remarkably similar. In addition, the jumps between different levels of narrative get rather abrupt in the second half of the book, as if Kostova had given up on smooth transitions between them. It is a striking contrast with, say, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, surely a model of how this sort of thing can be done well. Not very surprisingly, the climax, where most of the narrative lines combine, is confused and ineffective.

2) The Balkanology. Probably few will be as irritated as I was about this, but really, why disguise Ljubljana as “Emona”? Are readers so thick that they can’t cope with the spelling? And after many pages of insisting on “Ţepeş”, and on the Hungarian and Turkish diacriticals, why then spell Târgovişte incorrectly? Rather more seriously, the Getzi family of the narrator’s grandmother are presented as being Romanian speakers, when clearly they would much more likely have been Magyars trapped the wrong side of the border by the Treaty of Trianon. (The Wikipedia entry for the book points out other anachronisms.)

3) As so often, I was utterly unconvinced by the means and motivation of the villain. All this carry-on with scholars across the decades and the continents, and it turns out that Dracula just wanted to hire a librarian? There are easier ways of doing it. (At least so I understand.)

Anyway, I’m glad that’s over.