Second paragraph of third chapter:
Mercy had landed, curls of smoke around her but no fire, yet. Harp quick-released his harness, saw his new, reluctant buddy copy. ‘All set, Ludwiz?’
MilSF rubbish. You can get it here.
This is our first proper family holiday in Northern Ireland post-pandemic and post-Brexit. In the past, we had usually driven to the West Midlands via the Channel Tunnel on the first day of travel, and then through Wales to Holyhead to get the fast ferry to Dublin and then on up on the second day. But that was in part to pick up my mother-in-law, who is not coming this year; so we decided to try the brand new ferry that goes directly from Dunkirk to Rosslare, not touching England or Wales.
The cost for four of us, including a cabin, is about the same as the Eurotunnel and Irish Sea crossings combined, plus you get four square meals en route. It takes precisely 24 hours (or at least, that is the schedule). Of course, to that you add travel to Dunkirk at one end, and from Rosslare to Co Down at the other, 2.5 and 3 hours respectively on a good day; plus you have to check in 2-3 hours before departure, so total travel time ends up not dissimilar to the landbridge route (but total *driving* time considerably less).
The journey was not without snags. Having left home in very good time at 3.15, we had to turn around and start again when a quick passport count revealed that we were one short. Traffic in Belgium on the direct route from Brussels to the coast was so bad that Waze (my navigation app of choice) sent us to Dunkirk via Antwerp. Rather than arriving on the dot of 6pm for a 9pm sailing, we reached Dunkirk at ten to seven; though it was clear that we would not have been turned away even if we had missed the supposed 7pm deadline by a bit.
The ferry was Lithuanian. The crew communicated with each other in Lithuanian, all of the shipboard signs were in Lithuanian with most (but not all) translated into English, the safety notices were in Lithuanian, Swedish, English and French, and passenger announcements were in Lithuanian, English, Russian and German (not French, even though we departed from France). I had more exposure to Lithuanian on the trip than ever before in my life. Lithuania is the only EU member state that I have never been to.
Most of the travellers on our sailing were freight trucks. I counted only three other family cars besides ours, and a couple of camper vans. The truckers hung out together in the bar (which was open 24/7), no reserved space for them as there is on some ferries (but if almost all your passengers are truckers anyway, there’s no need). The TV in the bar showed films badly dubbed into Russian, switching to Sky News as we neared our destination. Several passengers had brought pets, mostly dogs though there were a couple of cats.
There was not a lot to do on board – and we were offline as maritime internet is very expensive. I finished and tarted several books. We got chatting to the owner of a Donegal-based haulage firm who was ending a work trip to Germany and the Netherlands. He said it was the worst boat he had ever been on, with no facilities apart from space to eat, drink and sleep. But we felt we had little cause for complaint; our cabin was small but functional and we knew what we had signed up for.
We were very unlucky with the weather. Storm Antonis blew right across our path on the Saturday and I personally was very queasy. Judging from the unpleasant evidence that the crew had to clear off the carpets, others had had it worse. I was just about OK for breakfast and lunch, but when dinner was first served at 5pm the storm seemed to me still at full blast and I just could not get out of bed. (The rest of the family are better sailors than me.) Very fortunately, soon after 6pm we got out of the storm and into a region of calm which lasted for the rest of the trip. I was suddenly back to 100%, just a few minutes after I had felt on the edge of the abyss. I was still in time for dinner and requested (and got) a double helping of lasagna.
The storm meant that we arrived in Rosslare at 9.30 pm rather than the originally scheduled 8pm, a 25½ hour sailing instead of 24. We go to County Down in just over three hours from the southeastern corner of County Wexford; I can well remember the days when that journey would have taken five or six. To my surprise, Waze directed us to turn off the N11 at Enniscorthy and head for the M9 across country via Bunclody and Ballon, neither of which seemed excessively busy on a Saturday night in August. Apparently the N11 has massive roadworks in County Wicklow.
Anyway, we got here just after 1 am on Sunday morning, a total journey time of just under 35 hours, of which less than 7 were spent driving. The landbridge route would generally have been the same length of time overall – leave home at 8am, arrive around 6pm the next day – but with far more time behind the wheel. And in fact, we were just unlucky with the weather. I am positively looking forward to the return trip.
Boosted by 24 hours on a boat with little else to do…
Current
Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett
Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays, by David Bratman
Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells
Last books finished
The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis et al
Akata Woman, by Nnedi Okorafor
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes
A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L’Engle
Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, ed. Vernon Bogdanor
The Outcast, by Louise Cooper
Falling to Earth, by Al Worden
The Shadow Man, by Sharon Bidwell
Next books
Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion, by Peter Harness
Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Life Span, by Digby Tantam
The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman
Which of this year’s books will be remembered in 50 or 100 years’ time? I won’t be around to keep count, but it’s a question that we can ask of the books of 50 and 100 years ago. So, I have crunched the numbers for the books of 1923 and 1973, as tracked by ownership on LibraryThing and the number of people who have rated them on Goodreads. Obviously there’s an English-language bias there, but I’m pleasantly surprised that a number of translated novels make both lists.
For 1923, The Prophet by Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran is way out in front. I’ve read it and the next two on the list and will report back on them in the next couple of days. I am familiar at least with most of the others, and have read another four or five, but they all look interesting. There are works of poetry and a play here; neither genre appears on the 1973 list. None of these appears in the Publisher’s Weekly lists of best-selling books in the USA for any year in the 1920s.
| Title | Author | GR ratings | LT readers | Genre | Language |
| The Prophet | Kahlil Gibran | 285,637 | 13,524 | poetry / philosophy | English |
| The Murder on the Links | Agatha Christie | 84,057 | 4,181 | fiction (detective) | English |
| Whose Body? | Dorothy L. Sayers | 53,897 | 4,732 | fiction (detective) | English |
| Emily of New Moon | L.M. Montgomery | 48,741 | 3,888 | fiction (children) | English |
| Zeno’s Conscience / La coscienza di Zeno | Italo Svevo | 24,462 | 3,425 | fiction | Italian |
| The Inimitable Jeeves | P.G. Wodehouse | 25,937 | 3,221 | fiction (humour) | English |
| Bambi | Felix Salten | 35,470 | 2,348 | fiction (children) | German |
| Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening | Robert Frost | 10,446 | 2,334 | poetry | English |
| Leave It to Psmith | P.G. Wodehouse | 10,835 | 2,118 | fiction (humour) | English |
| Saint Joan | George Bernard Shaw | 8,999 | 2,208 | stage | English |
| Cane | Jean Toomer | 10,201 | 1,806 | fiction (African American) | English |
| A Lost Lady | Willa Cather | 6,622 | 1,537 | fiction | English |
| The Fatal Eggs / Роковые яйца | Mikhail Bulgakov | 10,010 | 723 | fiction (science fiction / satire) | Russian |
| St Francis of Assisi | G.K. Chesterton | 4,284 | 1,583 | biography | English |
| The Devil in the Flesh / Le Diable au corps | Raymond Radiguet | 5,963 | 1,052 | fiction | French |
| Sonnets to Orpheus / Die Sonette an Orpheus | Rainer Maria Rilke | 3,409 | 1,021 | poetry | German |
| Antic Hay | Aldous Huxley | 2,213 | 1,266 | fiction (humour) | English |
| The Lurking Fear | H.P. Lovecraft | 2,201 | 972 | fiction (horror) | English |
| The Dark Frigate | Charles Boardman Hawes | 2,364 | 702 | fiction (children) | English |
| My Universities / Мои университеты | Maxim Gorky | 2,455 | 298 | autobiography | Russian |
I have read more than half of the 1973 list, and reread the second and third after crunching these numbers (reviews to come). There’s a distinct shift towards more popular literature, with more than a third of the list being fantasy or sf including The Princess Bride, top book by a long way, possibly due to having been later made into a hit fantasy film. Breakfast of Champions and The Hollow Hills both feature in the Publisher’s Weekly list for 1973, and both topped the New York Times Best Sellers list at different points that year.
| Title | Author | GR ratings | LT readers | Genre | Language |
| The Princess Bride | William Goldman | 876,632 | 24,080 | fiction (fantasy) | English |
| Breakfast of Champions | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | 252,249 | 15,739 | fiction (satire, possibly sf/fantasy) | English |
| A Wind in the Door | Madeleine L’Engle | 125,473 | 12,097 | fiction (children, sf) | English |
| Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon | 42,455 | 10,403 | fiction | English |
| Rendezvous with Rama | Arthur C. Clarke | 158,937 | 9,660 | fiction (sf) | English |
| The Dark Is Rising | Susan Cooper | 54,681 | 8,088 | fiction (children, fantasy) | English |
| Knowing God | J.I. Packer | 55,725 | 8,069 | religion | English |
| Sula | Toni Morrison | 88,287 | 7,260 | fiction (African American) | English |
| Time Enough for Love | Robert A. Heinlein | 34,891 | 5,403 | fiction (sf) | English |
| The Gulag Archipelago / Архипелаг ГУЛАГ | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 28,572 | 4,918 | history / reportage | Russian |
| How to Eat Fried Worms | Thomas Rockwell | 47,178 | 4,516 | fiction (children) | English |
| The Hollow Hills | Mary Stewart | 21,829 | 4,025 | fiction (fantasy) | English |
| Momo | Michael Ende | 74,409 | 3,789 | fiction (children, fantasy) | German |
| Crash | J.G. Ballard | 24,530 | 3,387 | fiction | English |
| Fear of Flying | Erica Jong | 21,026 | 3,364 | fiction | English |
| Rubyfruit Jungle | Rita Mae Brown | 40,058 | 3,111 | fiction | English |
| Summer of My German Soldier | Bette Greene | 16,884 | 2,893 | fiction (children) | English |
| Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 | Hunter S. Thompson | 22,055 | 2,858 | reportage | English |
| Child of God | Cormac McCarthy | 41,844 | 2,852 | fiction | English |
| Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities | Flora Rheta Schreiber | 88,919 | 2,799 | psychology | English |
So, a bit of compare and contrast:
I might keep up this analysis for the next few years, and see what titles it throws up.
I’m on a boat all day today, and setting this to post as I cruise sedately from France to Ireland, avoiding England and Wales entirely. I’ll write that up when I get a chance.
Earlier in the summer I watched the thirteen 25-minute episodes of the 1987 series Knights of God, an ITV children’s TV production about a near-future dystopian Britain (specifically, set in 2020), where a theocratic military regime has taken over and Wales has become the core of the limited resistance. Apparently the copyright rests with Disney, who have shown no interest in commercially releasing it, but at time of writing all 13 episodes can be found on both Youtube and Archive.org. For us genre TV fans, it’s especially notable for the resistance leaders being played by Gareth “Roj Blake” Thomas and Patrick “Second Doctor” Troughton.
The story was actually made in 1985, and by the time it was shown in 1987 two of the leading actors had died – Patrick Troughton and Nigel Stock, who is one of the leading bad guys, the titular Knights of God. The story revolves around young Gervase Edwards, a rebel who gets brainwashed by the Knights and instructed to kill the one person who can unite the country against them. It turns out (massive spoiler for a TV show from 36 years ago) that this person is in fact young Gervase himself, who is the rightful King. He overcomes his conditioning, the Knights are overthrown and the constitutional monarchy restored.
The two young actors in the lead roles are OK but somewhat overshadowed by the big names in the rest of the cast. Neither of them became a household name. George Winter, who plays Gervase, has switched careers and became an artist. Claire Parker, who plays his girlfriend Julia, is still an actor and wellness consultant. There is a decent dynamic between them. Her haircut is so 80s that you could probably identify the month it was filmed in 1985 with sufficient specialist knowledge. (Picture from the cover of the novelisation.)
But the pairing you really watch is the two lead bad guys, John Woodvine (memorable in Doctor Who as the Marshal of Atrios in The Armageddon Factor; he turned 94 last month) and Julian Fellowes (most famous now for writing Gosford Park and Downton Abbey, but also now a real-life Conservative member of the House of Lords) as Prior Mordrin and Brother Hugo. They move from being collaborators to becoming bitter enemies in a very credible story arc. (Nigel Stock is #3 in the hierarchy, Brother Simon, and enables them both at different times.)
Lots of other familiar faces from 1970s and 1980s television, especially Welsh actors, pop up from time to time. The most visible woman actor, apart from Claire Parker, is Shirley Stelfox who plays Gareth Thomas’s character’s wife (and Gervase’s supposed mother, until the truth comes out).
There are a lot of hidden father/child relationships. We start with the apparent one between Gervase and Roj Blake Gareth Thomas’s character, though that turns out to be fake. Two others become apparent in the course of the series, in one of which the actors concerned have only a nine year age different in real life. (Jocelyn Jee Esien, who played Clyde Langer’s mother in one of the Sarah Jane Adventures, is only eight years older than the youthful-looking Daniel Anthony.)
The whole thing was done on a relatively low budget – a few key sets and locations which we return to again and again, and a lot of money must have been blown on the two helicopters which feature frequently. But for what it is, I think it is very well done; I found the episodes flying by, and each cliff-hanger coming as a surprise. The directors were Andrew Morgan and Michael Kerrigan, both of whom also directed Doctor Who stories in the 1980s. If you have thirteen half-hour sized slots to fill in the coming days, you could make worse choices than watching this.
There’s also a novel by screenplay writer Richard Cooper (who also wrote Codename Icarus); the second paragraph of the third chapter is:
In the room, he saw the knight, who should have been standing to attention, slumped in a chair, head bowed in sleep. He slammed the door behind him and the man awoke, head jerking up, eyes slowly focusing and then, when he saw Mordrin, filling with fear. He got to his feet, rifle clattering to the floor. Mordrin, impassive, looked at it.
It’s great stuff, actually; only 204 pages for 13 episodes (and thus over 300 minutes of screentime) but packing in more interesting details – Ireland (as a whole) has become one of the states of the USA and is shipping in arms to the rebels; we get a lot more detail on the military situation and, crucially, on the Mordrin / Hugo relationship (rather less on the Gervase / Julia relationship, but that’s a case where less may be more). It is a perfectly adequate substitute for experiencing the original series.
I shouldn’t think this will ever be released commercially – the right moment to sell dystopian fiction set in the year 2020 may have passed, especially given what actually happened that year – but it was well worth tracking down.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“I became fascinated with the Daleks at an early age. I remember in the early 1980s, being quite disturbed by children’s television programmes such as Jigsaw and Chockablock — things that were supposed to be fun, completely freaked me out, while things that were designed to be terrifying — like the Daleks — enthralled me.[“]
I remember going to the Doctor Who exhibition in Blackpool in 1977, when I would have been ten; it was a subterranean chamber full of Doctor Who monsters, and I bought the new novelisation of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the very first Doctor Who book that I bought for myself. My memories of exactly what was on display are dim.
Not so for the contributors to Blackpool Remembered, a lovely full-colour commemoration of the exhibition which ran from 1974 to 1984. There’s a loving recreation of the exhibition space, which was updated each year to bring in more recent monsters – and these were genuine BBC props, with only a couple of Daleks specially made for Blackpool. There are extensive memories by fans who kept more careful notes and photographs than I did, including a couple who have gone on to become bigger names in the Whoniverse, such as Steve Cole and Matt Fitton. It’s a great example of how to reconstruct a purely physical and temporary display space after almost four decades.
There is a great interview with Julie Jones, the Doctor Who production office staffer who masterminded the whole thing; but disappointingly, we don’t get much from the female fan perspective. Lots of mums and sisters and a few girlfriends appear in the photographs; I don’t think we hear directly from any of them. I guess that reflects the resources available to the editor, but it’s an unfortunate gap. (Also everyone seems to be white.)
Still, it’s a lovely production which you can download for free from here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The old man wheezes and shifts on his pillows, bathed in soft exhaust. A chorus of machines hums and whirs around him, pumping fluid through the crude fabric of tubes weaving in and out of his skin. When he lowers a stained handkerchief from his bluish mouth to speak, a foul odor escapes. “Just throw him in the furnace and be done with it.”
Hugely unpleasant characters and depressing setting. Gave up after fifty pages. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story, not counting intro and a poem (“Miss Carstairs and the Merman”, by Delia Sherman):
In that house, Miss Carstairs sat by the uncurtained window of her study, peering through a long telescope. Her square hands steady upon the barrel, she watched the lightning dazzle on the water and the wind-blown sand and rain scour her garden. She saw a capsized dinghy scud past her beach in kinetoscopic bursts, and a gull beaten across the dunes. She saw a long, dark, seal-sleek figure cast upon the rocky beach, flounder for a moment in the retreating surf, and then lie still.
Lots of good stories in this collection, with a number of different takes on the mythology of mermaids and the closely related selkies. I think my favourite story was the rather gruesome “Mermaid of the Concrete Jungle”, by Caitlin R. Kiernan, closely followed by “Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home”, by Sarah Monette, but none of these were clunkers and I recommend the whole collection. You may be able to get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next on that dwindling pile is There Will Be War Volume X, edited by Jerry Pournelle.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
They’ve fought their oppressor for over a century, but things are different now. They started winning. Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, the Mau Mau movement in Kenya, and, of course, the Algerian war. Their fight was the longest, the bloodiest, but no one counts bodies on the winning side. They prevailed, and they inspired a whole fucking continent.
This was the book that threw me completely due to a scene set in Cambridge in 1844, in which the protagonist is looking out for Venus to appear over Memorial Court. She would have a long wait because Memorial Court was not built until 1926! She and John Couch Adams then spot Mars over King’s College Chapel. There was in fact no evening in 1844 when Mars was visible in the east and Venus in the west. Also John Couch Adams is referred to as an undergraduate, though he got his BA in 1843. You can get it here.
Incidentally when I went to Cambridge in April this year, I did see Mercury and Venus over Memorial Court.
Of course, you can’t see the buildings for the trees.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Checking back, I realised that a few months ago I skipped directly from September 2021 to November 2021 in this sequence, so here’s the post I should have made on 9 June!
It’s an especially silly omission because we had a really fun post-pandemic trip to The Hague for our wedding anniversary, starting with a rijsttafel and doing various cultural things. (While poor F was isolating with our household’s first COVID-19 diagnosis.)
As soon as we got back I had a London trip where I also visited Eltham Palace:
And the site of Parnell’s love affair with Catherine O’Shea:
I was still keeping up my ten-day plague posts.
At the end of the month my sister and her daughter visited, just in time for a significant birthday.
I read 31 books that month.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 38)
John Quincy Adams: American Visionary, by Fred Kaplan
Groetjes uit Vlaanderen, by Mohamed Ouaamari
The Ambassadors of Death, by L.M. Myles
Dark Water / Death in Heaven, by Philip Purser-Hallard
Free Speeches, by Denis Kitchen, Nadine Strossen, Dave Sim, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller
The Ryans of Inch and Their World: A Catholic Gentry Family from Dispossession to Integration, c.1650-1831, by Richard John Fitzpatrick (PhD thesis)
Those About to Die, by Daniel P. Mannix
Discipline or Corruption, by Konstantin Stanislavsky
Non-genre 2 (YTD 24)
The Wych Elm, by Tana French
Time Must Have a Stop, by Aldous Huxley
Scripts 1 (YTD 4)
Day of the Dead, by Neil Gaiman
SF 15 (YTD 109)
Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
“Fire Watch”, by Connie Willis
Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer
The Empire of Time, by David Wingrove – did not finish
Crashland, by Sean Williams – did not finish
City of Miracles, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh
The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson
Splinters and the Impolite President, by William Whyte
Axiom’s End, by Lindsay Ellis
Splinters and the Wolves of Winter, by William Whyte
Shadowboxer, by Tricia Sullivan
The Vanished Birds, by Simon Jimenez
The Unspoken Name, by A.K. Larkwood
Blake’s 7 Annual 1982, eds Grahame Robertson and Carole Ramsay![41wcwtI+eNL[1].jpg](https://i0.wp.com/fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2758535_300.jpg?resize=163%2C250&ssl=1)
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 18, 24 inc comics and non-fiction)
Prime Imperative, by Julianne Todd
The Xmas Files, ed. Shaun Russell
Mind of Stone, by Iain McLaughlin
The Crimson Horror, by Mark Gatiss
Doctor Who: The Ambassadors of Death, by Terrance Dicks
7,600 pages (YTD 60,600)
13/31 (YTD 99/231) by non-male writers (Myles, Strossen, Darl/Cooper/Harris/Harris, French, Willis, Kritzer, Tesh, Johnson, Ellis, Sullivan, Larkwood, Ramsay, Todd)
3/31 (YTD 37/231) by PoC (Ouaamari, Johnson, Jimenez)
Two particularly good books this month (and several that weren’t, but let’s focus on the positive).
Back to the normal sequence next week.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Melquiades claimed the mere thought such a thing might be possible was sacrilege: holiness could not reside in a flower or a drop of rain. Offerings to spirits were the devil’s work.
I thought this was really interesting, a reframing of H.G. Wells in the context of the historical Maya resistance to Mexican rule in the Yucatan. There was a twist three quarters of the way through that I should have seen coming, but didn’t. Hugo finalist. You can get it here.
These were the two winners of the James Tiptree Jr Award, now the Otherwise Award, in 2013 for works of 2012. The award is for works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore one’s understanding of gender.
Ancient, Ancient, uniquely for the Tiptree Award, is a collection of stories by a single author, Kiini Ibura Salaam, The second paragraph of the third story, “MalKai’s Last Seduction”, is:
The buzzing that had settled in Cori’s ears over the past couple of days was MalKai coming to get him. When the first “zzzzzz” licked his ear drums, Cori had swatted at the air around his newly-pierced ear lobes. A meddlesome mosquito—he imagined—hovering near. He made repeated attempts to shoo it away, but his arms soon grew tired. His shoulder ached from throwing his biceps into repeated attack arcs. His fist grew bored of finding no tender little bug crushed in its grasp. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders and rescinded the attack.
I hugely enjoyed this, a sexy and angry collection of short pieces, the longest and perhaps most effective being the last, “Pod Rendezvous”, which has a richly and economically depicted alien society. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kieran, is:
Dr. Ogilvy suspects that my fondness of dates may be an expression of arithmomania. And, in fairness to her, I should add that during my teens and early twenties, when my insanity included a great many symptoms attributable to obsessive-compulsive disorder, I had dozens upon dozens of elaborate counting rituals. I could not get through a day without keeping careful track of all my footsteps, or the number of times I chewed and swallowed. Often, it was necessary for me to dress and undress some precise number of times (the number was usually, but not always, thirty) before leaving the house. In order to take a shower, I would have to turn the water on and off seventeen times, step in and out of the tub or shower stall seventeen times, pick up the soap and put it down again seventeen times. And so forth. I did my best to keep these rituals a secret, and I was deeply, privately ashamed of them. I can’t say why, why I was ashamed, but I was afraid, and I lived in constant dread that Aunt Elaine or someone else would discover them. For that matter, if I had been asked at the time to explain why I found them necessary, I would’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an answer. I could only have said that I was convinced that unless I did these things, something truly horrible would happen.
It is a queer time-travel ghost story set in Rhode Island (which I plan to visit in September). There’s some vivid reflexive stuff with the protagonist intervening in and rewriting the narrative. Mental illness and gender identity dance through the pages; it’s an intense but rewarding experience. you can get it here.
Unusually, one novel was on the final ballot for the Clarke, BSFA and Tiptree Awards and failed to win any of them; this was 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson. There were five other novels and a short story on the Tiptree honor list, but I have not read any of them.
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett, which won the Clarke Award, was also on the BSFA ballot; Intrusion, by Ken MacLeod, was also on both ballots. The BSFA winner was Jack Glass by Adam Roberts, and the other BSFA finalist was Empty Space: A Haunting, by M. John Harrison. I voted for Dark Eden. I have not rea the other three on the Clarke shortlist: Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway, The Dog Stars by Peter Heller and Nod by Adrian Barnes. That year The Drowning Girl was also on the Nebula ballot, but the Nebula itself went to 2312, and the Hugo to John Scalzi’s Redshirts; I did not rank either very high.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
I first realized this at Dr. Rothman’s. Two years after my little brother died, but left us no body to confirm the fact and mourn, my mother told me I was going to the doctor’s. I prepared myself for the rituals of the pediatrician’s office: my knees tensed for the rubber hammer, that miracle of reflex; my nostrils anticipated an antiseptic tang, my tongue the compensatory lollipop. But as soon as we arrived—”a new doctor,” my father muttered as he parked—and we got out of the car, it was clear to me that this was no clinic.
The core of the story is parallel timelines where one of the leading characters did or didn’t die, which is often taken as sf, and some reflection on identity that wanders close to Philip K. Dick territory. This turns into commentary on grief, and on the problems of the contemporary US. Not sure that it totally hung together at the end. You can get it here.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 48)
Amy Dillwyn, by David Painting
After the War: How to Keep Europe Safe, by Paul Taylor
The Popes and Sixty Years of European Integration
How to End Russia’s War on Ukraine, by Timothy Ash et al
Blackpool Remembered, by John Collier
Drawing Boundaries, eds John C. Courtney, Peter MacKinnon and David E. Smith (did not finish)
The Deadly Assassin, by Andrew Orton
The Awakening, by David Evans-Powell
One Bible, Many Voices: Different Approaches to Biblical Studies, by S.E. Gillingham
Non-genre 7 (YTD 14)
The Cider House Rules, by John Irving
A Burglary, or, Unconscious Influence, by Amy Dillwyn
Jill, by Amy Dillwyn
Jill and Jack, by Amy Dillwyn
Nant Olchfa, by Amy Dillwyn
The Murder on the Links, by Agatha Christie
Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers
Poetry 1 (YTD 4)
The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran
SF 12 (YTD 122)
The Memory Librarian, ed. Janelle Monáe
Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy
In the Serpent’s Wake, by Rachel Hartman
Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam
Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, ed. Paula Guran
The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kiernan
Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree
Tofu Brains: Life on Zeeta 21, by Lars Koch
There Will Be War Volume X, ed. Jerry Pournelle (did not finish)
Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut
Knights of God, by Richard Cooper
The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 21)
Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who – The Awakening, by Eric Pringle
Comics 4 (YTD 14)
Arena of Fear, by Nick Abadzis et al
Saga, Vol. 10, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris
Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamara Bonvillain
8,200 pages (YTD 54,900)
17/35 (YTD 94/225) by non-male writers (Gillingham, Dillwyn x 4, Christie, Sayers, Monáe, Murphy, Hartman, Salaam, Guran, Kiernan, Novik, illustrators of Arena of Fear, Staples, Bonvillain)
2/35 (YTD 30/225) by a non-white writer (Gibran, Salaam)
5 rereads (Whose Body?, Breakfast of Champions, Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, Doctor Who – The Awakening, Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK)
360 books currently tagged unread – up 41 from last month, as I reintegrated the Clarke submissions that I want to get back to, and made some other updates.
Reading now
Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, ed. Vernon Bogdanor
The Outcast, by Louise Cooper
Falling to Earth, by Al Worden
Coming soon (perhaps)
Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis et al.
Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion, by Peter Harness
The Shadowman, by Sharon Bidwell
Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who: Stones of Blood, by David Fisher
The Stones of Blood, by Katrin Thier
Arachnids in the UK, by Sam Maleski
Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Life Span, by Digby Tantam
Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett
Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells
The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
“Beggars in Spain”, by Nancy Kress
The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd
The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad, by V. S. Naipaul
DALEKS, ed. Marcus Hearn
Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway
Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor
What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford
Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort
Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout
The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman: Including the Brother, by Flann O’Brien
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“The kids you babysat during the memorial tested positive,” my mother said through an intercom next to my bed. “Their parents swore they’d been tested. We thought they were safe. I’m so sorry, Jun.”
It is a book for our time, looking at worldwide plague and its consequences, in the form of a closely linked sequence of short stories. I felt that most of the stories were very good, but a couple missed the mark, including, crucially and catastrophically, the ending. You can get it here.
Current
The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, ed. Vernon Bogdanor
The Outcast, by Louise Cooper
Falling to Earth, by Al Worden
Last books finished
The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran
Tofu Brains: Life on Zeeta 21, by Lars Koch
There Will Be War Volume X, ed. Jerry Pournelle (did not finish)
Doctor Who – The Awakening, by Eric Pringle
Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamara Bonvillain
The Awakening, by David Evans-Powell
One Bible, Many Voices: Different Approaches to Biblical Studies, by S.E. Gillingham
Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut
Knights of God, by Richard Cooper
Next books
Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis et al
Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Life Span,by Digby Tantam
Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells
I picked up Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions again after many years, and was struck by the dedication:
IN MEMORY OF PHOEBE HURTY,
who comforted me in Indianapolis—during the Great Depression.
When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. —JOB
The introduction to the book expands on this a bit:
The person to whom this book is dedicated, Phoebe Hurty, is no longer among the living, as they say. She was an Indianapolis widow when I met her late in the Great Depression. I was sixteen or so. She was about forty.
She was rich, but she had gone to work every weekday of her adult life, so she went on doing that. She wrote a sane and funny advice-to-the-lovelorn column for the Indianapolis Times, a good paper which is now defunct.
Defunct.
She wrote ads for the William H. Block Company, a department store which still flourishes in a building my father designed. She wrote this ad for an end-of-the-summer sale on straw hats: “For prices like this, you can run them through your horse and put them on your roses.”
Phoebe Hurty hired me to write copy for ads about teenage clothes. I had to wear the clothes I praised. That was part of the job. And I became friends with her two sons, who were my age. I was over at their house all the time.
She would talk bawdily to me and her sons, and to our girlfriends when we brought them around. She was funny. She was liberating. She taught us to be impolite in conversation not only about sexual matters, but about American history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about school, about everything.
I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it. I keep trying to imitate the impoliteness which was so graceful in Phoebe Hurty. I think now that grace was easier for her than it is for me because of the mood of the Great Depression. She believed what so many Americans believed then: that the nation would be happy and just and rational when prosperity came.
I never hear that word anymore: Prosperity. It used to be a synonym for Paradise. And Phoebe Hurty was able to believe that the impoliteness she recommended would give shape to an American paradise.
Now her sort of impoliteness is fashionable. But nobody believes anymore in a new American paradise. I sure miss Phoebe Hurty.
Well, I thought, what can I find out about Phoebe Hurty, using the resources of Ancestry.com?
At first the trail was somewhat confusing. The 1940 city directory for Indianapolis has the following entries under Hurty:
Two years later, the 1942 directory has this:
So it looks like Phoebe was the wife of Gilbert, who died some time between 1940 and 1942, and that he was president of the Hurty-Peck favouring extracts company; and her mother-in-law Ethel also died between 1940 and 1942. Meanwhile there is a Gladys S. Hurty who works for the William H. Block Company as a copywriter, but seems to live at the same address as Gilbert and Phoebe.
This doesn’t quite match Vonnegut’s account. He has Phoebe, not Gladys, as the copywriter at Block’s. (Also he implies that she was already a widow when they first met when he was about sixteen; but he was born in 1922, and Gilbert was definitely still alive in 1938.) A bit more digging and I found documentary evidence for the following timeline:
There is only one reference to a Phoebe Hurty in official records anywhere that I could find: it is cited as the name of Robert Craig Jr’s mother, on his 2009 death certificate.
So, it begins to look as if Gladys and Phoebe Hurty were the same person, but were listed separately in the Indianapolis city directory in the different roles of Block copywriter and Gilbert’s wife. I got confirmation of this from her obituary in the Indianapolis News of 29 May 1956:
Gladys Hurty, former news writer, is dead
Gladys (Phoebe) Sutton Hurty, 61 [actually 64], former writer, had always been keenly interested in literature. She was attending a class on great books at Butler University last night when she suffered a stroke. She died on arrival at Methodist Hospital. Her home was in Golden Hill.
Born in Texas, Mrs. Hurty had lived in Indianapolis more than 50 years. She was the widow of Gilbert J. Hurty, former owner of Hurty Peck dealers in extracts.
For a number of years Mrs. Hurty wrote articles for The [Indianapolis] News’ editorial page under the name of Phoebe Craig. Also for a time she wrote a column in the [Indianapolis] Times under the pseudonym of Jane Jordan. For 20 years Mrs. Hurty had been an advertising executive at Block’s.
Her work there included writing copy for men’s clothing ads. Mrs. Hurty was planning to retire at Block’s June 30 and take a European tour. She was a member of the Woodstock Club, Great Books Club and the Contemporary Club.
Services will be at 3 p.m. Thursday in Flanner Buchanan Fall Creek Mortuary, with burial in Crown Hill Cemetery. Survivors are two sons by a former marriage, Robert L. Craig, Indianapolis, and David F. Craig, New Orleans; a brother, John A. Sutton, Indianapolis, and six grandchildren. Funeral: Home, with burial in Crown Hill.
It’s sad that she died so suddenly, just a month before she would have retired.
Dan Wakefield, who knew Kurt Vonnegut from their childhoods in Indianapolis (but is ten years younger), did a little more digging for his biography, Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer, told in the second person, present tense.
One of the mothers who reads the Echo [a high school newspaper] is Phoebe Hurty, an advertising copywriter for the William H. Block Company, one of the big downtown department stores. She likes what you write and sees that you write often; she hires you to write advertising copy for the Echo about the clothes that Block’s Department Store sells to teenagers. The deal is that you wear the clothes that you write about to school, and you pose as a model in ads that the store makes for its teenage clothes.
Phoebe Hurty becomes your mentor. Her legal name is Gladys Sutton Craig Hurty, but she doesn’t see herself as a Gladys, so she picked out a name she thinks suits her better: Phoebe. She uses another name for the advice column she writes for the Indianapolis Times: Jane Jordan. Her advice is to the point and practical.
A girl writes to tell “Jane Jordan” that she likes a boy who was respectful and nice, but on her last date with him, he’d been drinking and said if she really cared about him, she’d “surrender.” Here is “Jane Jordan’s” advice: “I think I would ignore the incident. If he behaves properly when he is sober, enjoy his company, and avoid him when he drinks.”
In an interview in the Indianapolis Times, Phoebe tells about her philosophy for raising her two sons to become independent.
“When they were very little, the garage was their playhouse,” she says, and one cold day they started a fire to keep warm. Phoebe came home from work to find the street clogged with fire trucks. The fire the boys had made to keep warm had nearly burned down the garage. Phoebe says her son Bobby “gave me one agonized look and said, ‘Mother, I will eat turnips.’ I saw that he wanted to be punished to relieve his sense of guilt and that in his opinion, nothing could be worse than turnips. So we had turnips for dinner and nothing more was said. We’ve never had a fire since.”
You get to be friends with Phoebe and her sons Robert, who is a year older than you, and David, who is a year younger, and you hang out at their house all the time.
Phoebe Hurty talks bawdily to you and her sons and to your girlfriends when you bring them around. She’s funny. She’s liberating. She teaches you and her sons to be impolite in conversation, not only about sexual matters, but also about American history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about everything.
So I’m pretty satisfied that I’ve filled out Vonnegut’s brief reference to Phoebe Hurty, born Gladys Sutton, for a few years Mrs Craig, and Jane Jordan in her advice columns. There’s one more log to add to the fire, though. The Indianapolis State Library has digitised several dozen editions of Block’s Booster, the in-house magazine for the employees of William H. Block and Company, and Phoebe Hurty is mentioned several times (as Phoebe, not Gladys). Notably, in the May 1948 issue, there is a two-page photo spread on the store’s advertising department, and one of the pictures features an indistinct Phoebe. (I’ve shifted the caption from its original position in the article, for clarity.)
That’s her on the right, the month before her 57th birthday. It’s a shame that the photographer didn’t catch her as well as her colleagues, but I’m grateful for what we have; and anyway Vonnegut’s pen-portrait is much more descriptive than any image could be.
CODA won the 2021 Best Picture Oscar, and two others: Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Troy Kotsur as Ruby’s father), in fact a clean sweep as those were the only three categories in which it was nominated. Dune won six Oscars that year, and the Hugo, and the Ray Bradbury Award. Apart from CODA and Dune I have seen two of the there nominees for Best Picture, Belfast and Don’t Look Up; I have not seen Drive My Car, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog or the remake of West Side Story.
Apart from this, I have also seen the other four Hugo finalists, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (which I voted for myself), Encanto, Space Sweepers and The Green Knight. I think the only other film I had seen was The Dig, about Sutton Hoo. Sticking my neck out, I liked CODA better than any of them. IMDB users rank it 23rd of 2021’s films on one list and 35th on the other, which is rather low. Dune and Spiderman: No Way Home top the two lists.
Here’s a trailer:
There’s one actor who has been in Doctor Who, and one who was in a previous Oscar winner. The Doctor Who crossover is rather spectacular: it’s Emilia Jones, who plays CODA’s protagonist Ruby, and was also the child singer Merry in the 2013 Eleventh Doctor story The Rings of Akhaten.
The Oscar crossover actor is the rather less prominent Armen Garo, seen here on the left in CODA as Gio Salgado, the guy who runs the fish auction:
Fifteen years before, he was the unnamed First Providence Gangster in The Departed, on the right here with Leonardo DiCaprio on the left:
The film is about Ruby, the child of deaf adults (hence the title, CODA), who can hear, unlike her parents and older brother, who communicate with her through American Sign Language. They run a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, which as it happened I visited with my family in 2005. Times are hard for the family and the fishing industry, and a new music teacher discovers that Ruby has an impressive talent for singing. She navigates her parents’ utter incomprehension, her feelings for the cute boy in the choir, her best friend’s romance with her brother and her own self-esteem in order to get to an audition for a top music school in Boston.
It’s beautifully filmed with the northeast Massachusetts sea, town, school and countryside all vividly depicted. (There are some great scenes with Ruby and the Cute Boy swimming together at an isolated lake.) The acting is absolutely top notch. I loved Marlee Matlin as pollster Joey Lucas in The West Wing (she was in at least one episode in every season, from 2000 to 2006) and I loved her here as Ruby’s mother. As mentioned previously, Troy Kotsur got an Oscar for playing her father.
And I have to be honest, the basic story of disability as a part of life that people live with and get on with, but also the effects that it has on a family, hit home very hard for me. The climax where Ruby sings Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” (in the video above) had me in tears. The last Oscar-winner that did that to me, I think, was The Sound of Music, though Terms of Endearment and The King’s Speech came close. That doesn’t necessarily make it a great film objectively, but it does shoot it right to the top of my personal table, and I’m ranking it at 7th place out of 94, just below Schindler’s List and ahead of Rebecca,
This is the first Oscar winner specifically made as a remake of an existing film – though Marty was based on a previously broadcast teleplay, and My Fair Lady stands on the shoulders of the 1938 Pygmalion, tracking it shot for shot in some scenes. CODA is based on the 2014 Franco-Belgian film La Famille Bélier, which I also sat down and watched. Here’s a trailer.
It’s almost exactly the same story as CODA, with some changes which don’t affect the thrust of the plot. The Bélier family have a farm rather than a fishing boat. The deaf brother is younger rather than older than the protagonist. The music college is in Paris, not Boston. The dad decides to run for mayor rather than to challenge the vested interests of fishing. (I remember reading somewhere, a couple of decades ago, that out of every sixty adult French men, one on average then held a locally elected municipal office of some kind. That’s probably shifted a bit with population growth and better gender equality, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still in that ball park.)
We still have the protagonist forced to take on an adult role for her family’s business; we still have the cute boy singer in the choir, and the best friend’s romance with the deaf brother; we still have the hilarious scene in the doctor’s office, and the parents having loud sex while the protagonist’s friend is in the house; we still have the eccentric music teacher who spots the young girl’s talent; we still have the dramatic fade-out of the sound-track during the school concert so that we can appreciate the experience of the deaf parents; we still have the dramatic dénouement of the audition. It’s not a shot-for-shot remake, but it’s very much the same story, told somewhat differently.
La Famille Bélier is funnier than CODA, and it’s also sexier (the songs are much more explicit and there’s a totally hilarious scene involving a condom). The music is also, frankly, better. Here, the music teacher is obsessed with the work of singer-songwriter Michel Sardou, and makes the choir and the protagonist sing nothing else. This gives the soundtrack a musical unity that the American remake lacks, and makes the whole thing much more earwormy. In particular, Paula’s final song at her audition, Sardou’s “Je vole”, made me cry even more than Ruby’s “Both Sides Now” in the American version. It’s a song about suicide, but the film turns it into a hymn to emancipation. Stunning stuff from 17-year-old Louanne, whose real life was not without complications; her father had died the previous year, and her mother died while the film was being made.
| Mes chers parents, je pars Je vous aime mais je pars Vous n’aurez plus d’enfant Ce soir Je ne m’enfuis pas je vole Comprenez bien, je vole Sans fumée, sans alcool Je vole, je vole | My dear parents, I’m leaving I love you but I’m leaving You won’t have any children any more This evening I am not running away, I’m flying Understand, I’m flying No tobacco, no alcohol I’m flying, I’m flying |
| Elle m’observait hier Soucieuse, troublée, ma mère Comme si elle le sentait En fait elle se doutait, entendait J’ai dit que j’étais bien Tout à fait l’air serein Elle a fait comme de rien Et mon père démuni a souri Ne pas se retourner S’éloigner un peu plus Il y a gare une autre gare Et enfin l’Atlantique | My mother was watching me yesterday Anxious, troubled As if she felt it In fact she suspected, heard me say That I was fine Looking quite serene She acted like nothing And my poor father smiled Don’t look back move away a bit more There is another station And finally the Atlantic |
| Mes chers parents, je pars Je vous aime mais je pars Vous n’aurez plus d’enfant Ce soir Je ne m’enfuis pas je vole Comprenez bien, je vole Sans fumée, sans alcool Je vole, je vole | My dear parents, I’m leaving I love you but I’m leaving You won’t have any children any more This evening I am not running away, I’m flying Understand, I’m flying No tobacco, no alcohol I’m flying, I’m flying |
| J’me demande sur ma route Si mes parents se doutent Que mes larmes ont coulé Mes promesses et l’envie d’avancer Seulement croire en ma vie Tout ce qui m’est promis Pourquoi, où et comment Dans ce train qui s’éloigne Chaque instant | I wonder on my way If my parents suspect That my tears have flowed My promises and the desire to move forward Just believe in my life All that’s promised to me Why, where and how In this train that is moving away Every moment |
| C’est bizarre cette cage Qui me bloque la poitrine Je ne peux plus respirer Ça m’empêche de chanter | It’s very weird, this cage Blocking my chest Stopping my breath Keeping me from singing |
| Mes chers parents, je pars Je vous aime mais je pars Vous n’aurez plus d’enfant Ce soir Je ne m’enfuis pas je vole Comprenez bien, je vole Sans fumée, sans alcool Je vole, je vole | My dear parents, I’m leaving I love you but I’m leaving You won’t have any children any more This evening I am not running away, I’m flying Understand, I’m flying No tobacco, no alcohol I’m flying, I’m flying |
| La la la la la la La la la la la la La la la la la la Je vole, je vole | La la la la la la La la la la la la La la la la la la I’m flying, I’m flying |
I loved La Famille Bélier, but CODA does score over it in a couple of important respects. The more important issue is that the supporting actors in CODA are genuinely deaf, whereas the French parents are played by hearing actors (the brother is genuinely deaf in both films). This is just really important for honest representation. We’ve come a long way from the second Oscar-winner, The Broadway Melody, where there was a character with a comic disability. (It’s currently at the very bottom of my league table of Oscar winners.) But we still need to give people their own voices.
The other point is that CODA is more politically on point. La Famille Bélier has a patronising mayor ultimately getting his just deserts at the hands of the voters, with Paula’s father as the agent of his downfall. CODA has the grim reality of late-stage capitalism dragging down the entire town and its industry, and the efforts of Ruby’s family to reverse the tide while also overcoming their own challenges. It’s played for real, rather than for laughs, and I think helps give it the edge as the better of the two films.
Only one Oscar-winner left: Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is also up for the Hugo this year.
Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture
1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)
Amy Dillwyn’s last novel for adults, Nant Olchfa, was published in The Red Dragon: The National Magazine of Wales in 1886 and 1887. I covered 1887 in my previous post; 1886 also saw the publication of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy and The Bostonians by Henry James. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
There was a story that one day when Reginald was a lad at school he, for the first time, heard the saying, chacun pour soi. Not catching it quite correctly, he was presently heard repeating thoughtfully to himself: “chacun pour moi. That’s a ripping good motto to take! The worst of it is that perhaps some of the other fellows won’t see it. They are so beastly selfish.”
This is the shortest of Dillwyn’s novels, I think, and it’s a straightforward though rather dark family melodrama. Reginald will inherit the Nant Olchfa estate if his cousins David and Gladys die, or if he marries Gladys who has just got engaged to someone else. At David’s 21st birthday party, Reginald kills him and makes it look like an accident, and then sows sufficient discord between Gladys (another of Dillwyn’s teenage girls) and her fiancée to get them to break up. Reginald then pursues a path of carnage to try and get his way, and eventually meets his just doom horribly while trying to escape through a steel foundry. It’s not very deep but it is a rollicking good read, with lots of circumstantial detail of the Welsh countryside.
Nant Olchfa has never been reprinted since it appeared in nine successive issues of the Red Dragon magazine. However I have downloaded all of the component parts and stuck them together, and you can access the 151-page file here. It’s 18 MB I’m afraid. Some day I may run the whole thing through OCR and see if I can get it into a more convenient form.
I have not been able to get hold of Maggie Steele’s Diary, Amy Dillwyn’s last novel, published in 1892, though I have found a detailed review in The Spectator. (Since you asked, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle was also published in 1892.) It sounds like it was another upper-class family melodrama, with the interesting twist that Dillwyn kills off her protagonist in the end. (Though this is often the case with novels which are told in diary form.) I see that copyright libraries all have it, but I’m nowehere near any of them.
Amy Dillwyn’s novel-writing career lasted only from 1880 to 1892, though she lived for another four decades. In 1892, her father died while campaigning for his tenth term as MP for Swansea, and the house where she had lived all her life passed to cousins; all she got was the foundry for the zinc-lead alloy spelter that he father had founded. It turned out that the spelter works was deeply in debt, and Dillwyn devoted herself to turning it around and then running it as a profitable concern, eventually selling it to Metallgesellschaft AG. This must have absorbed all of her energy. She never had a full-time romantic partner, though her passionate friendships seem to have continued; as the years went on she got active in politics and civic life, and died six months after her ninetieth birthday. A fascinating figure, who we can still get to know through her writing.
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un):
All three siblings attended this luncheon, and David’s favorite moment was not the expressions on the children’s faces when they were greeted with the sight of their feast but, rather, the one they assumed when they stepped into the bank’s lobby. He understood their awe, for he never failed to experience it as well: the vast floor of silvery marble, polished to a shining finish; the Ionic columns, hewn from the same stone; the grand rotunda ceiling, inlaid with a gleaming mosaic pattern; the three murals that occupied the length of three whole walls, painted so high that one was all but forced into a supplicative posture to properly see them the first depicting his great-great-great-grandfather, Ezra, the war hero, distinguishing himself in the battle for independence from Britain; the second, his great-great-grandfather, Edmund, marching northward with some of his fellow Utopians from Virginia to New York to found what would become known as the Free States; the third, his great-grandfather, Hiram, whom he had never known, founding Bingham Brothers and being elected mayor of New York. In the background of all the panels, rendered in browns and grays, were moments from his family’s and country’s history alike: the Siege of Yorktown, where Ezra had fought, his wife and young sons at home in Charlottesville; Edmund marrying his husband, Mark, and the first wars with the Colonies, which the Free States would win, but at great human and financial cost; Hiram and his two brothers, David and John, as young men, unaware that of the three of them, only Hiram, the youngest, would live into his forties, and that only he would produce an heir—his son, Nathaniel, David’s grandfather. At the bottom of each panel was a mounted marble plaque carved with a single word—Civility; Humility; Humanity—which, along with the phrase on the bank’s crest, was the Bingham family’s motto. The fourth panel, the one over the grand front doors, which opened onto Wall Street, was empty, a smooth blank expanse, and it was here that David’s grandfather’s accomplishments would one day be recorded: how he had grown Bingham Brothers into the wealthiest financial institution in not only the Free States but also America; how, until he had helped America fund its fight in the War of Rebellion and secured his country’s autonomy, he had successfully protected the Free States’ existence against every attempt to dismantle it and dissolve the rights of its citizenry; how he paid for the resettlement of free Negroes who had entered the Free States, helping them establish new lives for themselves in the North or the West, as well as escapees from the Colonies. True, Bingham Brothers was no longer the only or, some might argue, the most powerful institution in the Free States, especially with the recent flourishing of the arriviste Jewish banks that had begun to establish themselves in the city, but it was, all would agree, still the most influential, the most prestigious, the most renowned. Unlike the newcomers, David’s grandfather liked to say, Bingham did not confuse ambition for greed, or cleverness for wiliness—its responsibility was as much to the States themselves as to the people it served. “The Great Mister Bingham)” the journals called Nathaniel, occasionally mockingly, as when he attempted to initiate one of his more ambitious projects—such as his proposal, a decade ago, to advance universal suffrage throughout America as well—but mostly sincerely, for David’s grandfather was, indisputably, a great man, someone whose deeds and visage deserved to be painted on plaster, the artist swinging perilously on a rope-and-wood seat high above the stone floor, trying not to look down as he stroked his brush, glossy with paint, over the surface.
Three sections, set in an alternative 1893 and 1993 and a future 2093 based on the previous two. Passionate on sexuality and the history of Hawaii. Last part was less convincing for me. You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
We’re up to only a year ago now, a month which started for me in Sofia, Bulgaria:
At work we celebrated the resignation of Boris Johnson with a kayak trip (well, actually the trip was already planned):
I found myself in Paris on the hottest day of the year, and one of 1000 people in the Gare du Nord at 40 degree temperatures.
We finished the month with a lovely trip to the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.
And voting finished in the Hugo awards.
I read only 20 books that month:
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 62)
The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt
A Short History of Kosovo, by Noel Malcolm
Stability Operations in Kosovo 1999-2000: A Case Study, by Jason Fritz
The Smell of War, by Roland Bartetzko
Presidential Election, by John Danforth et al
Make Your Brain Work, by Amy Brann
Heaven Sent, by Kara Dennison
Hell Bent, by Alyssa Franke
SF 10 (YTD 60)
Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia (did not finish)
Victories Greater than Death, by Charlie Jane Anders
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, by Catherynne M. Valente
The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik
Moon Zero Two, by John Burke
Redemptor, by Jordan Ifueko
A Snake Falls to Earth, by Darcie Little Badger
Winter’s Orbit, by Everina Maxwell
Soulstar, by C.L. Polk (did not finish)
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 18)
The Unofficial Master Annual, ed. Mark Worgan
The New Unusual, by Adrian Sherlock and Andy Frankham-Allen
It was great to revisit Midnight’s Children, which you can get here, and Noel Malcolm’s Kosovo, which you can get here. Also good to encounter the two Black Archives on Heaven Sent and Hell Bent, which you can get here and here. But I bounced off the leaden prose of Guy Erma and the Sons of Empire; you can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
No bad, ta. Kenny got terrible sunburn and drank too much Sangria, the daffy. Flight delayed for two hours on the way back, the usual shite. How did you get on with my stand-in what) I was away then? My stunt double? Young Becky, was it?
Failed to grab me and I put it down after 50 pages. You can get it here.
Two more of my distant cousin Amy Dillwyn’s novels today, a natural pairing.
Jill is in my view the best of Amy Dillwyn’s seven novels (or at least of the six that I have read). It was published in 1884, the same year as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
We were making a tour through Holland and Friesland, and, when at Amsterdam, happened to make acquaintance with a Mrs. Grove, a widow, accompanied by two daughters, who were respectively two and three years older than me. I did not take to her at all, and thought she seemed a flattering, lying, pushing, cringing, vulgar individual; but having carelessly thought that much of her, I dismissed her from my mind as a person with whom I had nothing to do, and whose character was quite immaterial to me – little thinking what a bête noire she was to prove to me afterwards!
Gilbertina Trecastle, known as Jill, flees her abusive stepmother and stepsisters and disguises herself as a lady’s maid in order to get close to the woman she loves. She has numerous adventures, including burning the whiskers off an amorous valet, a hilarious but unsuccessful stint as a dog-walker, and getting locked up in a Corsican charnel-house with the object of her affections. She is cheerfully amoral and doesn’t let herself get ground down by adverse circumstances. It would make a great TV mini-series – the story is pretty episodic, and well-told. I found the (electronic) pages turning really quickly. I hope someone recommends it to Russell T. Davies.
There was one plot point that I found legally questionable: at the end, Jill is financially redeemed because her father forgot to change his will when marrying her stepmother. I know that under current British law, a will is invalidated upon a later marriage, and I’d be a bit surprised if that wasn’t already the case in 1884.
This is the third and last of Dillwyn’s novels republished by Honno Welsh Women’s Classics, and you can get it here. The introduction is by Kirsti Bohata, who is the current queen of Dillwyn studies.
Jill and Jack, the sequel, came out in 1887, the same year as A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy, and Allan Quatermain and She by H. Rider Haggard. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
For a right comprehension of Lady Wroughton’s attitude it must be explained that she was quite incapable of having set her heart as she had done on the match if she had not really entertained a sufficiently good opinion of the proposed bride to justify this conduct; and that she was not one of those heartless , unscrupulous mothers who care only for worldly advantages , and could be so destitute of right feeling and true regard for a son’s happiness as to have desired him to marry any one whom she thought seriously objectionable. On the contrary, such a marriage would have been abhorrent to her; and she did really and honestly believe Miss Trecastle to be a person possessing merits enough to render her likable and estimable, and worthy the high honour of becoming the wife of Sir John.
Here Jill and her friend, Sir John Wroughton (an eligible young baronet), get together to rescue a friend who is being victimised by her guardians in house nearby both of theirs. There are frightful threats, intricate knowledge of local train timetables, and a daring rescue mission with one of the villains plunging to an awful doom. It’s non-stop melodrama and very entertaining if not quite up to the level of Jill on her own. Meanwhile Sir John’s mother, who starts by thinking of Jill as excellent daughter-in-law material, finds out what she got up to in the previous book and changes her mind; but it’s okay, as Sir John’s own views change in the opposite direction, and there is a happy ending all round. It would make a decent single episode of the Russell T. Davies mini-series, or maybe a two-parter.
Jill and Jack isn’t in print, but you can get the two volumes from Google Books, here and here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“What are you doing?” she asked, bleary-eyed.
Good action technothriller stuff with genetic engineering and The End Of Humanity perpetrated by the protagonist’s immediate family. You can get it here.
Chloe Arguelle was Amy Dillwyn’s second novel, published in 1881 – the same year as The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
To turn against all humbugs would be out of the question; for in that case she would have to begin at Alice, who was false and superficial, quite as a matter of course, and evidently never had a qualm as to the scores of untruths which she uttered or otherwise expressed daily. Yet though Chloe saw that clearly enough, she knew also that Alice was good and kind, and like a mother to her; and Chloe’s affections were closely entwined round this only near relation that she possessed, and she could not believe it possible for her to do any great wrong. Certainly matters seemed very confusing when one came to think about them seriously, and it was very hard to settle whether to go in for honesty or for conventionalism – in other words — unblushing lying !
Like a lot of Dillwyn’s heroines, Chloe Arguelle is only seventeen but already making the big decisions of womanhood, ie who to marry. She moves in a society of adults whose behaviour is generalised as “humbug” by the omniscient narrator. I found one of them particularly interesting, Lady Jane Dorville, whose behaviour is not all that different from what is reported of the author herself in later life:
Lady Jane has blunt, straightforward, masculine manners… Her assumed manliness is merely put on, and very far from being her real self. She had from childhood greatly desired to excel in some way or other, without caring much what the way might be; but she knew herself to be neither beautiful, accomplished, nor clever enough to have a chance of distinction against other competitors in either of those lines, and was therefore puzzled as to how she could gratify her ambition, until it at last occurred to her that she might go in for being more independent and masculine than any other woman, and never allow herself to be outdone in that direction.
Accordingly she took to wear her hair short, to smoke, hunt, shoot, swear, bet, and generally comport herself in as manly a manner as it is possible for a lady to do.. She has no intention of giving up the role which she has thus far found successful, and wherein she has yet met no one to outstrip her; but it is not at all really congenial to her, and to keep it up often costs her a good deal.
It’s a good character description, which doesn’t quite land right. Lady Jane actually secretly hates acting masculine, just as a number of the other characters are acting against their own real inclinations – there’s also an Irish aristocrat who dumps his impoverished girlfriend for a rich widow, which has eerie resonances in the author’s own family.
The most vicious caricature is Chloe’s brother-in-law, Sir Cadwallader Gough, a particularly stupid Liberal MP. We must bear in mind that the author’s father had been the Liberal MP for Swansea since 1855 (and died suddenly in the run-up to defending his seat in the 1892 election). I really hope that he was in on the joke.
“A little more a — a — experience will convince you, Chloe — I may say a — a — conclusively convince you — how impossible it is for every person to attempt individuality. Look for instance at myself — one of the members of the supreme Parliament, one of those a — a — chosen men to whom the whole country looks for guidance, a — a — legislation, and wisdom ; do even I venture to adopt the a — a — pernicious course that you advocate. Emphatically not! Notwithstanding that I have been called to belong to that most a — a — important and influential body, the House of Commons, and notwithstanding the heavy weight a — a — of responsibility inseparable from that position which weighs upon me, yet my a — a — distinguished position has not blinded me to the great truth that without a — a — union there can be no strength ; and consequently, whatever question may arise, I invariably sink my own individual fancies and opinions in regard to it, and a — a — vote with the party to which I belong. And if this is the course which a man of my well-ripened, practised, and a — a — matured judgment sees the necessity
of pursuing, then surely there can be no hardship in a — a — deeming it the only safe one for women, and a — a — other men of lesser calibre…”
Sir Cadwallader is humiliated by the local poachers, though not as drastically as the squire in The Rebecca Rioter, and we readers cheer for the insurgent peasants.
Chloe meanwhile rejects the obviously suitable young man who likes her; her best friend decides that she may as well go for him in that case, and they get engaged; Chloe realises that she actually really likes the chap, and spends a chapter or two agonising about having left it too late. Meanwhile her best friend’s father has foolishly annoyed his butler, to the point that the butler grabs a gun and shoots both father and daughter dead (Dillwyn often resorts to melodramatic denouement to resolve her plots). So once a decent interval has passed after the double murder, the young man and Chloe get married after all and there is a happy ending.
Like The Rebecca Rioter, this was published in Russian almost as soon as in English, but I really wonder what the Russian readers would have made of it; this is not exactly Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. The Spectator commented that the melodrama was more successful than the satire, but to me they are roughly equally flawed.
Chloe Arguelle isn’t in print, but you can get it from the Internet Archive in two volumes, here and here.
A Burglary, or, Unconscious Influence, was Dillwyn’s third novel, published in 1883, the same year as Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stephenson and Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
There was an imposing procession, a ceremony, military escorts, bands, a public luncheon, toasts, flags, bell-ringing, firing of guns, singing, illuminations, fireworks and enthusiasm. All classes with any claim to consideration, were represented at the function lords, commons, clergy, soldiers, sailors, volunteers, dissenters, railway directors, friendly societies, and tradespeople. Immense efforts had been made to secure the presence of as many notables and school children as possible the former to make speeches, be gazed at, and regaled upon salmon, chickens, pineapples, champagne, and similar delicacies; and the latter to swell monster choruses in the open air, and enjoy the magnificent feast of one plum-bun apiece. Some magnates of very first-rate importance, indeed, had been induced to attend from a distance, and all local grandees were present as a matter of course. Wealth in every shape and form was conspicuous in all the best places, whilst poverty was graciously permitted to stand and stare wherever the police thought it would not be in the way of its betters; and might further look forward to the high privilege of sharing with them in bearing the burden of additional taxation, which would fall upon all ratepayers as a necessary consequence of the costly decorations and entertainments in which the town thought fit to indulge.
This time, rather than juggle a large number of characters, Dillwyn has a basic triangle of her teenage protagonist, Imogen Rhys; the chap she probably likes more, Sir Charles Dover (a young baronet, not the only one in Dillwyn’s works); and the chap who really wants her to like him more, William Sylvester. We know, but none of the other characters do, that the impoverished Sylvester has committed a heinous crime by stealing the jewels of a family friend staying at the Rhys’s house in Wales – the burglary of the title. To make things more complicated, Imogen has a deep romantic crush on Ethel, the victim of the theft, depicted as an entirely normal part of the spectrum of emotional experience.
Imogen, who is tomboyish and headstrong, gets stuck into the defence of the local Welshman who is unjustly accused of the crime, much to the consternation of her family. She gets the innocent man acquitted, and must then deal with the competing calls on her affection. Meanwhile Sylvester undergoes agonies of conscience which are sympathetically portrayed.
Then Dillwyn’s love of melodrama strikes again, and just as Ethel, who has put two and two together, is about to reveal to Imogen that Sylvester was the thief, an accidental fire devastates the London social gathering that they are all attending. The fire seems to take up a large number of pages, and by the time it is over, Sylvester is safely dead and the others alive if crispy. It’s a little more gracefully executed than in the previous book, and of course Imogen and Sir Charles end up together.
You slightly wish that Imogen had found a way of getting together with Ethel rather than with Sir Charles, and you wonder why Ethel restrains herself from exposing Sylvester. But the story is told in a leisurely fashion, without the previous sense of hurry. It feels a bit more under control than Chloe Arguelle.
This was the one book by Amy Dillwyn that I could not find in electronic format. You can get a paper copy, published by Honno Welsh Women’s Classics, with a foreword by Alison Favre, here.
Second paragraph of thid chapter:
The Aerodrome was only accessible down a winding country lane marked by an apologetically drooping road sign appearing to point into the bowels of the earth. It was so incongruously ugly, so ashamed of its architectural shortcomings compared with its bucolic surroundings, that it was inescapably quaint and was regarded by the local inhabitants with a proprietorial affection, especially the pork pies served at the airport cafe. Even the angry buzzing of the aircraft every five minutes as they took off and landed only served as a natural counterpoint to the harmonious sounds of the country: birdsong, chattering of insects, the occasional diesel belch of a tractor negotiating the winding roads.
Failed to grab me and I put it down after 50 pages. You can get it here.
I’m going to blog this week about my third cousin once removed, Amy Dillwyn, who lived from 1845 to 1935 in Wales, and wrote seven novels in the 1880s, six of which I have been able to obtain and read. She has been reclaimed in recent years as a Welsh lesbian feminist writer, who inherited a failing metal foundry from her father and turned it around; she was a suffragist who stood unsuccessfully for election; she famously wore men’s clothes and smoked cigars. Her father was a Liberal MP. Her grandmother was born a Whyte, but died before Amy was born, after a scandalous life. I am in touch with a couple of collateral relatives on her side of the family.
The only book-length publication about her dates from 1987, updated in 2013, by David Painting of Swansea University (who died in 2021). The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
That she saw so much was more of a tribute to her acute intelligence than her eyesight, because she was not wearing her glasses which she felt would have detracted from the dignity of the occasion until she noticed that another woman from Wales, the famous bluestocking Lady Charlotte Schreiber, ‘wore her spectacles all through everything at the drawing-room which struck me as being rather an idea for there were heaps of short-sighted people there’. The day after letting Minnie have all her news of the presentation there was yet more famous jewellery to be seen, this time at Garrards where they were displaying the Prince of Wales’s wedding presents to Princess Alexandra, and again Amy’s critical faculty came into its own. ‘It is a magnificent diamond and pearl necklace and two handsome brooches of diamonds in the form of the Prince of Wales plume. But I was not much struck by the guard ring – beryl, emeralds, ruby, turquoise and jacinth, nor yet by the lockets for the bridesmaids – pink coral and diamonds.’
It’s pretty short – only 120 pages – and basically takes us through the events of Dillwyn’s life, drawing largely on her own accounts. Painting soft-pedals the subversive parts of the story – Dillwyn’s love for Olive Talbot and her firm Welshness – but he allows her voice to ring out, and doesn’t get in the way of the story that his subject wants to tell us from a century or so ago. I hope that Dillwyn’s next biographer will look a bit more into the stories she didn’t tell through her correspondence and diaries. It’s a good start, though, and you can get it here.
Dillwyn’s first novel, The Rebecca Rioter, was published in 1880 – the same year as The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy, Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi and Heidi by Johanna Spyri. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Then the stories Miss Gwenllian read me were wonderful too. They were not all about good children who get rich and become lords and ladies, and bad children who come to a bad end; but they were stories of people who travelled about, and had adventures, and fought with lions, and bears, and wolves, and snakes; or else they were stories about fairies who could do whatever they liked with wands that they always carried in their hands – something like Moses’s rod, I used to think.
The Rebecca Rioter is the only one of her books not set in the present day (ie the 1880s); instead it tells the story of an episode of revolutionary unrest in her part of Wales in 1843, two years before she was born, in which agricultural workers and small farmers joined together to destroy the toll-booths which controlled access to the roads. Crucially, the insurgents became known as the Rebecca Rioters because they disguised themselves by dressing up in women’s clothes before mounting their attacks on state property.
Her account is told in the first person by Evan Williams, one of the rioters, and is totally sympathetic to them and their cause, though a bit tainted by the charming condescension of the local squire’s daughter (and stand-in for the author), Gwenllian, who takes our hero on as a special project and then (implausibly) successfully pleads for his life after he unintentionally shoots her father dead. He gets transported to Australia, and the narrative is presented as a dying account to the local doctor there, who sends it home to Wales.
I must say that I found it refreshingly robust in its defence of uprising against the tyranny of London, and it’s interesting that it was translated into Russian almost as soon as it had been published in English. Dillwyn’s sources included her own father’s diary account of managing the authorities’ violent suppression of the rioters, so the fact that she takes the other side is even more interesting. The 2001 Honno Welsh Women’s Classics edition has a thoughtful and analytical introduction by Katie Gramich; you can get it here.
Tomorrow I will look at two more of Dillwyn’s novels.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The offices for KPS the name of the organization on the card Tom gave me were on Thirty-seventh, in the same building as the Costa Rican consulate, on the fifth floor. The office apparently shared a waiting room with a small medical practice. I had been in the waiting room for less than a minute when Avella came to get me to take me to her personal office. There was no one else in the KPS office. I guess they, like most everyone else, were working from home.
Very readable and engaging story which I read to the end, a parallel universe with Godzillas; but as usual with Scalzi, all of the characters sound exactly the same (and indeed exactly like Scalzi himself in real life) and the social commentary is paper thin. You can get it here.
Current
Tofu Brains: Life on Zeeta 21, by Lars Koch
One Bible, Many Voices: Different Approaches to Biblical Studies, by S.E. Gillingham
There Will Be War Volume X, ed. Jerry Pournelle
Doctor Who – The Awakening, by Eric Pringle
Last books finished
Nant Olchfa, by Amy Dillwyn
Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks
Drawing Boundaries, eds John C. Courtney, Peter MacKinnon and David E. Smith (did not finish)
The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kiernan
Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris
Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree
The Deadly Assassin, by Andrew Orton
Murder on the Links, by Agatha Christie
Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers
Next books
The Awakening, by David Evans-Powell
Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, by Vernon Bogdanor
Falling to Earth, by Al Worden
As with yesterday’s post, I’m trying to derive some meaning from the Internet Movie Database’s user ratings of Doctor Who episodes. Here, for your edification and delight, are the top-rated episodes from each of the incarnations of the show. (Based on these statistics.)
The twentieth episode of the Australian K9 spinoff series, 2010’s Taphony and the Time Loop, has a better rating, at 5.7, than any of the other twenty-five K9 episodes, but that is still lower than any episodes of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors, or of any of the other spinoffs. I agree that it’s probably the best of the undistinguished run of the Aussie show, with an escaped Time Being in the shape of a cute girl (Taphony, played by Maia Mitchell) draining the essence of the regular cute girl character (Jorjie, played by Philippa Coulthard) and K-9 sorting it all out. It’s still not particularly good, though; I rewatched it last week for this post and I think it deserves a little better than 5.7. Maybe 5.8.
The metal mutt takes both of the bottom places in this list, in fact, with A Girl’s Best Friend, the only episode ever made of the unsuccessful 1981 spinoff K-9 and Company, scoring a lowly 6.1 with IMDB users. This brought back both Lis Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith and John Leeson as the voice of K9, but had a very silly plot involving pagan cultists in the English countryside – not natural Who territory, and a story that has been told much better before and since by others. Sarah Jane, of course, also went on to have her own much more successful spinoff.
The second and final episode of 1985’s Revelation of the Daleks is the top-rated Sixth Doctor story at 7.7 (and the first episode of the story is in second place at 7.6). I agree that this is the one story where the Six/Peri pairing comes together, partly because they’re not actually in the story all that much. If you can overlook the huge plot flaw of Davros feeding the entire galaxy with the corpses of a few rich people, it’s very well done, with various different factions of characters motivated for different reasons.
Village of the Angels, the fourth of the six-part Flux storyline, is the top-rated Thirteenth Doctor episode. I am among the many who found this series difficult to follow, but this was a good instalment, with many murky and dramatic goings-on in the Village, culminating with the Doctor herself being transformed into a Weeping Angel. IMDB users rate it at 7.8, which again seems a bit mean.
The top-rated episode of short-lived 2016 spinoff Class is its finale, The Lost, ranked at 8.1 and ending with a massive battle between the Coal Hill Academy kids who have been charged with the defence of Planet Earth and the alien Shadowkin. Alliances and friendships are forged and broken and several significant characters are (apparently) killed off. We are left with a massive cliff-hanger regarding the new nature of regular girl April, which presumably would have been resolved had the BBC commissioned a second series. It’s a shame that they didn’t. I couldn’t recommend watching this on its own, but there are only eight episodes altogether, so you might as well watch them all. I was myself rather disappointed by this episode; my own favourite of the eight is the third, Night Visiting.
The top-rated surviving First Doctor episode, broadcast the day after Christmas Day in 1964, saw the first ever departure of one of the regular characters in Flashpoint, rated 8.3 by IMDB users, the last of the six-part story that we now call The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, falls in love with a Scottish resistance fighter against the Daleks who bears an uncanny resemblance to David Tennant (six years before David Tennant was born), and is left behind on Earth to build a new life, Hartnell delivering one of his great set-piece speeches in farewell. Actually my own favourite episode of this story is the third, Day of Reckoning, which features a desperate scramble across a deserted London. But I won’t fight (much) with those who prefer this one.
The top-rated Seventh Doctor episode is the second of the opener to his second season, Remembrance of the Daleks, at 8.5. It took me a while to warm to this story, but I have come around to its good points. I still prefer the middle two stories from the final season of Old Who, Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric, but there are a couple of great set-pieces in this episode, with the Doctor retrieving the Hand of Omega from a London gravesite in 1963, and Ace menaced by Daleks.
The top-rated Third Doctor episode, also at 8.5, is the second last of his 1970 debut season, the sixth of the seven parts of Inferno. The story concerns a dangerous experiment to drill into the Earth’s crust; for several of the episodes, the Doctor is transported to a parallel Earth where his friends are all fascists and the experiment is further advanced. In the sixth episode, despite the Doctor’s efforts, the parallel Earth begins to disintegrate and he escapes back to our timeline. It’s dramatic doomed stuff, and I think I’m with the IMDB voters here.
I’m surprised to see a lost episode outpolling all of the surviving First Doctor episodes, but it’s a good one. My favourite Hartnell story is the thirteen-part epic that we now (mostly) call The Daleks’ Master Plan. Only three episodes survive, and they do not include the finale, Destruction of Time, in which the Doctor activates the Time Destructor in order to defeat the Daleks by aging them into oblivion, but loses his own companion Sarah Kingdom in the process. IMDB voters rank it at 8.5, which I think I can agree with. You’ll appreciate it more after experiencing the previous twelve parts of the story.
I think that the best single story of the Sarah Jane Adventures is Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane Smith? from the 2007 first series, in which she is replaced in her life history by the ambiguous Andrea, played by Jane Asher. IMDB users rate its two episodes third and fourth at 8.6, but rank two other episodes with visiting guest stars from the parent show just a bit higher at 8.7: in second place, the second part of 2010’s Death of the Doctor, with Matt Smith (and Katy Manning), and at the top, the second part of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, for which David Tennant did his last filming in his first run as the show’s regular star in 2009. Sarah has been yanked into a prison dimension through a fake wedding with a rotter played by Nigel Havers and the Doctor turns up to save her with her friends. Great stuff.
There’s a fairly strong fan consensus that the Fifth Doctor’s final story, The Caves of Androzani, is also his best, and IMDB voters also subscribe to that view; its four episodes hold four of the top five Fifth Doctor spots in the system (the other going to the last episode of Earthshock). And the best of the four, according to IMDB where it is rated 8.8, and also frankly in my own opinion, is the last, where desperate people fight over dwindling resources and lives are brutally and dramatically ended, including the Doctor’s own. Poor Peri doesn’t get much to say except at the end, but it’s her second appearance in this list.
While I’m not surprised that the Eighth Doctor’s unexpected 2013 return in Night of the Doctor rates higher then The Movie, I am surprised that it rates as high as 9.0 on IMDB. It’s less than seven minutes long, and I feel that fannish enthusiasm at the time of the fiftieth anniversary has not yet been tempered by sober reflection.
In general I’ve been concentrating on the top-rated single episodes for each case, but for the Ninth Doctor’s 2005 series, the top two episodes, rated 9.0, are a two-part story, The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, which also incidentally won the Hugo Award that year. This is the one introducing Captain Jack Harkness, set in WW2 London, famously featuring the gasmask zombie child asking “Are you my mummy?” My own favourite Ninth Doctor story is Dalek, but I’m clearly not with the majority. The second part, The Doctor Dances, is a hair above the first part on IMDB.
My own favourite Second Doctor episode is the completely bonkers opening to The Mind Robber, but IMDB voters disagree. Their top-ranked episode of the black-and-white era is also the very last: the tenth episode of epic 1969 story The War Games, rated 9.1. Having invoked his own people, the Time Lords, to defeat an alien mastermind’s evil plans, the Doctor himself is put on trial for interference in cosmic affairs, and sentenced to exile on Earth, his companions sent home with their memories wiped. The final shots, as he howls in protest at the Time Lords changing his face, are among the bleakest of the whole of Doctor Who (cf above mentions of The Daleks’ Master Plan and Earthshock).
My favourite story of Old Who is the Fourth Doctor’s The Deadly Assassin, from 1976. But I find it difficult to argue with the verdict of IMDB users that the best single episode of Old Who, rated 9.1, is the sixth and final part of 1975’s Genesis of the Daleks, in which their crazed creator Davros loses control of the malevolent pepperpots. (It’s their fifth appearance on this list.) There are many beautiful moments here, including Davros’s large button marked “TOTAL DESTRUCT” which lurks like Chekhov’s gun.
The spinoff shows have had a mixed success rate here, but Children of Earth, the third series of Torchwood (co-starring Peter Capaldi as a harassed senior British government official), is in a league of its own, its five episodes ranked between 8.7 and 9.2, all of them higher than any First, Third, Sixth, Seventh or Thirteenth Doctor stories. The top-ranked episode is the fourth, which features the growing evidence of Jack’s involvement with the alien threat to the world’s children, and famously ends with the demise of the much-loved Ianto, and I think I’d support that choice, though maybe not put it as high as 9.2.
We’re getting near the end here. I totally agree with the final three verdicts by IMDB voters. Their top-ranked Eleventh Doctor story, at 9.3, is Vincent and the Doctor, with its intense portrayal of artistic genius and mental illness, leavened by an alien incursion. I was surprised that the 2010 season closer, The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, won the Hugo that year; the verdict of history, I think, is with Vincent.
The top-rated Thirteenth Doctor episode, 2015’s Heaven Sent at 9.6, is again my favourite from the era, with the Doctor, newly bereaved of Clara, trapped in a mysterious castle where he must recapitulate a cycle of death and renewal, over and over. I think it’s tremendous, though very different from the norm.
And finally, my favourite Doctor Who episode of all time, and also well clear at the top of IMDB’s rankings, is the Hugo-winning 2007 Tenth Doctor story Blink, which introduced the Weeping Angels and communicated much of its plot through DVD Easter eggs. I loved it on first broadcast and I still love it now. IMDB voters give it a massive 9.8 out of 10. It also won the Hugo Award. Although it barely has the Doctor and Martha in it, I think you could safely show it to someone who had never seen Doctor Who before, and who wondered if they would like the show; it would be a valid litmus test.
Steven Moffat wrote four of the above (Night of the Doctor, The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, Heaven Sent and Blink) and Terry Nation is credited with two (Genesis of the Daleks and Flashpoint, though there are varying reports of the real extent of his input). Graeme Harper, David Moloney and Douglas Camfield are each credited with directing two of them (Harper: Revelation of the Daleks and The Caves of Androzani; Moloney: The War Games and Genesis of the Daleks; Camfield: Destruction of Time and Inferno, though in fact he was too ill to direct episode 6 of the latter).
I am a little surprised that the greatest Old Who writer Robert Holmes appears in both the “best” and “worst” lists, for The Caves of Androzani and The Space Pirates respectively. As previously noted, I think The Space Pirates is underrated. Director Andrew Morgan did only two Doctor Who stories, but one of them is on each list, Remembrance of the Daleks here and Time and the Rani yesterday.
To round off the post, the average ratings for each Doctor and spinoff show:
10th Doctor: 8.04 (highest 9.8, lowest 5.9)
9th Doctor 7.93 (highest 9.0, lowest 6.9)
11th Doctor: 7.81 (highest 9.3, lowest 6.7)
12th Doctor: 7.80 (highest 9.6, lowest 5.8)
Torchwood 7.72 (highest 9.2, lowest 6.2)
8th Doctor 7.65 (higher 9.0, lower 6.3)
Sarah Jane Adventures 7.56 (highest 8.7, lowest 6.7)
4th Doctor 7.55 (highest 9.1, lowest 5.8)
3rd Doctor 7.47 (highest 8.5, lowest 6.4)
Class 7.46 (highest 8.1, lowest 6.9)
2nd Doctor 7.36 (highest 9.1, lowest 4.9)
5th Doctor 7.12 (highest 8.8, lowest 5.9)
1st Doctor 7.05 (highest 8.5, lowest 5.6)
7th Doctor 6.94 (highest 8.5, lowest 5.3)
6th Doctor 6.72 (highest 7.7, lowest 5.3)
13th Doctor 6.25 (highest 7.8, lowest 4.2)
K9 and Company 6.1
[Australian] K9 4.87 (highest 5.7, lowest 4.1)
If you have been, thank you for reading this.