Have spent this weekend (and chunks of the last) tidying up my elections site. Not being on the ground, it’s impossible to have a sense of the likely shift of votes; and opinion polls are notoriously useless. But, on the basis of the twin elections for Westminster and the local councils in 2005, I can say the following:
ii) The Alliance Party has tricky defences in Lagan Valley, South Antrim and Strangford, but I remain optimistic (indeed they ought to have a chance of picking up one of the Nationalist seats in South Belfast).
iii) The fate of independent MLA Kieran Deeny in West Tyrone is an interesting question. In 2003 he won a seat from the SDLP which in my view would otherwise have fallen to Sinn Fein. He put in a storming cross-community perfomance in the 2005 general election, though failed to win. While SF is certain to win two seats, and the Unionists another two, it’s very difficult to read which two out of Deeny, the SDLP, and a third SF candidate will make it.
iv) With total certainty, I can predict that some of the above predictions are wrong.
7) Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, by Dee Brown
I’m surprised and somewhat saddened to say that I am dropping this one, not quite a third of the way in. I am sure that in 1970, when it was first published, the idea of telling the colonisation of the Great Plains from the native Americans’ point of view was ground-breaking and necessary. Of course, this side of the story has now been effectively mainstreamed into American history; see eg Tindall and Shi’s book, which is my main reference on that subject. What we have here is a collection of accounts of betrayal, massacre and forced expulsions, retrieved from official documents of the 1860-1890 period. But I felt that it leant far too much on one strand of source material to be really interesting; I had the same criticism of McCullough’s much-acclaimed Adams biography, and am left wondering if this is a common fault in American historical writing.
I would have really liked some further background: both on the white men’s point of view – some exploration of both the motivation for the settlers’ murderous expansion, and some idea of how the political establishment reacted to or dealt with these crimes carried out in their name – and indeed some more on the native Americans – some sense of their culture, religious beliefs, concepts of their relations with the land and with the white men, rather than just treating them as the objects of genocide. As it is, I spend far too much time in my professional life reading about this sort of thing (usually perpetrated by Europeans on other Europeans) and this book failed to engage my interest in reading about it in a geographical area I don’t know so well and don’t care about as much.
Well, now I can give it back to the guy who lent it to me 15 years ago.
Not really great literature: Doctor and Ace on far future planet, where not all is as it seems, and the plot depends on an untold story from the Doctor’s past. Still, I will read the fourth in this series.
I seems to be in a distinct minority on my f-list in continuing to find Torchwood entertaining and watchable, better than most X-Files, as good as most Doctor Who, and while not up to Buffy at her best still something I look forward to watching whenever my first free evening of the week after Sunday happens to be. (Which was Friday this week. Ooogh.) However. I make no excuses.
Countrycide
OK, we have to be honest and admit that there were two serious plot problems this week – the implausibility of a village getting away consistently with regular bouts of mass murder over the decades, and Jack’s arrival to save the day at the end, not so much deus ex machina as Harkness super machina. But the mood of tension throughout was, I thought, brilliant – both the physical fear of the killers, especially in a way when they turn out not to be rubber suited monsters but ordinary country folk, and the sexual tension between Owen and Gwen – I know, we’ve seen it coming, it’s a huge mistake, she must surely end up with Jack, but there you go.
Greeks Bearing Gifts
As Cyberwoman was Ianto’s story, this was Toshiko’s; and she came out of it well, succumbing to the temptations of the lusty alien – less fatal than the previous sex-possession in the series – and of course hearing voices rather like Buffy in Earshot, which was one of my favourite Buffy episodes. As points out, however, Torchwood did different things with it, though, in particular underlining Jack’s differences with the rest of humanity. Again, I felt Jack’s solution – sending the villain to the heart of the Sun, rather than, say, immobilising her or even returning her to her home planet – wasn’t quite right, but I enjoyed the ride.
We’ve been re-watching last year’s Doctor Who and were surprised to see Toshiko pop up in Aliens of London, though I’m sure I must have seen references to that elsewhere.
They Keep Killing Suzie
Was the amnesia pill called “retcon” in the previous episode where it was used? Glorious. Also, in a superb piece of pedantry, reveals that the script quotes the wrong ISBN. (Hat-tip to for that.)
Suzie’s plan is ever-so-slightly convoluted – she risked being locked into Torchwood with everyone else, surely, when Max started his recital; and all this just so that she could kill her father, a few weeks before the cancer would have got him anyway? But entertaining stories are often made of unlikely sets of events, and we were duly entertained. And the return of Yasmin Bannerman, from living tree to policewoman, was very welcome.
Finally, is there any decent livejournal search engine out there any more? Because I am frustrated by being unable to easily search my f-list for Torchwood-related entries. LJseek is pretty erratic, currently giving me only one link less than three weeks old, and I know some of you have been writing about it since then. I suppose I should simply add the relevant posts to my memories as I see them – but doesn’t that risk reading spoilers?
This story, first shown in 1972, brings the Third Doctor and Jo Grant to the barbarous and wind-swept planet of Peladon, ruled by a young king (also called Peladon), which is seeking admission to a Galactic Federation including the future Earth, for whose commission delegates the Doctor and Jo are mistaken.
The story is widely seen as a reference to Britain’s entry into the Common Market, now the European Union; the UK’s accession treaty was signed a week before the first episode was shown. I wonder how explicit this was at the time? Both Peladon and the Galactic Federation have a number of interesting features that seem to me to be drawn from elsewhere in history or literature, and which make the Peladon=Britain, Federation=Europe reading not especially straightforward.
First off, what is really striking is that Peladon seeks to join the Federation from a position of weakness, not strength. It is a formerly closed society opening up to the outside world, a minor player seeking to be admitted to the big leagues, being dragged out of barbarity towards modernity by the young and idealistic (but weak) king. I can’t quite believe that many in newly post-imperial Britain in 1972 saw the country’s geopolitical position in that light. (King Peladon=Edward Heath? I think not.)
Combined with the question of mineral resources (the delegate from Arcturus wants to cut a side deal with Peladon’s high priest, Hepesh, giving his planet exclusive access to Peladon’s minerals but keeping them out of the Federation), the story actually has more resonances for me with the process of decolonisation, the Federation being the UN rather than the EU, and the young king’s heroism reflecting the media lionisation of the leaders of newly independent countries at the time; or perhaps even going slightly further back, King Peladon=the young Haile Selassie, getting into the League of Nations in 1923 and getting satirised for his pains by Evelyn Waugh.
The main plot revolves around conservative forces trying to prevent the modernisation process from happening, by exploiting traditional religious beliefs and using violence to undermine the state. From England in 1972, one just has to look across the water to Northern Ireland for a contemporary example; Hepesh=Ian Paisley, on this reading. Though by the time the programme was shown, the Northern Ireland conflict had slipped from debates about the modernisation of society to much older patterns of behaviour: Bloody Sunday was the day after the first episode of the Curse of Peladon, and Stormont was abolished a few weeks after the story finished. The Doctor’s taming of the mystical/mythical beast Aggedor and using him to bring about a good ending is not so very far from the aspirations of the Corrymeela community to use religion as a unifying rather than dividing force back home.
Of course, the story also reflects a general assumption of the time that federations are better than going it alone; see also the setting of the 1967 Star Trek story, Journey to Babel. Is this still as generally held a view? Would the story would carry more resonance in today’s Britain if Hepesh were the hero, defending his planet’s priceless assets against the greedy aliens, opposing the young and deluded king’s shallow fascination with the latest interplanetary political gadgetry? (And how did the royal family get to where they are, anyway? As says, “Whenever I hear about a planet with just one government I start asking about mass graves.”)
The final geopolitical point that struck me was the necessity for all the galactic delegates to agree before force could be used – in this case, to defend King Peladon’s authority against Hepesh’s rebel forces. This is a classic case of Chapter VII intervention, and thus strengthens the Federation=UN rather than Federation=EEC reading; the question of a European army, which remains even now a bit of a red herring, was surely not being discussed by anyone in 1972. Of course (as sometimes happens) the procedures are fudged – Arcturus has already been killed by the Ice Warriors, so his vote is not needed for unanimity; but nobody raises this procedural point.
Apart from that, I rather enjoyed the story. It is interesting to see the Doctor actually make a mistake: normally, he spots the danger before anyone else does, but in this case his suspicions of the Ice Warriors turn out to be ill-founded. He redeems himself by performing the Venusian lullaby, “Klokkleda partha mennin klatch”, to the tune of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”. Jo gets (I think) her first romantic plot-line, with King Peladon, and is all the better for it. The citadel (as far as we can tell, the only inhabited spot on the entire planet!) is nicely conveyed (indeed, the whole thing looks great). I actually like the “Doctor Who?” gag at the end a well. Minor problem: the story effectively ends at the start of episode 4 rather than the end, which would have been better planning. Major problem: Alpha Centauri (no need to explain why).
The weather is horrible outside, and I have two more weeks in this job; my motivation is dribbling away. Also I know I’m going to have to come in tomorrow to do some of my least favourite task – editing. Also I have been suffering from nasty mouth ulcers all week, which were not cured by the miracle steroid cream which had always worked before. Also we had a bad night last night with both girls, so am feeling very sleepy.
But the new job is looking good – I changed my mind, and went for the first office I’d looked at, on Rondpoint Schuman, right in the heart of the European quarter. As noted earlier in the week, the internship advertisement went up on Monday and had attracted 100 replies by Tuesday. Though having said that, there is an intern here who has approached me already. He uses a wheelchair, which presumably means he will be less able to hump office equipment around; but on the other hand he has a car which he is allowed to park almost anywhere in Brussels, which is a serious bonus. And – joy of joys – I have been authorised to go and get myself a Blackberry!
(I know, I’m very shallow.)
Meantime, slightly to my surprise, one of the NATO jobs I applied for last year has come back to me with dates for interview in January. I’m not getting my hopes up, and in any case I suspect that if I become a serious candidate it could take months to get a security clearance. But I’ll go and do the interviews anyway. While I’m very happy to have got the new job, it remains my medium-term goal to get inside the institutions rather than outside, and if that matures a little sooner than I had anticipated, well, what the heck.
Right, time to go home. Since the car died I am beholden to public transport. I hope there is a tram soon – seems like the rain has stopped but the wind still sounds pretty vicious…
5) The Great English Pilgrimage, by Christopher Donaldson
A somewhat rambling book by an elderly vicar attempting to follow the steps of Augustine from Rome to Canterbury in 597, written in 1995 in the hopes that many would try and follow the same route two years later for the 1400th anniversary. Lots of circumstantial detail about the late sixth century in Italy, France and England – gosh, I would like to read a proper biography of Brunhilda! – retold in a gentle High Anglican kind of way. Quite charming, but not very deep.
4) This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, by Swanee Hunt
I have to speak about this at an event later tonight, and if I’m happy with my speech I’ll post it here. Swanee Hunt was the US ambassador to Austria for the later stages of the Bosnian war and the immediate aftermath, and one senses that as an outsider – a political appointee in the US diplomatic service – she was trying also to bring other outsider voices into the process. But she keeps herself largely in the background, and the book is a collection of interviews with twenty-six Bosnian women of diverse backgrounds, with the interviews edited and assembled by theme, to give a rounded picture of, say, perceptions of history, actual wartime experience, the chance of reconciliation. Moving and thought-provoking.
As is inevitable, this reflects partly my speaking notes, partly what I think I said, and partly what I think I ought to have said.
Today is 6 December, the feast day of St Nicholas, so a very important day for children in this country and also an important day for those of us whose name is Nicholas.
St Nicholas, historically, was the bishop of Myra, which is now in Turkey; Myra is mentioned once in the New Testament, in Luke’s record of his landing there with Paul en route to Rome. In the previous verse, it is recorded that they had to sail around Cyprus because the winds were against them. Sometimes that happens.
The film we’ve just seen, Akamas, is set in the time written about by Lawrence Durrell in his famous book, Bitter Lemons: “The days passed in purposeless riots and the screaming of demagogues and commentators; and the nights were busy with the crash of broken glass and the spiteful detonation of small grenades.”
Durrell is of course not a completely honest witness. At the time he was playing a role in the British colonial administration not dissimilar to that played by certain present day officials.
Rather an interesting quest story from early Doctor Who – the show’s first real sf narrative apart from the original Daleks story, and like the original Daleks story written by Terry Nation. With a certain foreshadowing of the Key to Time season, thirteen years and three Doctors later, our heroes are sent across five different environments on the planet Marinus (which, unlike so many sf planets, actually has different climates depending on where you happen to be) to retrieve the five keys which will operate the Magical Machine.
The first four episodes (out of six) are standard sfnal fare – indeed, perhaps Doctor Who’s closest early approach to the monster-of-the-week concept (bottled brains, mutant plants, giant wolves) – but I think it lifts itself into something rather superior in the last two episodes, a courtroom drama where the Doctor is defending Ian against a charge of murder, with only circumstantial evidence against him, but collusion between key officials and the real culprits. (A helpful official asks Ian, “Who is he?” “Who?” replies Ian, rhetorically agreeing.) Though the trial judges do bear a disturbing resemblance to the High Priests in the 1973 film of Jesus Christ Superstar.
The climax really does take us back to the future, as the First Doctor, having assembled all of the Keys of Marinus, makes the same decision as the Fourth Doctor at the end of The Armageddon Factor; though with more explosive consequences. One of the heavily costumed bad guys nearly trips over his own shoes as he tries to bring our heroes to their doom, but recovers from it quickly; and that’s part of the charm, really.
Is this final snippet of information for real?
Amongst later changes made to Nation’s scripts was the removal of a TARDIS sequence from episode one, The Sea Of Death. Here it was revealed that the reason the Doctor and Susan had been on Earth in 1963 was because the Doctor had visited the British Broadcasting Corporation to get help repairing the colour scanner in the TARDIS, which was showing only monochrome images. He had been in such a bad mood upon his return to the TARDIS because the BBC had been “infernally secretive”!
I regret that I haven’t been able to get hold of the first book in this series. Urban Shaman sold out, apparently, even on the side of the Atlantic where it was available, which is not this one. I did at least get hold of the short story that comes between the first and second books.
The heroine of Thunderbird Falls is a Seattle policewoman who turns out to have psychic powers, in an environment drawing substantially from Native American traditions, with a certain helping of Celtic lore and the author’s own imagination. It is very difficult to convey such a setting without falling into the trap of being either too twee or too earnestly evangelical, and it is very much to the author’s credit that she manages it; the dangers, both physical and psychic, to the narrator make it clear that this is very far from the fotherington-tomas “Hullo clouds hullo sky hullo sun etc” view of nature.
The plot, unfortunately, depends a bit on the heroine not asking certain important questions that occur to the reader (at least to this reader) fairly early on. OK, we are given good reasons why she doesn’t think her situation through, but it’s a nagging concern. Also, I was kind of hoping (this is the romantic in me) for a more definite resolution of the various sexual tensions surrounding our narrator’s life. Having said that, I really do hope there is another book to follow, and that I somehow get hold of the earlier one.
I was slightly thrown yesterday by someone on my friends-list referring to a car called Petite, owned by a character called Jo, and thought, “Gosh, that’s someone who’s reading the same book I’m reading…” …and then realised in fact it was the person who wrote the book that I was reading. It is a small world.
B has taken to removing the duvet from our bed, swaddling herself in it, and falling asleep in front of the front door. She can’t tell us what the attraction is; perhaps she likes the cool air coming in through the doorframe. Anyway, normally it is easy enough to persuade her to go upstairs to her room when we want to reclaim the duvet for our own use. But this evening I realised another potential pitfall – if she’s already lying in front of the door when I get back from work, it is very difficult for me to open it and gain access to my own home…
I am now spending a lot more time on the tram than I did before the car died. This evening on the way from work to Brussel-Centraal I overheard the couple sitting opposite talking English. They came from Somerset, in Brussels for a couple of days’ holiday, and they were lost; expecting to get to the Grand’Place, but sitting on the #93 as it bowled along the Rue Royale, so they were in danger of going seriously off course. I took them off at the Palais stop, and walked them down the steps, past the site of the Brontës’ sojourn in Brussels, down more steps through the Ravenstein and the railway station, instructing them to keep going downhill and veer to the left. I hope they had a good time; it was her birthday treat, and it was raining very heavily, but if they end up in the Roi d’Espagne as I recommended they will probably be OK.
The first sentence of the first entry of each month from this year:
January: So as one year turns to another, I’ve returned to a youthful passion: the fourteenth century scholar Richard of Wallingford, who as Abbot of St Albans designed an elaborate astronomical clock capable of predicting lunar eclipses, as chronicled once again by John North, who published the definitive edition of Richard of Wallingford’s works thirty years ago, and here attempts to give a more accessible account (at a cost of £15 rather than the £400 that the 1976 version will cost you).
February: Fog at Pristina airport meant all flights were cancelled today (because incoming planes couldn’t land) so I get an extra 24 hours in Kosovo.
March: Apparently I’m a Chaotic Good Half-Orc Fighter
May: I’ve compiled a list of School Reunion entires from other people’s LJ’s, not just my own f-list but following links from comments to other pages.
June: Släpp in de som står utanför: My contribution to Sweden’s debate on the future of Europe, here.
July: I have a bit of an obsession with people who have certain things in common with me, like my exact date of birth, for instance, or shared interests via livejournal.
August: Reading this is a bit like reading someone’s livejournal entry when you have only one person’s side of the story.
September: Jeepers, if you’re going to apologise, you should make it look like a real apology!
One of the reasons I read so many books is that we don’t get out much, a combination of the difficulty of getting babysitters for the rather unusual needs of our children (on which subject, thanks once again to for helping out last night) and the related difficulty of working up enough energy to get out for more than a waiter-service meal. However, as it happens I have managed to see two films in the last two months, due to (in the first case) an unusual confluence of baby-sitting availability and our energy levels, and (in the second case) having an evening to kill in Berlin.
The Queen
For no especially good reason I persuaded to come and see this with me; the story of how the royal family coped with the political crisis caused by the death of Princess Diana in 1997. The two lead actors, Helen Mirren as the title character and Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, are very good; we were much less convinced by
Alex Jennings’ Prince Charles or Helen McCrory’s Cherie. A lot of the audience (indeed, most of you reading this) will remember that week pretty vividly; I, however, was in Bosnia, and managed to pass the crucial days pretty much unaware of what was going on, so it had affected us rather less.
I found it none the less quite an interesting study of political crisis, of what happens when decision-makers are confronted with a situation that requires them to think out of the box. Not that the Queen actually gets to make many decisions, other than those relating to her main function, the linkage between her subjects and the idea of the State; but that is not an unimportant issue. was, I think it is fair to say, less impressed.
Casino Royale
The Potsdamerplatz in Berlin is a pretty fantastic place, including a cinema showing movies in the original English, so I though I should do what everyone else has been doing and see “Casino Royale”. I was of course thrilled that one of my favourite small countries featured so much, but puzzled as to why I didn’t recognise any of the settings: the answer of course turns out to be quite simple – none of it was actually filmed in Montenegro! The casino scenes are all in Karlovy Vary, and even the bit I thought might be the Boka Kotorska is actually Lake Como (explaining why it looked like a cold winter day). There was one other touch which I though might be deliberate or might not; the “Montenegrin” police wear shoulder flashes of the old (1993-2004) flag, while it is the new version that flies outside the Hotel Splendide. Anyway, I’m sure it will boost tourism, even if the justification for that is slim.
The film itself is great. Daniel Craig’s Bond is as close as I can imagine to an updated version of Fleming’s hero, fifty years ago (I confess I have read only Moonraker and a condensed version of Casino Royale which none the less found space for the famous torture scene). It is a film that takes itself just seriously enough. Very enjoyable.
seeks guidance from me as to what classic Doctor Who she should watch. Also I am spurred into action by a post on the Dork Report commending Sarah Hadley for setting new standards in Doctor Who esoterica, and also commending my Ian Marter post from last weekend, “lest [Sarah’s site] be too broad for the true Who anorak”.
Anyway, I don’t feel my knowledge is as in-depth as some on my f-list (in particular, the likes of , who is surely the queen of Who in the city of my birth), so I’m just going to repeat links to places which I find useful as I explore the past of the show:
The Doctor Who dynamic rankings site – this was the one I meant to link to in my reply to , but screwed it up, which covers all the broadcast stories since 1963;
The Doctor Who Ratings Guide, which carries reviews of almost all Who stuff, including most of the spinoff fiction;
‘s reminiscences of watching it all at the time of first broadcast;
‘s assessment, having watched all the old series repeated in Australia.
I’m not satisfied with my indexing of my own Doctor Who reviews at the moment, and will give some thought as to how to make them better organised and more accessible, though the livejournal tagging system does help.
What with the older car having died, and Anne needing the newer one to ferry B back and forth to her new place in Tienen, it looks like I will be reading even more books in the future as I will have about an hour and a half on the train every day. We were planning for this to happen after I start at the new job in January anyway, so it’s just come a bit sooner than expected.
Despite my best intentions, my list of unread books now stands at 153, actually up from 146 the last time I counted, despite my efforts to be disciplined. Of those 153, 52 were acquired this year (plus, er, about 165 that I have already read); in other words, of the 130-odd I mentioned at the end of last year, I have read about a quarter. Thanks to LibraryThing I can list certain priorities as follows:
Most recently acquired:
Robert A. Heinlein, Variable Star (for review)
Elizabeth Pond, Endgame in the Balkans (for review)
Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives
Added earliest to my catalogue:
Anne Lamott, Crooked little heart
Dee Brown, Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Theodore Zeldin, An intimate history of humanity
Marina Warner, Joan of Arc
Christopher Donaldson, The great English pilgrimage
Most popular among LibraryThing users:
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Bill Bryson, Notes From a Small Island
Most often tagged “unread” by LibraryThing users:
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
George Elliot, The Mill on the Floss,
J.R.R. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales
Dee Brown, Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
With less than a month to go in the year, my reading resolutions are in mixed form. But I still have a chance of meeting some of my targets by the end of the year by:
Finishing Don Quixote.
Finishing Dhalgren, reading Grey Lensman, and buying and reading one other out of A Princess of Mars, Tau Zero, Again, Dangerous Visions, The Female Man, Last and First Men, and Deathbird.
Reading seven other books that I acquired before the end of 2005.
A more serious effort by Durrell here than his collection of humorous diplomatic stories which also drew on his time in Belgrade. The cover describes it as being in the genre of John Buchan but in fact I think it’s pretty obvious that Durrell was trying to cash in on the James Bond phenomenon (Casino Royale was published two years earlier, in 1953, and Live and Let Die in 1954) by bringing his British secret agent hero to untangle murky doings in Serbia in (one assumes) early 1948.
No sex and no glamorous violence here. But there was enough vivid circumstantial description for me to pull out my map and check the topography Durrell was describing:
Most of the action takes place in the Studenica valley, near the monastery of the same name, half-way between Kraljevo and Novi Pazar (on the right hand side of the map) – not, in fact, a part of the country I’ve been to, though I’ve come close – spent a night in Kraljevo in 1998, and did the Kosovo to Bosnia route via Prijepolje and Pljevlja in 2002. The walk up the Studenica valley to rendezvous with Royalist rebels at the Jankov Kamen summit of Golija seems convincing. (This is, after all, still a hotbed of that sort of thing, with fugitive war criminals from the 1990s conflict rumoured to be hanging out in this area.) However, I felt that the trek over the mountains to the Crno Jezero on the flanks of Mount Durmitor, all the way over in Montenegro (bottom left corner of my map), should probably have taken a great deal longer than the single day Durrell allows his characters, especially since they were trying to carry vast quantities of gold with them.
It’s a very nicely observed book in terms of the scenery, the people, the fishing (especially the fishing!), the weather, the politics (though in fact Durrell arrived in Belgrade to work only in 1949 – but I suppose he may have explored there from Corfu before the war). Unfortunately Durrell didn’t quite pull it together in terms of plot. The narrative makes perfect sense, but our hero, Methuen, appears curiously unchanged by it all; he does get the girl out of danger, but it is not at all clear that he gets the girl; no huge lessons are learnt about love, loyalty or heroism (I was struck that the Royalist rebels were portrayed as being as unattractive as Tito’s Communist officials and militia). So although it’s a charming enough book, I felt a bit flat at the end of it.
A fifteen-year-old German boy has a love affair with a woman twenty years older, in the early 1960s; years later, he finds himself observing her trial for war crimes – she had been a concentration camp guard, and is jailed. He knows she is innocent of some of the charges, but complicit none the less. I guess Hanna is a metaphor for Germany itself, with its difficulty in reading its own past. The end is not a happy one.
(PS: top UnSuggestion for this book is the Harry Potter boxed set, by J.K. Rowling. I can understand that.)
24) Skeletons on the Zahara, by Dean King
25) Western Sahara: The Roots of a Desert War, by Tony Hodges
26) Endgame in the Western Sahara, by Toby Shelley
27) Western Sahara: Anatomy of a Stalemate, by Erik Jensen
Three of these books are about the conflict in Western Sahara since 1975. The first, however, is an account of a group of American sailors who were shipwrecked off the Saharan coast in 1815, captured and enslaved by the locals, and how their captain and a few of his crew eventually made it to freedom, being bought out by the British consul at Essaouira (“Swearah”) in Morocco. The captain, James Riley, and one of his crewmen published accounts of their journey and captivity after they had got back which were apparently widely read in early nineteenth-century America, the young Abraham Lincoln citing Riley’s as one of the six most important books he had read as a child.
King has filleted the published accounts of Riley and his colleague Robbins, and added a considerable amount of circumstantial and historical detail and his best guesses as to where the incidents described actually took place – no mean feat since we are talking hundreds of miles of pretty featureless desert, and he needs to make some fairly heroic corrections to Riley’s sense of direction. The last book I read to take this approach – essentially a modern spin on nineteenth-century texts – was that rather awful biography of Fanny Kemble; this time round, the author makes it work, though I did wish that we got a little more than odd scraps of the original writing from which he is drawing.
The descriptions of the desert, as it is now and was then, and of the physiological effects of dehydration and exposure to extreme climate are gripping, and there is also the human drama of the Americans’ negotiations for freedom. I was a bit surprised that King draws no particular parallel between the brutal treatment of the Americans by their captors, and of the treatment of slaves in the contemporary United States, though he does mention that Riley in later life became a fervent abolitionist. The point was obviously not lost on the young Abraham Lincoln though.
The other three books all deal with the conflict between Morocco and the indigenous Polisario Front in Western Sahara since the Spanish pulled out of their colony in 1975, reneging on their promise to hold a referendum (said referendum has now been mandated by the UN but has yet to be held). Hodges’ book, a totally comprehensive guide to the region’s history, was published in 1983, since when the world has changed but Western Sahara remains in much the same state. Shelley’s book is from 2004, and is basically a political overview of the state of play then. Jensen’s is an insider account; he was head of the UN mission to organise the referendum for four years.
While of course, the narrative is basically one of powerful Morocco being allowed to oppress the much weaker Sahrawis and exploit their territory’s mineral resources with the tacit blessing of the international community (ie primarily the US, France and Spain). so one of grand sweeping historical forces, I was struck by two moments where human contingency appeared in the narrative, where the potential for a better outcome was missed because the key individuals were distracted by other questions.
The first of these moments was on 17 October 1975, when the Spanish cabinet was meeting to discuss details of their withdrawal and the extent to which they could resist Morocco’s imminent invasion. If General Franco, who had been in power for over forty years, had been able to focus on the question, and stay clearly in control of the process, I can imagine that some kind of formal handover to the locals might have been possible rather than the messy situation which the Spanish left behind them. As it was, Franco was taken ill at the cabinet meeting, and spent the next five weeks slowly dying; Spanish policy was to a large extent on autopilot, and Spain’s policy-makers operating in an environment of extraordinary uncertainty.
The second moment was at the end of Javier Perez de Cuellar’s term as Secretary-General of the United Nations in late 1991, when the Security Council had a characteristic last-minute burst of activity. John Bolton, now of course the reviled US Ambassador to the UN, stated in 1998 (quoted by Shelley and extensively by Jensen) that there was a clear choice to be made in those last few days of the year between bedding down the UN’s work on Central America or addressing the Western Sahara issue; and for the US, of course, there was no question as to which was more important. But had Nicaragua and Guatemala been quieter at the time (which would, of course, have required a large set of preconditions) perhaps late 1991 could have been a kind of Dayton moment, when the international community as a whole might had brought its collective will to bear. If this is part of a regular sixteen-year cycle, the next window of opportunity will be in late 2007.
Otherwise, the three contemporary accounts are a depressing reminder of the ineffectiveness of the international system at defending the rights of the weak against the strong. Nobody will lean on Morocco, which portrays its oppression as part of the fight against Islamic terrorism (rather than as part of the fight against Communism, which was its line twenty years ago). The Polisario Front have done pretty much everything the international community asked of them, in terms of calling a ceasefire and cooperating with various international efforts, and have received very little in return. Jensen, charged with running the referendum for the United Nations, doubts that anyone (especially among the international community) was ever sincere about holding it, let alone enforcing the results. Shelley is rather more passionate, but unfortunately less coherent – his book could have done with more vigorous editing.
The garage got back to me, and the cost of repairing the car is more than we paid for it six years ago (when it was already ten years old). So Off to the breaker’s yard, alas.
21) An International Relations Debacle: The UN Secretary-General’s Mission of Good Offices in Cyprus 1999-2004, by Claire Palley
22) Disaccord on Cyprus: The UN Plan and after, by Clement Dodd
23) Everything is about Cyprus, by Hasan Erçakica
I know it’s now December, but there are still a bunch of books I read last month which I haven’t listed here. Though in fact, of these three books on Cyprus I have read only two; I record Claire Palley’s heavy, lavishly-illustrated tome as one of those books I am never going to finish. It is rabidly partisan towards the Greek Cypriots, complete with juvenile captions making fun of their opponents in the many photographs, and I found the tone pretty unbearable; I couldn’t get past the first chapter. Fortunately I didn’t pay for it; it was given by the Greek Cypriot government to a friend of mine who couldn’t wait to unload it onto me. The only reason I was interested in it was that one of my co-panellists back in March taunted me for not having read it, and I wanted to correct any lapse I might have made; but I think I have made a reasonable effort.
The only merit of Clement Dodd’s pamphlet is that is is much shorter, only 52 pages, but equally tediously partisan from the other direction; Denktash and the old Turkish policy were the only sensible approach, and the Turkish Cypriots’ recent shift in favour of the UN proposals a mistake. Apparently, the Turks have never done any wrong, and all that is now needed is for the Greek Cypriots to withdraw their claims of sovereignty over the TRNC.
Hasan Erçakica’s book was sent to me by the Turkish Cypriots; he is now the spokesman of the Turkish Cypriot President, Mehmet Ali Talat, but this book is a collection of his newspaper columns from July last year to May this year (when he got his new job). All fairly sane if brief exposes of the official line, though I have a couple of points of disagreement (for instance, the assessment of one particular senior UN official seemed rather paranoid to me). Certainly more digestible than either of the other two.
As I’ve said before, the most entertaining read about Cyprus is the weekly “Tales from the Coffeeshop” column in the Cyprus Mail. Great quote from this week: “Nobody expects journalists at Simerini and Machi to check their facts, because it is against the general ethos of the papers and to do so is cause for dismissal – neither paper allows facts to get in the way of a solid rabble-rousing story. But you would assume that the hacks possessed the minimum intelligence required to realise that a playground row between two 12-year-olds, even if it involved spitting on a cross, does not amount to a hysteria-stirring story, let alone to a threat against Hellenism or Christianity.”
19) [Doctor Who] Evolution, by John Peel
20) [Doctor Who] The Stealers of Dreams, by Steve Lyons
I have read some serious books recently, honest, and reviews of those are coming up Real Soon Now. But it just so happens that I have managed 14 Doctor Who books this month, the nine Ian Marter novelisations and five spinoffs; perhaps I need to admit to myself that I am a fan?
I got both of these as a result of recommendations. Evolution somehow fitted into my purchase of Managra months ago; it is a Virgin Missing Adventure featuring the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, set immediately after “The Brain of Morbius”. The Stealers of Dreams was recommended to me last week by Evolution is much the better of the two, a glorious Victorian romp featuring the young Arthur Conan Doyle (just after I discovered my own obscure family connection with him) and an even younger Rudyard Kipling, combined with affectionate references to those classic Fourth Doctor stories, “Horror of Fang Rock” and “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”.
The Stealers of Dreams takes us to a rather unlikely planet where both fiction and government have been outlawed, resulting in a heavily policed and medicated society. Some good ideas, and nice capturing of the Doctor and his companions, but my science-fictional soul prefers settings that feel a bit more alien rather than just London give or take a few features necessary to the plot.
One bit of my Berlin trip that I will remember for a long time:
In previous visits I have tended to concentrate on the Bundestag, the Foreign Ministry and the thinktankers. On this occasion I decided I would take in the Defence Ministry as well, and found to my delight that it was conveniently close to my hotel. A rather impressive building, I thought; I wondered if there was any particular history behind it?
(Of course, the Bundestag, in the former Reichstag building, has history literally oozing out of the walls – if you’ve been inside you’ll know what I mean. And the Foreign Ministry was originally built as the central bank of the Third Reich, and then served as Communist Party headquarters in East Germany.)
So I asked the silver-haired colonel who I was meeting about the building’s history. He told me that it had originally been the headquarters of the German Navy from 1911, and was then the territorial army headquarters; and then became the centre of resistance to Hitler within the armed forces, in particular under Claus von Stauffenberg. (I realised why the street I had just walked down is called the Stauffenbergstraße.) He added, “So after 20 July, von Stauffenberg was shot in one of the courtyards,” indicating which one with a nod.
Gulp.
On a different note entirely, I am quite unreasonably pissed off with the people who have mis-spelt my name on the invitation to next week’s book launch. They are the embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I get on very well with their ambassador in Brussels, and it’s irritating that one of her staff has let her down; but also, I have always done my best to make sure that invitations to events involving diplomats respect the necessary protocol and it really irritated me today that they weren’t able to extend the courtesy reciprocally. (They also used an out-of-date logo for my employers.) I spent sixteen months of my life in 1997 and 1998 trying to help strengthen democracy in their country, and… well, no point in going on about it I suppose.
