This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 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.
Lots of travel this month, starting rather sadly with a weekend trip to Brussels to say farewell to Ian Traynor. Back at home we had the traditional Dorpfeest, including children’s toy and game sale, and display by local artists including Anne:
Lots of travel, starting with a trip to London (and Oxford), including the Bagpuss and Clangers exhibition with S and little W (who has got a lot bigger since).
This was followed by a grim work trip to Dublin and Serbia in which my back was hurting so badly that I barely staggered out of bed to my meetings. At the end of the month I went to Amsterdam with my brother, mother and sister, and then on to Albania for my first meetings with the Foundation of which I am a trustee.
Current The Monk, by Matthew Lewis (a chapter a week) Half Life, by Shelley Jackson Directed by Douglas Camfield, by Michael Seely The Happier Dead, by Ivo Stourton
Last books finished Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card CBT Workbook, by Stephanie Fitzgerald A Modern Utopia, by H. G. Wells Mythos, by Stephen Fry Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, eds. Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, by Amia Srinivasan True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, by Abraham Riesman
Next books Queen of the States, by Josephine Saxton Monstress, Volume 6: The Vow, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
The heat had started in the small hours of the morning, swiftly building up. Around ten o’clock, it had fully erupted into being, just after Turks and Greeks on each side of the Green Line had finished their morning coffees. Now it was past noon and the air was stiff, difficult to breathe. The roads were cracked in places, the tar melting in rivulets, the colour of charred wood. A car somewhere revved its engine, its rubber tyres struggling on the sticky asphalt. Then, silence.
A novel set in Cyprus and London, by well-known Turkish writer Elif Shafak, telling several parallel stories of forbidden love and tragic death from the points of view of the protagonists and also from the perspective of the fig tree in their garden, both on the smaller island and a shoot from it that is planted in the London garden. I confess that because I am already familiar with the history and current situation of Cyprus, I was not very surprised by any of it, and I found the imagery frankly a bit clunky (eg the parallel between the fig tree, buried for its own protection, and the corpses of civilians killed in 1974, thrown down a well to protect their killers). But if the novel brings the island’s story to a new generation of readers who aren’t as familiar with it, that’s fine by me. You can get it here.
Reading it did make me dig into the archives and find the original Green Line map of Nicosia as drawn by a British officer, Major-General Peter Young, in 1963, and compare it with the current situation (ie since 1974) on OpenStreetMaps. It’s striking that in the city centre, very little has changed at all, and there’s not a lot of difference in the nearer suburbs either. Further out, of course, is a different matter.
I used to have fantasies of some day opening a long-shut cupboard in the Green Zone to find a bunch of tapes of lost Doctor Who stories, abandoned by some luckless TV technician in 1974, but in fact now that I’ve established that the Green Zone in Nicosia is still basically where it was when established in 1963, I accept that this is never going to happen, especially not to me.
Second paragraph of third story (“Missy’s Magical Mystery Mission”, by Jacqueline Rayner):
And so Daphne (‘Mrs N’ to her clients, although she wasn’t married), scrubbed Tivone of Enfis’s bathroom, steam-cleaned his oubliette and de-crumbed his toaster, hoping all the while her cheerful chat, homemade oat and raisin cookies and occasional casual mentions of how every person was worthy of rights and respect would make his heart shine, just a little bit. In return, Tivone of Enfis gave Mrs N a Festival of Snowtide bonus and a personalised bolo-card, included her in Team Tivone awaydays, and had refrained from having any of her relatives killed (although admittedly she didn’t have many relatives and if they’d shown any signs of seditious behaviour they’d have been for the chop, however well their sister / aunt / second-cousin-once-removed dusted his ornaments).
Six short stories about different incarnations of the Master, by Peter Anghelides (Delgado!Master), Mark Wright (Pratt/Beevors!Master), Jac Rayner (Missy), Mike Tucker (Ainley!Master), Beverley Sanford (Simm!Master) and Matthew Sweet (Dhawan!Master). I thought they were all pretty good; I expect that Matthew Sweet’s Soviet-era riff on a well-known novel, “The Master and Margarita”, will sail over some people’s heads but I enjoyed it too. Recommended. You can get it here.
The Pilgrimage of S. Silvia of Aquitania to the Holy Places (circa 385 A.D.), trans. John H. Bernard, with an appendix by Sir Charles William Wilson. Online here. The Pilgrimage of Etheria, trans. M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe. Online here. The Pilgrimage of Egeria: A New Translation, by Anne McGowan and Paul F. Bradshaw. You can get it here.
Second section of third chapter in the original Latin (as given here):
Hac sic ergo iubente Christo Deo nostro adiuta orationibus sanctorum, qui comitabantur, et sic cum grandi labore, quia pedibus me ascendere necesse erat (quia prorsus nec in sella ascendi poterat, tamen ipse labor non sentiebatur, ex ea parte autem non sentiebatur labor, quia desiderium, quod habebam, iubente Deo videbam compleri): hora ergo quarta pervenimus in summitatem illam montis Dei sancti Sina, ubi data est lex, in eo id est locum, ubi descendit maiestas Domini in ea die, qua mons fumigabat.
Second paragraph of third chapter, as given by McGowan and Bradshaw (who put footnote references at the start of the sections to which they refer, rather than the end):
2 So, by the will of Christ our God and helped by the prayers of the holy ones who were accompanying [us], and with great labor, it was necessary for me to ascend on foot because it was not possible to ascend in the saddle (however, the labor itself was not felt, but the labor was partly not felt because I saw the desire that I had being fulfilled by God’s will), at the fourth hour then we arrived at the summit of the holy mountain of God, Sinai, where the Law was given, that is, at the place where the glory of the Lord descended on that day when the mountain smoked. 2 The reference to the necessity to go on foot indicates that Egeria generally rode during her journeys, presumably on a donkey or mule, or possibly on a camel across desert regions; see also 7.7; 11.4; 14.1. For “the fourth hour,” see the Preface, p. vii, on the Roman divisions of the day. “When the mountain smoked” is a reference to Ex 19:18.
Same passage as given by McClure and Felton:
By this way, then, at the bidding of Christ our God, and helped by the prayers of the holy men who accompanied us, we arrived at the fourth hour, at the summit of Sinai, the holy mountain of God, where the law was given, that is, at the place where the Glory of the Lord descended on the day when the mountain smoked.1 Thus the toil was great, for I had to go up on foot, the ascent being impossible in the saddle, and yet I did not feel the toil, on the side of the ascent, I say, the toil, because I realized that the desire which I had was being fulfilled at God’s bidding. 1 Exod. xix. 18.
Same passage as given by Bernard:
And so, Christ our God commanding us, we were encouraged by the prayers of the holy men who accompanied us; and although the labour was great – for I had to ascend on foot, because the ascent could not be made in a chair – yet I did not feel it. To that extent the labour was not felt, because I saw that the desire which I had was being fulfilled by the command of God. At the fourth hour we arrived at that peak of Sinai, the holy Mount of God, where the law was given, i.e., at that place where the majesty of God descended on the day when the mountain smoked.18 18 Exod. xix. 18.
Egeria is one of the really fascinating characters of late antiquity. She seems to have been an independent woman of means, from southern Gaul or possibly northern Spain, who went on a long journey to the Holy Land some time in the late fourth century – staying in Jerusalem for three years! – and wrote a detailed account to her lady friends back home, which survives in one eleventh-century manuscript (there are a couple of fragments elsewhere). The start and end of the document are lost, as are a couple of bits in the middle, but basically it’s in two halves: her journeys around Egypt, Palestine and Anatolia, and her description of Christian rituals in and around Jerusalem.
I mean, this is just extraordinary, isn’t it? Here we are in the not-quite-yet-fallen Roman Empire, and a single woman (if rich enough) can safely travel (well, with the occasional military escort) from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, to practice a religion which was actually illegal only a few decades earlier. It’s a fairly dry travelogue – no banter or hassle, just going from holy place to holy place to talk to the holy men and sometimes holy women – but the mind boggles that it was possible at all. There is only one other named living person, an old friend who she meets at the shrine of Thecla:
Nam inveni ibi aliquam amicissimam mihi, et cui omnes in oriente testimonium ferebant vitae ipsius, sancta diaconissa nomine Marthana, quam ego apud Ierusolimam noveram, ubi illa gratia orationis ascenderat; haec autem monasteria apotactitum seu virginum regebat. Quae me cum vidisset, quod gaudium illius vel meum esse potuerit, nunquid vel scribere possum?
For I found there someone very dear to me, and to whose way of life everyone in the east bore witness, a holy deaconess by the name of Marthana, whom I had known at Jerusalem, where she had gone up for the sake of prayer; she was governing cells of apotactitae or virgins. When she had seen me, surely I cannot write down what her joy and mine could have been? (McGowan and Bradshaw)
I was also fascinated by the second part, about the rituals of Jerusalem – and again, bear in mind that Christianity had only emerged a few decades previously as an official and powerful cult; this is all pretty new stuff, rather than ritual hallowed by millennia of tradition. The birth of Christ is celebrated on the Epiphany. Lent is a period of fasting which ends before Easter. Different churches in the Greater Jerusalem area all get their turn during the eight day period of the major feasts. I found the language arrangements particularly interesting:
Et quoniam in ea prouincia pars populi et grece et siriste nouit, pars etiam alia per se grece, aliqua etiam pars tantum siriste, itaque quoniam episcopus, licet siriste nouerit, tamen semper grece loquitur et nunquam siriste: itaque ergo stat semper presbyter, qui episcopo grece dicente siriste interpretatur, ut omnes audiant [ut omnes audiant] quae exponuntur.
Lectiones etiam, quecumque in ecclesia leguntur, quia necesse est grece legi, semper stat, qui siriste interpretatur propter populum, ut semper discant. Sane quicumque hic latini sunt, id est qui nec siriste nec grece nouerunt, ne contristentur, et ipsis exponitur eis, quia sunt alii fratres et sorores grecolatini, qui latine exponunt eis.
And because in that province some of the people know both Greek and Syriac, others Greek alone, and others only Syriac, and because the bishop, though he may know Syriac, however always speaks Greek and never Syriac, therefore a presbyter always stands by, who, when the bishop is speaking in Greek, translates into Syriac so that everyone may hear what is being explained.
The readings also that are read in church, because they must be read in Greek, someone always stands there to translate into Syriac for the sake of the people, so that they may always learn. Indeed, those who are Latin here, that is, who know neither Syriac nor Greek, lest they be disheartened, also have things explained to them, because there are other brothers and sisters who are bilingual who explain to them in Latin. (McGowan and Bradshaw)
Egeria herself would have been a Latin speaker; I wonder what the real balance of Syriac/Aramaic to Greek as native language was among the worshippers, beziehungsweise the inhabitants, of Jerusalem at the time.
I probably didn’t get as much out of this as someone who was really into the subject of early Christianity would do. I still found the narrative a breath of fresh air. We tend to think of early Christianity as being the dry-as-dust Church Fathers arguing with each other. This is a genteel lady wandering around the countryside and taking notes for her friends back home. It’s a wholly different perspective.
All three translations are worth looking at, but I think the most recent (McGowan and Bradshaw) is the best, and also has the most up-to-date speculation about the author. John Bernard’s St Silvia appears to have been someone else entirely, and McClure adn Feltoe have gone for a less documented spelling of her name.
I latched onto Egeria following a totally different train of thought. John Bernard, her early translator into English, also had a minor role in Irish history as leader of the Southern Unionists at the moment when their cause became utterly lost; he was Protestant Archbishop of Dublin and then Provost of Trinity College. While doing my PhD I went through his papers searching in vain for insights into his attitude to science. His notes on the fourth-century pilgrim would have been a more entertaining read.
Last week I had a work trip to Switzerland and Montenegro. (For unrelated reasons; the two appointments just happened to fall on adjacent days.) The last time I was in any German-speaking country was in February 2020, changing planes on the way to and from Gallifrey One; the last time I was in the former Yugoslavia was a year before that.
And gosh, it was quite a morale booster to feel that travel to other language zones is now possible again. Of course, I live in Flanders and work in Brussels, and in 2020 we went to my sister in Burgundy and on to Geneva, so French and Dutch have been constants in my life; but I also speak German fluently, and my Serbian / Croatian / Bosnian / Montenegrin is at advanced tourist level, so this was my first chance to speak those languages in a long time.
Speaking a familiar but different language is like changing gear mentally, or perhaps like driving a very different car, where the controls may be in a completely different place to where you normally find them. I joke that on some days when I go to work, I will have spoken three languages before I sit down at my desk (to family and train conductors); and on other days, I may not have spoken to anyone at all!
I’ve had the opposite side of the coin this week. When I went to hospital with COVID in November, they picked up a lump on my larynx, and after various backs and forths they removed it surgically (with a LASER) on Monday. Nothing alarming; a granuloma probably caused by acid reflux. My first time under a general anæsthetic, and that eerie experience of feeling the bathwater of consciousness draining away. (But where does it drain to?)
I’m fine – hardly even any physical discomfort (does the larynx even have pain sensors?) but the kicker is that I have to rest my voice until tomorrow, so I’m on my third day of enforced silence. I had to skip the British embassy reception for the Queen’s Jubilee last night, and a much anticipated conference today – not a lot of point in going to such events if you can’t talk to people. And for work I have been typing frantically into the chat during Zoom meetings, rather like a hybrid panel at a science fiction convention, but less fun.
Looking around for wisdom on this topic, I found a blog post by Hannah Little (hi, Hannah!) about the theories of why the human larynx is located lower in the throat that its equivalent in other primates. She cites an hypothesis of Mark Jones that the lowered larynx reduces the amount of lung compression needed to achieve speaking pressure, creating the ability to be louder and have lower resonances. That was in 2010 and doesn’t seem to have been published yet, but I find it convincing.
On the plus side, I took an extended lunch break yesterday to visit B. She was able to talk a little when she was two, but has not said a word for the last twenty-two years. She is still very capable of communicating – she was glad to see us, and also made it clear when she thought that our walk in the park was over. As ever, I need to improve my selfie game. And I am looking forward to talking again for myself tomorrow.
Non-fiction 16 (YTD 45) Carnival of Monsters, by Ian Potter Thursday’s Child, by Maralyn Rittenour Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd, by Mark Blake Queens of the Crusades, by Alison Weir A Norman Legacy, by Sally Harpur O’Dowd Tower, by Nigel Jones The Pilgrimage of S. Silvia of Aquitania to the Holy Places (circa 385 A.D.), trans. John H. Bernard, with an appendix by Sir Charles William Wilson. The Pilgrimage of Etheria, trans. M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe Signs and Symbols Around the World, by Elizabeth S. Helfman The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, by Simon Bucher-Jones The Pilgrimage of Egeria: A New Translation, by Anne McGowan and Paul F. Bradshaw Terrorism In Asymmetric Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects, by Ekaterina A. Stepanova Marco Polo, by Dene October The Halls of Narrow Water, by Bill Hall Never Say You Can’t Survive, by Charlie Jane Anders CBT Workbook, by Stephanie Fitzgerald
Non-genre 1 (YTD 9) The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak
SF 11 (YTD 43) The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki A Master of Djinn, by P. Djélì Clark Flicker, by Theodore Roszak Stardust, by Neil Gaiman Demons and Dreams: Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror v. 1, eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling She Who Became the Sun, by Shelly Parker-Chan Mort, by Terry Pratchett Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card A Modern Utopia, by H. G. Wells Mythos, by Stephen Fry
9,700 pages (YTD 31,500), median 322 (YTD 205) median LT ownership 83 (Queens of the Crusades / Never Say You Can’t Survive); YTD 72.5 15/32 (YTD 47/120) by non-male writers (Rittenour, Weir, Harpur O’Dowd, 3x Egeria and commentators, Helfman, Stepanova, Anders, Fitzgerald, Shafak, Aoki, Datlow/Windling, Parker-Chan) 4/32 (YTD 16/120) by non-white writers (Shafak, Aoki, Clark, Parker-Chan)
329 books currently tagged “unread”, 3 less than last month
Reading now The Monk, by Matthew Lewis (a chapter a week) The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, by Amia Srinivasan Half Life, by Shelley Jackson
Coming soon (perhaps) The Happier Dead, by Ivo Stourton Queen of the States, by Josephine Saxton Monstress, Volume 6: The Vow, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media, by Peter Steven Junker: een Pruisische blues, by Simon Spruyt Killdozer!, by Theodore Sturgeon Intimacy, by Jean Paul Sartre The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie Make Your Brain Work, by Amy Brann Lenin the Dictator, by Victor Sebestyen Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells (2021) The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter Roger Zelazny’s Chaos and Amber, by John Betancourt The Harp and the Blade, by John Myers Myers The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett “Tangents”, by Greg Bear Mr Britling Sees it Through, by H. G. Wells End of the World Blues, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood Manifesto, by Bernardine Evaristo
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 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 spent the first half of the month in Loughbrickland as usual, and saw the Red Arrows fly over Tyrella Beach:
There’s an exhibition on in Leuven at present featuring fifteen works involving sound in one way or another, in different historic locations around the city. F and I did it in two hours this afternoon; it is only on until 6 June, so you will need to hurry.
The standout exhibit – for me and for other visitors whose photos I have seen online – is a piece called “Clinamen” by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, a couple of dozen porcelain bowls gently colliding in a pool located in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ter-Koorts chapel. Really rather soothing.
The best of the others is called “Antenna”, by Floris Vanhoof: a grand piano stood on its edge, being “played” by the signals picked up by a large hexagonal antenna on top of it, in the Bac Art Lab at Vital Decosterstraat 102.
I have to say that some of the rest left me rather unmoved, but those two pieces alone are well worth looking at. You can pick up a guide at the tourist office in Leuven, as long as you get there before the exhibition’s last day, tomorrow week.
Current The Monk, by Matthew Lewis (a chapter a week) Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card CBT Workbook, by Stephanie Fitzgerald A Modern Utopia, by H. G. Wells
Last books finished A Master of Djinn, by P. Djélì Clark Terrorism In Asymmetric Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects, by Ekaterina A. Stepanova Marco Polo, by Dene October Flicker, by Theodore Roszak Stardust, by Neil Gaiman Demons and Dreams: Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror v. 1, eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling She Who Became the Sun, by Shelly Parker-Chan The Halls of Narrow Water, by Bill Hall Mort, by Terry Pratchett Never Say You Can’t Survive, by Charlie Jane Anders
Next books The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, by Amia Srinivasan Half Life, by Shelley Jackson
Stardust won the 2008 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, beating the first season of Heroes, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Enchanted and The Golden Compass. It was way ahead at nominations stage and while it had a closer run on the final ballot, it was ahead on every count. I have seen none of the other finalists; from the long list, I have seen the Zemeckis Beowulf and Vadim Jean’s Hogfather, and would confidently put Stardust way above both.
Lots and lots of crossovers with Doctor Who and with previous Oscar and Hugo winners. The one actor who ticks all three boxes is however invisible here: Ian McKellen is the narrator, having previously been Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings films; he would go on to be the voice of the Great Intelligence in the 2012 Eleventh Doctor story, The Snowmen.
Here after appearing in two Oscar winners is Peter O’Toole as the dying King, having previously been the tutor of The Last Emperor in 1987 and Lawrence of Arabia in 1962.
The bishop is played by Struan Rodger, who had been the voice of the Face of Boe in the Tenth Doctor stories Gridlock (2006) and New Earth (2007), went on to be the voice of Kasaavin in the Thirteenth Doctor story Spyfall (2020) and appeared on screen as Ashildr’s butler Clayton in the Twelfth Doctor story The Woman Who Lived (2015); but many years before was also Sandy McGrath in Chariots of Fire.
Rupert Everett, who plays Secundus, the first prince to be bumped off, was Marlowe in Shakespeare in Love.
David Walliams, who is Quintus, another dead prince, here, played the cringing alien Gibbis in the Eleventh Doctor story The God Complex.
Mark Williams is the man-who-is-really-a-goat here, was in both Shakespeare in Love as Nol and in several Eleventh Doctor stories as Rory’s father.
Spencer Wilding, one of the pirates, has played several roles in Doctor Who but is heavily masked in all of them.
Last but definitely not least, Robert de Niro is Captain Shakespeare here; we have previously seen him in two other Oscar winners, Mike in The Deer Hunter and the young Don in The Godfather II.
For once, I had actually seen this in the cinema when it first came out. It is great fun, even if all of the speaking characters are white and almost all of them are slim and beautiful. Claire Danes and Michelle Pfeiffer do convincing English accents. The cinematography is lovely, the acting spot-on, and the script sufficiently funny that we almost accept the skeeviness of much of the plot – that our hero forcibly abducts our heroine in order to trade her, as property, to buy his way into a relationship with the woman he thinks he wants; and how come Una can’t rule Stormhold in her own right as the only surviving child of the old King?
Robert de Niro completely steals the show as the cross-dressing pirate airship captain, making us wonder why we care about these young folks, just about managing to rise above the stereotypes. I really enjoyed watching it again.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the original novel is:
The eighty-first Lord of Stormhold lay dying in his chamber, which was carved from the highest peak like a hole in a rotten tooth. There is still death in the lands beyond the fields we know.
A very enjoyable fairy tale by Gaiman. As ever I find myself spotting similarities with Sandman (in this case, the supernatural siblings, and the half-human heir), but I felt he had rung the changes here rather effectively, and the story combines lovely incidental detail with a good sound (if traditional) plot. Great fun.
I had forgotten just how different it is from the film. It’s darker and sexier, as you would expect from Gaiman; the fallen star breaks her leg as she lands at the start of the story, and is disabled for the rest of the book; there are many more diversionary adventures and no big fight scenes; the pirates play a much smaller role; and of course it feels more English than you get from the Scottish and Icelandic filming. I still enjoyed it though. You can get it here.
Next up is WALL-E, followed by Slumdog Millionaire.
Blatantly ignoring the sacred rule of holy sanctuary, Henry [II] had Hubert [de Burgh] dragged from a chapel in Brentwood, Essex, where he had taken refuge. The fallen nobleman was placed on a ‘miserable jade’ with his legs tied under the nag’s belly and ‘ignominiously conveyed to the Tower’. Here, where the constable had so recently commanded, Hubert was clapped in chains and thrown into a dungeon. The old man — he was in his sixties — stayed until pressure from the Church made Henry change tactics. He returned Hubert to the chapel, but placed guards around the building to ensure no food was brought in. Hubert was literally starved out, and a blacksmith summoned to clamp the old warrior back in irons.
I bought this when we actually visited the Tower in 2017, partly out of general interest but mainly because I wanted to get a little more on the gruesome death of my ancestor and namesake, Sir Nicholas White, while a prisoner in the Tower of London in 1592 (or possibly 1593).
It’s a rollicking good book on British political history between the construction of the Tower in the eleventh century, and its transformation from security asset to tourism spot in the nineteenth century, and how that affected the building – most often of course as a prison and place of execution for those who had fallen out with the state, but also as a centre of administration, in particular as the location of the Mint.
But the gore is the point. Two kings of England were murdered there in the late fifteenth century (Henry VI and Edward V). Two of Henry VIII’s queens were executed there (Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard). Thomas More ends up there. So does Samuel Pepys, for a while. Unfortunately Jones doesn’t mention either Sir John Perrot or my ancestor who was brought down in his wake.
I’d hoped for a little more. A book about the exercise of state coercive power and government-sanctioned violence could surely have interrogated these concepts a bit. There’s also a whole city outside the gates which underwent its own transformations – there are a couple of moments when the two intersect (the Peasants’ Revolt; the Great Fire) but otherwise thebook treats them rather separately. So it’s a good starting point, but I’m going to have to dig further.
There is a record of King John of England staying with Balthazar [Whyte] at Ballymorran Castle, one of the homes of the Whyte family, in July 1210 on his second expedition to Ireland.
Sally is my fourth cousin once removed; her mother was from the de Burgh Whyte branch of the family (like Lady de la Beche, Amy Dillwyn and Gladys Sandes) and her first cousin once removed works in Brussels (C, sister of K and mother of F2). This is a slim book (160pages) which pulls together the basics of the Whyte family history, which theoretically goes back to the Norman invasion of Ireland, and goes through our common ancestors to the present day.
It’s a labour of love, and while I disagree with some of the statements (there is, in fact, a Kingsmeadow House in Waterford; also, rather than dating from 1752, the “de Burgh Whyte” surname doesn’t seem to have been used before the 1840s), I found some new material too. There’s not a lot to say about the more obscure ancestors, but Sally bulks it out well with information about the genealogies of the women they married, which in most cases is as firm (or as nebulous) as what we have on the Whytes.
The most interesting suggestion is that my 8xgreat-grandfather Andrew Whyte/White, son of the Elizabethan Sir Nicholas White and father of the seventeenth century Sir Nicholas White, died in the service of the Crown in 1599, despite having previously fallen under suspicion for papistry. I need to dig into this more, but there seems to me to be an indication that he was spying on Irish exiles in, wait for it, Leuven. His father had died a prisoner in the Tower of London just a few years earlier.
Probably the most famous person directly mentioned here is Keith Kyle, a fairly prominent lefty British journalist of the later twentieth century, who married Sally’s older sister; here he is reporting from Brussels sixty years ago this month on the UK’s first bid to join the EEC.
#OnThisDay 1962: Gallery reported from Brussels, where Britain was attempting to join the EEC. Keith Kyle interviewed the President of the Commission of the EEC, Walter Hallstein. pic.twitter.com/ZtKw05q6Bv
I like to track the winners of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize because of my own past association with it, and was really interested to see that earlier this month it went to a book of poetry, The Sun is Open, by QUB-based writer Gail McConnell. In fact the 119 pages of text are one long poem broken into chunks, playing with text and with font colour, processing the writer’s reaction to going through a box of her father’s things, long after he died in 1984 at 35, shot dead by the IRA while checking under his car for bombs, in front of his wife and his then three-year-old daughter.
Gail McConnell barely remembers her father and has no memory of that awful day, but of course it has affected her whole life, and the poetry captures that disruption and the effect of engaging with her father through a box of personal souvenirs, most notably a diary and a Students Union handbook from his own time at QUB. There is some incredible playing with structure – quotations from the box are in grey text, documents are quoted in fragments to let us fill in the blanks, at one point the page fills with vertical bars to symbolise the prison where her father worked. It’s provocative and unsettling, and meant to be. You can get it here.
This moved me to seek out an earlier poem by Gail McConnell, Type Face, which you can read here. It’s funnier, though the humour is rather dark; the theme is that it explains her reaction to reading the Historical Enquiries Team report into her father’s murder, and discovering that it was written in Comic Sans. The third verse is:
‘Nothing can separate me from the Love of God in Christ Jesus Our Lord’. Nothing can, indeed. I am guided by Google, my mother by Christ. Awake most nights, I click and swipe. I search and find Bill McConnell Paint and Body. Under new management!!!!! Northeast Tennessee. Where is God in a Messed-up World? Inside the Maze. (My phone flashes up a message like a muse.) Straight & Ready: A History of the 10th Belfast Scout Group. (35) (PO) (IRA) – for more and a photograph, push this link>> the maroon death icon on CAIN.ulst.ac.uk You visited this page on 06/02/15. And here I am again. And in The Violence of Incarceration (Routledge, 2009), eds. Phil Scraton and Jude McCulloch (page thirty-three), he ‘oversaw, but later denied in court, the brutality of prison guards, [and] was executed by the IRA on the 8 March 1984.’ (He’d been dead two days by then.) Execute. Late Middle English: from Latin exsequi ‘follow up, punish’. There’s a listing on victims.org.uk, ‘an [sic] non-sectarian, non-political’ nook complete with Union Jack and Ulster flag campaigning pics, the Twitter feeds and tags, a calendar and videos. Powered by WordPress. And then there’s Voices from The Grave (and this one’s hard to bear, though can I say so? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.) I won’t write down the page. But something in me, seeing that crazed portrait – something’s relieved.
Really good stuff, and very different in presentation from The Sun is Open. Both are recommended.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 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.
July started with my personal Brexit bonuses as I gave talks on the subject in Birmingham and, more exotically, Portland, Oregon. Pleased with this picture of one of the Cascades, probably Mount Rainier, from the plane.
On the Portland trip I started off with a couple of days in Washington, taking in a Chinese TV interview on the issues of the day.
I also had work trips to Belgrade (not as enjoyable as usual) and to Dublin (more fun), and we finished the month in Loughbrickland at the start of our holiday.
Thanks to various daytime travels, I read 30 books that month.
Non-fiction: 9 (YTD 29) Fanny Kemble and the Lovely Land, by Constance Wright The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, by Cliff Stoll Hamilton: The Revolution, by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter Boy, by Roald Dahl Empire of Mud, by J.D. Dickey Between structure and No-thing: An annotated reader in Social and Cultural Anthropology, ed. Patrick J. Devlieger Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich Tove Jansson: Work and Love, by Tuula Karjalainen Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Fiction (non-sf): 5 (YTD 19) Diary of a Wimpy Kid: A Novel in Cartoons, by Jeff Kinney Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, by Jeff Kinney Tales from the Secret Annexe, by Anne Frank A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré Holes, by Louis Sachar
sf (non-Who): 9 (YTD 56) The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester The Secret History of Science Fiction, ed. James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel Gráinne, by Keith Roberts Corona, by Greg Bear Islands in the Sky, by Arthur C. Clarke The Sands of Mars, by Arthur C. Clarke Earthlight, by Arthur C Clarke Galileo’s Dream, by Kim Stanley Robinson Doctor Dolittle in the Moon, by Hugh Lofting
Doctor Who, etc: 4 (YTD 26) Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury, ed. Paul Cornell The Algebra of Ice, by Lloyd Rose Dead Romance, by Lawrence Miles Lethbridge-Stewart: Beast of Fang Rock, by Andy Frankham-Allan
Comics: 3 (YTD 17) The Divine, by Boaz Lavie, Asaf Hanuka and Tomer Hanuka Invisible Republic, Vol 1, by Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman Bétélgeuse v.5: L’Autre, by Leo
7,500 pages (YTD 40,100 pages) 6/30 (YTD 47/139) by women (Wright, Alexievich, Karjalainen, Frank, Rose, Bechko) 2/30 (YTD 10/139) by PoC (Miranda, Coates)
His [Henry II’s] father, Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, was a vassal of the King of France and had been nicknamed ‘Plantagenet’ after the sprig of broom — Planta genista — that he wore in his hat (the name was not adopted as a royal surname until the fifteenth century). Henry II and his sons founded the Angevin royal dynasty, but the county of Anjou was lost to England in the thirteenth century, so modern historians have come to use the surname Plantagenet for them and their descendants, who ruled England until 1485.
A good chunky book about the queens of England from Eleanor of Aquitaine (Henry II) to Eleanor of Castile (Edward I), including therefore also Berengaria of Navarre (Richard I), Isabella of Angouleme (John) and Eleanor (here Alienor) or Provence (Henry III). Weir has already published entire books about two of these (the first of the Eleanors and Isabella) and they rather dominate the narrative; in particular, the first queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who is everyone’s favourite of course, dies on page 186 of a 400-page book.
As narrative history it feels fairly complete. I am much more familiar with Eleanor and her children than with the second half of the story, and it filled in some gaps in my knowledge; in particular, I had no idea that Berengaria of Navarre had quite an interesting career as dowager queen, living another 30 years after Richard I was killed. The details of Henry III’s hapless reign were also largely new to me.
However, it would have been interesting also to interrogate the role of women in medieval politics. All of these queens were sometimes able to exercise legal authority and issue their own decisions; at other times they were not. What was the difference? What were the expectations of women in public life at that time? Weir does describe how the queens are portrayed in art, but without a lot of context for us to see how this compares with the portrayal of other women, or indeed men.
So, a slightly old-fashioned book, but full of interesting stuff. You can get it here.
A set of three plays from Big Finish all starring women from the Whoniverse – in fact, all bringing women characters together from the TV shows who did not meet on screen, or only met once – produced for International Women’s Day this year (they did the same in 2020, but I don’t seem to have reviewed that box set, though I enjoyed it too).
The first of these, Stolen Futures by Lizbeth Myles, is a sequel to the enigmatic Fourth Doctor story Warrior’s Gate, directed by Louise Jameson, following Lalla Ward’s Romana and John Leeson’s K9 as they start to liberate the Tharils from oppression, with Big Finish stalwart John Dorney and Louise Jameson’s ex David Warwick in the cast. It may not make much sense to you if you don’t remember Warrior’s Gate, but I do remember Warrior’s Gate and I really loved it; a strong concept and a strong script.
I’m apparently in a minority in not loving the middle play, Prism by Abigail Burdess. It brings together Georgia Tennant as Jenny, the Doctor’s Daughter, and Michelle Ryan as Lady Christina de Souza, in an adventure with a large, possibly very large diamond. I had some difficulty following the plot and the two leads are very similar to each other in character and voice.
But I felt we were cooking on gas again with the last of the three, The Turn of the Tides by Nina Millns (like Abigail Burdess a new writer for the Whoniverse). Here we have Katy Manning’s Jo Jones (nee Grant) and Anjli Mohindra’s Rani Chandra reunited, in the Amazon, with a UNIT character who I confess I had forgotten about, facing global catastrophe. It’s very much in tune with the times and also a nice nostalgia moment for Jo and (vicariously) Sarah Jane Smith.
Gradually working through the excellent Black Archive series of short monographs on Doctor Who stories, I have reached another Old Who story which I watched on first broadcast. When I rewatched Full Circle in 2008, I wrote:
Imagine if you were a 19-year-old fan and submitted your script idea to Doctor Who and it actually got accepted… again, I was surprised by how good Full Circle actually is, bar Matthew Waterhouse. Quite a sophisticated plot, both in terms of rebels vs establishment and in terms of the scientific hand-waving; and lots of nasty tension involving threats to Romana and the Tardis. The Gallifrey stuff at the beginning does seem a bit bolted on, and it’s one of the drawbacks of this season that it is dealt with a bit inconsistently.
When I came back to it in 2011 for my great Old Who rewatch, I wrote:
I think this may be a recurring theme in this post, but Full Circle was also much better than I remembered. This month’s DWM ran an interview with author Andrew Smith, who was only 18 at the time the story was made, and thus a cause of immense envy to all Who-watching teenagers such as myself (both then and also now, though I am no longer a teenager). Smith admits that the story underwent considerable massage by script editor Christopher Bidmead, but of course that actually helps to give it a certain unity of style with the rest of the season.
Rewatching it this time, I was not quite as satisfied in some ways – the science behind the plot doesn’t really make a lot of sense even in its own terms, and for a supposedly hard science script it draws on horror movie tropes to an extent that I found uncomfortable. However I particularly enjoyed Paddy Kingsland’s incidental music, and it was also interesting to see James Bree, recently escaped from Secret Army, in one of his three Doctor Who roles, as well as George Baker, who was Tiberius in I CLAVDIVS.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:
Amid all the relieved, frightened, and numbed faces, Nefred and Garif, overseeing the boarding operation, perceived Halrin Login, Keara’s father. Login was a respected man, a wise man destined perhaps one day to be a Decider.
Hmm. Smith is of course determined to give his own script a fair wind, but the end result is not very special; it is one of those rare occasions when the book doesn’t quite do justice to the special effects of the original series. Of course he gives us a bit more background to the Alzarians and their origin – or not – on Terradon, but if anything it rather confuses the picture.
Coming back to it now, I think this was a bit harsh of me. Smith does the descriptive bits perfectly adequately, and does his best to add colour to the background, without spoiling it by trying to add realism to the pseudoscience. You can get it here (for a price).
John Toon’s Black Archive essay on Full Circle is largely about the intellectual ideas behind the story. I’m coming to realise that while this is a perfectly valid approach, I find the Black Archive volumes giving the inside scoop on the creative choices made in the production of the story much more interesting. This is partly because I have previously dealt with the history of ideas in my own career, and moved on, and partly because often (as in this case) Doctor Who slightly muffs the landing for big philosophical debates.
Anyway, it’s a perfectly decent book as this very good series goes, and it won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Professional Production/Publication in 2019.
The first chapter makes the intriguing argument that rather than thinking of the Nathan-Turner era of Old Who, we should think of the Bidmead, Saward and Cartmel eras, the script editors being much more important than the producer in terms of content; and that Full Circle is the point where the Bidmead era really begins, after two stories at the start of the season which were leftovers from the previous regime.
The second chapter takes us through theories of evolution, which as previously mentioned is something I have done before; my Ph D supervisor was Peter Bowler. So I did not learn much from it.
The third chapter explains the Gaia hypothesis at some length, and reflects on its impact – or lack thereof – on the story line. I had forgotten that Lovelock’s book came out only the previous year, 1979. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Lovelock used the name ‘Gaia’47 to refer to this system of chemical feedback loops, partly because it had all of the convenience and none of the ugliness of an acronym, and partly to make the idea more relatable for his readers. The downside of this is that the reader might too easily suppose Lovelock was depicting the Earth itself as an intelligent being, personifying it by naming it in this way. In his preface to the 2000 edition of the book, Lovelock insists that he was simply exercising poetic licence for the benefit of his non-scientist readers, but not all of his readers drew a distinction between the poetry and the science. In the decades that followed its publication, Gaia was scorned by the orthodox scientific community and hailed as a visionary text by the New Age contingent of the environmental movement. 47 The name of an ancient Greek goddess personifying the Earth; as Lovelock admits in his opening chapter, the name was suggested to him by his neighbour William Golding (Lovelock, James, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth p10).
The fourth chapter points out that most of the “science” in Full Circle is pretty magical.
The fifth chapter tries (largely unsuccessfully) to find a social critique in the story’s presentation of progress, both evolutionary and scientific.
The sixth chapter looks at the importance of Adric being a teenager, and the presentation of teens and kids in Who at the time, while omitting any assessment of Waterhouse’s performance in the role.
The seventh chapter, one of the best, looks at the Marshmen in the context of cinematic monsters and finds much inspiration from the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
An appendix makes the slight point that it’s interesting when fans start to get involved with the production of the show.
Full Circle will never be one of my favourite stories, and I’m afraid this isn’t one of my favourite Black Archives either; I wanted more info on how the story was actually made, and way certain things were done or not done in the course of production. But John Toon is entitled to write the book he wants, which may not be the book I want. You can get it here.
Current The Monk, by Matthew Lewis (a chapter a week) Flicker, by Theodore Roszak Demons and Dreams: Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror v. 1, eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling A Master of Djinn, by P. Djélì Clark
Last books finished I am the Master, by Peter Anghelides et al The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, by Simon Bucher-Jones Doctor Who – Marco Polo, by John Lucarotti The Pilgrimage of Egeria: A New Translation, by Anne McGowan and Paul F. Bradshaw
Coming next, perhaps Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card Mort, by Terry Pratchett
In my genealogical researches, the only relative on my father’s side to have made even a minimal impact in the film industry who I’ve found is Sally Seaver, my third cousin, the second oldest of the great-great-grandchildren of William Charlton Hibbard and Sarah Anne Smith (she had an older sister, Janet). Born in 1928, two weeks before my father (her father Talcott Seaver was his second cousin), she had a brief career in Hollywood; she was announced as the female lead in the 1950 Kim, starring Errol Flynn and a very young Dean Stockwell, but that didn’t work out and the part went instead to Laurette Luez.
Sally then had four very small parts in films in 1952-1953:
In Aladdin and his Lamp (1952), she is credited as a dancing girl, but does not actually dance; In Skirts Ahoy! (1952), she is one of a large number of extras in the women’s naval training station scenes; In The Merry Widow (1952), she is one of many girls at Maxim’s under the spell of Fernando Lamas as Count Danilo; And finally in Off Limits aka Military Policemen (1953), she is one of many women fighting for the affections of Bob Hope, as “Maddy”, her only speaking part.
Here they are.
I do see a bit of a resemblance with my aunt Ursula, who was herself at one time a professional singer.
Sally died in 1963, aged only 35. She was married four times, and I am in touch with her son Michael from her first marriage, her only child, who helped me identify her in these scenes. I actually made contact with him through myheritage.com – the only person who I’ve got to know through that site. Michael is the oldest of the 3xgreat-grandchildren of William and Sarah Hibbard; my niece S, born more than sixty years after him, is the youngest and likely to stay that way.
Second paragraph of third section (“Rogues: The Battling Time Lords”, by Rob Levy):
While planning Season 8, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks decided to give Jon Pertwee’s third Doctor his own proper archenemy. Using the Sherlock Holmes/Professor Moriarty template as a guide, they birthed the Master, a mysterious antagonist that was the antithesis of the Doctor in almost every way.
Another of the unofficial Doctor Who annuals for the years when Old Who missed out, this time featuring the Sixth Doctor and (mostly) Peri and (sometimes) the Ainley!Master. Shorter than the Unofficial 1972 Annual. Two successive stories feature carnivorous plants, which is a bit of an editorial slip. The one I liked best was “A Weaponised Personality” by Christopher Swain-Tran. Out of print.
The year of 1966 would be a causal one for rock music and popular culture as a whole. The Beatles released Revolver – an album filled with exotic sounds that reflected the group’s LSD experiences – Cream, rock’s first so-called super-group, began inventing heavy metal; while Jimi Hendrix wowed London’s clubland with his dazzling, pyrotechnic approach to playing the electric guitar. In London, a collision of fashion, art and music was slowly taking effect, and would peak during the following year’s so-called Summer of Love.
Inspired to get this by the V&A exhibition a few years back. Starts with an in-depth account of the Live 8 reunion, which I read while rewatching the actual event. It’s more comprehensive and detailed than Nick Mason’s book, but less funny; it does address some points that Mason doesn’t, notably how the band handled rapidly becoming rich but also looking at the importance of the Cambridge roots (which Mason wasn’t part of) and the art that went with the albums and concerts (which Mason wasn’t as interested in). Very detailed, but didn’t quite sing to me. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is The Harp and the Blade, by John Myers Myers.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 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.
The major development of June 2016 was the Brexit referendum, which of course went the wrong way. I wrote to over a thousand British friends in the days immediately before, pleading with them to vote Remain; I led with the likely impact of Brexit on Northern Ireland, which really was not too hard to foresee. Shell-shocked the day after, I wrote this reaction with a colleague, most of which turned out to be right. I am still resentful and angry about Brexit, though I am also pretty clear that it will not be reversed any time soon. What a shame.
My major trip of June 2016 was to Northern Ireland for my great-aunt’s 100th birthday. She is still going strong and will turn 106 next month. (Sadly her oldest daughter, on the left here, has since passed away.)
I had two work-related trips as well, one at the start of the month in London, where I took in a Comics Museum exhibition of the work of Doctor Who illustrator Chris Achilleos:
And one at the end of the month to Barcelona.
It was also the month of the Belgium/Ireland match in the European Championships; out local pub allowed space for our Irish neighbours and us despite the general Belgitude.
6,200 pages (YTD 32,600 pages) 2/22 (YTD 41/109) by women (Munro, Dunnett) 1/22 (YTD 10/109) by PoC (Dumas)
Enjoyed re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which you can get here, and Dark Horse, which you can get here; best new read was the Selected Stories of Alice Munro, which you can get here. Several awful books in the Hugo packet, thanks to Puppy infestation; no names, no publicity.
When he married Hilda, she wanted everything for her two sons, and she exerted her all-powerful influence to detach my father from his family and his regimental friends, starting with his only child. She believed, wrongly, that having been on the other side during the war, she would not be accepted by his family. He sent a letter, which I received just as I was leaving for Switzerland and my mother and stepfather for Singapore. He wrote that he never wanted to see me again, that I preferred my mother and was only interested in his money. He had already paid for the year in Switzerland but would not give me another penny. Under English law at the time, it was perfectly legal to abandon a child of sixteen unless he or she was physically or mentally disabled. Everyone, including his family, assumed this was a temporary aberration, being infatuated with his new wife, and he would come to his senses before long. [Spoiler: he didn’t.]
Maralyn is my second cousin, the third oldest (second oldest living) great-grandchild of our Whyte great-grandparents, born in 1938. I only remember meeting her once, but I’ll certainly get back in touch after having read this very entertaining memoir. My parents, aunt and grandmother get passing mentions; she writes a lot more about her own family, the MacDermots, and other relatives who we both knew and know.
Having been disinherited after her parents’ divorce at the behest of her stepmother, Maralyn worked at a variety of jobs, starting with nannying for her uncle who was the British Ambassador in Indonesia, culminating in a series of semi-diplomatic roles in New York and then retirement in the Hamptons. She has been married twice; her first husband died dramatically in a canoeing accident, her second much later in life of natural causes.
She has clearly kept a diary, or at least good records, of everything that has happened to he since she was a teenager. The theme of the book is supposedly her travel to various parts of the world, including Antarctica, and indeed she has a sharp eye for detail, especially nature and landscapes and the things that happen to you on a long sea voyage, but the heart of the book is really her own friendships and family relationships.
Obviously I got this out of personal interest, but I think it would be an entertaining read even if you are not related to the author. You can get it here.
Next in the series of Black Archive monographs on Doctor Who is the second story from Season 10, where the Doctor has been liberated by the Time Lords from his exile on Earth and is once again able to travel the Universe. I missed it on original broadcast, but devoured the Target novelisation as a kid, and also enjoyed the re-showing of the TV story in 1981. When I came back to it in 2007, I wrote:
I’ve tended to rather rush through writing up the Pertwee stories I have been watching, as they are much of a muchness, but this is different. I remember back in 1981 when it was re-broadcast, we really wondered why – surely there were other, better Pertwee four-parters out there? The Terrance Dicks novelisation is only average. It seemed as if Carnival of Monsters had been chosen mainly because it followed on in continuity directly after The Three Doctors. Spoiled as we were by the Hinchcliffe and Williams years, Carnival of Monsters did not seem all that special.
I must say that now it does. The 1973 season was probably Pertwee’s second best (after his first, the 1970 season) and Carnival of Monsters is surely the best story in it – followed by Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks, which are both OK but not spectacular, and ending with The Green Death which is also a good one, particularly because it gets rid of Jo. The one thing that lets it down is the visual effects, rather a lot of dodgy CSO being used. But if you can shut your eyes and pretend you are still six during those bits, the rest is fantastic – Robert Holmes at his very best in the script, Michael Wisher in pre-Davros days as the main villain, Ian Marter in pre-Harry Sullivan days as a minor character, a real feeling of several different completely alien cultures (the two classes on Inter Minor and the Lurmans), and an absence of the blatant padding that mars so many Pertwee stories. A special shout to Cheryl Hall, later the girlfriend of Citizen Smith, as showgirl Shirna.
And there’s a couple of serious reflections in there too – the MiniScope itself is a futuristic development of the zoo, and gives rise to a rather caricatured discussion of conservation versus entertainment’ more seriously, Inter Minor is clearly a communist totalitarian state, threatened to its very foundations by any influence from the outside. [2022: I would not describe it as “communist” now.] Michael Wisher’s character Kalik is the conservative brother of the unseen president Zarb. It’s nicely observed, although not all conservative backlashes end with the leader of the hardliners being eaten alive by a Drashig. Shame.
When I came back to it again for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
And Carnival of Monsters takes us to an alien planet, with one of the great Robert Holmes scripts: he specialised in having a couple of characters whose dialogue informs us all about their world, and here he does it twice over, with Kalik and Orum (and to an extent Pletrac) revealing Inter Minor to us, and Vorg and Shirna representing the outside world. The idea of a closed and bureaucratic society dealing with the decadent entertainment possibilities of its neighbours is a rather good one. The first episode is especially good with no apparent connection between Inter Minor and the SS Bernice, until Vorg’s hand removes the Tardis.
Michael Wisher is excellent as the villainous Kalik. Maybe they should bring him back to, I dunno, play a mad scientist who invents the Daleks. I love Cheryl Hall as Shirna as well, though admittedly more for her costume than her acting. The Drashigs rather let it down though. And I noticed a continuity goof: as Jo flees from being thigh-deep in the marsh, her trousers dry instantly (and her close-fitting pockets don’t seem to contain the bulky set of skeleton keys).
Rewatching it now, I was impressed by the theatricality (in a good way) of the story. The scenes on Inter Minor all take place around the MiniScope. Cheryl Hall, only 22, is really impressive in a generally good cast. I did twitch at the racism of the S.S. Bernice sections, but it’s reasonable to say that this is counterpointed by the Inter Minor setting, which is not a communist state but an authoritarian racist apartheid society. I loved the line, “Give them a hygiene chamber and they store fossil fuel in it”!
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:
‘My dear fellow, do you really think that’s necessary?’
A good Robert Holmes script, turned into an average Terrance Dicks novel. I remember seeing this one in 1981 during the “Five Faces of Doctor Who” repeat season; wonder how well it would stand up to re-watching now?
In Dicks’ defence, I would say that he adds some extra bits of background colour to make Inter Minor more fully realised than it was on screen. I enjoyed returning to both the story and the book. You can get the book here.
I’ve greatly enjoyed Ian Potter’s Who-related fiction – several audio plays and a couple of short stories – and was curious as to how he would approach the task of writing up this story. He’s done a great job. I will quote the body of the first chapter in full, because it’s a good statement of how writing about Who can work at its best.
One of the great things about Doctor Who is that it is constructed by many hands for many audiences. It was built to entertain viewers of different ages and consequently has to work on several levels at once to engage them all. That gives us a lot to latch on to.
Carnival of Monsters (1973) is a story all about levels, but it’s not the vision of an auteur with a single story or underlying message to relay. It’s a show full of episodic set pieces having fun with us and with itself that also happens to be a story full of messages.
Once we get into critical analysis of any work of art, we inevitably open ourselves up to the accusation that we’re seeing things in the work that ‘aren’t there’. Our own expectations, prejudices, historical perspectives and personal contexts will always colour our responses and interpretations. I happen to think that’s fine. That’s viewing for you – you bring yourself to the show. I also make no apology for the fact that the discussion of the programme you’re now reading will end up longer than either the programme’s script or its novelisation, and will probably take longer to read than the programme takes to view. There’s always more in a script than is on the page, more in a production than ends up on screen, and more than one way to reinterpret it in print.
Some of the things I hope to explore in this brief look at Carnival of Monsters will be ideas that were quite deliberately placed there by one or more of the show’s many creators. Some will be things that may have slipped in without the creators’ knowledge. Some will have arisen simply through the circumstances of the production, or the climate of the time. Others are perhaps more visible now than they were then. I hope you’ll forgive me missing out or under-emphasising any aspects that interest you.
The second chapter records the extensive source material available about how the show was made. Part of the script was used for Malcolm Hulke’s book on TV writing, including the classic stage direction “‘A STREAM OF INCOMPREHENSIBLE BUT OBVIOUSLY REVOLUTIONARY GOBBLEDEYGOOK.”
The third chapter looks briefly at the soundtrack. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
The great triumph of the soundtrack is [Brian Hodgson’s] unearthly Drashig roars which combined treated versions of Hodgson’s own voice, his corgi bitch, an Australian butcherbird and, as Barry Letts recalled it, a squeal of car brakes. Whether deliberately, to help blend the elements, or just as result of slowing down tapes, the roar also has a curious long reverb, suggestive of a large echoing space. Perhaps the one weakness of the Drashig sound effects is that this reverb remains constant whether the Drashigs are in open country, within the SS Bernice hold, or roaming the Inter Minorian city.
The fourth chapter looks at the logistical considerations that led to the S.S. Bernice sections being on film and the Inter Minor scenes on video.
The fifth chapter looks in depth at the theatricality point I made earlier, for good and ill (mostly good), and how the editing process contributed to the final effect (more than usually so).
The sixth chapter looks at how the editing process affected the plot, with a few loose ends left dangling (most of which I must admit I did not notice on any of the four times I watched it).
The seventh chapter looks at Robert Holmes’ potential inspiration for the story. The one taproot text that is (plausibly) identified is Frederik Pohl’s “The Tunnel Under the World”. Potter also makes the interesting observation that Holmes saw military service in Burma in the second world war, and therefore would have had first-hand experience both of the Raj and of the bubbling marshes that feature in so many of his stories – a really interesting point that I had not thought of before.
The eighth chapter looks at the extent to which the story is commentary on TV, on Doctor Who and on itself.
The populations of Inter Minor and the SS Bernice are not massively dissimilar: both locations feature a pair of male and female travellers, a handful of authority figures, and about six non-speaking characters who do all the work for them and mostly end up as disposable foot soldiers for the elite. The extent to which this is the writer drawing a deliberate parallel or devising drama for each recording block with similar available resources is up for debate, but Holmes definitely seems to repeatedly invite us to draw connections between the worlds.
The ninth chapter looks briefly at the political satire in the script, with reference to Britain’s relations with the EU and to pandemics.
The tenth chapter looks at the story’s approach to racism, both on Inter Minor and the Raj, and packs a lot of things to think about into a few pages.
The eleventh chapter looks at the story’s unusual use of vertical perspectives in filming. (Actually this did not completely convince me.)
The twelfth chapter looks at language, specifically the language of the chickens, and Polari.
The thirteenth chapter looks at the extent to which the story resets the narrative of Doctor Who as a whole.
The fourteenth chapter looks at the story’s longevity and popularity, especially the Drashigs.
The fifteenth chapter tries to establish the dates on which the story is set, at length.
An appendix, as long as the main text, compares the early and final versions of the script. Unfortunately in the electronic version of the book we can’t see the struck through text which indicates deletions.
This is generally very good, breezy and enlightening, and you can get it here.
The goddess Nehalennia was worshipped in ancient Roman times by the people of the Schelde delta; what is now Zeeland in the Netherlands. She is always depicted with a basket of fruit and/or loaves, and a dog. Nobody knows why.
She had been largely forgotten by history until 1645, when a massive storm shifted the coastal dunes revealing a lost temple near the town of Domburg. Dozens of votive plaques to Nehalennia were found, all showing her with her dog and her basket of apples. It is thought that sailors threw them overboard, or otherwise dedicated them, at the start of a voyage to pray for safety.
The many votive plaques were stored in the church in Domburg. One night in 1848 the church was struck by lightning, caught fire and collapsed, destroying the ancient limestone within. (I am not making this up.) Only one of the ancient tablets to Nehalennia survived, because it had been lent to scholars in Brussels and had not been returned following Belgian independence. The sole surviving tablet is now in the Cinquantenaire Museum, and I went to see it with little U at Christmas time.
Since 1970, more tablets to Nehalennia have been coming to light a bit further along the coast at Colijnsplaat, where local pagan enthusiasts have now built a small Roman-era-style temple to the goddess, which I visited last September.
It includes both a genuine Roman Nehalennia tablet and a more modern vision of the divinity.
Local pagans use the building for weddings and other celebrations. It is good to see the memory of a powerful woman being revived and venerated, even if she probably never existed.
Current The Monk, by Matthew Lewis (a chapter a week) I am the Master, by Peter Anghelides et al Flicker, by Theodore Roszak The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak
Last books finished Queens of the Crusades, by Alison Weir The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers A Norman Legacy, by Sally Harpur O’Dowd Tower, by Nigel Jones The Pilgrimage of S. Silvia of Aquitania to the Holy Places (circa 385 A.D.), trans. John H. Bernard, with an appendix by Sir Charles William Wilson. The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell The Pilgrimage of Etheria, trans. M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe Signs and Symbols Around the World, by Elizabeth S. Helfman Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
Next Demons and Dreams: Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror v. 1, eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
It’s been a while since I have written at length about Brexit, but the most recent developments have driven me to put some electrons together on the topic. By way of introduction, I participated in a televised manel discussion on Al-Jazeera on Wednesday with Duncan Morrow of Ulster University and Graham Gudgin from Cambridge, which you can watch here:
Also very importantly, the excellent Brexit Witness archive has published a wide-ranging interview with Andrew McCormick, one of the best of the mandarins in the Northern Ireland Civil Service. I do recommend reading the whole thing, but Tony Connelly of RTE has published a summary here.
The other recent development, of course, is the Northern Ireland Assembly election. I wrote about the raw numbers last weekend; there is some necessary analysis which will come now.
It seems however that this only slowly dawned on Whitehall after the referendum result. When the EU insisted that citizenship rights, financial obligations and arrangements on the Irish border should be sorted out as part of the divorce deal, the British initially found the first two much more difficult to swallow. Many in London seemed to believe that Chancellor Merkel of Germany would tell the Irish to accept whatever deal suited the British for the sake of future car exports, thus completely misunderstanding the weight of individual member states in the EU system, not to mention the politics of the German car industry.
Part of the myth spread by Brexit secretary David Davis is that the Irish government drastically hardened its line on sorting out the border when Leo Varadkar took over from Enda Kenny as Taoiseach in 2017. Again, this is untrue, but I categorise it as a misunderstanding rather than a lie; what actually happened in 2017 was that the UK actually started paying attention to the fact that Dublin had a view (to say that London was actually listening would be a step too far).
There is no need to rehearse at length the agony of Theresa May, who eventually realised that the hard Brexit to which she had committed herself at the start of the process would be disastrous if implemented on the Irish border, but failed to take her party with her, let alone the DUP. Johnson, having replaced her as Prime Minister with the help of the DUP, then (to my surprise) agreed a deal with Leo Varadkar including a special status for Northern Ireland which became the Protocol.
To remind you: the Protocol keeps Northern Ireland inside the EU’s single market and customs union, in order to avoid customs checks on the land border. But since the UK has “taken back control”, this inevitably means that somewhere there must be customs and other checks on goods which might travel from the rest of the UK to the EU, and if the Border is to remain open, that means that those checks take place in the Irish Sea, between England, Scotland and Wales to the east, and Ireland and Northern Ireland to the West. The great sitcom Parlement spoofed these discussions rather well:
The question is, how did we end up with a situation where Boris Johnson claimed to have an “oven-ready” deal with the EU before the 2019 election, and now repudiates the Northern Ireland Protocol, one of the core planks of that deal? The UK government’s defenders make various arguments. Some say that the EU has been too tough in implementing the rules (which in fact have not yet been implemented in any meaningful sense). Some (including the then UK chief negotiator, David Frost) say that the deal was negotiated too quickly (after three and a half years, which does not really seem too short a time to prepare).
The UK now threatens to unilaterally disapply the Protocol starting next week, provoking a trade war with the EU at precisely the moment that the West needs to be united in support of Ukraine. It is alleged that the new arrangements have made life worse in Northern Ireland (though the government’s own economists report that thanks to the Protocol, Northern Ireland’s economy is outperforming the rest of the UK’s). The EU is blamed for creating the trade barriers which the UK demanded and agreed to. The UK, now keen to sign trade agreements with the rest of the world, is about to tear up its biggest agreement, with its closest and largest trading partner. Not hugely smart.
Why do this? I ask again. My view is that Conservatives in general, who are genuinely and deeply emotionally attached to the Union, cannot bear the thought of implementing a trade and customs frontier inside the UK. Johnson assured them in 2019 that it would be all right, no matter what might actually be written in the deal, and they believed him, despite his track record with the truth. So I predict that the Johnson government, however long it lasts, will not implement the Protocol in any meaningful way.
On top of that, the consequences of fighting with the EU are largely positive for the Conservatives. It keeps Brexit going and puts Labour in a difficult position. Sure, there are economic consequences, but they are lost in the static of post-pandemic recovery and the effects of the war in Ukraine, and will be most felt in Northern Ireland where the Conservatives do not stand anyway. Few Conservatives care about the damage to the UK’s international reputation – they are all foreigners, after all. The strategy is in fact to fight rather than to win.
There is very little appetite in Brussels, Dublin or other capitals to give the British what they currently say they want. This goes right back to the early days of Brexit, when the EU was very alert to the potential for the UK to undermine the Single Market. In addition, the UK’s July 2021 Command Paper on the Protocol ambitiously rewrote the recent history of the relationship to an extent that was unrecognisable outside Westminster and further undermined trust. The tactics of escalation have failed to convince other capitals that the British are serious about finding solutions. It’s also noticeable that the current escalation is coming from the UK Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, who clearly has ambitions to be the next Conservative leader, an election that must come sooner or later, and also needs to put her own previous pro-Remain baggage behind her.
How do we know this is a problem…well a former Defra secretary — one @trussliz warned of this in the 2016 referendum campaign in an article for @Vet_Record /12 pic.twitter.com/2isrikJqkM
The actual situation on the ground in Northern Ireland is barely relevant to Conservative decision-making. The DUP do have an outsized influence with the Tories because they have the largest delegation at Westminster, and their MPs are well networked with the Conservative back-benchers; Sinn Fein are not there at all, the SDLP have only two MPs, one of whom is the party leader, and Alliance have only one, who is the party’s deputy leader. But one should not exaggerate this factor; it did not help the DUP when the 2019 deal was passed, over their loud objections about the Protocol.
So, the last part of this post is about Northern Ireland, where the DUP last week paid the price at the ballot box for their strategic mistakes of the last few years. I wrote briefly about Arlene Foster’s leadership when she resigned; it’s worth adding that the DUP’s pledge to punish the Northern Ireland institutions, by not allowing a government to be formed until the Protocol has gone, has a real whiff of Blazing Saddles. Yes, it is a functional political problem that Unionists as a whole do not accept the Protocol; but Stormont has very little to do with that, and Westminster is where the battle actually is. (Unlike almost everyone else, I’m therefore actually rather sympathetic to Jeffrey Donaldson’s stated intention to remain an MP for the time being.)
That brings us to the other side of the DUP’s policy choices. There is a very strong perception among non-Unionists that the real reason that the DUP do not want to reinstate the Northern Ireland Executive is that Sinn Fein would get the position of First Minister, thanks to the rewriting of the rules at the behest of the DUP in 2007. Personally, I share that perception, though I will be glad to be proved wrong. If I am right that the UK government is about to escalate the situation with the EU, we will soon see if the DUP is actually prepared to accept the result of an election that it did not win. (For more on the election, see the very interesting analysis by Lee Reynolds.)
The DUP is under threat from Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice, which snatched a quarter of their 2017 votes away on 5 May (though remarkably failed to win any seats); Allister is very clear that Sinn Fein should not be allowed in government at all, and that the DUP would be stooges for enabling them to lead it, and the voters who defected to him from the DUP presumably feel the same. But if Northern Ireland is to have a long term future at all as a society, power-sharing is essential – as my father recommended in 1971.
A brief personal parenthesis: Both Jim Allister (when he was an MEP) and Sir Jeffrey Donaldson (when he was a member of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly) have been personally helpful to me in the past, knowing full well that I disagree with them on a lot of things, so I want to state on the record that I respect and salute their professionalism.
But if you are attached to the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland – and I am not – you will need to start selling the case for the Union better; as Lee Reynolds puts it, “The declining politics of birth and disappeared politics of push must be replaced by the politics of persuasion.” Crucially, you will need to show that Unionism accepts election results even when it doesn’t win; non-Unionists have had to accept that for a century.
Unionism continues to be worse than Nationalism at appealing to its own core vote and not engaging with the centre (✔)
There is a better offer on the table from Nationalists (currently quite far from being achieved, and in particular the need for Nationalists to find a convincing narrative on health services is even more acute after the last two years).
Nothing is certain in politics, but the current direction of travel is clear, and the DUP and the Conservative Party are doing nothing to stop it.
Thence they had a long (over 200 miles) journey by road to Chalon-sur-Saône, whence they took a steamer down the River Rhone to Avignon, which should have been much more comfortable. The swift flowing Rhone can be quite exciting to sail down, and this trip reportedly took thirteen hours. That would be an average of 16.8 knots!
I complained of the four previous biographies that 1) none of them is particularly good, 2) none of them looked at Kavanagh’s political career in much detail (he ended up leader of the Irish Unionist MPs in the House of Commons) and 3) none of them looked at his religious beliefs. Igoe’s biography is certainly better than the other four, and looks at Kavanagh’s politics in detail, and at least gives more than passing notice to his religious practice, so I think I’d recommend it as a starting point to anyone wanting to explore Kavanagh’s life.
I felt that Igoe is particularly good also at looking at Kavanagh’s family circumstances, a younger son of a landlord family, a class that was already dying out, doing his best to stand up for his ideal of an old-fashioned, conservative Ireland in changing times. And to be honest, Ireland was a pretty conservative country until quite recently; had he lived to see Irish independence (he would have been 91 in 1922) he would probably have accommodated himself to it as he accommodated himself to other inconveniences in his life.
Igoe’s style is a bit breathless, and there are one or two moments where I winced at a truncation of the historical record. But he sticks close to the historical facts, as far as they can be determined from the record, where other recent biographers have taken the truncated figure of Kavanagh as a canvas to project their own fantasies onto. Really, the truth is extraordinary enough. You can get it here.
