Got to the airport in bags of time to check in for my 7 am flight. Indeed, I have even more time than I had realised; because the flight is not, in fact, until 0850.

Must remember to chesk itinerary very carefully next time, and then check it again.

The usual: bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved. These are the Pulitzer Prize winners for the Fiction (since 1948) and Novel (to 1947) categories.

2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2006: March by Geraldine Brooks
2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham
1998: American Pastoral by Philip Roth
1997: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
1996: Independence Day by Richard Ford
1995: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
1994: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
1993: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
1992: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
1991: Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
1990: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
1989: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
1988: Beloved by Toni Morrison
1987: A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
1986: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
1985: Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
1984: Ironweed by William Kennedy
1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1982: Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
1981: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
1980: The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
1979: The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
1978: Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
1977: no award given
1976: Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow
1975: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
1974: no award given [Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon recommended by the jury but turned down by the Pulitzer board]
1973: The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
1972: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
1971: no award given
1970: The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford
1969: House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
1968: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
1967: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
1966: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
1965: The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
1964: no award given
1963: The Reivers by William Faulkner
1962: The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor
1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1960: Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
1959: The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
1958: A Death in the Family by James Agee
1957: no award given
1956: Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
1955: A Fable by William Faulkner
1954: no award given
1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1952: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
1951: The Town by Conrad Richter
1950: The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
1949: Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens
1948: Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
1947: All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
1946: no award given
1945: A Bell for Adano by John Hersey
1944: Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin
1943: Dragon’s Teeth by Upton Sinclair
1942: In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow
1941: no award given
1940: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
1939: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
1938: The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand
1937: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
1936: Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis
1935: Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson
1934: Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller
1933: The Store by Thomas Sigismund Stribling
1932: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
1931: Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes
1930: Laughing Boy by Oliver Lafarge
1929: Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin
1928: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
1927: Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield
1926: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (declined prize)
1925: So Big! by Edna Ferber
1924: The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson
1923: One of Ours by Willa Cather
1922: Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington
1921: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
1920: no award given
1919: The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
1918: His Family by Ernest Poole

I haven’t read a lot of them (yet).

22) George’s Marvelous Medicine, by Roald Dahl

I’ve been feeling very under the weather today (which explains how come I have been reading so many books); F, dutiful son that he is, sent me a “get well” email from the Roald Dahl website and pressed the book itself into my fevered hand. Well, I do hope that the medication I’ve been taking doesn’t have the same effect on me that it does on George’s grandmother!

Top UnSuggestion for this book: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace

21) Gilead, by Marilynn Robinson

And so from a book about the writings of a clergyman's son to a book about a clergyman writing to his son. This is a lovely, understated novel about the distance between generations, family histories, the meaning of fatherhood, faith, and redemption, set in Iowa in 1956. Having a low-energy evening so will leave it there.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: Dragons of Winter Night by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

20) The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod, ed. Andrew M Butler and Farah Mendlesohn

It is too long since I have read the Fall Revolution Quartet, because most of these essays would have meant a lot more to me if I had had it nearer the top of the memory stack. Oh well, perhaps an incentive to reread them some time soon. I particularly enjoyed Adam Frisch’s piece on the Engines of Light trilogy, the intriguing review of MacLeod’s poetry by K.V. Bailey, and the pieces by Ken himself. But am not feeling energetic enough right now to write something here that properly engages with the whole of the book.

19) 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

Lots of pictures here, many of them very familiar to me from my own experience of Northern Ireland politics. The explanatory text is best when it explains the roots of some of the images used; the political commentary, however, has dated rather rapidly.

One thing that surprised me was the prominence of Cedric Wilson as a personality in this side of things. I knew him as a rather buffoonish character at the time I was most involved – he was the one who heckled President Clinton at his speech at Mackies in December 1995, and when I was involved with the Mitchell talks he was still hanging around with Bob McCartney, though they split fairly quickly after the 1998 Assembly elections. But according to this book he designed both the “Ulster Say No” logo of the mid-80s, and the “Heart for Ulster” anti-Agreement logo more recently. I have to honestly confess this is the first I’d heard of it, but presumably the editors did their research, which means I seriously underestimated him.

Not all Unionist posters were as memorable as the ones attributed to Cedric Wilson. I was going to illustrate this post with several bad ones, but realised that this would look rather unbalanced, as none of the Nationalist or Republican ones are particularly bad, while the non-sectarian/ centre grouns oned tend to be a bit wince-making. So I will only give you one, but it is the worst one by far, for the short-lived (and as it turned out ironically named) United Ulster Unionist Party:

Isn’t that truly dire? Too many messages and mixed metaphors: the Good People of Ulster (workman, housewife and businessman) protected by the umbrella of the UUUP from the ambiguous glow of “Westminster moonshine” (not at all clear about the identity of the face from which said moonshine radiates – maybe Roy Mason, who was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the late 1970s?) and yet the umbrella is not merely a protection, it is a spike which slays the verminous IRA.

It is not easy for a splinter group (or in the case of the UUUP, a splinter of a splinter) to insist convincingly that the path to unity lies in supporting them and nobody else, and this poster comprehensively fails to do the job.

The UUUP’s best performance was in the 1979 Westminster election, when they won Mid Ulster thanks to an electoral carve-up (none of the larger parties wanted to challenge their sitting MP and risk a loss to the Nationalists); apart from that they scored in the 2-3% range and won no seats in the 1982 Assembly election, after which nothing more was heard of them.

Having said which, their deputy leader, Reg Empey, is now the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (formerly the largest party in Northern Ireland, now in close competition for third place with the SDLP).

Anyway, enough of that. I will have to buy the CD of all of them next time I am in Belfast.

18) Sailing to Sarantium, by Guy Gavriel Kay

I’ve read two very bad novels about Justinian, Belisarius, and seventh-century Constantinople, one by Robert Graves and one by David Weber Eric Flint and David Drake. This is a damn good novel about them, one I had been meaning to get around to for ages. It is fortuitous (or maybe not completely) that I have been reading it so soon after my own visit to Istanbul two weeks ago; having just been there, I really found Kay’s description of the city, the Hippodrome, and the grand Sanctuary of Holy Wisdom helping me make sense of what I saw and letting me imagine what the place would have been like 1400 years ago. Kay also brings to life the decaying civilisation of the former imperial territories to the west, and the lonely and dangerous land route to the capital. (As for the latter, I also have eerie memories of driving its modern equivalent, the former Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, between Zagreb and Belgrade in a thick winter fog, hoping to avoid the minefields.)

And yet of course this book isn’t ostensibly about Justinian, or Belisarius, or Theodora, or the Byzantine Empire, but about the emperor Valerius, his general Leontes, his wife Alixana, and the empire of Sarantium. It is reasonable to ask if it is worth the hassle of Kay renaming a few personal and place names to tell his story. I think it is. For a start, it liberates him from any obligation to stick too closely to the historical events from which he has drawn his story, and in particular to be a bit more inventive about the religious beliefs and practices of his characters; and I suppose to write about faith and belief as universal human experiences, while separating them from what the reader may know or think about specific religions in our own world. And second, it allows him to inject a fantasy element or two, specifically an alchemist who can create telepathic metal birds, and an intervention from the Old Gods of the type favoured by Lois McMaster Bujold in her most recent novels.

Having raved about the scenery, I am now going to rave about the plot and characters. The core of the book is the story of Crispin the mosaicist’s journey from the western city of Varena (ie Ravenna, Kay’s least opaque renaming) to the capital to decorate the new Sanctuary, overcoming personal tragedy and deadly political conspiracy. But Kay builds up the mosaic of the narrative from lots of little glimpses of perspective as well, in a memorable sequence actually telling one part of the story backwards, each new viewpoint character taking us to an earlier stage of the action. All really well done, and yet the worldbuilding is even better than that.

Well, I really enjoyed this, as I have enjoyed all Kay’s books (apart from his first, coauthored with a more famous writer). I wish I had bought the sequel at the same time as this.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: Knowing God, by J.I. Packer.

I caught this interview with Peter Davison this morning, about his secret life as a song-writer. If you click on “Listen to the show” his bit starts at 28 minutes in (marked for some reason as 1h 28m, but it starts at 1h 0m). Good fun.

Here is the song the radio programme is about (unmistakably the voices of Peter Davison and his first wife Sandra Dickinson performing):

And while I’m at YouTube, I just want to salute the fantastic fanvids of Stuart Humphreys. All worth watching, some of them good, some of them very good indeed.

what’s this chirpy music?

Lucky Martha with the phone. But she’s not Rose.

Hah, future gender-balanced space crew. Very Firefly.

Nice line, “42 minutes until we crash into the Sun”!

Boo, Chris Chibnall; but yay, Graeme Harper.

Hah, ship is illegally obsolete.

All 29 doors deadlocked, of course.

Captain’s husband accused of sabotage. Hmm, he’s obviously not out of it completely. Possessed by alien forces, or some personal grudge?

Don’t like the music.

“Happy primes”? Never heard of them. “Some stupid pub quiz.” Good line. Beatles vs Elvis – good question.

Hah, the patient woke up as we knew he would.

Korwin can now kill people with his eyes. I guess it wasn’t just something personal with his wife then.

Here he goes again. Crew is a bit less gender-balanced now…

What is the captain holding back?

And Korwin makes a convert rather than killing.

What’s that handy door? Oh, an escape pod. How sweet!

Oh Martha, don’t scream! (But it’s better than the music.) Fan-fic writers are going to love this scene of her stuck in the escape pod.

Korwin thinks it is his wife’s fault…

Ice vents – jolly good! That’ll teach ’em.

Martha disappears off – a beautiful silent scene, no stupid music this time.

Doctor wants a spacesuit. Rescue plan…

Heat shields fail, and then into free fall? Seems a bit unlikely.

Oh Martha, you should have been nicer to your mum!

Good for Kath, taking direct action against Ashton.

Doc in spacesuit. Some day someone will do a montage of Doctors wearing spacesuits.

Martha doing last phone call. Her mother has company though. Who? Someone doing a phone trace?

What buttons is the Doctor trying to push? (Fnarr!) Oh yeah, the recall plot device button.

But he has looked into the face of the sun and got infected! Brilliant!

Go and get frozen!

Who’s that twitching? Korwin?

The Doctor is “so scared”! But he can of course regenerate.

Korwin cuts the power to the med centre. And chases the captain off.

Music has improved now.

The captain’s self-sacrifice – very good!

But the Doctor is still infected…

Martha takes his message to the two remaining crew members. They do what he says, and the day is saved.

Hmm, it would be enough to make you want to try not being a Time Lord for a bit.

Martha has to say goodbye. Snog. Yuck. And bad music again.

“Frequent flyer’s privilege.”

Martha’s mother – in league with Mr Saxon, or being used?

Actually that was quite good, though there were moments of naffness and implausibility, and the music was more than usually irritating. Better than any of Chibnall’s Torchwood scripts.

17) Islam in Azerbaijan, by Arif Yunusov

This may seem a somewhat obscure subject, but the author gave me a copy of this book when we met at a conference in July 2005 so I have finally got around to reading it.

Azerbaijan may be the only country in the world named after a religion; apparently it comes from an ancient form, “Atropatena”, which originally means “the land of fire-worshippers”, in reference to the large proportion of the population who followed the teachings of a local chap, the prophet Zoroaster. The Persians, under various dynasties, sustained his beliefs in the region for centuries, while to the north dissident Christians hung out and set up their own Monophysite church. All this was swept away by the armies of a new prophet from Arabia in the mid-7th century AD, though the old beliefs took centuries to die out. (The mysterious Khazars make an appearance here too.)

For the next thousand years, the story is one of variable relations between state and clergy, with occasional movements towards repression or radicalism respectively. The Russian conquest in 1801-1806 brought a new element into play: for the first time, Muslims in Azerbaijan were ruled by Christian overlords, just at the moment when 19th-century nationalism began to make Pan-Islamism and Pan-Turkism conceivable alternatives to rule from Moscow.

But when the Russian Empire did fall, the short-lived democratic Azerbaijan republic (established between 1918 and 1920) was brought down by an interesting coalition of the Red Army and local Islamists suspicious of the independent republic’s secularist pretensions. Lenin was determined to crush the Orthodox church but was apparently much more relaxed about Islam. Things deteriorated (as they did everywhere in the Soviet Union) later in the 1920s, and the cycle of greater or lesser state repression, combined with state co-option of the religious bureaucracy, resumed.

There was a revival of popular interest in Islam under perestroika in the 1980s, which also of course came immediately after the Iranian revolution of 1979 (three quarters of Azeris live in Iran rather than in the ex-Soviet republic). Nationalists in Baku, especially at the time of the war with Armenia, were depicted in Yerevan and Moscow as Islamic extremists, but in fact religion had little to do with the conflict, or with the succession of chaotic changes of government in Baku culminating in the ascent to power of Heydar Aliev and later his son Ilham, the current president. (Iran’s only formal intervention was a disastrous peace initiative in the middle of the war.)

Since then, the Azeri government has obsessively kept tabs on the official Islamic religious bureaucracy (to the extent of creating a competitor organisation to keep the older structure on its toes) and has consequently taken its eye off the ball of less formally organised groups. A few of these are indeed very sinister – the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 appear to have been coordinated through a cell in Baku. Mostly, however, the authorities are reaping the consequences of the notorious corruption of the state-supported clerical structures, and are intervening to suppress popular religious figures and movements because they are not sufficiently under control, rather than because of any sinister political agenda they may or may not have.

Anyway, an interesting book, which could perhaps have benefited from the attention of an Anglophone proof-reader – published in English, but by a German organisation, and in places it shows.

16) The Age of Kali, by William Dalrymple

I admit to a youthful fascination with William Dalrymple, who was at Cambridge a couple of years ahead of me and was much talked of (though rarely seen) in the Catholic chaplaincy, which I frequented. And his first book, In Xanadu, was the sort of adventure I always wished I could go on. (It has helped inspire me to the occasional much more modest quest of my own.)

Until today I hadn’t read any of his later books though we have a couple on the shelves. The Age of Kali, to be honest, is a bit disappointing. First off because of the form – it is a collection of pieces written for different journals at different times in the 1990s, and there is occasional repetition from one piece to the next, with no overall guiding structure. Second, because of this, the book lacks any synthesising introduction or conclusion, apart from a page at the very beginning explaining the concept of the Age of Kali, the Kali Yuga.

Having said that, what you are left with is a series of very readable, vivid, in-depth essays on particular places, personalities or events; we start with sectarian violence in Bihar, and end with the Bhutto family. The book is mainly about India, but there are excursions also to Sri Lanka, Réunion, and of course Pakistan. (But for some reason not Bangladesh.) And India is, of course, a fascinating subject, about which I learnt almost everything I know as a result of reading Kipling, Rushdie, River of Gods, and . (Another of the unread books on my shelf is John Keay’s India: A History.)

However, what comes across from Dalrymple’s account is an India descending into terminal anarchy and violence, where the old days of the Raj are much missed and the new world is uncertain and probably a Bad Thing. The book is nine years old now, and India doesn’t actually seem to have disintegrated into anarchy, or even into the statelets foreseen by in his novel, so I have to wonder how fair the picture painted actually is. And I am dubious about the fact that almost the only aspect of British rule which Dalrymple criticises is that it ended.

Still, it will spur me on to have another go at Keay.

Top UnSuggestions for this book:

1. Eragon by Christopher Paolini
2. Deception Point by Dan Brown
3. The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin

Neil Gaiman on Doctor Who:

…the shape of reality – the way I perceive the world – exists only because of Dr Who. Specifically, from The War Games in 1969, the multipart series that was to be Patrick Troughton’s swan song.

And, on a different level, on Postman Pat:

Greendale is Postman Pat’s personal harem, isn’t it? ALL the kids in Greendale have his nose or his hair or both. ALL of them.

This is, frankly, the least impressive of any Hartnell series I have seen so far. (Though at this stage I am down to the least famous and least accessible stories – Galaxy 4, The Space Museum, Planet of Giants and The Web Planet.) The Sensorites themselves are pretty dire (early relatives of the Ood, I understand); so are most of the cast, with Maitland being the worst. It’s just ludicrous to have aliens who had never thought of the concept of disguise until our heroes introduce the idea to them.

And the basic point of the plot turns out to be the aliens’ concerns about the Earth people extracting their minerals. If this were a Jon Pertwee story, we would know just what it was all about. But instead we have numerous episodes of peculiar personality-based bickering amongst the aliens, which would be OK if we actually liked or sympathised with any of them, but we don’t.

There are some redeeming features. I actually liked the fleshing out of Susan’s character and her relationship with the Doctor; shame that this wasn’t taken much further in her three remaining stories. I thought that John, the human who is deranged and then cured, was good too but it was difficult to understand what he saw in Carol. And the actual plot that develops in the last episode, that there are insane astronauts hiding under the city contaminating the water supply, certainly does grab your attention.

But as for the Sensorites themselves? Poison the lot and take their molybdenum, I say.

I’m very pleased with this:

Canonical TV shows, in broadcast order

Novelisations, novels and audios in order of internal chronology

On a related topic, this looks very interesting, and several months to plan it in. Hmm, who do I know that lives near Portsmouth…

Back in January 1978, I was in my last year in primary school, coming up to my eleventh birthday; and Blake’s 7 started, the story of a group of desperate future freedom fighters battling against the evil Federation. I see that there is now a new version being webcast, and as soon as I can work out how to download these and convert to MP3s for easy listening, I’ll be onto it. (Technical assistance on this gratefully accepted.) (Though they are by Ben Aaronovitch, so not sure how excited I can get.)

But meantime I sat down and re-watched the first three TV episodes from 1978. After getting over my shock at how young they all look (all in their 30s, I think, so younger than I am now), I found myself really enjoying it. The first three episodes are a more tightly-linked narrative than the others, as Blake gets together his team and gets control of the alien technology of the Liberator. But they feel very different from each other as well; this is not yer six-part Terry nation Doctor Who story.

The Way Back: A lot of effort goes into building up a picture of a future Earth which (if I remember correctly) we never actually return to over the next four seasons. (See the director’s reflections on this.)

There are some surprising weaknesses in it – there are longueurs that would be intolerable in today’s Doctor Who, whose episodes are about the same length. One has to ask oneself why, if the Federation holds life so cheap (the body count in this episode must surely be one of the highest for the entire series), they don’t simply kill Blake off as they do so many others. Also the mind-control aspects of the plot, which are potentially very interesting in a Philip K Dick kind of way, are simply left aside by later writers if I remember rightly. But the atmosphere of the repressive government is brilliantly conveyed; these are people that you immediately want to fight against, and you want Blake to fight against them and win.

On one minor plot point: It is difficult to imagine framing someone on paedophilia charges being treated so incidentally in a drama written today. I wonder if Terry Nation got this one from Roger Zelazny’s Today We Choose Faces, published in 1973, where the narrator(s) (one of whose names is Black) do(es) the same thing to a minor character (who turns out to be his/their love interest’s father).

Space Fall: I think the least successful of the three, in that it just involves people talking and occasionally fighting on a spaceship, or on two spaceships (once we find out about the Liberator). Having said that, we have a lot of useful introduction – Jenna, Avon and Gan all make their first appearances here (Vila having already been briefly in the previous episode). And we are slightly on tenterhooks as to who is actually going to be a regular character and who isn’t: the unfortunate Nova looks at first like he is going to be one of the Seven, but then gets suffocated by oozing gel.

The Federation officials continue to be utterly horrible, with Leylan, who seems like the nice cop, unable to restrain the nasty Raiker. And the contrast between the functional Federation ship and the alien if dusty Liberator (not yet called that) is effective.

Cygnus Alpha: This is the one where we meet the alien technology of teleportation, that point where Blake’s 7 tried to prove that it was not just aping Star Trek – the visuals were different, the psychological approach to the technology was different, though unfortunately it still worked just exactly the same as the elder version. It memorably features Brian Blessed as Vargas, the leader of the peculiar cult on the eponymous prison planet, which ends with exactly what Avon had predicted happening to him: “I would imagine that they would appear momentarily in space, and then that their atoms would be scattered to the solar winds.”

Again, it’s not clear who is going to be among the 7 until the very last moment – especially since, in fact, we are still not up to our full complement by episode’s end, with only five humans aboard the Liberator (we don’t yet know for sure that Zen counts as one of them).

Oddly enough the teleportation technology is an excuse for a significant exchange between Blake, Avon and Jenna. The two men have just discovered that they both had worked on a project on a similar technology back on earth; Jenna tells them sharply, “I didn’t work on it.” It’s almost a defining moment: the key relationship in the series is between Blake and Avon, and the women are sidelined now and mostly hereafter as well. I have written before about Terry Nation’s women characters, concluding by praising him for the introduction of Soolin in later Blake’s 7 series, but Nick Barlow pointed out that in fact she almost certainly came from someone else.

Anyway, I shall press on with these, and report back here as I do.

It’s only a short week in Brussels, and I somehow didn’t make it to the gym, but I got through another two Eighth Doctor audios on the commute, the second and third of the Big Finish series with Paul McGann and India Fisher playing his companion Charley Pollard.

The Sword of Orion seems to be much loved by fans, but I really couldn’t get into it. The voices of the two female guest actors were so similar that it was a while before I worked out that they were different characters, and then of course one of them turns out to be a cute robot. (I hate cute robots.) The surprise is that it turns out to be a Second Doctor Cyberman story (Wheel in Space, I think, though I haven’t seen/heard it) reheated. I recently decided (after re-watching Earthshock in particular) that No Cyberman Story Ever Makes Sense, and this was no exception. I knew I was losing interested when I found myself speculating that the hold the Tardis was stuck in, 38B, might have been named after someone’s bra size.

The Stones of Venice was another matter. Starts with a fun little prologue of the Doctor and Charley, having meddled in some planet’s local politics, getting shot at and deciding to call a halt to that particular adventure and go to Venice instead. Beautiful evocation of a dying city, contested by elites and cultists, with Michael Sheard putting in what must have been one of his last performances as Duke Orsino (and shout out also to Elaine Ives-Cameron, alas also recently deceased). The script is littered with references to E.M. Forster and Shakespeare. OK, I could see how the plot was going to work out from miles off, but the whole thing was done with great gusto and conviction. Also, I like the Eighth Doctor’s obsession with tea.

This is the fourth ever Doctor Who story, broadcast in 1964, and the earliest one to be lost conpletely from the archives. It was also the first purely historical Doctor Who story, telling simply of an encounter between the time travellers and Marco Polo (and eventually Kublai Khan) in the late thirteenth century.

I bought the soundtrack with linking narration from William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton in the original series. It’s generally pretty good though the fifth episode sound quality is rather lousy. I was also misled by one of the hidden extras – the first of the three CDs includes also all seven episodes as MP3s without narration, and since this is nowhere stated I ended up loading them by mistake.

Took me a while – first started this the week before last, and took a break from it while I was travelling. But it is in fact very good. Seven episodes is about right for a leisurely plot, with Susan bonding with the maiden Ping-Cho, and the others dealing with the treacherous warlord Tegana and with Marco Polo himself, who decides to seize the Tardis and offer it to the Khan as his ticket home to Venice. (Or, as Croatian lore would have it, Korcula.)

It builds to a satisfying conclusion with the Doctor playing the Great Khan at backgammon, with the Tardis as the stake. Marco Polo himself, weighing in the balance his honour, his liking and respect for Ian and the others, and his desire to get home, is an interesting character study.

A shame, but I guess understandable, that they stopped making stories like this one after a while.

15) Dead Air, by Iain Banks

A gratifyingly easy read compared to some I’ve tried recently, this is the story of Ken Nott, a Scot who hosts a popular London radio show. The political disasters of late 2001 are mirrored in his personal life, as his dangerous affair with a gangster’s wife drags him into the underworld. Nott’s obsession with truth at a professional level (there is a rather peculiar show-down with a Holocaust denier) is contrasted with his difficulties with honesty in his sex life. Banks has a great ear for dialogue and for the different demotics of London. And the climactic chapters, where Nott tries and fails to avoid the wrath of his lover’s husband, are vividly related. Very enjoyable.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: The sisterhood of the travelling pants, by Ann Brashares.

14) [In Search of Lost Time #2] In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by Marcel Proust

Having had my enthusiasm engaged by the first volume in Proust’s classic series, I started reading the second with some enthusiasm. (A shout out here to Odette, reading Proust in Foxborough, who commented on my last entry.)

I have to say that I found vol 2 a bit more slow-moving, alternating passages of eye-glazing introspection with some really profound and expressive descriptions of what love is like, and how we react to art and to artists (be they actors, writers, or painters). But a welcome surprise was that there is an actual plot, with the narrator’s rebuff of Gilberte near the start vaguely reflected in his relationship with Albertine, and with her other young friends, at the end.

I found myself very irritated by the publisher’s notes. (I’m reading the new-ish Penguin edition.) First of all, I hate end-notes rather than foot-notes as a general matter of principle. Second, while I don’t mind explanations of obscure references to contemporary or older French literature, I thought the editors went overboard in drawing attention to Proust’s minor plot inconsistencies. (Though I did wonder why these were never corrected by any of Proust’s French editors.)

I’m already realising that this is a set of books that I will have to re-read in perhaps five or ten years’ time.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey

Just in case you are interested: I’m mirroring all my Old Skool Doctor Who reviews to

mavic_chen

:

First Doctor
Second Doctor
Third Doctor
Fourth Doctor
Fifth Doctor
Seventh Doctor
Eighth Doctor

But NB nothing will appear there that hasn’t already appeared here first.

Some time I shall think about how to systematise my reviews of the spinoff novels and audios as well.

Istanbul
Skopje (mostly)
The ruined city of Stobi
The first world war battlefield where my grandfather fought
A moment of reflection (locked post)
Štip

13) The Druid King, by Norman Spinrad

The story of Vercingetorix vs Julius Caesar, not really successful because Spinrad can’t quite make up his mind whether it is fantasy or not, and whether it is for adults or young adults. Well, it will be useful background when I get around to reading Caesar himself.

12) Military Operations Macedonia: From the Outbreak of War to Spring 1917, by Captain Cyril Falls

Wonderful that the Imperial War museum has reprinted this volume (originally published in 1931), though it’s a shame that we lose out on the full-colour maps. Certainly the most comprehensive guide you’ll find, yet very dense – I might well have given up on my little research project (to be written up in more detail later) if I had started here instead of with Wakefield/Moody, Palmer and Price.

11) The Epic of Gilgamesh

It’s incomplete, but it’s raw and powerful; it is reminiscent of the Book of Job, but it has a flood in too; it has monsters, harlots, wise men and gods. Difficult to get started but then strangely compelling.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: Evening Class by Maeve Binchy

Nebula award winners here. One woman out of four (below average for the Nebulas); three first-time winners and one second-time winner; one born before 1942, two after 1951 and one in the period in between.

Well done Serbia on winning Eurovision; time for some good news there.

George Monbiot writes an article that I completely agree with.

For my last stop on this trip I decided to explore the town of Štip, which I had visited briefly on my first trip to Macedonia in April 1997, but appeared from Thammy’s book to have a lot more to recommend it. Indeed, it is a good reminder of the intermingling of cultures in this part of the world (and not in fact very far from Stobi, if you want to combine the two some day as a good day trip from Skopje).

Here, for instance, is a dilapidated mosque, built on the ruins of an early Christian church:

Here is the monument in Freedom Square to Alexander the Great:

Here is the monument a bit further along the river to the 561 Jews deported from Štip to Treblinka:

And here is the Bezisten, a former bazaar:

…now doing service as an art gallery:

And, as all former Ottoman towns ought to have, an old clock tower:

Saturday is often a day for getting married in this part of the world:

And I finished off the visit, and my trip as a whole, with a visit to the Kežovica mineral springs for a very convincingly mineral-tasting hot shower. The bath complex nestles into a crook of the hills:

 
And a beautiful church overlooks it from the other side of the river.

 
And so to the airport, and then home.

One thing I have learnt from this trip is that the learning experiences of travel are the people at least as much as the scenery.

I gave lifts to a couple of hitch-hikers during my drive. One was a woman of perhaps my own age, who nattered away to me in a cheerfully obscene mixture of Serbian and German – the phrase “Pička ti materina!” was cheerfully interjected at points where I wouldn’t have used it. Though actually, I wouldn’t ever use that phrase anyway. Then she told me that she was “in sex-business”, normally doing the rounds of the autobahns in Germany and the Netherlands, but back home in Macedonia and having a day of rather slim pickings. I made it clear that she was out of luck with me, and dropped her at the point I turned off the main road for Valandovo. (My spirit of scientific enquiry wishes in retrospect that I had asked the going rate.)

Later on, after we came down from our climb, Bekir told me more of his life story; Gastarbeiter in Germany, economic asylum seeker in Austria, then kicked out and back to Macedonia. His house was not large, he and his wife and two kids have no electricity (Mehmet, who you have seen in the picture at the charcoal kiln, has moved out and lives with his wife and two kids around the corner). But he had been reading the latest issue of the Macedonian weekly version of the main Turkish daily, Zaman, and was well up with the affairs of the world. Only at one point did our conversation falter, when he told me that he had served a prison sentence in his late teens; “Ich hab’ ein’ Mann getöt’,” he said, and his face broke. After a moment we carried on talking, but about something else.

Well, the actual point of this trip was to explore and find out more about the battlefield where my grandfather fought the Bulgarians in 1915 (as opposed to the Turks earlier that year or in 1918). To guide me I had the maps below (respectively, from the books by Cyril Falls and Wakefield and Moody, and a modern one), some reminiscences written years after his death, and the excellent description of the battle itself by Ward Price. (A nod also to Alan Palmer who is informative on the geopolitics.)

Relating the map – especially three different maps – to the situation on the ground is tricky, and coming from Valandovo through Rabrovo I missed the crucial turning for Tatarli (because it was signposted for Čalakli) and was halfway up the pass to Kosturino before I a) realised my mistake and b) was able to turn on the narrow and twisting (though well-surfaced) road. There was a policeman at the junction, and I wondered if I had also somehow driven past the Irish war memorial that was supposedly in Rabrovo. Using my best efforts at mangled Macedonian and Serbia I asked him if he knew where the ирски споменик was. He looked blank, but then offered me a Greek military cemetery, only a few hundred metres away. I left the car and investigated. Sure enough, there it was:

But hang on – further up the hill behind it was something else:

Yes, I had found the monument to the 10th (Irish) division.

The setting is pretty spectacular, looking across the plain to the mountains, the Greek cemetery to the right, the road (which is actually signposted to Greece and Turkey) heading due south to Lake Dojran and the border. As you can see, it is fertile territory.

Encouraged, I returned to the car, waved to the policeman, and began the next stage. My hope was that I would be able to drive up the track marked on the map towards Memešli, in the valley east of the peaks marked as Crête Rivet and Crête Simonet. According to both Price and Falls, my grandfather’s regiment had held out on Crête Rivet for a day after the rest of the front line had pulled back to Crête Simonet; which made me feel pretty certain that that was the location of the anecdote passed on by my grandmother.

However, at this point the utter inadequacy of the maps in detailing the situation on the ground let me down, and I began wishing I had invested in a GPS system. I found myself in a clearing with numerous charcoal pits in varying stages of use. And at this point fate took a hand, with a local man, Bekir, offering to take me up the hill to show me the landscape.

Bekir spoke some German, which is how we communicated (my German is fairly fluent); we discussed the local vegetation, the resignation of Tony Blair, climate change, and the shocking state of the Macedonian economy as we climbed. As it turned out, he is actually an ethnic Turk, and he told me that all the villages nearby (apart from Sobri, across the valley) were largely Turkish-speaking; a legacy population of the Ottoman empire, kicked out of these parts by the Bulgarians in 1912, themselves kicked out by the Serbs in 1913, with my grandfather part of an unsuccessful attempt to save them from the Bulgarians again in late 1915 before they went back to Serbia in 1918. (Back and forth again during the second world war, and of course in independent Macedonia since 1992.) The landscape alternates between rocky and bushy; junipers and yew, mostly, but it smelt lovely.

Bekir guided me through the scrub to the top of the peak called Crête Simonet on the allied maps (I asked if there was a local Turkish name for it; he looked blank; the names were presumably given to the features by the French who had occupied the area in a counterstrike against the Bulgarians in early November 1915, handing over to the Irish at the end of the month) and I satisfied myself that I was in the right place. Here is the view north to Crête Rivet.

Was it from here that my grandfather ordered his men to descend diagonally, guessing that the Bulgarians would fire straight down into the valley and so miss them? Certainly if Crête Rivet is like Crête Simonet, a diagonal descent on the southern edge is favoured by the rock formations. (Presumably also the houses they allowed to be shelled belonged to Bekir’s wife’s relatives – he himself was from further north. He told me that the village of Kajali is completely deserted with barely any buildings standing; I guess we know why.)

On top of the ridge I found this interesting and clearly artificial arrangement of rocks, which Bekir said was either Bulgarian or Russian in origin.

One of the stones appeared to have been drilled and had traces of cement:

My first feeling was that this surely must have been constructed by the Allies, not the Bulgarians; it was open to the south, and clearly facing north. But on reflection, I think it may instead be what is left of the trigonometric beacon marked both by Falls and on the modern map just inside the 400m contour, a kilometre or so north of the village. (Which, incidentally, Bekir tells me is now generally called Čalakli, Tatarli being only one small part of it.)

The top of the ridge flattens out into a fairly clear platform several hundred metres long by three or four wide, the slopes dropping away to the scrub on either side:

I was too tired and the weather too hot to press on to the northern peak; also my short-sleeved shirt was inadequate protection against the scrub, so we declared a partial victory and, like the 10th Division in 1915, beat a tactical retreat. I had not been to the gym all week due to my travel, but this certainly made up for it.

Most of the local wildlife moved fast enough to get out of sight before my exhausted fingers could get my new camera to focus on it, but there was one exception:

We also said hi to Bekir’s son Mehmet who was busy making charcoal.

Bekir invited me in for a cup of Turkish coffee, and recommended that I should come back some time to do both peaks, which should take us about four hours; he also hoped I would bring someone who spoke decent Macedonian or Serbian, though I felt we had managed OK in German. I gave him what I hope was a decent tip, and drove off, feeling pretty triumphant. This expedition was something that had started out as a castle in the air, and ended with the kindness of a charcoal-burner. I do hope I get back there some time to do the fuller version.

Tipped off by Thammy Evans’ guidebook, I broke my drive for lunch at the ruined city of Stobi, which is conveniently located just off the main road north of Gradsko (not too far from Štip). An extraordinary and beautiful monument; I was the only tourist there.

 
The emperor Theodosius is supposed to have stayed here:

 
And this house belonged to a prominent Jewish family:

 
Alas, the synagogue, built in the early fourth century, was demolished and replaced with a Christian cathedral. The mosaics of the baptistery are beautifully preserved:

 

 
Peacocks are still a ubiquitous presence in Macedonian art and nature.

The very first thing that catches your eye on the way in is the amphitheatre:

 
Some of Stobi’s citizens had their names carved into (presumably) their favourite seats.