Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr. Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent. For he had been as instructive as Milton’s “affable archangel;” and with something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest of truth was no light or speedy work. His notes already made a formidable range of volumes, but the crowning task would be to condense these voluminous still-accumulating results and bring them, like the earlier vintage of Hippocratic books, to fit a little shelf. In explaining this to Dorothea, Mr. Casaubon expressed himself nearly as he would have done to a fellow-student, for he had not two styles of talking at command: it is true that when he used a Greek or Latin phrase he always gave the English with scrupulous care, but he would probably have done this in any case. A learned provincial clergyman is accustomed to think of his acquaintances as of “lords, knyghtes, and other noble and worthi men, that conne Latyn but lytille.”
I had really been looking forward to this bubbling to the top of my reading list, and I was not at all disappointed. You’ve probably either already read it or decided that it’s not for you, and that’s fine; rather than review it, I’m going to run briefly over the reasons why I love this book.
Characterisation. Everyone in the novel has their own distinctive voice. There are no stereotypes. Even Bulstrode, who seems at an early stage to be being set up as a rhetorical target, turns out to have unexpected depths.
Change. I wrote a few years back that it’s rather an sfnal book, dealing as it does with the impact on society of a time of rapid social, political and scientific change. Eliot is writing 40 years after it happened, so we readers know that it’s a done deal, but her characters don’t and she takes us beautifully through the uncertainty.
Setting. We can guess whether or not Middlemarch is pre-industrial Coventry, but it hardly matters; it could be anywhere in England. More impressive is that she has given a compelling picture of a time 40 years ago which manages to avoid appearing anachronistic. (The same distance separates us from 1981: Reagan and Mitterand become presidents, the Hunger Strikes in Northern Ireland, martial law in Poland, MTV and PacMan launch.)
Plot. I’m jotting these things down in no particular order, but really the 682 pages fly by as we wonder exactly what will happen next. Eliot has a great gift for taking people into very difficult situations in such a way that we understand exactly how they got themselves there and feel deeply invested in how they can possibly get out.
Politics. It’s everywhere, and it’s not just the issue of the day, the Great Reform Bill; it’s also the politics of gender, with the major women characters all constrained by social (and in Dorothea’s case legal) pressure to take or avoid particular roles. She doesn’t bang on about it, but shows us enough to make it clear which side she is on.
Happy ending. I am a bit of a sucker for soppy conclusions, and I love this one.
If you like this sort of thing, you probably already have it, but if you don’t you can get it here.
This was the top book on my shelves which I had already read but not reviewed here. Next on that pile is (shudder) The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Current Le dernier Atlas, tome 2, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard Fish Tails, by Sheri S. Tepper The Dragon Republic, by R.F. Kuang
Last books finished A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, by Zora Neale Hurston Empire Games, by Charles Stross
"Grotto of the Dancing Deer", by Clifford D Simak Star Tales, ed. Steve Cole The Kingdom of Copper, by S. A Chakraborty Too Innocent Abroad: Letters Home from Europe 1949, by Joan Hibbard Fleming Martin Lukes: Who Moved My Blackberry, by Lucy Kellaway
Next books Strange Bedfellows: An Anthology of Political Science Fiction, ed. Hayden Trenholm The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams
Fri, 10:45: How Dominic Cummings always makes things worse https://t.co/RU38g4AopI “The result of his supposed ceaseless quest to deliver a system of government that is competent and rigorous and serves the public? Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.”
The dull stinging sensation of a numb arm woke Tom Niven. He glanced at his watch. It was still stupid o’clock. What the hell was going on? His head was still fuzzy from last night’s trip to the Students’ Union. Cheap booze, Ronnie’s jazz fags and Freshers… ah. That explained the dead arm. And the blonde head on the pillow beside him. She was lying across his arm. Christ, what was her name again? Anne? Andrea? Anna! Bingo. That’s was it. Anna! Anna Whitaker. It was all coming back to him. Anna Whitaker, a Fresher with an interest in medieval history. He had done the course on the Crusades a few years earlier. He’d given her a bit of chat about the course, what books to go for, what the tutors would look for… a few drinks, some all-American charm and then back to the flat. None of his flatmates were back for term yet so they’d had the place to themselves.
I've been taking a bit of a sabbatical from Doctor Who books over the last year or so, but I've decided to jump back in, taking three strands of reading: the stories of Erimem, an audio companion for Peter Davison's Doctor; the Candy Jar novels of the Brigadier; and also the most recent BBC publications (which have slowed to rather a trickle at the moment). I'm going to resume the Brigadier books from where I left off, but I'm taking the Erimem series from the beginning, even though I had already read this one in 2015. Back then I wrote:
Here she is brought back to adventure by her creators, Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett (with a foreword by Caroline Morris who played her on audio and has now given up acting for other behind the scenes media work). It's a decent enough story; Erimem appears in a 21st century university museum, with convenient amnesia of her adventures since leaving Egypt, and gets swept up into faculty politics with demonic forces and the Battle of Actium. I was entertained and I will get the next in the series.
(Well, it took me six years but I did eventually get the next in the series.) On rereading, I still enjoyed it; Erimem's convenient amnesia means that you don't need to know anything about her Doctor Who background to appreciate the book, though you may wonder how a young woman could both be a Pharaoh and also have awesome combat skillz. The seedy campus scenes of the 21st century are written with conviction, and the Egypt / Actium scenes with enough spirit to avoid the impression of historic bludgeoning. Also a couple of the incidental characters get killed off, having been given decent characterisation first, which doesn't always happen in books like this. Not Great Literature, but entertaining. You can get it here.
Wed, 15:06: RT @davidschneider: Not sure why Lord Frost wants to change the NI Protocol. Here’s Boris Johnson clearly saying it’s a “brilliant deal” an…
Wed, 15:30: RT @davemacladd: I see Lord Frost is getting really angry at the Brexit deal negotiated by Lord Frost again
Wed, 15:45: Des O’Malley, founder of the Progressive Democrats, has died. Condolences to Eoin and the rest of the family. In his famous “I stand by the Republic” speech of 20 February 1985, he said that reading my father crystallized his thinking. https://t.co/15pBDXy2Gqhttps://t.co/X7tvnRdsfy
Wed, 16:05: RT @perdricof: my crazy take is that you can’t really understand american gender roles unless you understand that they’re basically a react…
Wed, 17:11: It’s our National Day! Martin Conway’s @five_books about Belgium: Sorrow of Belgium (H Claus) Belgium and the Congo (G Vanthemsche) King Ottokar’s Sceptre (Hergé) Legacy of Nazi Occupation (P Lagrou) Souvenirs Pieux / Dear Departed (Marguerite Yourcenar) https://t.co/elZBhmR3kzhttps://t.co/PyGJalbiYn
Wed, 21:00: RT @SFischer_EU: A #Brexit reminder: The Northern Ireland Protocol was negotiated by the government. It was signed by the government.…
Wed, 21:51: RT @JenniferMerode: David Frost’s plan to renegotiate Irish protocol will fail on the big points (trusted traders and ECJ). But at least t…
It's too soon, sire. You do not have enough influence over his will. There is no telling what may happen. The melding is still in its early stages.
I've previously read Kearney's first two novels, The Way to Babylon and A Different Kingdom, both of which involve liminal adventures of a chap in our world who finds himself also playing a vital and heroic role in a fantasy world; but is it real? Riding the Unicorn has much the same premise, but some differences; the protagonist is an older ex-army prison guard, who is somehow chosen for a vital political assassination on the other side. It did not come together as well as the first two, I felt; it's brave to make the central character less attractive, but it also makes him less interesting, and I wasn't actually convinced by the need for the fantasy world to choose him for the mission. And there's no actual unicorn, except in an opening quotation about schizophrenia. But it's not too long. I see it's now being marketed as in sequence with the previous two, suggesting that the parallel world is the same in each case. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Strange Bedfellows: An Anthology of Political Science Fiction, ed. Hayden Trenholm.
Tue, 15:42: John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer 2011 https://t.co/xxyMTiUDst Little did I know when I wrote this, ten years ago today, that it would annoy Larry Correia so much that he started the Sad Puppy campaign.
Wed, 10:45: RT @DavidHenigUK: The bold new UK government threat to break the Northern Ireland protocol is of course completely unlike the old threat to…
My last update was a bit pessimistic, as COVID case numbers started to surge again in Belgium. But actually it now looks not too bad. Cases today are at 1330 (well, that’s the daily average for 10-16 July), compared to 697 ten days ago and 328 twenty days ago. But hospital numbers are only at 265, up a bit from 240 ten days ago and down rather more from 329 twenty days ago. So it looks rather like the extensive vaccination campaign (68% of the entire population has had one jab, 49% have had both) means that those who are getting the bug are not getting it as badly. It’s still far from over, of course, but this is the first time we’ve seen a surge in cases that wasn’t immediately followed by a surge in hospital numbers, ICU cases and ultimately deaths. We are in new territory. I see unconfirmed reports today that the UK is no longer screening arrivals from green or amber countries; I do hope that’s true and also that it’s sustainable.
A different disaster: on Thursday last week we were woken early in the morning by extraordinarily heavy rain. The flooding was very bad in parts of Belgium and worse in Germany, and a number of kind people contacted us to ask if we were OK. Fortunately we’re elevated well above the river basin. We had some roads closed, and some houses in the next village had to be evacuated and had their cellars flooded. Other places had it much worse. But the most dramatic thing in our locality was a confused beaver seen navigating a street which is normally not under water.
Also in more or less local news, this morning I went to Landen to attend a ceremonial visit by Patrick Butler, Lord Mayor of Limerick, to inspect the battlefield on which Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, lost his life in 1693. The Mayor of Landen, Gino Debreux, presented him with a rare contemporary print of the battlefield.
We then went to the Chapel of the Holy Cross, which you may remember is a favourite place of mine anyway, where Wim explained the course of the battle to us.
The two mayors (both wearing sunglasses) inspected a contemporary 1693 rifle. (Later on the Mayor of Landen got a fantastic photo of the Mayor of Limerick firing a similar weapon, which I hope he will publish).
I’ve had a nice relaxed few days in Paris, which I’ll write up at the weekend, and tomorrow is a public holiday here. Back to work after that. But it’s been really good to have a five-day break, my first since the start of the year.
6) Monster Hunter International, by Larry Correia. I do have little hesitation in putting Monster Hunter International last. It is relentlessly single-tone, derivative and predictable, and I can't see how anyone could rank it above any of the other works included in the package. To an extent the John W. Campbell Award is about the future of the genre; books like this take us way back to the past, with the incidentals slightly jazzed up for the twenty-first century, and I think it would be embarrassing for the genre if Correia won on the basis of this.
I stand by this; I think it was harsh but fair, and voters by and large voted for other people (the winner was Lev Grossman). And I wasn't just picking on Correia, though he may have felt so; for comparison this is what I wrote about that year's winner of the Hugo for Best Novel, which came in two huge parts, Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear:
(First half🙂 The portrayal of wartime Britain is relentless and in the end wearyingly sentimentalised, the history students too busy being caught up in the moment to reflect on what they are doing there and what they might learn. There is an awful lot of running around and missed communication, and then the book ends in mid-story, without even the dignity of a decent cliffhanger, the publisher expecting you to buy the next volume to see how it ends. I will, but will wait until it is available as a second-hand paperback.
(Second half🙂 It is a mild improvement on the first volume, in that there are actual signs of plot around page 400 and again around page 600. But the tone is wearyingly sentimental as ever, and the characters just dull apart from the two cheeky kids; and in the end, if the time continuum is going to respond to time travellers in such a way as to preserve History As We Know It – and there is never any good reason for Willis's characters to think otherwise apart from her need to inject emotion into her writing – it's difficult to get excited about it. I also spotted more errors of setting here than I had noticed in Blackout – premature mention of the Jubilee Line by over three decades, and reportedly vast distances separating the Tower from Stepney (actually about a mile and a half apart) and St Paul's from Bart's (five minutes' brisk walk).
I suppose the good news is that it will probably take Willis another six years to publish her next book; the bad news is that it too will probably win awards it doesn't deserve.
I will admit that I am sometimes grumpy and brief in what I write about novels – I find it much easier to write at length about non-fiction books (as a glance at my recent reviews will demonstrate). I don't pretend to write for anyone but myself; I generally try not to be performative (with occasionalexceptions).
But my brief caustic note about Monster Hunter International had a substantial afterlife, and mutated out of all recognition in the telling of Larry Correia, as analysed by Camestros Felapton here and even more so here:
In later years, Correia would recount that either a “European snob reviewer” or a “British blogger” wrote either that “If Larry Correia wins the Campbell, it will END WRITING FOREVER” or that if Larry Correia wins the Campbell it will end literature forever”. I have searched for reviews saying these things but have not found them [13]. It is likely that Correia had read Whyte’s review as he would note:
And closer to the convention he would increase the number of people rating him sixth:
“I am the least favored to win by the literary critical types, (in fact, I’ve seen a few places where they have ranked me #6 out of the 5 finalists) but that’s cool, because I am the only author eligible that has had a gnome fight or trailer park elves. (or as one critic pointed out, I am a relentlessly single tone throw back, and another said that if I win it is an insult and a black mark on the entire field of writing.) SWEET! I’m so unabashadly pulpy and just happy to entertain, and thus offensive, that I make the inteligensia weep bitter blood tears of rage.” https://monsterhunternation.com/2011/08/13/my-worldcon-schedule-and-running-commentary/
Basically, nobody ever wrote that Correia winning the Campbell Award would "end writing forever" or "end literature forever", or that it would be an "insult" or "a black mark on the entire field of writing". "A few places" suggests more than two people rating him sixth out of five; I don't believe that anyone stated that in public other than me and one commenter on my blog, which is two people in one place, rather than "a few places". Those statements by Correia were, simply, lies (or fiction, if you will), distorting my words, made up to feed his narrative of victimhood and drive the marketing campaign for the Sad Puppies. (I won't complain about being called a "European snob reviewer" – I've had much worse, from more important people than him. I would not claim to be "literati elite" either.)
If I had realised that Correia was so thin-skinned that he would be provoked by my review, and by other slights whether real or imaginary, to launch a campaign to wreck the Hugos, would I have moderated my tone? Obviously I regret and deplore the Puppy campaigns, but I disclaim any responsibility for Correia's actions. He is legally an adult and should have been able to behave like a grownup. Some people like his writing; some don't; I am in the latter category, and strangely enough the subsequent behaviour of Correia and his allies did nothing to change my mind.
The advocates of the pulp tradition simply cannot see beyond the ends of their noses. Science fiction has existed in British and European literature for about a hundred years. It existed as a natural part of all literature. Writers outside the science fiction category, both major and minor, have turned to the speculative themes of sf as a means of saying something. They did this before Gernsback came along, they did it all through Campbell’s so-called Golden Age, and they continue to do it now. After fifty years, pulp science fiction has improved itself to the point where the half-dozen or so best sf writers can compete with writers outside. This is my principal indictment of the pulp tradition: it put the clock back and created something worse. Gernsback and his imitators siphoned off speculative literature into crass, commercial magazines, and made it into trash. After fifty years, we’re just recovering.
Looking forward to seeing Chris Priest again at this year's Novacon, all being well. I hope that I never encounter Larry Correia in person.
Sun, 12:07: RT @PickardJE: U-TURN ALERT: – Number 10 spokesman now says Johnson will remain at Chequers to self-isolate”, conducting meetings with min…
There is a big exhibition about Napoleon in Paris, and in the course of a long weekend there F and I visited it yesterday.
It’s alway interesting to see what is included and what is not in an exhibition like this. Napoleon’s career as a military and political leader lasted only 20 years, but he packed a lot into that time. The exhibition is big on art and artefacts, including several of the classic portraits:
And also the coach that took Napoleon to his coronation and his second marriage, and some pretty amazing domestic objects.
Videos of talking heads and animated maps illustrate the course of Napoleon’s career. These filled in a couple of important gaps in my own knowledge. I was aware of the Egypt campaign, of course; I didn’t realise that Napoleon also invaded the Holy Land, getting as far north as Acre before having to retreat. When he sneaked back to France leaving his army in the lurch in Egypt, it was to a hero’s welcome and within weeks he was in charge of the whole affair.
I was also vaguely aware of the Haitian revolution, but had somehow missed that this was sparked by Napoleon’s reintroduction of slavery, eight years after Revolutionary France had abolished it. This must be the worst thing that Napoleon did in his career, as a matter of principle. The extraordinary story of Louis Delgrès and the failed revolt in Guadeloupe was new to me.
It had not occurred to me that Napoleonic France had a legislative system, but of course it did, even if this was somewhat limited – the Tribunat, which could debate new laws but not vote on them, and the Corps législatif, which could vote on the new laws but not debate them, along with the hand-picked Conservative Senate (the adjective is part of the official name) which eventually formally deposed Napoleon in 1814. I would have liked to hear more about Cambacérès, the Second Consul who was basically prime minister and wrote the Code Napoléon. Not mentioned in the exhibition, but he was homosexual and everyone knew it.
There’s a nice presentation of the two empresses. I always feel sorry for Marie-Louise, made empress at 18 for five brief years. Her lover and second husband was a younger son of the Neipperg family, who owned the land on which I worked as an archaeological volunteer in Germany in 1986. The head of the family then was Joseph Hubert Graf von Neipperg, who died only last year, aged 102.
It’s impossible not to feel some sympathy for Napoleon at the end. I thought the Montfort/Vernet painting of Napoleon’s Farewell to the Imperial Guard was striking.
And you leave the exhibition under the brooding gaze of Vela's statue of the last days of Napoleon on St Helena.
Time well spent. Get to Paris and view the exhibition while you can.
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.
This was the month that I agreed to become Division Head for promotions for the 2014 Worldcon in London. I had never held a position of responsibility in a science fiction convention before. More on this as the months go by. This conversation took place at my first Eastercon at Heathrow, which will be remembered by many for the bizarre presentation at the BSFA Award ceremony… But otherwise it was great fun and the Guardian wrote it up.
I also wrote about our family:
And had a crazy visit to Strasbourg with the Georgians.
I turned 45; my intern, Colombian L, also a Doctor Who fan and a keen baker, presented me with a very welcome present.
Fri, 15:41: RT @13sarahmurphy: Freedom Day. Independence Day. Levelling up. Build back better. Oven ready deal. Take back control. World-beating. Globa…
Fri, 16:05: RT @Tom_deWaal: “Putin, an amateur, boldly steps on every mine as he attempts to tell Ukrainians that their statehood is an accident, their…
Fri, 20:53: I’m at Reserve Du Terroir in Paris, �le-de-France https://t.co/4mc8PpMprR Eating a meal in Paris for the first time in more than two years. Eating a meal outside Belgium for the first time in almost a year.
Sat, 09:09: RT @RTEsport: “I’m just so happy to be able to come here and perform and do my country proud.” – Rhasidat Adeleke gives her reaction after…
Sat, 10:45: RT @emilydugan: Exclusive:- Londoner Cynsha Best always thought she was British. Now, after 30 years, the government says she’s not https:/…
Current Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, by Zora Neale Hurston Empire Games, by Charles Stross A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik
Last books finished The Last Pharaoh, by Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett The Separation, by Christopher Priest Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir Middlemarch, by George Eliot The House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard Times Squared, by Rick Cross
Next books The Kingdom of Copper, by S. A Chakraborty
"Grotto of the Dancing Deer", by Clifford D Simak
Thu, 12:56: The Tories are learning that culture wars make you enemies as well as friends https://t.co/31APyzirxb And that if you pick a fight with footballers, you may lose.
Thu, 22:16: RT @Freedland: Admired him already, but this statement from Saka – and especially the directness of its message to the social media platfor…
A retelling of Frankenstein from the point of view of one of the Scottish islanders, where Frankenstein creates a spouse for the mosnter. TBH I didn't really get it; I didn't find the use of dialogue convincing Scottish (let alone Frankenstein's use of German) and that rather threw me, and it was difficult to believe that early 19th-century islanders would behave as described. You can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2014. Next on that pile is Strange Bedfellows: An Anthology of Political Science Fiction, ed. Hayden Trenholm.
Wed, 17:11: RT @LordCFalconer: The government today just amended an absolute duty on it contained in an Act of Parliament by a motion in the Commons.…
Wed, 20:48: RT @scarethehorses: The censoring of an artwork by a local council that sensitively draws attention to elements of local and national histo…
Her birth had been expensive. Eighteen years ago, in order to wrench a final bud from this terminal axil, her mother and father had slaughtered all the children of their House in order to secure a necromantic heir. Harrow had been created in that hour of pallor mortis, while the souls of her peers were fumbling to escape their bodies, her genesis their ignition of thanergy as they died with a simultaneity her parents had agonised to calculate. None of this had been kept from her. It had been explained to Harrow, year after year, right from the time she knew both when to speak and when to not. This skill came early to Ninth House infants.
Jeepers. I really didn't understand what was going on here. I didn't remember a lot about the first book, which was a finalist last year, but am not sure it would have helped if I had. Clearly appeals to quite a lot of people.
She felt the apprentices’ hands, two girls who strained and heaved as they dragged her from the river. She heard Zataya order them to build up the fire, and then she breathed in the smoke the witch fanned from the flames. She screamed without sound at the hot, thick drip of blood against her naked chest, and then at Zataya’s command to her apprentices to spread the blood evenly over Naranpa’s supine form. And as the witch covered her with a blanket, pausing only to pry her mouth open and place a salt rock under her tongue, Naranpa wept unnoticed tears.
Interesting set-up, four characters on separate journeys to the same date with destiny, across a fantasy world which is largely based on Native American culture. Slightly muffs the denouement, but I kept reading.
It was only four standard Preservation day-cycles back to Preservation via wormhole, and I meant to use the time to finish watching Lineages of the Sun. It was a long-running historical family drama, set in an early colony world, with one hundred and thirty-six characters and almost as many storylines.
I'm one of the three people in fandom who rather bounced off previous Murderbot stories, largely due to my antipathy to cute anthropomorphic robot stories (even if the robot is also a killer robot). But this was OK, as it turns out that Murderbot does actually have a space for friendships and possibly even growth, making it a bit more than a one-joke story. Won the Nebula and Locus (SF).
He shook hands with the president, who was a trim, handsome white man in the Clark Gable mold, with dark hair just going silver at the temples. “Director. Thank you so much for coming out.”
I missed the middle volume of the trilogy, but it's easy enough to pick up on what's happening; the space programme as a liberalising catalyst to 1960s/70s America which is recovering from a devastating meteor strike. The calamities that kept falling on the head of the protagonist did challenge my suspension of disbelief just a bit, as did the postscript after the main action of the book was over. But very readable.
It was not the Other. He was thinner, and not quite so tall.
As I have said before, Clarke's first novel in the fifteen years since Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a much much shorter book, in which the eponymous protagonist is one of two living inhabitants of a vast building which seems to be the entire world. Gradually the truth about the narrator's past and about the world they are in becomes clear. Intense and intricate. I nominated it for the BSFA Best Novel award.
The terminal is mostly just a big, brightly lit room where a few hundred people can assemble. There’s nothing that should be scary about it. Its walls are lined with ads for movies Aislyn isn’t planning to see and makeup she probably won’t ever wear. The people standing or sitting around her are hers, her people; she feels this instinctively even though her mind resists when her gaze skates over Asian faces, or her ears pick up a language that probably isn’t Spanish but also definitely isn’t English. (Quechua, her strange newer senses whisper, but she doesn’t want to hear it.) They aren’t bothering her, though, and there are plenty of normal people around, so there’s no good reason for her to be as terrified as she is. Terror doesn’t always happen for a good reason.
I was also one of the three people in fandom who bounced off the Broken Earth trilogy (I also counted the votes that gave the second volume its Hugo). However this worked a lot better for me for some reason – our protagonists discover that they have become the incarnations, the genii loci, of New York's boroughs, and also that they are under magical attack. Somewhat reminiscent of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London, except that here it's the human-built settlements that have acquired personalities. Vivid and sharp. Has already won the BSFA Award and Locus (Fantasy).
Tue, 21:05: RT @PippaCrerar: Ex-PM Sir John Major furious about foreign aid cuts – suggesting Govt’s plan is “the stamp of Little England, not Great Br…
Wed, 10:45: RT @TNeenan: I, a white man should be allowed to choose the anti-racism symbol I am most comfortable with. Maybe a tiny car we call the ‘be…
Tue, 09:01: RT @pkincaid_critic: @nwbrux How about: you can’t stoke racism and still hold a responsible position in government. The world can’t work li…
Tue, 09:15: RT @Cygie: Het is precies 1 jaar geleden dat ik mijn eerste tweet heb gepost met de COVID-19 cijfers. Toen nog zeer beperkt. Maar het begin…
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 work travel this month. I gave a lecture in Geneva; I spoke at a conference in Skopje; and the Georgians took me to Barcelona to (successfully) lobby Liberal International. My trip to Switzerland was more fortunate than one of our local schools, which lost seven pupils and two staff members in the Sierre coach crash. F’s own school was directly affected, in that several of the victims had relatives who were either fellow-pupils or on the staff. It was pretty grim.
Titanic won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1996, and equalled both the record of fourteen nominations set by All About Eve, and the record of eleven wins set by Ben-Hur. The other ten were: Best Director (James Cameron), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, Best Original Song, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects. Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart were nominated in Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively, but did not win. (At 87, Gloria Stuart remains the oldest ever nominee for Best Supporting Actress.) The Hugo that year went to Contact.
I have not seen any of the other four Oscar nominees, which were As Good as It Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting and L.A. Confidential. I have seen nine other films made in 1998: Men in Black, Starship Troopers, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Contact, Wag the Dog, The Peacemaker, Spice World, The Man Who Knew Too Little, Mrs Brown and Fools Rush In. These are all enjoyable films, especially Spice World, and to be honest I’d rank Titanic somewhere in the middle. IMDB users are much more wowed than me, and put it top of bothrankings. Here’s a trailer.
Three of the cast of Titanic also appeared in the Whoniverse. First off, David Warner, Spicer Lovejoy here, went on to pay Professor Grisenko in the 2013 episode Cold War. He was also the unpleasant Bilfil in Oscar-winning Tom Jones, way back in 1963.
Martin Jarvis plays Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon here, and has been in Doctor Who three times: as the Menoptra leader Hilio in the 1965 story we now call The Web Planet, the villains’ sidekick Butler in 1974’s Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and the Governor of Varos in the 1983 Vengeance on Varos.
On rather a different scale, there’s Derek Lea, who is stoker Frederick Barrett here and played an alien posing as a paramedic in the 2008 Torchwood episode Sleeper.
There’s a couple of overlaps with Hugo-winning films also directed by James Cameron. The versatile Jenette Goldstein shows up here as the Irish mommy, having previously been John Connor’s foster mother Janelle Voight in Terminator 2 and tough-as-nails Vasquez in Aliens.
Also in Aliens was Bill Paxton, here treasure hunter Brock Lovett, there Sergeant Hudson.
A couple more Hugo-winner appearances: Elsa Raven is Ida Straus here and was the Clocktower Lady in Back to the Future.
Mark Capri is one of the Stewards here and was imperial comms officer M’Kae in The Empire Strikes Back.
And, getting to the end, there are two more crossovers with previous Oscar-winners apart from David Warner. Frances Fisher is Rose’s mother here, and was Strawberry Alice, the brothel manager, in Unforgiven.
Last but not least, Bernard Hill plays Captain Smith here, having previously been Sergeant Putnam, the soldier on the railway station roof, in Gandhi. We will be seeing him again.
Before we get into the meat of it, there’s an interesting linguistic quirk that caught my attention (and probably won’t catch anyone else’s). Thomas Andrews, the engineer who designed the ship, is played by Canadian actor Victor Garber, who I don’t think I have seen in anything else. He’s the very first character in 70 Oscar-winning films to be explicitly from Northern Ireland. Garber gives him a bit of a lilting brogue, to signal to the audience that he is vaguely Irish.
There are no surviving recordings of Thomas Andrews’ voice, as far as I know. But his brother, John Miller Andrews, was interviewed when he became Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in 1940, and as you can hear he has a much more distinctly Ulster twang in his voice. (He lasted only two and a half years, becoming the first but not the last Unionist leader to be ruthlessly ditched by a rebellion in the ranks.)
Anyway. As if you didn’t know, the film is about the 1912 sinking of Titanic, the largest ship in the world at the time, on its maiden voyage. My great-grandmother, born in 1887, told me when I was a child that she had seen it pass along Belfast Lough as it emerged from the Belfast shipyard where it was made, and it’s not difficult to imagine how this massive man-made object would have briefly dominated the natural landscape as it went by.
Belfast has a slightly ambivalent relationship with the ship and the story; there is a massive and impressive museum dedicated to the disaster on the site of the dock where the ship was built, and a big memorial in the grounds of the City Hall. But for a city which has since acquired a strong relationship with tragedy – twice as many were killed in the Troubles as died on Titanic – it’s not a comfortable bit of heritage. The final exchange with the doomed ship is very poignant.
A friend of mine lost her father on the Estonia in 1994; he was the ship’s chief radio operator. Just leaving that there.
Well, what did I think of the film then? It’s all right, I suppose. It’s interesting to come to it at the far end of the centenary in 2012, and having been to the museum in Belfast twice. I don’t think I saw any black faces, though perhaps this is excusable given the setting. Not noted above, because there is no decent picture of him in the film, is the Chinese survivor played by Van Ling (also briefly in Terminator 2).
The only other film I’ve seen Leonardo di Caprio in is the 1996 Romeo + Juliet. Sorry to be heretical, but I don’t think he’s a particularly good actor. His part in Titanic doesn’t have much to it, but I don’t feel he brings much to it either. I think he particularly fails to connect smirking self-confident Jack to sensitive artistic Jack. It’s just about plausible that Rose falls for him on the ship, especially given the awfulness of the alternative, but I can’t believe she would have stayed with him for long.
Those are the only two negatives, though. The music teeters on the edge of being annoying, but just about manages not to be. Only five Oscar-winning Original Songs were also in the Best Picture or equivalent; before “My Heart Will Go On” we had “Swinging on a Star” in Going My Way, and “Gigi” in, er, Gigi; we’ll get to the two others in due course. Just in case you had forgotten, here’s Celine Dion.
Kate Winslet on the other hand has a great part and does it well. Rose is one of those rare leading women characters with a serious and interesting arc. The sequence of her wielding the axe is tremendous.
And the film does a traditional story-telling job very well – introducing us to a bunch of very human people, some of them more interesting than others, and then hitting them with a disaster that many of them do not survive. The core narrative is not original but very competently executed, and tying it back to the present day with Gloria Stuart’s brief but impressive performance as older Rose gives it a firm sense of grounding and relevance.
And the effects of course are spectacular. Cameron has set a high bar with his previous work, and just about exceeds it. The sense of scale of the sinking ship, and the subsequent horror of the slow deaths of the shipwrecked, are particularly effective.
So, I thought it was good but not superb. I’m putting it just under halfway down my list of Oscar winners, ahead of The Last Emperor which also look good but has no attractive characters, and behind Out of Africa which also looks good but does have interesting men as well as women.
That takes me to 70 Oscar-winning films. The most recent ten have had four really good, four medium (The English Patient is very medium, but I gave it extra marks for having Juliette Binoche) and two awful, which I guess is not too bad. Here’s my full ranking.
Just for fun, I’ve broken down the 70 Oscar-winning films by main date and time of setting. (Obviously some straddle timelines and locations – I’m calling the two Godfather films as set in New York, as that’s where their hearts are, and calling All the King’s Men as set when it was made although it is based on real events that happened between the wars.) Five of the eleven “Other Europe” films are set in France.
Sat, 19:23: RT @law_and_policy: Fundamental constitutional reform? We cannot even sort out the hereditary element of the House of Lords Today’s law an…
I’m a bit less cheerful today than I have been in some of my recent updates. Belgium managed briefly to qualify for the ECDC green zone last week, but infections have started to surge again in the last few days, today’s case rate being a massive 82% ahead of a week ago. Hospitalisations and deaths have not yet started to rise in sympathy, which either means that a lot of people who are getting diagnosed are not in fact all that ill, or that the other numbers are delayed. And it’s currently raining cats and dogs outside, on a Saturday when I have been grumpily stuck doing Day Job stuff since this morning. It’s been great to be back in the office three days a week, less great when it extends to the weekend. And the ongoing tedious wrangling over Brexit, with the UK pretending they did not know what they negotiated or signed last year.
I had one of those bizarre media appearances on Egyptian TV last weekend, with long pauses for simultaneous translation, on the future of NATO. It sounded to me like I made sense, but I have no idea what the translation said.
Also an Albanian TV interview which I did in June was actually broadcast at the start of the month, this time interviewed in English but dubbed into Albanian.
One welcome bit of nostalgia was a friend posting photographs from a couple of student parties in Cambridge days. I had bad luck with the reflection off my glasses in the first one, and am looking the wrong way in the second. Amused that in the second I happened to be sitting in front of my future wife, two years before we started dating. Weird also to think that young F is now older than either of his parents were in these pictures taken in 1988.
Not going to jinx it, but I’m planning to get away from Belgium for a couple of days next weekend. I’ll report on that after the fact.
But for now, I think I’m likely to be keeping up these ten-day updates for a while yet.
Fri, 16:05: RT @pmdfoster: It’s OUT!! My weekly #Brexit Briefing for @ft This week: the transition from “CE” safety marks (u see them on everything) t…
Fri, 20:48: RT @apcoworldwide: The 2020 halt to tourism caused huge losses of jobs and income in communities that are largely reliant on tourism. Now,…
Sat, 02:01: RT @ottocrat: If this is true, and see the discussion in the replies, then the headline in the article is wrong. It should read “Brexit put…
Current Middlemarch, by George Eliot The Separation, by Christopher Priest The Last Pharaoh, by Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
Last books finished Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko Riding the Unicorn, by Paul Kearney Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse
Next books Empire Games, by Charles Stross The Kingdom of Copper, by S. A Chakraborty
If you’re within reach of Leuven, and on the look-out for something a bit different to do this weekend, you could do worse than visiting the Abdij van Park, south of the city. We know it well – Anne actually volunteered in the museum for a few months, a couple of years ago. I started a videoblog entry about it last summer, but never completed it; this was the intro.
The abbey now hosts a religious art museum, Parcum, with a permanent exhibition and a rotating set of temporary displays. This summer – now scheduled to finish on 29 August, though they will surely extend it again – they have opened up some more of the abbey infrastructure for the visiting public. As well as various works of art, this includes the incredible recently restored baroque stucco ceilings of the monks’ refectory and library. Made in 1672 by Jan-Christian Hansche, these are vivid, three-dimensional scenes hanging over your head. Here, for instance, is St Norbert being struck by lightning, an incident that caused the young nobleman to rethink his life and dedicate himself to God.
Here is the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well:
And most striking of all, here is the Last Supper, seen in a mirror on the refectory table, with apostles leaning out of the ceiling into our space:
The rest of the art is interesting enough, but I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite like Hansche’s stucco ceilings. Well worth going to see.
