Second paragraph of third chapter:
Mercy had landed, curls of smoke around her but no fire, yet. Harp quick-released his harness, saw his new, reluctant buddy copy. ‘All set, Ludwiz?’
MilSF rubbish. You can get it here.
I’m on a boat all day today, and setting this to post as I cruise sedately from France to Ireland, avoiding England and Wales entirely. I’ll write that up when I get a chance.
Earlier in the summer I watched the thirteen 25-minute episodes of the 1987 series Knights of God, an ITV children’s TV production about a near-future dystopian Britain (specifically, set in 2020), where a theocratic military regime has taken over and Wales has become the core of the limited resistance. Apparently the copyright rests with Disney, who have shown no interest in commercially releasing it, but at time of writing all 13 episodes can be found on both Youtube and Archive.org. For us genre TV fans, it’s especially notable for the resistance leaders being played by Gareth “Roj Blake” Thomas and Patrick “Second Doctor” Troughton.
The story was actually made in 1985, and by the time it was shown in 1987 two of the leading actors had died – Patrick Troughton and Nigel Stock, who is one of the leading bad guys, the titular Knights of God. The story revolves around young Gervase Edwards, a rebel who gets brainwashed by the Knights and instructed to kill the one person who can unite the country against them. It turns out (massive spoiler for a TV show from 36 years ago) that this person is in fact young Gervase himself, who is the rightful King. He overcomes his conditioning, the Knights are overthrown and the constitutional monarchy restored.
The two young actors in the lead roles are OK but somewhat overshadowed by the big names in the rest of the cast. Neither of them became a household name. George Winter, who plays Gervase, has switched careers and became an artist. Claire Parker, who plays his girlfriend Julia, is still an actor and wellness consultant. There is a decent dynamic between them. Her haircut is so 80s that you could probably identify the month it was filmed in 1985 with sufficient specialist knowledge. (Picture from the cover of the novelisation.)
But the pairing you really watch is the two lead bad guys, John Woodvine (memorable in Doctor Who as the Marshal of Atrios in The Armageddon Factor; he turned 94 last month) and Julian Fellowes (most famous now for writing Gosford Park and Downton Abbey, but also now a real-life Conservative member of the House of Lords) as Prior Mordrin and Brother Hugo. They move from being collaborators to becoming bitter enemies in a very credible story arc. (Nigel Stock is #3 in the hierarchy, Brother Simon, and enables them both at different times.)
Lots of other familiar faces from 1970s and 1980s television, especially Welsh actors, pop up from time to time. The most visible woman actor, apart from Claire Parker, is Shirley Stelfox who plays Gareth Thomas’s character’s wife (and Gervase’s supposed mother, until the truth comes out).
There are a lot of hidden father/child relationships. We start with the apparent one between Gervase and Roj Blake Gareth Thomas’s character, though that turns out to be fake. Two others become apparent in the course of the series, in one of which the actors concerned have only a nine year age different in real life. (Jocelyn Jee Esien, who played Clyde Langer’s mother in one of the Sarah Jane Adventures, is only eight years older than the youthful-looking Daniel Anthony.)
The whole thing was done on a relatively low budget – a few key sets and locations which we return to again and again, and a lot of money must have been blown on the two helicopters which feature frequently. But for what it is, I think it is very well done; I found the episodes flying by, and each cliff-hanger coming as a surprise. The directors were Andrew Morgan and Michael Kerrigan, both of whom also directed Doctor Who stories in the 1980s. If you have thirteen half-hour sized slots to fill in the coming days, you could make worse choices than watching this.
There’s also a novel by screenplay writer Richard Cooper (who also wrote Codename Icarus); the second paragraph of the third chapter is:
In the room, he saw the knight, who should have been standing to attention, slumped in a chair, head bowed in sleep. He slammed the door behind him and the man awoke, head jerking up, eyes slowly focusing and then, when he saw Mordrin, filling with fear. He got to his feet, rifle clattering to the floor. Mordrin, impassive, looked at it.
It’s great stuff, actually; only 204 pages for 13 episodes (and thus over 300 minutes of screentime) but packing in more interesting details – Ireland (as a whole) has become one of the states of the USA and is shipping in arms to the rebels; we get a lot more detail on the military situation and, crucially, on the Mordrin / Hugo relationship (rather less on the Gervase / Julia relationship, but that’s a case where less may be more). It is a perfectly adequate substitute for experiencing the original series.
I shouldn’t think this will ever be released commercially – the right moment to sell dystopian fiction set in the year 2020 may have passed, especially given what actually happened that year – but it was well worth tracking down.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“I became fascinated with the Daleks at an early age. I remember in the early 1980s, being quite disturbed by children’s television programmes such as Jigsaw and Chockablock — things that were supposed to be fun, completely freaked me out, while things that were designed to be terrifying — like the Daleks — enthralled me.[“]
I remember going to the Doctor Who exhibition in Blackpool in 1977, when I would have been ten; it was a subterranean chamber full of Doctor Who monsters, and I bought the new novelisation of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the very first Doctor Who book that I bought for myself. My memories of exactly what was on display are dim.
Not so for the contributors to Blackpool Remembered, a lovely full-colour commemoration of the exhibition which ran from 1974 to 1984. There’s a loving recreation of the exhibition space, which was updated each year to bring in more recent monsters – and these were genuine BBC props, with only a couple of Daleks specially made for Blackpool. There are extensive memories by fans who kept more careful notes and photographs than I did, including a couple who have gone on to become bigger names in the Whoniverse, such as Steve Cole and Matt Fitton. It’s a great example of how to reconstruct a purely physical and temporary display space after almost four decades.
There is a great interview with Julie Jones, the Doctor Who production office staffer who masterminded the whole thing; but disappointingly, we don’t get much from the female fan perspective. Lots of mums and sisters and a few girlfriends appear in the photographs; I don’t think we hear directly from any of them. I guess that reflects the resources available to the editor, but it’s an unfortunate gap. (Also everyone seems to be white.)
Still, it’s a lovely production which you can download for free from here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The old man wheezes and shifts on his pillows, bathed in soft exhaust. A chorus of machines hums and whirs around him, pumping fluid through the crude fabric of tubes weaving in and out of his skin. When he lowers a stained handkerchief from his bluish mouth to speak, a foul odor escapes. “Just throw him in the furnace and be done with it.”
Hugely unpleasant characters and depressing setting. Gave up after fifty pages. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story, not counting intro and a poem (“Miss Carstairs and the Merman”, by Delia Sherman):
In that house, Miss Carstairs sat by the uncurtained window of her study, peering through a long telescope. Her square hands steady upon the barrel, she watched the lightning dazzle on the water and the wind-blown sand and rain scour her garden. She saw a capsized dinghy scud past her beach in kinetoscopic bursts, and a gull beaten across the dunes. She saw a long, dark, seal-sleek figure cast upon the rocky beach, flounder for a moment in the retreating surf, and then lie still.
Lots of good stories in this collection, with a number of different takes on the mythology of mermaids and the closely related selkies. I think my favourite story was the rather gruesome “Mermaid of the Concrete Jungle”, by Caitlin R. Kiernan, closely followed by “Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home”, by Sarah Monette, but none of these were clunkers and I recommend the whole collection. You may be able to get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next on that dwindling pile is There Will Be War Volume X, edited by Jerry Pournelle.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
They’ve fought their oppressor for over a century, but things are different now. They started winning. Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, the Mau Mau movement in Kenya, and, of course, the Algerian war. Their fight was the longest, the bloodiest, but no one counts bodies on the winning side. They prevailed, and they inspired a whole fucking continent.
This was the book that threw me completely due to a scene set in Cambridge in 1844, in which the protagonist is looking out for Venus to appear over Memorial Court. She would have a long wait because Memorial Court was not built until 1926! She and John Couch Adams then spot Mars over King’s College Chapel. There was in fact no evening in 1844 when Mars was visible in the east and Venus in the west. Also John Couch Adams is referred to as an undergraduate, though he got his BA in 1843. You can get it here.
Incidentally when I went to Cambridge in April this year, I did see Mercury and Venus over Memorial Court.
Of course, you can’t see the buildings for the trees.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Melquiades claimed the mere thought such a thing might be possible was sacrilege: holiness could not reside in a flower or a drop of rain. Offerings to spirits were the devil’s work.
I thought this was really interesting, a reframing of H.G. Wells in the context of the historical Maya resistance to Mexican rule in the Yucatan. There was a twist three quarters of the way through that I should have seen coming, but didn’t. Hugo finalist. You can get it here.
These were the two winners of the James Tiptree Jr Award, now the Otherwise Award, in 2013 for works of 2012. The award is for works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore one’s understanding of gender.
Ancient, Ancient, uniquely for the Tiptree Award, is a collection of stories by a single author, Kiini Ibura Salaam, The second paragraph of the third story, “MalKai’s Last Seduction”, is:
The buzzing that had settled in Cori’s ears over the past couple of days was MalKai coming to get him. When the first “zzzzzz” licked his ear drums, Cori had swatted at the air around his newly-pierced ear lobes. A meddlesome mosquito—he imagined—hovering near. He made repeated attempts to shoo it away, but his arms soon grew tired. His shoulder ached from throwing his biceps into repeated attack arcs. His fist grew bored of finding no tender little bug crushed in its grasp. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders and rescinded the attack.
I hugely enjoyed this, a sexy and angry collection of short pieces, the longest and perhaps most effective being the last, “Pod Rendezvous”, which has a richly and economically depicted alien society. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kieran, is:
Dr. Ogilvy suspects that my fondness of dates may be an expression of arithmomania. And, in fairness to her, I should add that during my teens and early twenties, when my insanity included a great many symptoms attributable to obsessive-compulsive disorder, I had dozens upon dozens of elaborate counting rituals. I could not get through a day without keeping careful track of all my footsteps, or the number of times I chewed and swallowed. Often, it was necessary for me to dress and undress some precise number of times (the number was usually, but not always, thirty) before leaving the house. In order to take a shower, I would have to turn the water on and off seventeen times, step in and out of the tub or shower stall seventeen times, pick up the soap and put it down again seventeen times. And so forth. I did my best to keep these rituals a secret, and I was deeply, privately ashamed of them. I can’t say why, why I was ashamed, but I was afraid, and I lived in constant dread that Aunt Elaine or someone else would discover them. For that matter, if I had been asked at the time to explain why I found them necessary, I would’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an answer. I could only have said that I was convinced that unless I did these things, something truly horrible would happen.
It is a queer time-travel ghost story set in Rhode Island (which I plan to visit in September). There’s some vivid reflexive stuff with the protagonist intervening in and rewriting the narrative. Mental illness and gender identity dance through the pages; it’s an intense but rewarding experience. you can get it here.
Unusually, one novel was on the final ballot for the Clarke, BSFA and Tiptree Awards and failed to win any of them; this was 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson. There were five other novels and a short story on the Tiptree honor list, but I have not read any of them.
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett, which won the Clarke Award, was also on the BSFA ballot; Intrusion, by Ken MacLeod, was also on both ballots. The BSFA winner was Jack Glass by Adam Roberts, and the other BSFA finalist was Empty Space: A Haunting, by M. John Harrison. I voted for Dark Eden. I have not rea the other three on the Clarke shortlist: Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway, The Dog Stars by Peter Heller and Nod by Adrian Barnes. That year The Drowning Girl was also on the Nebula ballot, but the Nebula itself went to 2312, and the Hugo to John Scalzi’s Redshirts; I did not rank either very high.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
I first realized this at Dr. Rothman’s. Two years after my little brother died, but left us no body to confirm the fact and mourn, my mother told me I was going to the doctor’s. I prepared myself for the rituals of the pediatrician’s office: my knees tensed for the rubber hammer, that miracle of reflex; my nostrils anticipated an antiseptic tang, my tongue the compensatory lollipop. But as soon as we arrived—”a new doctor,” my father muttered as he parked—and we got out of the car, it was clear to me that this was no clinic.
The core of the story is parallel timelines where one of the leading characters did or didn’t die, which is often taken as sf, and some reflection on identity that wanders close to Philip K. Dick territory. This turns into commentary on grief, and on the problems of the contemporary US. Not sure that it totally hung together at the end. You can get it here.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 48)
Amy Dillwyn, by David Painting
After the War: How to Keep Europe Safe, by Paul Taylor
The Popes and Sixty Years of European Integration
How to End Russia’s War on Ukraine, by Timothy Ash et al
Blackpool Remembered, by John Collier
Drawing Boundaries, eds John C. Courtney, Peter MacKinnon and David E. Smith (did not finish)
The Deadly Assassin, by Andrew Orton
The Awakening, by David Evans-Powell
One Bible, Many Voices: Different Approaches to Biblical Studies, by S.E. Gillingham
Non-genre 7 (YTD 14)
The Cider House Rules, by John Irving
A Burglary, or, Unconscious Influence, by Amy Dillwyn
Jill, by Amy Dillwyn
Jill and Jack, by Amy Dillwyn
Nant Olchfa, by Amy Dillwyn
The Murder on the Links, by Agatha Christie
Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers
Poetry 1 (YTD 4)
The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran
SF 12 (YTD 122)
The Memory Librarian, ed. Janelle Monáe
Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy
In the Serpent’s Wake, by Rachel Hartman
Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam
Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, ed. Paula Guran
The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kiernan
Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree
Tofu Brains: Life on Zeeta 21, by Lars Koch
There Will Be War Volume X, ed. Jerry Pournelle (did not finish)
Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut
Knights of God, by Richard Cooper
The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 21)
Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who – The Awakening, by Eric Pringle
Comics 4 (YTD 14)
Arena of Fear, by Nick Abadzis et al
Saga, Vol. 10, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris
Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamara Bonvillain
8,200 pages (YTD 54,900)
17/35 (YTD 94/225) by non-male writers (Gillingham, Dillwyn x 4, Christie, Sayers, Monáe, Murphy, Hartman, Salaam, Guran, Kiernan, Novik, illustrators of Arena of Fear, Staples, Bonvillain)
2/35 (YTD 30/225) by a non-white writer (Gibran, Salaam)
5 rereads (Whose Body?, Breakfast of Champions, Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, Doctor Who – The Awakening, Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK)
360 books currently tagged unread – up 41 from last month, as I reintegrated the Clarke submissions that I want to get back to, and made some other updates.
Reading now
Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, ed. Vernon Bogdanor
The Outcast, by Louise Cooper
Falling to Earth, by Al Worden
Coming soon (perhaps)
Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis et al.
Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion, by Peter Harness
The Shadowman, by Sharon Bidwell
Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who: Stones of Blood, by David Fisher
The Stones of Blood, by Katrin Thier
Arachnids in the UK, by Sam Maleski
Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Life Span, by Digby Tantam
Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett
Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells
The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
“Beggars in Spain”, by Nancy Kress
The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd
The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad, by V. S. Naipaul
DALEKS, ed. Marcus Hearn
Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway
Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor
What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford
Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort
Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout
The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman: Including the Brother, by Flann O’Brien
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“The kids you babysat during the memorial tested positive,” my mother said through an intercom next to my bed. “Their parents swore they’d been tested. We thought they were safe. I’m so sorry, Jun.”
It is a book for our time, looking at worldwide plague and its consequences, in the form of a closely linked sequence of short stories. I felt that most of the stories were very good, but a couple missed the mark, including, crucially and catastrophically, the ending. You can get it here.
Amy Dillwyn’s last novel for adults, Nant Olchfa, was published in The Red Dragon: The National Magazine of Wales in 1886 and 1887. I covered 1887 in my previous post; 1886 also saw the publication of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy and The Bostonians by Henry James. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
There was a story that one day when Reginald was a lad at school he, for the first time, heard the saying, chacun pour soi. Not catching it quite correctly, he was presently heard repeating thoughtfully to himself: “chacun pour moi. That’s a ripping good motto to take! The worst of it is that perhaps some of the other fellows won’t see it. They are so beastly selfish.”
This is the shortest of Dillwyn’s novels, I think, and it’s a straightforward though rather dark family melodrama. Reginald will inherit the Nant Olchfa estate if his cousins David and Gladys die, or if he marries Gladys who has just got engaged to someone else. At David’s 21st birthday party, Reginald kills him and makes it look like an accident, and then sows sufficient discord between Gladys (another of Dillwyn’s teenage girls) and her fiancée to get them to break up. Reginald then pursues a path of carnage to try and get his way, and eventually meets his just doom horribly while trying to escape through a steel foundry. It’s not very deep but it is a rollicking good read, with lots of circumstantial detail of the Welsh countryside.
Nant Olchfa has never been reprinted since it appeared in nine successive issues of the Red Dragon magazine. However I have downloaded all of the component parts and stuck them together, and you can access the 151-page file here. It’s 18 MB I’m afraid. Some day I may run the whole thing through OCR and see if I can get it into a more convenient form.
I have not been able to get hold of Maggie Steele’s Diary, Amy Dillwyn’s last novel, published in 1892, though I have found a detailed review in The Spectator. (Since you asked, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle was also published in 1892.) It sounds like it was another upper-class family melodrama, with the interesting twist that Dillwyn kills off her protagonist in the end. (Though this is often the case with novels which are told in diary form.) I see that copyright libraries all have it, but I’m nowehere near any of them.
Amy Dillwyn’s novel-writing career lasted only from 1880 to 1892, though she lived for another four decades. In 1892, her father died while campaigning for his tenth term as MP for Swansea, and the house where she had lived all her life passed to cousins; all she got was the foundry for the zinc-lead alloy spelter that he father had founded. It turned out that the spelter works was deeply in debt, and Dillwyn devoted herself to turning it around and then running it as a profitable concern, eventually selling it to Metallgesellschaft AG. This must have absorbed all of her energy. She never had a full-time romantic partner, though her passionate friendships seem to have continued; as the years went on she got active in politics and civic life, and died six months after her ninetieth birthday. A fascinating figure, who we can still get to know through her writing.
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un):
All three siblings attended this luncheon, and David’s favorite moment was not the expressions on the children’s faces when they were greeted with the sight of their feast but, rather, the one they assumed when they stepped into the bank’s lobby. He understood their awe, for he never failed to experience it as well: the vast floor of silvery marble, polished to a shining finish; the Ionic columns, hewn from the same stone; the grand rotunda ceiling, inlaid with a gleaming mosaic pattern; the three murals that occupied the length of three whole walls, painted so high that one was all but forced into a supplicative posture to properly see them the first depicting his great-great-great-grandfather, Ezra, the war hero, distinguishing himself in the battle for independence from Britain; the second, his great-great-grandfather, Edmund, marching northward with some of his fellow Utopians from Virginia to New York to found what would become known as the Free States; the third, his great-grandfather, Hiram, whom he had never known, founding Bingham Brothers and being elected mayor of New York. In the background of all the panels, rendered in browns and grays, were moments from his family’s and country’s history alike: the Siege of Yorktown, where Ezra had fought, his wife and young sons at home in Charlottesville; Edmund marrying his husband, Mark, and the first wars with the Colonies, which the Free States would win, but at great human and financial cost; Hiram and his two brothers, David and John, as young men, unaware that of the three of them, only Hiram, the youngest, would live into his forties, and that only he would produce an heir—his son, Nathaniel, David’s grandfather. At the bottom of each panel was a mounted marble plaque carved with a single word—Civility; Humility; Humanity—which, along with the phrase on the bank’s crest, was the Bingham family’s motto. The fourth panel, the one over the grand front doors, which opened onto Wall Street, was empty, a smooth blank expanse, and it was here that David’s grandfather’s accomplishments would one day be recorded: how he had grown Bingham Brothers into the wealthiest financial institution in not only the Free States but also America; how, until he had helped America fund its fight in the War of Rebellion and secured his country’s autonomy, he had successfully protected the Free States’ existence against every attempt to dismantle it and dissolve the rights of its citizenry; how he paid for the resettlement of free Negroes who had entered the Free States, helping them establish new lives for themselves in the North or the West, as well as escapees from the Colonies. True, Bingham Brothers was no longer the only or, some might argue, the most powerful institution in the Free States, especially with the recent flourishing of the arriviste Jewish banks that had begun to establish themselves in the city, but it was, all would agree, still the most influential, the most prestigious, the most renowned. Unlike the newcomers, David’s grandfather liked to say, Bingham did not confuse ambition for greed, or cleverness for wiliness—its responsibility was as much to the States themselves as to the people it served. “The Great Mister Bingham)” the journals called Nathaniel, occasionally mockingly, as when he attempted to initiate one of his more ambitious projects—such as his proposal, a decade ago, to advance universal suffrage throughout America as well—but mostly sincerely, for David’s grandfather was, indisputably, a great man, someone whose deeds and visage deserved to be painted on plaster, the artist swinging perilously on a rope-and-wood seat high above the stone floor, trying not to look down as he stroked his brush, glossy with paint, over the surface.
Three sections, set in an alternative 1893 and 1993 and a future 2093 based on the previous two. Passionate on sexuality and the history of Hawaii. Last part was less convincing for me. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
No bad, ta. Kenny got terrible sunburn and drank too much Sangria, the daffy. Flight delayed for two hours on the way back, the usual shite. How did you get on with my stand-in what) I was away then? My stunt double? Young Becky, was it?
Failed to grab me and I put it down after 50 pages. You can get it here.
Two more of my distant cousin Amy Dillwyn’s novels today, a natural pairing.
Jill is in my view the best of Amy Dillwyn’s seven novels (or at least of the six that I have read). It was published in 1884, the same year as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
We were making a tour through Holland and Friesland, and, when at Amsterdam, happened to make acquaintance with a Mrs. Grove, a widow, accompanied by two daughters, who were respectively two and three years older than me. I did not take to her at all, and thought she seemed a flattering, lying, pushing, cringing, vulgar individual; but having carelessly thought that much of her, I dismissed her from my mind as a person with whom I had nothing to do, and whose character was quite immaterial to me – little thinking what a bête noire she was to prove to me afterwards!
Gilbertina Trecastle, known as Jill, flees her abusive stepmother and stepsisters and disguises herself as a lady’s maid in order to get close to the woman she loves. She has numerous adventures, including burning the whiskers off an amorous valet, a hilarious but unsuccessful stint as a dog-walker, and getting locked up in a Corsican charnel-house with the object of her affections. She is cheerfully amoral and doesn’t let herself get ground down by adverse circumstances. It would make a great TV mini-series – the story is pretty episodic, and well-told. I found the (electronic) pages turning really quickly. I hope someone recommends it to Russell T. Davies.
There was one plot point that I found legally questionable: at the end, Jill is financially redeemed because her father forgot to change his will when marrying her stepmother. I know that under current British law, a will is invalidated upon a later marriage, and I’d be a bit surprised if that wasn’t already the case in 1884.
This is the third and last of Dillwyn’s novels republished by Honno Welsh Women’s Classics, and you can get it here. The introduction is by Kirsti Bohata, who is the current queen of Dillwyn studies.
Jill and Jack, the sequel, came out in 1887, the same year as A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy, and Allan Quatermain and She by H. Rider Haggard. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
For a right comprehension of Lady Wroughton’s attitude it must be explained that she was quite incapable of having set her heart as she had done on the match if she had not really entertained a sufficiently good opinion of the proposed bride to justify this conduct; and that she was not one of those heartless , unscrupulous mothers who care only for worldly advantages , and could be so destitute of right feeling and true regard for a son’s happiness as to have desired him to marry any one whom she thought seriously objectionable. On the contrary, such a marriage would have been abhorrent to her; and she did really and honestly believe Miss Trecastle to be a person possessing merits enough to render her likable and estimable, and worthy the high honour of becoming the wife of Sir John.
Here Jill and her friend, Sir John Wroughton (an eligible young baronet), get together to rescue a friend who is being victimised by her guardians in house nearby both of theirs. There are frightful threats, intricate knowledge of local train timetables, and a daring rescue mission with one of the villains plunging to an awful doom. It’s non-stop melodrama and very entertaining if not quite up to the level of Jill on her own. Meanwhile Sir John’s mother, who starts by thinking of Jill as excellent daughter-in-law material, finds out what she got up to in the previous book and changes her mind; but it’s okay, as Sir John’s own views change in the opposite direction, and there is a happy ending all round. It would make a decent single episode of the Russell T. Davies mini-series, or maybe a two-parter.
Jill and Jack isn’t in print, but you can get the two volumes from Google Books, here and here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“What are you doing?” she asked, bleary-eyed.
Good action technothriller stuff with genetic engineering and The End Of Humanity perpetrated by the protagonist’s immediate family. You can get it here.
Chloe Arguelle was Amy Dillwyn’s second novel, published in 1881 – the same year as The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
To turn against all humbugs would be out of the question; for in that case she would have to begin at Alice, who was false and superficial, quite as a matter of course, and evidently never had a qualm as to the scores of untruths which she uttered or otherwise expressed daily. Yet though Chloe saw that clearly enough, she knew also that Alice was good and kind, and like a mother to her; and Chloe’s affections were closely entwined round this only near relation that she possessed, and she could not believe it possible for her to do any great wrong. Certainly matters seemed very confusing when one came to think about them seriously, and it was very hard to settle whether to go in for honesty or for conventionalism – in other words — unblushing lying !
Like a lot of Dillwyn’s heroines, Chloe Arguelle is only seventeen but already making the big decisions of womanhood, ie who to marry. She moves in a society of adults whose behaviour is generalised as “humbug” by the omniscient narrator. I found one of them particularly interesting, Lady Jane Dorville, whose behaviour is not all that different from what is reported of the author herself in later life:
Lady Jane has blunt, straightforward, masculine manners… Her assumed manliness is merely put on, and very far from being her real self. She had from childhood greatly desired to excel in some way or other, without caring much what the way might be; but she knew herself to be neither beautiful, accomplished, nor clever enough to have a chance of distinction against other competitors in either of those lines, and was therefore puzzled as to how she could gratify her ambition, until it at last occurred to her that she might go in for being more independent and masculine than any other woman, and never allow herself to be outdone in that direction.
Accordingly she took to wear her hair short, to smoke, hunt, shoot, swear, bet, and generally comport herself in as manly a manner as it is possible for a lady to do.. She has no intention of giving up the role which she has thus far found successful, and wherein she has yet met no one to outstrip her; but it is not at all really congenial to her, and to keep it up often costs her a good deal.
It’s a good character description, which doesn’t quite land right. Lady Jane actually secretly hates acting masculine, just as a number of the other characters are acting against their own real inclinations – there’s also an Irish aristocrat who dumps his impoverished girlfriend for a rich widow, which has eerie resonances in the author’s own family.
The most vicious caricature is Chloe’s brother-in-law, Sir Cadwallader Gough, a particularly stupid Liberal MP. We must bear in mind that the author’s father had been the Liberal MP for Swansea since 1855 (and died suddenly in the run-up to defending his seat in the 1892 election). I really hope that he was in on the joke.
“A little more a — a — experience will convince you, Chloe — I may say a — a — conclusively convince you — how impossible it is for every person to attempt individuality. Look for instance at myself — one of the members of the supreme Parliament, one of those a — a — chosen men to whom the whole country looks for guidance, a — a — legislation, and wisdom ; do even I venture to adopt the a — a — pernicious course that you advocate. Emphatically not! Notwithstanding that I have been called to belong to that most a — a — important and influential body, the House of Commons, and notwithstanding the heavy weight a — a — of responsibility inseparable from that position which weighs upon me, yet my a — a — distinguished position has not blinded me to the great truth that without a — a — union there can be no strength ; and consequently, whatever question may arise, I invariably sink my own individual fancies and opinions in regard to it, and a — a — vote with the party to which I belong. And if this is the course which a man of my well-ripened, practised, and a — a — matured judgment sees the necessity
of pursuing, then surely there can be no hardship in a — a — deeming it the only safe one for women, and a — a — other men of lesser calibre…”
Sir Cadwallader is humiliated by the local poachers, though not as drastically as the squire in The Rebecca Rioter, and we readers cheer for the insurgent peasants.
Chloe meanwhile rejects the obviously suitable young man who likes her; her best friend decides that she may as well go for him in that case, and they get engaged; Chloe realises that she actually really likes the chap, and spends a chapter or two agonising about having left it too late. Meanwhile her best friend’s father has foolishly annoyed his butler, to the point that the butler grabs a gun and shoots both father and daughter dead (Dillwyn often resorts to melodramatic denouement to resolve her plots). So once a decent interval has passed after the double murder, the young man and Chloe get married after all and there is a happy ending.
Like The Rebecca Rioter, this was published in Russian almost as soon as in English, but I really wonder what the Russian readers would have made of it; this is not exactly Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. The Spectator commented that the melodrama was more successful than the satire, but to me they are roughly equally flawed.
Chloe Arguelle isn’t in print, but you can get it from the Internet Archive in two volumes, here and here.
A Burglary, or, Unconscious Influence, was Dillwyn’s third novel, published in 1883, the same year as Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stephenson and Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
There was an imposing procession, a ceremony, military escorts, bands, a public luncheon, toasts, flags, bell-ringing, firing of guns, singing, illuminations, fireworks and enthusiasm. All classes with any claim to consideration, were represented at the function lords, commons, clergy, soldiers, sailors, volunteers, dissenters, railway directors, friendly societies, and tradespeople. Immense efforts had been made to secure the presence of as many notables and school children as possible the former to make speeches, be gazed at, and regaled upon salmon, chickens, pineapples, champagne, and similar delicacies; and the latter to swell monster choruses in the open air, and enjoy the magnificent feast of one plum-bun apiece. Some magnates of very first-rate importance, indeed, had been induced to attend from a distance, and all local grandees were present as a matter of course. Wealth in every shape and form was conspicuous in all the best places, whilst poverty was graciously permitted to stand and stare wherever the police thought it would not be in the way of its betters; and might further look forward to the high privilege of sharing with them in bearing the burden of additional taxation, which would fall upon all ratepayers as a necessary consequence of the costly decorations and entertainments in which the town thought fit to indulge.
This time, rather than juggle a large number of characters, Dillwyn has a basic triangle of her teenage protagonist, Imogen Rhys; the chap she probably likes more, Sir Charles Dover (a young baronet, not the only one in Dillwyn’s works); and the chap who really wants her to like him more, William Sylvester. We know, but none of the other characters do, that the impoverished Sylvester has committed a heinous crime by stealing the jewels of a family friend staying at the Rhys’s house in Wales – the burglary of the title. To make things more complicated, Imogen has a deep romantic crush on Ethel, the victim of the theft, depicted as an entirely normal part of the spectrum of emotional experience.
Imogen, who is tomboyish and headstrong, gets stuck into the defence of the local Welshman who is unjustly accused of the crime, much to the consternation of her family. She gets the innocent man acquitted, and must then deal with the competing calls on her affection. Meanwhile Sylvester undergoes agonies of conscience which are sympathetically portrayed.
Then Dillwyn’s love of melodrama strikes again, and just as Ethel, who has put two and two together, is about to reveal to Imogen that Sylvester was the thief, an accidental fire devastates the London social gathering that they are all attending. The fire seems to take up a large number of pages, and by the time it is over, Sylvester is safely dead and the others alive if crispy. It’s a little more gracefully executed than in the previous book, and of course Imogen and Sir Charles end up together.
You slightly wish that Imogen had found a way of getting together with Ethel rather than with Sir Charles, and you wonder why Ethel restrains herself from exposing Sylvester. But the story is told in a leisurely fashion, without the previous sense of hurry. It feels a bit more under control than Chloe Arguelle.
This was the one book by Amy Dillwyn that I could not find in electronic format. You can get a paper copy, published by Honno Welsh Women’s Classics, with a foreword by Alison Favre, here.
Second paragraph of thid chapter:
The Aerodrome was only accessible down a winding country lane marked by an apologetically drooping road sign appearing to point into the bowels of the earth. It was so incongruously ugly, so ashamed of its architectural shortcomings compared with its bucolic surroundings, that it was inescapably quaint and was regarded by the local inhabitants with a proprietorial affection, especially the pork pies served at the airport cafe. Even the angry buzzing of the aircraft every five minutes as they took off and landed only served as a natural counterpoint to the harmonious sounds of the country: birdsong, chattering of insects, the occasional diesel belch of a tractor negotiating the winding roads.
Failed to grab me and I put it down after 50 pages. You can get it here.
I’m going to blog this week about my third cousin once removed, Amy Dillwyn, who lived from 1845 to 1935 in Wales, and wrote seven novels in the 1880s, six of which I have been able to obtain and read. She has been reclaimed in recent years as a Welsh lesbian feminist writer, who inherited a failing metal foundry from her father and turned it around; she was a suffragist who stood unsuccessfully for election; she famously wore men’s clothes and smoked cigars. Her father was a Liberal MP. Her grandmother was born a Whyte, but died before Amy was born, after a scandalous life. I am in touch with a couple of collateral relatives on her side of the family.
The only book-length publication about her dates from 1987, updated in 2013, by David Painting of Swansea University (who died in 2021). The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
That she saw so much was more of a tribute to her acute intelligence than her eyesight, because she was not wearing her glasses which she felt would have detracted from the dignity of the occasion until she noticed that another woman from Wales, the famous bluestocking Lady Charlotte Schreiber, ‘wore her spectacles all through everything at the drawing-room which struck me as being rather an idea for there were heaps of short-sighted people there’. The day after letting Minnie have all her news of the presentation there was yet more famous jewellery to be seen, this time at Garrards where they were displaying the Prince of Wales’s wedding presents to Princess Alexandra, and again Amy’s critical faculty came into its own. ‘It is a magnificent diamond and pearl necklace and two handsome brooches of diamonds in the form of the Prince of Wales plume. But I was not much struck by the guard ring – beryl, emeralds, ruby, turquoise and jacinth, nor yet by the lockets for the bridesmaids – pink coral and diamonds.’
It’s pretty short – only 120 pages – and basically takes us through the events of Dillwyn’s life, drawing largely on her own accounts. Painting soft-pedals the subversive parts of the story – Dillwyn’s love for Olive Talbot and her firm Welshness – but he allows her voice to ring out, and doesn’t get in the way of the story that his subject wants to tell us from a century or so ago. I hope that Dillwyn’s next biographer will look a bit more into the stories she didn’t tell through her correspondence and diaries. It’s a good start, though, and you can get it here.
Dillwyn’s first novel, The Rebecca Rioter, was published in 1880 – the same year as The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy, Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi and Heidi by Johanna Spyri. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Then the stories Miss Gwenllian read me were wonderful too. They were not all about good children who get rich and become lords and ladies, and bad children who come to a bad end; but they were stories of people who travelled about, and had adventures, and fought with lions, and bears, and wolves, and snakes; or else they were stories about fairies who could do whatever they liked with wands that they always carried in their hands – something like Moses’s rod, I used to think.
The Rebecca Rioter is the only one of her books not set in the present day (ie the 1880s); instead it tells the story of an episode of revolutionary unrest in her part of Wales in 1843, two years before she was born, in which agricultural workers and small farmers joined together to destroy the toll-booths which controlled access to the roads. Crucially, the insurgents became known as the Rebecca Rioters because they disguised themselves by dressing up in women’s clothes before mounting their attacks on state property.
Her account is told in the first person by Evan Williams, one of the rioters, and is totally sympathetic to them and their cause, though a bit tainted by the charming condescension of the local squire’s daughter (and stand-in for the author), Gwenllian, who takes our hero on as a special project and then (implausibly) successfully pleads for his life after he unintentionally shoots her father dead. He gets transported to Australia, and the narrative is presented as a dying account to the local doctor there, who sends it home to Wales.
I must say that I found it refreshingly robust in its defence of uprising against the tyranny of London, and it’s interesting that it was translated into Russian almost as soon as it had been published in English. Dillwyn’s sources included her own father’s diary account of managing the authorities’ violent suppression of the rioters, so the fact that she takes the other side is even more interesting. The 2001 Honno Welsh Women’s Classics edition has a thoughtful and analytical introduction by Katie Gramich; you can get it here.
Tomorrow I will look at two more of Dillwyn’s novels.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The offices for KPS the name of the organization on the card Tom gave me were on Thirty-seventh, in the same building as the Costa Rican consulate, on the fifth floor. The office apparently shared a waiting room with a small medical practice. I had been in the waiting room for less than a minute when Avella came to get me to take me to her personal office. There was no one else in the KPS office. I guess they, like most everyone else, were working from home.
Very readable and engaging story which I read to the end, a parallel universe with Godzillas; but as usual with Scalzi, all of the characters sound exactly the same (and indeed exactly like Scalzi himself in real life) and the social commentary is paper thin. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Fallacy 3: ‘Ukraine should adopt neutrality'”, by Orysia Lutsevich):
Imposed neutrality would leave Ukraine exposed to a continued existential threat. It would invite more aggression from Russia and is contrary to a fundamental principle of international law – the sovereign right to choose international alliances. Russia itself formally recognized this principle as a co-signatory of the Istanbul Declaration of 1999.
In line with my commitment to blogging more about my work-related reading, this is a report from Chatham House which came out last month, in which ten authors look at some of the underlying principles of the current conflict – the title is slightly misleading, in that it doesn’t mean “By adopting these recommendations, the war can be brought to an end”, it’s more “This is the intellectual framing in which the end of the war should be imagined”.
There are nine chapters, each by a different writer, book-ended by pieces from James Nixey, who has ceded to Tim Ash the distinction of being first-named contributor, I guess on alphabetical grounds. Each chapter tackles a particular fallacy – and these are not straw men, these are arguments I have actually seen and heard people make, including some who surprised me. In general I agree with the writers of the report, and disagree with the following propositions:
Several of the authors presented it last week at a thinktank in Brussels, and I was really rather shocked that a couple of audience participants made the argument that we have to find a way to let the Russians off gently. Fundamentally, it’s important to help Ukraine to win, and not to impose external limits on what that victory is going to look like. What the Russians do is their responsibility. They chose this war, completely without provocation, and they can sort themselves out afterwards.
You can get the Chatham House report here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
They accessed the original police interview with the suspension scientist, Rima Cagnac, conducted by two Genovese Homicide inspectors a day after her husband’s murder and just five days before she was due to leave Earth. Apparently still in a state of shock, Cagnac answered all the questions factually, stating that she’d been in a meeting with Captain Xavier Fernandez at the time of the killing. The interview was in French, auto-translated for Kemp’s benefit, although he knew Danni understood the original. When asked about the state of her relationship with her late husband, Kemp noticed that Cagnac blinked and hesitated fractionally before replying, ambiguously, that after five years of marriage they remained good friends.
I don’t know about you, but I’m always annoyed by police detectives in SF novels who don’t behave at all like police detectives in real life. Anyway. Twin narratives of detective solving decades-old future crime and alien contact from Earth’s first colony ship, plus corruption and murder in high places. Kept me reading to the end, but it’s not very subtle. And did I mention that I found the police bit unrealistic?
Though I am vey sorry that we have lost Eric Brown since I read it.
Second paragraph of third papal document (Paul VI’s Apostolic letter Pacis Nuntius of 1964, proclaiming St Benedict as the Principal Patron of Europe):
| Sic igitur spiritualem illam unitatem Europae coagmentavit, qua quidem nationes, sermone, genere, ingenio diversae, unum populum Dei se esse sentiebant. Quae unitas, fideliter annitentibus monachis, disciplinae tanti parentis alumnis, peculiaris nota facta est mediae, quam vocant, aetatis. Illam, quae, ut ait Sanctus Augustinus, «ommis pulchritudinis forma» est, lugenda rerum vicissitudine discissam, quotquot sunt bona praediti voluntate, restituere temporibus nostris conantur. Libro, seu ingenii cultu, idem venerabilis patriarcha, a quo tot monasteria nomen vigoremque traxerunt, vetera litterarum monumenta, cum liberales disciplinae artesque obruebantur caligine, diligenti cura servavit et ad posteros transmisit, atque doctrinas studiose excoluit. Aratro demum, seu re rustica, aliisque subsidiis loca vasta et horrida in agros frugum feraces et hortos amemos mutavit; et precationibus fabrilia iungens, secundum verba illa «ora et labora», humano operi excellentiam addidit. Haud immerito ergo Pius PP. XII Sanctum Benedictum «Europae patrem» appellavit, cuius quidem terme continentis populis ille amorem et studium recti ordinis inspiravit, in quo socialis vita eorum inniteretur. | It was in this way that he cemented that spiritual unity in Europe, whereby peoples divided on the level of language, ethnicity and culture, perceived that they constituted the one People of God – a unity that, thanks to the constant efforts of those monks who followed so illustrious a teacher, became the distinctive hallmark of the Middle Ages. It is this unity, which St. Augustine calls the “exemplar and model of absolute beauty”, but which regrettably has been fragmented through a maze of historical events, that all men of good will even in our own day seek to rebuild. With the book, then, i.e. with culture, the same St Benedict, – from whom so many monasteries derive their name and vigour – with provident concern, saved the classical tradition of the ancients at a time when the humanistic patrimony was being lost, by transmitting it intact to posterity, and by restoring the cult of knowledge. Lastly, it was with the plough, i.e. with the cultivation of the fields and with other similar initiatives, that he succeeded in transforming abandoned and overgrown lands into fertile fields and greaceful gardens; and by uniting prayer with manual labour, according to his famous motto “ora et labora,” he ennobled and elevated human work. Rightly, therefore, Pius XII hailed Saint Benedict XII as “the father of Europe”; for he inspired the peoples of this Continent that loving care of order and justice that forms the foundation of true society. |
This is an old-fashioned little publication (108 pages), lent to me by a colleague, pulling together fifteen major statements by the popes on European integration from 1957 to 2017. It is nicely illustrated, the photograph of the EU leaders meeting the current Pope in the Sistine chapel is particularly striking.
There’s nothing very surprising here for anyone familiar with the EU and the Vatican. Successive popes have been opposed to war and to Communism, and the EU was constructed as a bulwark against both. More recent themes include an emphasis on social justice and on environmental protection, with the Church’s own particular wrinkles on those themes. There’s not much here that anyone could object to, frankly.
There was a time when the relationship looked closer. Of the six founding mamebr states of the EU, four are largely Catholic by religious tradition and the other two (the Natherlands and West Germany, as it then was) were balanced between Catholicism and Protestantism. Now things are vey different; of the 27 current member states, you’d have to put at least four in the Orthodox column, three in the firmly Protestant tradition, and anyway most of them are part of the rising tide of secularism. The European People’s Party, Europe’s largest political grouping, came from the post-war Christian Democrat tradition, but has moved firmly away from anything too church-oriented (though often gets tempted by anti-wokeness, which is not quite the same thing).
I do remember attending a conference for Northern Ireland party activists in the early 1990s, at which a Unionist participant informed us that Pope John XXIII had endorsed European integration in order to ensure Catholic domination in Europe. One of the others present snorted that not many of John XXIII’s plans for the church had worked out in the end. The EU’s two openly gay prime ministers are both from traditionally Catholic countries. Pius XII would not have approved.
Anyway, this is co-published by the EU External Action Service and L’Osservatore Romano, and you can get it from their websites, here and here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Hi,” I said, while they took me up in the mysterious freight elevator to another cloak-and-dagger meeting with that asshole Quint. “Long time no see.” I repeated myself in a couple new languages and dialects when they didn’t answer, just in case it really was all a matter of misunderstanding.
I thought this very good. Race against time with unlikely allies in an abandoned space structure inhabited by horrible creatures. I didn’t think it put a foot wrong. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Her father, the old count, had always had protégés—young priests, mostly, some of whom became bishops or advisers to Count Pesavolta. It had never occurred to Marga that she might have a protégé of her own, or that she’d want one. But looking at Tess—curious and eager, smart enough to have taught herself Quootla, resourceful enough to have found the Continental Serpent on her own—was like looking at herself at that age. There were things Marga needed to tell that young self.
Putting my money where my mouth is, I bought and read this, the book on the Hugo ballot with the best page-to-dollar ratio. I was glad to see it because I hugely enjoyed the previous book in the series, Tess of the Road, but did not write it up in 2020 because I was on the Hugos that year too. In the Serpent’s Wake takes Tess on a polar expedition led by a hilariously unperceptive aristocratic lady, where they tour also colonialism and rape culture. It didn’t move me quite as much as the previous book – seemed to be a lot of circumpolar circling – but I still enjoyed it a lot. Hartman’s imagined world is richly drawn and internally consistent. Worth getting all four books in the series for the YA reader in your life. You can get this one here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Alpha.”
I felt it was a bit too derivative of Hunger Games and Earthsearch (for those with longer memories), and the powers of the AI (and indeed the human kids) are just sufficient for the plot to proceed as the writer wants. You can get it here.
Second frame of third story (“The Infinite Corridor”):
Continuing the adventures of the Tenth Doctor and New Yorker Gabby Gonzalez. The first of these, the title story, has a rather cliched arena situation crossed with a much better than usual take on the characters losing and recovering their memories. Gabby’s friend Cindy joins the TARDIS at the end of the story, though to be honest I have difficulty distinguishing between their characters. The second story, “The Wishing Well Witch”, is a pleasing little vignette set in an English village that is not quite Stockbridge. The third story sets us up for the next volume with the Osirians returning to the fore. You can get it here.
Next in this sequence: Sins of the Father, by a similar team.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
My sister cried. My sister rarely cried; I was the one who sat and screamed over every scraped knee and torn skirt, the one who our father fluttered to and swept up in his arms and kissed on the head and called mia Gracino and mia trezoro and mia karulino in the Malisintian tongue of our ancestor, taking little notice of the fact that despite all my howling, my eyes were always dry. But on the day we left for Ceiao my sister had wept at the runway in the harbor as the ship heat curled up around our feet, face red and silent, her mouth a fiat line and her eyes so hot on me that I was afraid my hair would burn.
Yet another space operatic tale of dynastic politics witha same-sex romance twist. Maybe I was just in a bad mood, but I stopped after a hundred pages with the feeling that nothing new was going to happen. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
In the boys’ division, this sentiment informed his nightly blessing – his benediction, shouted over the beds standing in rows in the darkness. Dr Larch’s blessing followed the bed-time reading, which – after the unfortunate accident to the Winkles – became the responsibility of Homer Wells. Dr Larch wanted to give Homer more confidence. When Homer told Dr Larch how he had loved reading to the Winkles in their safari tent – and how he thought he had done it well, except that the Winkles had fallen asleep – the doctor decided that the boy’s talent should be encouraged.
A long but tremendous book, set mainly in an orphanage in Maine before, during and after the second world war. Dr Larch, the head of the orphanage, is also an abortionist and helps women from all over the community to end unwanted pregnancies. His protégé, Homer Wells, makes friends with coastal orchard kids Wally and Cindy and leaves the orphanage. We know that he will come back in the end but the journey is beautifully told and heart-breaking.
The Cider House Rules was published in 1985, twelve years after Roe v Wade, when it seemed improbable that abortion rights would be rolled back. Now of course we are seeing precisely that, as the U.S. Right attempts to run away from the devastation it has wrought on the country by picking culture war fights with the poor and oppressed. One hopes that the current situation is a nasty temporary blip, but I recommend this book educationally as a reminder of why abortion rights were and are needed. You can get it here.
This was the top book by LibraryThing populatiry on my shelves that I had not yet blogged here. Next is “The Metamorphosis”, by Franz Kafka.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
I had been walking, as was my habit, without purpose along the Portway. In a melancholic state, vision turned inwards, I felt as if I drifted in this manner most mornings. Looking for what, I could not recall. I wandered alone, my hands firmly plunged into my pockets, my fingers twitching rhythmically in forgotten arrangements, remembering the ghostly movements of some old functionality long since dissolved. What was it I had used to do, before I had begun to walk here every day? What had I used my hands for? (Mummy, can you pick me up? I can’t see!). I could never remember. My shoulders hunched against the chill. Every now and then, I managed to drag my eyes away from the beautiful bridge that hung above me, a bridge I stared at without really seeing, trying and failing to block out its insistent, persuasive calls. I would look away, struggling to reconnect my feet and my body to the ground beneath me, but my gaze always drifted back. The bridge was magnetic.
Protagonist is being treated for profound psychiatric problems by dodgy contemporary British academics with an agenda and a dream machine. It all goes horribly wrong. Author makes it clear from the foreword that it’s partly based on personal experience of psychiatric treatment. It comes from the heart, but I’m afraid I found the writing very clunky, especially at the start; it improved a bit as it went on. You can get it here.
