‘Don’t ask me, sir,’ replied the harassed man, who had just extricated himself with difficulty from the embrace of a Bessarabian refugee who wanted 237 AA 15 r 3 b Street. ‘All I know is that this is D Street that we’re in—and I believe it, straight. If I was you, I should make a cast up by the Marble Arch.’ He had once upon a time been in the old City police force and still retained traces of a courteous bearing.
I had read a collection of Bramah’s Kai Lung stories in 2015, spotted this going for sale at Eastercon in 2019, and bought it as a potentially interesting future history. It’s pretty horrible actually. Written in 1907, it is set in 1918 after a Socialist government has come to power in the UK (and Ireland has Home Rule); the lefties turn out to be disastrous at actually governing (for certain values of ‘disastrous’) and the forces of conservatism mount a successful campaign of civil disobedience to overthrow the democratically elected ministry, rather as the Unionists did in Northern Ireland in 1974. The book ends with the happy reform of the franchise to restrict it to men with more than £10 to their name, with the extra provision that if you are rich you get more than one vote; this is considered to be a Very Good Thing. Meanwhile in Ireland,
The Parliament sitting at College Green deemed the moment opportune for issuing a Declaration of Independence and proclaiming a republic. Three years before, all Irishmen had been withdrawn from the British army and navy on the receipt of Dublin’s firmly-worded note to the effect that since the granting of extended Home Rule, Irishmen came within the sphere of the Foreign Enlistment Act. These men formed the nucleus of a very useful army with which Ireland thought it would be practicable to hold out in the interior until foreign intervention came to its aid. Possibly England thought so too, for Mr Strummery’s Ministry contented itself with issuing what its members described as a firm and dignified protest. Closely examined, it was discoverable that the dignified portion was a lengthy recapitulation of ancient history; the firm portion a record of Dublin’s demands since Home Rule had been conceded, while the essential part of the communication informed the new republic that its actions were not what his Majesty’s Ministers had expected of it, and that they would certainly reserve the right of taking the matter in hand at some future time more suitable to themselves.
Irish independence is of course portrayed as a Bad Thing.
The pace of the book is energetic, but the politics so repulsive that I cannot really recommend it. If you still want to, you can get it here.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2019 and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on both lists is The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett, which I am certain I will enjoy a lot more.
When I first wrote up this year’s Doctor Who episodes, I wrote:
And the fourth in a good run of four episodes was Rogue, in which it turns out that aliens in the Doctor Who universe are also fans of Bridgerton. This had particularly good emoting from Ncuti Gatwa, suddenly taken by feelings for Jonathan Groff’s Rogue, but also had Millie Gibson playing Ruby pretending to be an alien pretending to be Ruby, and getting away with it. The contrast between spaceship and 1813 was well done.
Jonathan Groff of course was the very first King George in Hamilton, and so his voice was the first heard by the audience. I felt that (unlike Jinkx Monsoon) he avoided chewing the scenery here. And I also cheered for Indira Varma, the Duchess here, but previously seen by me in Game of Thrones and the first season of Torchwood.
Re-watching before reading the novelisation, I felt again that as an episode it hangs together very well, even if the imminent peril seems to slightly come out of nowhere (which, let’s face it, is hardly unusual in Doctor Who). Millie Gibson is really spectacularly good. There is, however, one costume that doesn’t really do it for me.
The novelisation is by the writers of the TV episode, Kate Herron and Briony Redman. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
It had been a good night, all in all, but none of it could have prepared Ruby Sunday for a party like this. This was the kind of party she’d dreamed of.
As well as the efficient and effective transfer of script to page, we get lots more back story about Rogue himself and the lover who he lost on a previous mission, and a little more on the Chuldur. Rogue’s ship is named as the Yossarian, perhaps as a nod to Catch-22, though I note also that there is a London band with that name. The book has a lot of humorous flashes as well, reminiscent of Douglas Adams but not trying too hard to be him. This is the best Fifteenth Doctor book so far. You can get it here.
According to historian Branden Little, approximately 120 American relief committees were operating in 1914, including organizations such as “Father De Ville’s Milk Fund for Belgian Babies; the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee… King Albert’s Civilian Hospital Fund… the Belgian Relief Fund; the Belgian Relief Committee; and the Commission for Relief in Belgium.”
A few months ago I was showing off the delights of Leuven a friend who has recently moved to Brussels, and challenged her to guess which American president has a square named after him in the city. If you don’t already know, I confidently predicted, you won’t get it in your first ten guesses. I was right. The story of how future president Herbert Hoover co-ordinated the delivery of food to occupied Belgium during the First World War is not well known outside this country, and indeed is a fading memory even here.
This book is a brief but detailed history of the effort an amazing triumph of non-governmental diplomacy and organisation, with food bought in the UK and distributed to the Belgians (and northern French) living under occupation. Hoover had to fight turf wars with other American do-gooders, and establish clear demarcation with the Belgian relief committee about how the distribution was to managed; but those issues pale into insignificance in comparison with the need to get the British and Germans to allow the effort to proceed in the first place despite being locked in vicious war.
The Germans come out as the bad guys, no matter how you look at it. When the Commission for Relief in Belgium complained to the military governor that German soldiers were mistreating their staff, he refused to believe them and sent one of his own men to observe the situation on the ground. The undercover German soldier was beaten up, arrested and jailed by his own comrades who refused to believe his story.
A small team of young Americans, mostly young men, supervised the relief operation on the ground. The recruitment process was basically any Rhodes scholar, or other upper-class white male American student in western Europe, who spoke decent French (as most well-educated Westerners did in those days). That obviously meant that the ‘delegates’, as they were known, were mostly from the northeastern white elite, especially since they were paid a very meagre stipend on top of expenses so that those from a less wealthy background could not afford to do it.
But it reminded me of the OSCE and other international staff who I knew in Bosnia when I was working there immediately after the war of the 1990s, people who were recruited as much for availability as for expertise, whose main role was really to demonstrate the continuing commitment of the international community to the country. It’s not such an awful thing. Going back to the First World War, my grandmother’s elder brother, Lyman C. Hibbard, volunteered not in Belgium but with the ambulances of the American Field Service in France, and was awarded the Croix du Guerre for it.
The author himself is the grandson of one of the American delegates and the Belgian industrialist‘s daughter who he fell in love with, but he doesn’t let that colour the story, which relies on the copious documentation in English. He has laudably put a lot of his source material online for wider use. However, I see only two books in French and two in Dutch out of eighty in the bibliography.
One other point that is not mentioned: the captains of Belgian industry who were able to marshal local resources as part of the effort had made most of their money from exploiting the Congo.
Anyway, it’s a short and digestible book about a quietly heroic moment of history, which is not well enough known. You can get it here.
“No woman?” he asked in consternation. He was beginning now to be accustomed to these conversations with her in which her part was little more than a movement of head or hand, or at most an occasional word dropped unwillingly from her wide mouth. He had even come to feel no lack in such conversing. “But it will be odd with only two men in the house!” he continued. “My mother had a woman from the village. I know nothing of these affairs. Is there none in the great house, no old slave with whom you were friends, who could come?”
The best-selling novel of the early 1930s, telling the story of Wang Lung, a Chinese farmer who goes from poverty to wealth, his two wives, his evil uncle, and his various children, one of whom is disabled and requires full-time care (as did one of the author’s own children). I am sure that there are many errors of detail, but its heart is very much in the right place, confronting its American and European readers with a vast and ancient culture where the foreigners are probably the bad guys, and where power is shifting rapidly away from the old rulers. I found it gripping and efficiently written. You can get it here.
It would be interesting to know how it is regarded in China, if at all. Its Chinese Wikipedia entry has just a dry plot summary. (Japanese Wikipedia discusses the possibility that it was written as anti-Japanese propaganda.)
The book itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 on the back of this and its two sequels. It bubbled to the top of three of my lists simultaneously – top book acquired so far this year, top unread book by a woman and top non-sf fiction. Next on those piles are The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne (though I may not get all the way through it, it sounds rather dull); The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin; and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong.
‘I couldn’t possibly,’ said Peri politely. ‘I’m still full after our lunch.’
Second last of the Sixth Doctor books that I read in 2015 and failed to blog at the time. To be honest, I didn’t get much out of this; the Doctor and Peri land on a planet where Autons are re-enacting the dramas of 1980s soaps, a cultural phenomenon that I’m not especially invested in. It turns out that the Nestene Consciousness is the offspring of Shub-Niggurath from the Lovecraft mythos. There are some fun nods to other parts of the Doctor Who canon. One for completists. You can get it here (at a price).
Next up: Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Beyond Utopia: The Dystopian Capitalist Society in Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863)”, by Murielle El Hajj):
At first sight, the reader thinks that Paris in the Twentieth Century depicts a utopian aspect of the Parisian society in the twentieth century. Verne opens the novel with a portion of the Parisian populace heading to the metro stations from where local trains will take them to Champ-de-Mars. It was August 13, 1960: The Prize Day at the Academic Credit Union. The latter and the age’s industrial aims were “in perfect harmony” (Verne 1996, 21). However, this ideal state of society, where no distress prevails and where no one is unhappy or hopeless seems to be just an illusion. The reader deduces the declination of society, and even its dehumanization, underlining a dystopian world controlled by tyrannical governments and facing environmental disasters.
A collection of ten short essays on futuristic science fiction, a topic which I also enjoy reading and writing about, all rather academic and unfortunately imperfectly edited; the English is clunky in places, and I was startled to read that “Victoria Butler” wrote Parable of the Sower.
But the essays, all written in the shadow of COVID for this 2022 collection, are all decent enough looks at specific works, some of which I know and some of which I don’t:
French writer Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s The Year 2440 (1771)
Argentinian writer Leopoldo Antonio Lugones Argüello’s short stories collected in Las fuerzas extrañas (1906)
Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century, unpublished until 1994
Martin Robinson Delany’s African-American freedom novel Blake; or the Huts of America (1859-1862)
Two Russian works of the early Communist era about human-animal hybrids: Alexander Belyaev’s novel The Amphibian Man (1928) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella Heart of a Dog (1925)
The great French sf writer René Barjavel, especially his 1943 novel Ravage / Ashes, Ashes
For the four essays where I already knew the source material, the authors gave me new insights (the Orwell chapter perhaps the weakest), and all of the other chapters succeeded in making me want to read the works they were about, with Blake and the long-lost Verne sounding the most attractive. I was sorry though that in their analysis of successors and imitators of Edward Bellamy, Majed Al-Lehaibi and Bernard Montonori don’t mention Oesterreich im Jahre 2020!
(Fewer than a dozen nuclear weapons, small ones, had been used in twelve years of war. A large one had destroyed Atlanta, and although the Ngumi denied responsibility, the Alliance responded by giving twenty-four hours notice, and then leveling Mandellaville and Sao Paulo. Ngumi contended that the Alliance had cynically sacrificed one nonstrategic city so it could have an excuse to destroy two important ones. Julian suspected they might be right.)
Next in my sequence of joint Hugo and Nebula winners. When I first read it in 2002, I wrote:
Julian Class and his lover Amelia Harding are physicists at a Texas university in 2049. Julian is also a part-time conscripted soldier, fighting ten days a month in the Central American front of a war between the developed world and the developing world, but doing his fighting by remote control as the brains of a military robot. He and his platoon are linked by a neurological modification known as “jacking” which enables them to share each others’ sensations, experiences and memories. He is also the part-time narrator of the book, which drops into third person now and then, giving the impression that his memories have been assembled by a later editor to make a coherent whole. Haldeman used a slightly similar presentation in his earlier The Long Habit of Living and I first came across this technique used to devastating effect in the books based on the TV series Yes, Minister! and Yes, Prime Minister! In this case, of course, it helps the author get around the problem of a first-person narrator who has suicidal impulses; by dropping into the third person now and again we readers are kept guessing as to whether or not the narrator makes it to the end of the book (cf. Podkayne of Mars, Flowers for Algernon.)
When Haldeman writes in the foreword to Forever Peace that it examines some of the problems of his earlier novel, The Forever War, “from an aspect that didn’t exist twenty years ago”, one of the problems in question must surely be the evolution of humanity towards the day “when violence towards another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh”, to use the words of Martin Luther King quoted in the first pages of the book. The aspect that (I guess) didn’t exist in 1974 is the concept of nanotechnology and by extension the whole set of ideas about the human/computer interface associated with the cyberpunk movement, which came to the fore in sf only in the 1990s. It transpires that those who have been “jacked” with other people for more than two weeks become “humanised”, incapable of deadly violence against other human beings. Julian and Amelia (who for various reasons are both excluded from being affected in this way themselves) decide that this is a Good Thing and conspire with their friends to get the entire command structure of the US military modified in this way.
There is a second conspiracy, one which they are working against. It turns out that the vastly ambitious particle physics experiment Amelia has been working on has the potential to end the universe (or at least the solar system) by replicating the conditions of the Big Bang. A millennialist conspiracy within the higher reaches of the US government decides that the end of the world would be a Good Thing and resolves to thwart Amelia’s efforts to prevent the experiment from being carried out. Various agents are sent to stop them, including a memorably sexy female assassin. But the good guys triumph just in time. Some find the idea of such conspiracies at high level in the US government unconvincing. Well, first of all, it’s a novel, and novels contain things which are not true but make a good story. Secondly, I’ve been sufficiently involved in shedding light on various Balkan conspiracies involving the highest levels of government that little can surprise me any more.
The future war in Central America is between a developed world fighting largely by remote control, and an indigenous population absorbing most of the casualties; from the 1997 perspective, this must have seemed a reasonable extrapolation from the 1990-91 Gulf War, and indeed Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001 were largely fought on that basis. Haldeman even has a massive, one-off attack on a major American city, though it’s nuking Atlanta rather than jumbo jets in New York. The descriptions of the conflict are graphic, on a par with Lucius Shepard’s Life In Wartime, and the narrative is particularly gripping as the assassin closes in on our heroes towards the end. As a novel, it works. The portrayal of Julian’s suicidal impulses and emotional confusion is convincing, and we the readers can see what is really going on for Amelia through his perceptions. The fact that neither main characters is able to share in the jacked consciousness of the newly enhanced humanity is rather poignant. The final couple of pages, describing the victory of the good guys, are perhaps a little too rapid, and when we first encounter those who have already been “humanised” in their North Dakota hideout, I found the scene rather reminiscent of the decaying scientists in the 1983 Doctor Who story Mawdryn Undead, which slightly spoiled it for me. But in general, I felt the tone was more mature and the ending more plausible, if the style a little less raw, than Haldeman’s earlier Hugo and Nebula winner, The Forever War.
One of the least successful aspects of Haldeman’s earlier book is its portrayal of a pacifist end-state for the human race. The Big Idea of Forever Peace is that this pacifist end-state can be achieved by technological intervention; through the sharing of our common humanity via “jacking”. Now, the idea that the Next Big Step in human evolution will involve a fundamental shift in consciousness is quite an old one, with honorable antecedents in Olaf Stapledon and George Bernard Shaw up to Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Greg Bear’s Blood Music. The angle is still an unusual one. I was reminded a bit of Frank Herbert’s minor novel, The Santaroga Barrier, where the hero begins by rejecting the prospect of a new form of human consciousness but end up eagerly participating. Forever Peace‘s biggest flaw, as a novel examining issues of humanity and morality, is that it lacks an examination of the ethics of forcing major (and risky) brain surgery on people to bestow on them the benefits of the evolutionary leap forward.
Coming back to it twenty-two years later, I feel that it has not aged especially well. The waging of war remotely, and the attached civilian horrors, perhaps resonate with today’s atrocities in Ukraine and Gaza, though of course these are being largely waged by drone and missile, with deployment of human troops a smaller part of the story than was the case fifty years ago (though still very important). We can see now that Haldeman’s anthropomorphic soldier robots are militarily unnecessary.
And who would have thought that rather than conspiracy theorists in government needing to hide their activities from the authorities, they would actually be getting cabinet-level appointments from the incoming president of the United States?
And the woman assassin at the end is just a little bit too homicidally competent to be true.
Anyway, you can get it here. Next up is “The Ultimate Earth”, by Jack Williamson.
Usually in these entries I go through the other Hugo and Nebula contenders for that year, but this was in the odd period when the Nebulas seemed to part company with quality control. I wrote at the time (though I think my views have shifted a bit over the last two decades):
Since the Nebulas changed their eligibility criteria to allow novels to be considered two years running, the number of works winning both Hugo and Nebula has decreased quite dramatically. Between 1966 and 1996, 15 novels and 34 shorter works pulled off the double, ie on average more than one each year, in each case winning Hugo and Nebula for different years but awarded in the same year. Since 1996, one novel (Forever Peace) and one shorter work (Jack Williamson’s “The Ultimate Earth”) have managed to win both awards, in both cases for the same year but awarded in different years. [We now know that in fact “The Ultimate Earth” kicked off a new sequence of joint wins, but that wasn’t knowable in December 2002 when I wrote this.]
It seems quite clear that, for whatever reason, the profiles of the sf likely to win each award has diverged. My own experience is that the Nebula Award final ballot is not very useful for me in identifying novels that I would like to read, and two of the three awards for Best Novel made since Forever Peace are, in my humble opinion, completely incomprehensible.* The Hugo shortlist, on the other hand, always includes several books that I already own and I usually enjoy tracking down and reading the others; and while I may disagree with three of the four Hugos for Best Novel awarded since Forever Peace I can at least understand what the voters saw in them.** Perhaps there are SF readers out there for whom the Nebulas in recent years make sense, but I have not heard from any of them.
* For the record: I consider The Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler, to be a comprehensible and worthy winner of the Nebula Award for 2000, though had I been voting I would probably have gone for George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings or Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division. I cannot say the same for Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, which beat both A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold and Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson for the 2001 award. And while the 2002 shortlist is generally uninspiring, with the singular exception of George R.R. Martin’s superb A Storm of Swords, I simply cannot comprehend the award going to Catherine Asaro’s The Quantum Rose, with its awful stereotyped romantic lead characters and contrived attempts to link the plot to quantum mechanics.
** The Hugo Award I agree with was the 1999 one to To Say Nothing Of the Dog, by Connie Willis. For 2000 I’d have picked A Civil Campaign or Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon over A Deepness in the Sky, for 2001 Ken MacLeod’s The Sky Road or George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords rather than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and for 2002 Bujold’s Curse of Chalion rather than Gaiman’s American Gods, but I’ll admit that it’s a close call in all three cases and I certainly respect the judgement of those who voted the other way.
There were no novels on both the relevant Hugo and Nebula final ballots other than Forever Peace; it beat the following year’s Hugo winner, To Say Nothing of the Dog, for the Nebula. That year’s Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo winner was Contact; there was no SFWA equivalent.
Back to a different sequence of Eleventh Doctor graphic stories, this unites a one-shot, where Rory’s spam emails come alive in the Tardis,with a three-parter, where the Doctor, Amy and Rory get mixed up with the police investigation of Jack the Ripper. It’s a bit dubious, frankly, to adapt the very real femicidal atrocities of the Ripper murders for a Doctor Who story and to make an anthropophagic alien the secret killer. Doctor Who doesn’t go to the Holocaust, or even Ireland much, and this isn’t so very different.
But Tony Lee (as usual) captures the characters well, and the first bit with living spam emails is sheer fun; and the Ripper story is superbly illustrated by the art of Tim Hamilton, who I don’t think I had otherwise come across, but I shall definitely look out for now.
Every morning, day breaks over the mudflats, covered in osprey corpses and unexpected bluish reflections, as if a hundred will-o-the-wisps of the wrong colour were advancing over the watery surface. The smooth flat mirror of the mudflats shines indigo: fluorescent, freakish, wrong. From their beaks, and from sores on their chests and bellies, there pours a tainted viscous liquid that resembles watery gelatine, odourless and sticky to the touch.
I got this collection back in 2019 when one of the stories, ‘Kingfisher’, was on the BSFA shortlist. I wrote then of “Kingfisher”:
A very different, grim story of a relationship breaking down in a near future world where we have had environmental catastrophe and yet middle-class struggle against harsh economic reality continues, as does the battle against patriarchy. Vividly realised and tautly told.
It got my second preference (my first pref went to Time Was, by Ian McDonald, which won).
The collection as a whole addresses human relationships in the coming environmental apocalypse, and does that from an impressive variety of different angles. (There are a couple of exceptions but this covers most of them.) I was hooked with the very first story, “Orange Dogs”, set in a devastated Cambridge where books have almost vanished and babies come with huge difficulty. It’s a tremendous short body of work, containing more than half of Womack’s short fiction to date (and she has another collection coming out). You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next up is What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah.
Second paragraph of third section (English only, I don’t have access to the Dutch original):
‘I want to know all about it. I want to learn who they were, the nobodies who no one was ever interested in. I want to find out how he was as a person, whether he hated, whether he loved, what his weaknesses and his strength [sic] were. I want to learn to understand that person, who, like so many others, was exterminated as a nobody?’ She looks surprised. Suddenly she gets up. Her hands come to life in the overfull secretary [sic]. Documents, photographs, letters, it is all mixed up but she blindly finds what she is looking for and sits next to me with her small collection.
This is the story of Fritz Pfeffer, known to the world as Dussel the dentist, who shared a bedroom in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam with the diarist Anne Frank for twenty uncomfortable months from November 1942 until they were arrested in July 1944 and sent to their deaths. (Fritz Pfeffer died in Neuengamme that December, Anne Frank in Belsen probably in February 1945.) I have written before about the editing of Anne’s original words about him, here and here; I think even her biggest fans (and I count myself as quite a big fan) would need to admit that her writing about him does not show her at her best, and it’s actually rather redeeming to read about him in his own terms.
Fritz Pfeffer was from Gießen in Hesse (all eight of the fugitives in the Achterhuis were born in Germany, including both Frank girls). He was born in 1889, moved to Berlin in 1912 and opened a dental surgery there, served in the First World War, married in 1926, had a son in 1927 and divorced in 1932. He met Charlotte Kaletta (1910-1985) in 1936; she too was divorced, with a son, and although her background was Christian, her ex-husband and therefore her son counted as Jewish.
They fled together to Amsterdam after Kristallnacht in 1938, and Fritz’s son went to his brother in England and survived the war. A twist of Dutch law meant that Fritz and Charlotte could not marry; as they were German citizens, the Netherlands was not willing to let them break German law. She did marry him retroactively in 1950, with effect from 1937, but of course he had been dead for several years by then. Fritz’s mother had died in 1925, but his father and both his sisters, and Charlotte’s ex-husband and her son, all died in the Holocaust as well. It’s another grim story among so many millions.
I really hate to say it, but this is actually a terrible book. Nanda van der Zee, one of the Netherlands’ most controversial historians, decided to write it not as non-fiction but as a fictional interview with Charlotte (who had died two years before the Anne Frank House researchers came across the papers, so van der Zee never actually met her). We therefore don’t know what details are true and what are van der Zee’s creative licence. On top of that, the English translation of van der Zee’s original Dutch text, and of Fritz’s own letters to Charlotte in German, is clunky and tin-eared. We do at least get the original German text of those letters, so if you have the linguistic skills (or access to a translation engine) you can draw your own conclusions. Fritz’s German was awkward but fluent, like most repressed professional men of his time. (Anne mercilessly mocks his Dutch in the Diary.)
At the end of the book, van der Zee gives her fictional version of Charlotte a peroration about the evil of war, but this rather misses the point (though let me be clear that war usually is evil): it was not war that killed Fritz Pfeffer, Anne Frank and five of their six companions – it was the rulers of the country where they were born, declaring that they were not fully human and that they deserved only death. While the war certainly did not help, it was another result of Fascism, which was the ultimate cause of both the war and the genocide. It seems to me very strange that van der Zee chose to take a different, and demonstrably wrong, line.
On the positive side, a bunch of photos are included, mainly from Fritz’s earlier life but a few from Charlotte’s. There is one picture, and only one, of the two of them together, on a boat probably in the Netherlands in 1939 or 1940. She looks blissful; he looks pretty content too, and has a good cigar slipped between his fingers. From the number of clothes they are wearing, it was a cold day though a sunny one; they must have provided their own warmth for each other.
It is awful to think of Charlotte living another four decades, knowing that the man she loved had spent his last year and a half in the Netherlands sharing uncomfortable space with a resentful teenager – whose side of the story then became world famous, to the extent that a comic actor got an Oscar nomination for playing him for laughs in the film. She had at least had regular letters from Fritz during his time in the Achterhuis, but sadly they have not survived. I am glad that we now have some access to Fritz’s past, though it could really have been presented much much better than it is in this book.
I found this cheap and remaindered at a book fair, and I can’t find anywhere on the Internet that is actually selling copies of the English translation. If you really want to look for it, the ISBN is 905911096X. The Dutch original is also out of print (and is not cited as a source by the Anne Frank House) but you may be able to get it here.
This was the shortest book on my unread shelves acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells.
Non-genre 7 (YTD 32) The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins La piège aux maris, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) Les débuts de la forgeronne, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck The Harvey Girls, by Samuel Hopkins Adams Marriage, by H.G. Wells Creed Country, by Jenny Overton
SF 5 (YTD 81) The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling Lost Objects, by Marian Womack Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 30) Synthespians™, by Craig Hinton Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman
Comics 4 (YTD 32) The Ripper, by Tony Lee The Nikopol Trilogy: A Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap, by Enki Bilal The Nikopol Trilogy: Cold Equator, by Enki Bilal
6,400 pages (YTD 64,300) 8/26 (YTD 110/262) by non-male writers (Riehl, van der Zee, Rattazzi, Buck, Overton, Womack, Wynne Jones, Herron/Redman) None (YTD 26/262) by a non-white writer, for second month running – rather poor of me 5/26 rereads (The Moonstone, Forever Peace, Creed Country, Synthespians™, The Nikopol Trilogy: A Bedlam of Immortals) 259 books currently tagged unread, down 8 from last month, down 79 from November 2023.
Reading now Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin Authors of their Lives, by David A. Gerber
Coming soon (perhaps) When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis Eden Rebellion, by Abi Falaise The Aztecs, by Doris V Sutherland Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells M Leuven Collectie Schilderijen, by Lorne Campbell The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling The Crown of Dalemark, by Diana Wynne Jones Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis “The Ultimate Earth”, by Jack Williamson The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde
One of the Peshawar Club’s discreet manservants had slipped the calling card under the door. As King read, he fended off the soft rounded warmth that pressed to his back, and the hands that reached teasingly around his body and tried to undo the bath towel wrapped about his waist.
Warning: this is a long piece, and a lot of it is pedantic whining.
This is the last of the science fiction novels that I found set in 2025 (and published before 2005), though I have a graphic novel coming up still. It’s also the longest of them, and the one in which 2025 has diverged the most from our own history. In this timeline, Europe and North America were devastated by meteorites in 1878, and the British Empire has resettled in India, with the royal family adopting a syncretic version of Anglicanism and Hinduism (Islam is a religion of the provinces and fringes) and ruling a polity anchored by South Africa at one end and Australia at the other. They are on friendly terms with France/Algeria, where the Napoleonic dynasty has resumed power, and threatened by the Russians, who have become devil-worshippers and cannibals based in Central Asia. China and Japan have united and are distantly threatening. Technology has developed to roughly steampunk level rather than anything more sophisticated.
Our heroes, a happy band of protagonists including the heirs to both the British and French empires (the latter is meant to be a surprise but it’s signalled pretty much from the start), with a diverse crew of warriors and a magically talented Russian defector, are battling to prevent the Russians taking over which would obviously be a Bad Thing. Starts with a fridging, then lots of steampunky combat and action, finishing with several perilous passages on an airship over Afghanistan, in the spirit of Kipling and Flashman. It’s an alternate world where the ruling classes happily bicker about who gets to rule, and where men are real men and allow women to be intellectuals too if they want. The obvious three couples all get together at the end. (Also, the Peshawar Lancers of the title are barely in the story at all.)
It’s all meant to be great fun, but several things really annoyed me about this novel. Stirling is determined to show off to us how much research he has done; but a little learning can be a dangerous thing. In Chapter 2, we have the following passage:
The younger man whispered to his companion in Bengali: “How can we trust this cow-murdering winebibber, my teacher? Even for a Muslim and outcaste, he is vile.”
The older man flicked a look at Ignatieff’s face to make sure he hadn’t understood—Bengali and Hindi were closely related—and the Okhrana agent beamed uncomprehending friendship.
He spoke both languages perfectly, of course.
Bengali and Hindi are not closely related. They are from different branches of the Indo-Aryan language group, Hindi from the Central subgroup and Bengali from the Eastern. In these enlightened days, you can actually ask an online translation engine to give you Bengali and Hindi versions of the phrase “How can we trust this cow-murdering winebibber, my teacher? Even for a Muslim and outcaste, he is vile.” The results are completely different:
Bengali
Hindi
আমরা কিভাবে এই গো-হত্যাকারী ওয়াইনবিবারকে বিশ্বাস করব, আমার শিক্ষক? এমনকি একজন মুসলিম ও বহিরাগতদের জন্যও সে জঘন্য।
इस गौ-हत्यारे शराबी पर हम कैसे भरोसा कर सकते हैं, मेरे गुरु? एक मुसलमान और बहिष्कृत व्यक्ति के लिए भी वह नीच है।
Is gau-hatyaare sharaabee par ham kaise bharosa kar sakate hain, mere guru? Ek musalamaan aur bahishkrt vyakti ke lie bhee vah neech hai.
There is some similarity between the words for “cow-killer”, “gō-hatyākārī” in Bengali and “gau-hatyaare” in Hindi, and also between the words for “Muslim”, “musalima” in Bengali and “musalamaan” in Hindi, which perhaps is an indication that you shouldn’t mutter insults in a language that you’re not sure your interlocutor doesn’t understand. But otherwise, you’re probably safe using Bengali in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, which is where this scene is set.
Stirling may have got confused between Bengali and Urdu, the languages of the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (now just Pakistan) respectively. Urdu is very similar to Hindi, to the point that ‘closely related’ may not convey the relationship strongly enough. However his fictional Angrezi Raj seems to have lost most of its Urdu speakers.
And these languages are not obscure – Hindi and Bengali have the fourth and fifth most native speakers in the world, after Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English. I can’t imagine anyone writing, for instance, “The older man flicked a look at Sanchez’s face to make sure he hadn’t understood—Spanish and English are closely related.”
One can make the excuse for Stirling that online translation services were not available when he was writing the book. But encyclopedias certainly were, and you will find no encyclopedia that gives you reason to think that Bengali and Hindi are mutually intelligible. It’s fairly clear that he did not offer the draft for review to anyone with actual first-hand knowledge of Indian languages.
On another point, my eyebrows rose sharply in Chapter 23, when “Cassandra started wolfing down a fiery chicken Marsala”. No she didn’t. Marsala sauce, with an ‘r’, is made with the sweet wine of the same name and is not ‘fiery’. Masala, with no ‘r’, is a general term for an Indian spice mix, but usually not an especially hot one. If it is hot, its name is usually qualified with a particular set of ingredients, a ‘vindaloo masala‘ for instance.
And another thing: it’s a pet peeve of mine with other writers too, but the treatment of Russian is very inconsistent. Пожалуйста, “please”, is given as “pajalsta”, and Спасибо, “thank you” as “spacebo”; if I were being phonetic, I’d use “pazhal’sta” and “spasiba” to convey how they are actually pronounced by real Russian speakers, but usually in English writers use the standard transliterations, “pozhaluysta” and “spasibo”, even though they are a bit misleading. Yet at other points Stirling does use the standard transliteration, for example in Chapter 10 where we have the exchange “Govorite-li vy po-russki?” / “Da, govoryu. Kto vy takoy?” – “Do you speak Russian?” / “Yes, I do. And who are you?” If we were being phonetic, the first two vowels in говорите and говорю sound much more like short ‘a’ than short ‘o’, and the exchange is rather stilted anyway – “Vy govorite po-russki?” / “Da, a vy kto?” would be much more idiomatic. Though we are told it is the “High Formal mode” of Russian, for what that’s worth.
Incidentally the Russian-speaker is wearing a burqua rather than a burqa, and the military caste of India are the Kyashtria rather than the Kshatriya. Again, anyone who actually knows anything about Asian cultures will pick these up immediately.
These things do matter. If you are writing about other cultures, especially if you are writing in English about formerly colonised cultures in an alternate history where they have stayed colonised, it is important to show respect by getting at least basic language and cookery facts right.
Sorry to whine. Other readers, better informed on India than I am, have commented on other mistakes in the book, but those were the ones that jumped out at me.
I know that this book is beloved by many readers, but I’m afraid that I am not among them. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un, again):
The Normans were at this time the foremost race in Christendom. Their courage and ruthlessness had made them conspicuous among the rovers from Scandinavia who ravaged Western Europe. Their sails had been the terror of both coasts of the Channel, long before they conquered and settled in Gaul. But – unlike the previous Scandinavian warriors – the Normans were not content to remain seafarers. They became landsmen. And in land warfare, they cast aside the weapons of their forefathers and learnt to handle the weapons of their newly-won land with greater prowess than they had ever been handled before. They had archers with bows carrying death at a distance; they had cavalry clad in mail armour, and armed with long lances and glittering kite-shaped shields. In the province of Normandy they founded a mighty state, which gradually extended its influence over the neighbouring provinces of Brittany and Maine. And, without laying aside that dauntless valour which terrorized every land from the Elbe to the Pyrences, the Normans rapidly acquired all, and more than all, the knowledge and refinement which they found in the country where they settled. They established internal order. They adopted the French tongue, in which Latin was the main element, and raised it to a dignity and importance which it has never lost. French literature became the glory of the civilized world. They embraced Christianity and adopted the feudal doctrines of France which they worked into some sort of a system. They adopted their own form of architecture, the romanesque. They were chivalrous, these Normans; indeed, with them began the age of chivalry. Unlike other Germanic peoples, they renounced brutish intemperance; their polite luxury presented a striking contrast to the coarse voracity and drunkenness of their Saxon and Danish neighbours. The Norman baron displayed his magnificence, not in huge piles of food and hogsheads of strong drink, but in large and stately edifices, rich armour, gallant horses, choice falcons, well-ordered tournaments, and wines chosen for their flavour rather than for their intoxicating power. They were dignified in their bearing and well-spoken. They were born orators as well as born lawyers, just as they were born soldiers. For before all else they were soldiers. Their conquests extended to Southern Italy and Sicily on the one hand, and to the British Isles on the other.
I have been trying to find out about the author of this book. Thanks to the genealogy websites, I have determined that his full name was Brian Boteler Fitzgerald, that he lived from 21 January 1908 to 20 July 1977, that he was the son of Lord Henry Gordon FitzGerald (1863–1955) and Inez Charlotte Grace Casberd-Boteler (1871-1967) and the grandson of the 4th Duke of Leinster, and that he married Elizabeth Dorotea Maud Brocklebank Fleetwood-Hesketh (1914-1992) on 28 July 1936 when he was 28 and she 22. I don’t find any record that they had children. In addition to this book, published in 1951, he published four other Irish history books in 1949, 1950, 1952 and 1954, and a few more edited volumes of letters later in the 1950s, all relating to the Fitzgerald family, so a rather concentrated period of writing activity in the middle of his adult life. I have no record of anything else that he did at any other time in his career. He was born, married and died in London, but clearly wore his Irish heritage proudly.
This book is the work of a very enthusiastic and energetic romantic, dedicated to proving the proposition that the Fitzgeralds are the key factor in Irish history for more than four centuries. It’s actually a proposition that most would agree with, but by focussing on one family’s history, you can lose sight of what else is going on. In particular I’d have liked to get an understanding of the relationship between the Fitzgerald lands and the Pale/Butler territory on the one hand, and the more Irish districts on the other.
It’s also misleading to suggest that the Fitzgeralds’ rule of Ireland was the basic pattern of Irish government consistently from 1189 to 1603. It was perhaps the default, but there was no automaticity and the right of English kings to intervene was clearly accepted by all concerned. The peak of the Kildare Fitzgeralds’ power comes at the very end of the period, when Henry VII is forced to accept their continued rule in Ireland after Bosworth Field because he has no alternative; but the collapse of that power in the 1530s came very swiftly, which suggests that it did not have such deep foundations after all.
I was surprised to learn that the Fitzgerald family trace their origins to the Gherardini family of Tuscany, based in Florence from 1100, whose most famous member is probably Lisa del Giocondo, to use her married name (though that is not how she is best known). This link seemed really fanciful to me, but the book has documentary evidence from both sides indicating that the Gherardini accepted that the connection was there. To me it’s fairly clear that the mythology of the family begins with Gerald of Wales, who was the son of one of the daughters of Gerald FitzWalter, the best documented originator of the dynasty, and I don’t quite see the timelines adding up.
Still, it’s full of details about the entire period of Irish history from 1170 to 1603, and although it’s partisan, it wears its heart on its jacket and is rather endearing. You can get it here.
This was the very last of the books that I acquired in 2018 which I managed to clear from the unread shelves, ten months after I did the same for the last of my 2017 acquisitions. The full list so far, since I started tallying this way eight years ago, is:
There are 26 books on my unread shelves which I acquired in 2019, and 11 of them are by H.G. Wells, so there’s going to be a fair bit of minor Wellsiana coming up. I’m starting with:
The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee (shortest)
Lost Objects, by Marian Womack (sf that has lingered longest unread and isn’t by Wells)
What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah (top book on LibraryThing which isn’t by Wells)
Marriage, by H. G. Wells (top book on LibraryThing which is by Wells)
Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, by David A. Gerber (non-fiction that has lingered longest unread)
Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien (non-genre fiction that has lingered longest unread and isn’t by Wells)
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long’un, about a list of the havens of Ireland; this paragraph alone has many more words than the document it is describing):
The list’s comprehensiveness is impressive, considering that it was likely drawn up in the early Tudor period, a time when knowledge in England of Ireland’s geography, most especially of the west and north-west, was limited. In the commonplace book of Christopher Cusack, sheriff of Meath – a copy of which survives from the early sixteenth century but which contains disparate material which is probably much older – there is a geographic description of the island of Ireland in which its most southerly and northerly points are aligned against St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and Dumfries in Scotland, respectively. Here, it was inaccurately stated that Ireland was larger than England: ‘Irland should be mor then Ingland by iiixx miles’ its author concluded.2 Later, in 1543 Sir Anthony St Leger, lord deputy of Ireland, offered Henry VIII a detailed description of Ireland’s havens – ‘The more parte of the notable havons of Ireland’; but he named only thirty-seven, and was quick to point out those havens which lay within (or near) the Irishry and which were, in effect, beyond royal control.3 It was only in Elizabeth’s reign, as Tudor rule extended throughout the island, that a greater awareness of such geographical detail was achieved in governing circles, and mainly through the increasing use of maps.4 This is evident, for example, in the well-known, and richly detailed, maps of Ireland drawn in the 1560s by Laurence Nowell and John Goghe.5 When these are compared with the crude ‘Cotton’ map of Ireland drawn in the 1520s – this drawing represents the earliest known attempt under the Tudors to map the island – and a later Italian map of Ireland from 1565 – in which Dublin and its hinterland are plotted too far south, and Sligo is depicted as lying north-east of Donegal – the new-found superiority of English knowledge of Ireland’s geography and topography becomes immediately apparent.6 Of course the act of listing havens, and ultimately plotting them on maps, did not conjure these locations into being. For centuries Englishmen and Irishmen had relied on local knowledge to move about the country, by land and by sea, without a reliance on lists of places or maps. Lists of places, such as that included in the Hatfield Compendium and on maps, were not intended to replace local knowledge. Rather they represent an effort to impart some of this local knowledge to those unfamiliar with Ireland, so allowing them to measure and to visualize that which they could not see first-hand. 2 TCD MS 594, fo. 36. The description in Cusack’s commonplace book is nearly identical to the undated and anonymous ‘Geographical account of Ireland’, which was placed in the year 1514 in the State Papers of Henry VIII: TNA, SP 60/1/5, fo. 7 (see also below, p. 138). 3 Havens of Ireland, 6 Apr. I543, TNA, SP 60/11/2(1), fo. 15. St Leger provided a brief description of each haven: ‘Dublyn, a badde haven. Wicklowe, but a crecke’. 4 William Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory: a geography of colonial and early modern Ireland, c.1530-1750 (Cork, 2006), ch. 1. 5 ‘General description of England and Ireland’, c. 1564, BL, Additional MS 62540, fos 3v-4r; ‘Hibernia: insula non procul ab Anglia vulgare Hirlandia vocata” , 1567, TNA, MPF 1/68. 6 The well-known ‘Cotton’ map is reproduced in Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory, pp 40-1. Bolognino Zaltieri’s 1565 map of Ireland, published in Venice, is a copy of Sebastiano de Re’s 1558 map of Ireland. The former is reproduced in S.G. Ellis, ‘The Tudor borderlands, 1485-1603’ in John Morrill (ed.), The Oxford illustrated history of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford, 1996), pp 66-7. See also the Elizabethan effort to set out the depths of some of the harbours in Munster: the depths, anchorages etc., of the harbours of Ireland, 21 Apr. 1567, BL, Cotton MSS, Titus B XII, fo. 482.
Coming at the Tudor period, and Ireland specifically, with the tools of the historian rather than the literature scholar, this is a deep analysis of a 15-folio manuscript preserved in Hatfield House, by two of the top writers on the period. The manuscript includes eight short documents, all about different aspects of Ireland in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the most substantial are a potted history at the beginning and a set of Ordinances for Ireland at the end, though it’s not clear if these last were ever put into effect.
The Hatfield Compendium was clearly written for a newly appointed Tudor official with a senior role in the government of Ireland, and the authors spend a large part of the book examining the very poor state of knowledge of Irish affairs in England throughout the Tudor period. The overthrown Yorkists had had much better links than their Lancastrian predecessors or Tudor successors – not mentioned here, but Richard of York, before he gave battle in vain, was the chief governor of Ireland for over a decade and launched the 1460 campaign to retake England from there.
Henry VII came to throne only vaguely aware of his nearby realm, and devoted significant effort and personnel (though not a lot of money) to getting a grip on it. Maginn and Ellis are able to trace the information in the Hatfield Compendium both backward and forward, looking at how it was created to satisfy the needs of the king and his senior advisers for data about a rather unknown place.
The book then traces the story through the ending of the Fitzgerald dominance and the beginning of surrender and regrant, and the definition of the kingship of Ireland (rather than lordship as it had been since Henry II), through the policies of successive underfunded chief governors appointed by Henry VIII.
Taking a step back, it strikes me that when the English court thought of Ireland, they really meant the Pale and a few outposts under government control (loosely defined), and the areas under the control of the greater magnates, the Butlers and Fitzgeralds; about half of the island, under the control of the Irish clans, just didn’t feature in calculations except as a source of trouble and potential fodder for land grabs. It’s a normal enough paradigm for this sort of conflict between a well-armed but under-informed military and a hostile and well-dug-in population; one thinks of Israel v the West Bank and Gaza, but there are plenty of other parallels.
Quite a short book, but with a lot of good stuff in it. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third essay (“The Tudor Court: Dust and Desire”, by Thomas Betteridge):
This discussion is in two parts. The first section will examine a number of mid-Henrician responses to the court, including Wyatt’s courtly lyrics, while the second part will look in detail at the work of Skelton. This chapter will argue that the Henrician court paradoxically exists in its purest state in the work of Skelton before this court starts to emerge as a coherent institution during the 1520s and ’30s. In Magnyfycenceand The Bowge of Courte, Skelton creates a Henrician court before the avant la lettre [sic], a spectral court that haunted the real thing, not as a hidden secret but as dust, detritus, as a material reminder of the court’s consistent failure to achieve its fantasy of itself.²
² Slavoj Žižek comments that “object petit a is the reminder that can never be sublated [aufgehoben] in the moment of symbolization. So not only is this reminder not an ‘inner’ object irreducible to external materiality— it is precisely the irreducible trace of externality in the very midst of ‘internality,’ its condition of impossibility (a foreign body preventing the subject’s full constitution) which is simultaneously its condition of possibility. The ‘materiality’ of this reminder is that of the trauma which resists symbolization.” Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 90-135, 117, emphasis in the original.
A collection of essays on how the court actually functioned under the Tudor monarchs, apparently papers from a conference in 2004. The two editors and the other six contributors are all English literature scholars, and I must say I find it interesting that I’m getting quite a lot of value from the literature end of analysis of the Tudor period. The first three essays are about Henry VIII and humanism as deployed at court; the other five are about Elizabeth I, and the standout for me was Peter Sillitoe’s piece on the royal progresses, both their limitations and their achievements in terms of projecting royal power. But there is lots of other good stuff to chew on. No mention of Ireland though. You can get it here (for a price).
Ah. Actually this is rather difficult. The book is broken up into four sections, one of which is further subdivided:
Prologue (6 pages)
The Story: First Period (170 pages)
The Story: Second Period (249 pages split into eight Narratives)
Epilogue (6 pages split into three parts)
Each of these sections and narratives is in turn split up into many sub-sections. But I don’t usually count prologues, so I’ll take the second paragraph of the third sub-section of “The Story: First Period” as my sample text for the book. It is, appropriately enough:
Penelope’s notion is that I should set down what happened, regularly day by day, beginning with the day when we got the news that Franklin Blake was expected on a visit to the house. When you come to fix your memory with a date in this way, it is wonderful what your memory will pick up for you upon that compulsion. The only difficulty is to fetch out the dates, in the first place. This Penelope offers to do for me by looking into her own diary, which she was taught to keep when she was at school, and which she has gone on keeping ever since. In answer to an improvement on this notion, devised by myself, namely, that she should tell the story instead of me, out of her own diary, Penelope observes, with a fierce look and a red face, that her journal is for her own private eye, and that no living creature shall ever know what is in it but herself. When I inquire what this means, Penelope says, “Fiddlesticks!” I say, Sweethearts.
I had read this a very long time ago: one of the very first mystery novels in English, about the disappearance of a mystical jewel, with train timetables. drug addicts, religious fanatics (both Christian and non-Christian), peculiar medical conditions and suicidal love. Our copy is an ex-library edition which Anne acquired many years ago, with an enthusiastic introduction by no less than Dorothy L. Sayers.
What makes the book so memorable is that the story is told from many different points of view, and the first two are both very vivid – the old family servant, who believes that all wisdom can be found in Robinson Crusoe, and the crazy Christian relative, who annoys all the other characters. There is then a fine momentum which carries you through to the end.
It’s not without its flaws. The actual solution to the mystery resembles one of Agatha Christie’s more implausible schemes. The dead maidservant is a surprisingly good writer for someone of her background. Also, given that the jewel was stolen from the Indians by the British in the first place, it might have been better to save all the trouble by just giving it back to them early on; but then I guess you would have no story. Still, I was entertained, and you can get it here.
This was the book on my shelves with the most LT owners that I have not previously reviewed online. (Apart from children’s books, and books by Terry Pratchett.) Next on that pile, on a rather different note, is The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis.
Second paragraph of third document (a letter from Pope Alexander III to Irish bishops):
Inde est utique quod nos ex vestris litteris intelligentes quod per potentiam karissimi in Christo filii nostri H[einrici] illustris Anglorum regis qui divina inspiratione compunctus coadunatis viribus suis gentem illam barbaram, incultam et divine legis ignaram suo dominio subiugavit, ea que in terra vestra tam illicite committuntur, cooperante domino, incipiunt iam desistere gudio gavisi sumus et ei qui iamdicto regi tantam victoriam contulit et triumphum inmensas gratiarum actiones exsolvimus, prece supplici postulantes ut per vigilanciam et sollicitudinem ipsius regis vestro cooperante studio gens illa indisciplinata et indomita cultum divine legis et religionem Chritiane fidei per omnia et in omnibus imitetur et vos ac ceteri ecclesiastici viri honore et tranquillitate debita gaudeatis.
Hence it is that – understanding from your letters that our dear son in Christ, Henry, illustrious King of England, stirred by divine inspiration and with his united forces, has subjected to his dominion that people, a barbarous one uncivilized and ignorant of the Divine law, and that those evils which were unlawfully practised in your land are now, with God’s help, already beginning to diminish – We are overjoyed and have offered our grateful prayers to Him who has granted to the said King so great a victory and triumph, humbly beseeching that by the vigilance and care of the same King that most undisciplined and untamed nation may in and by all things persevere in devotion to the practice of the Christian faith, and that you and your ecclesiastical brethren may rejoice in all due honour and tranquillity.
NB that Curtis and McDowell give only the English translation; I found the Latin original here.
I was rather glad to find that this book was given by my grandmother to my grandfather, as a present for his 64th birthday. (It’s his handwriting, I think, not hers.)
Published by Methuen in 1943, the previous year, it’s exactly what it says on the cover, an assemblage of important Irish historical documents from Laudabiliter to the 1921 Treaty and its immediate aftermath. It includes some classic texts that I would had never thought of seeking out for myself – the Statutes of Kilkenny and Poynings’ Law, for instance.
Inevitably the Anglo-Irish relationship is covered much more closely than any other topic, and it is hardly surprising that the well-documented Dublin Castle / London perspective provides a lot of material. But there are a couple of moments where the Irish nationalist voice is heard too – we get Hugh O’Neill’s declared war aims from 1599, and less than half a century later the agenda of the Confederation of Kilkenny in 1642.
This book was printed in 1943, and I see a copy of the 1977 reprint going for £46 on Amazon right now; otherwise I don’t think you’ll get it easily anywhere. This was my top unread book acquired in 2018; next (and last) on that list is The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald.
Die weiten Wälder, von Wiesen unterbrochen, bieten Tausenden genußreiche Gelegenheit, sich zu ergehen und dem Ballspiel, Cricket oder Lawn tennis zu huldigen, wozu die Erfordernisse reichlich vorhanden sind. Es ist ein Aussichtsthurm hier und in einer Stunde etwa kann man auf herrlichen Wegen den Hermannskogel erreichen, auf welchem auch ein uralter Thurm steht, dessen Entstehungsgeschichte der Castellan erzählt. Wir legitimirten uns in der Wirthschaft auf dem Kahlenberge mit der Anweisung des Tullner Beamten und wurden mit allem versorgt. Wir ließen Zwirner telephonisch benachrichtigen, daß wir gleich nach dem Mittagstisch nach Payerbach fahren wollten, um die herrliche Nacht auf dem Schneeberg zu verbringen. Man versah uns, als wir aufbrachen, mit einer Tasche, in der wir die nöthigsten Reiseerfordernisse und Mundvorrath mitnahmen, und wurden ersucht, Tasche und Reiserequisiten in Tulln abzugeben, von wo sie wieder gelegentlich zurückgebracht würden.
The wide forests, dotted with meadows, offer thousands of enjoyable opportunities to relax and to play ball games, cricket or lawn tennis, for which the equipment is readily available. There is a lookout tower here and in about an hour you can reach the Hermannskogel by following some magnificent paths. There is also an ancient tower on top of the Hermannskogel, whose Castellan will tell you the story of its origin. We checked in at the inn on the Kahlenberge with the approval of the official from Tulln, and were provided with everything. We had Zwirner notified by telephone that we wanted to leave for Payerbach right after lunch to spend the night on the Schneeberg. When we left, we were given a bag in which we took the most essential travel supplies and provisions, and we were asked to hand in the bag and travel documents in Tulln, from where they would be returned in due course.
Translation by me
I wrote about this 1893 novel when doing my write-up of 2020 as portrayed in science fiction, but thanks to a DeepL subscription, I have only now got around to actually reading it. I wrote previously, having skimmed the German text:
Here Julian West from Looking Backward and a friend from another utopian novel of the time visit a future Austria, which has successfully maintained the Hapsburg monarchy and aristocracy andat the same time adopted most of the socialism of Bellamy’s novel. Austria is part of a European Union (that phrase isn’t quite used) which stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals, but does not include England.
It is quite a short book – 200 large print pages in the most recent edition – with typically ponderous nineteenth-century German sentences with long subordinate clauses which even DeepL struggles with. The premise is that by 2020, Austria – and when we say Austria, we mean the entirety of the Hapsburg Empire as it was in 1893 – has long been a Communist utopia under a constitutional monarchy, thanks to the wise reforms enacted by Franz Josef II and his heir Franz Ferdinand when he in turn came to the throne. (In reality, Franz Ferdinand was a petulant bigot who loved killing animals, and if he had ever come to the throne he is unlikely to have ruled in an enlightened manner.) Everything is tightly regulated by the authorities and everyone loves this because society has been made perfect. Money has been abolished, and so has smoking.
Most modern reviewers remark on the future arrangement of European politics in the book, which is actually dealt with rather rapidly, in two as-you-know-Bob moments of exposition, the first in Chapter 7:
Austria no longer has an army, as a disarmament treaty has long existed in Europe; but it maintains a very important naval defence force. [NB that this is the Austria which controls Trieste and Rijeka.] All the Continental states, which in the east are fully protected by Russia in return for subsidies and seconded personnel, have agreed on a coastal defence alliance and maintain not only coastal fortifications but also a strong navy, partly to protect themselves against England, which has been driven out of all seas and islands from Gibraltar to the Red Sea, and partly to protect themselves against the predatory states in Argentina and China, from where piracy is shamelessly practised.
A more extended description in Chapter 13 explains that the European Union (as I said before, not quite given that name) depends on regional security as well as internal disarmament:
Turkish rule had been completely abolished and Russia had taken over Asia Minor and Arabia, Italy Egypt, France the area from Egypt to the western border of Algiers, Spain the entire west of northern Africa. The peoples of the Balkan states had formed four independent Christian empires under the sovereignty of the Emperor of Austria, who was also in command of the navy and coastal defence.
…We consider that there is no danger of the Union breaking up, as the German Confederation once did, and provision has also been made to ensure that Union law can develop in line with the times. We hope that England will soon be compelled [gezwungen] to join the Union, and for the still distant future we may well assume that the whole of Asia will be won over to the collective principle, and then Europe, Asia and Africa, which in reality form only one continent, will be united into a single confederation of states.
A lot to unpack here, perhaps more than these few paragraphs are actually worth, but I’ll just note that there is no reference to Islam anywhere in the book.
The other thing that surprised me was the book’s take on women and sex. The population has been kept under control and dispersed around the countryside – Vienna has only 3,500 inhabitants – and reproduction is controlled by the sinister and all-powerful Women’s Curia, a body which includes all women over the age of 18. Only a few women are allowed to have babies, for good old eugenic reasons. Women who give birth to illegitimate children, ie without permission of the Curia, are either forced to permanently wear a garment of shame covering their face and body, or graciously allowed to emigrate to Africa. (Nothing is said about the consequences for the fathers.) The Women’s Curia legislates and enforces all of this, and it is portrayed as a Good Thing.
I’m scratching my head to think of another sf novel, or even another novel, where pregnancy is treated quite so neurotically. Brave New World, perhaps; but in that case there are (almost) no pregnancies at all, human reproduction having been mechanised.
Having said that, it’s clear that there is a lot of sex happening in Neupauer’s future Austria, and his protagonist Julian West has several close encounters and one definite score with the lovely Giulietta. Nothing is said about how the large amount of sex doesn’t then lead to large numbers of babies, but perhaps we are meant to read between the lines of the unspoken activities of the Women’s Curia. The book ends with a long letter from Giulietta to Julian, in which what isn’t discussed is perhaps more interesting than what is.
Second paragraph of third chapter (with embedded quote):
In his comments on the Ruddymane episode Upton cites the View where Spenser, in his inventory of Irish customs supposedly inherited from the Scythians, refers to Irish war-cries: ” … at theire ioyninge of Battell they likewise Call vppon theire Captaines name or the worde of his Auncestours As they vnder Oneale crye Landargabo, that is the bloddie hande which is Oneles badge” (Spenser 1949, 103). Although Upton is right to make this connection with the Red Hand of Ulster his interpretation of the episode is unconvincing:
This wicked witch had slain the parents of young Ruddymane, the bloody-handed babe: —plainly alluding, I think, to the rebellion of the Oneals, whose badge was the bloody-hand, and who had all drank so deep of the charm and venom of Acrasia that their blood was infected with secret filth. [emphasis as original] (Upton 1987a, 378)
Given that the episode is about the seduction of “The gentlest knight … the good Sir Mordant” (2.1.49.8-9) it is strange that Upton should think it is the Native Irish O’Neills who have been infected. If Upton’s reading of the allegory is correct then we might ask what group or individual Acrasia is meant to represent and who or what has infected the blood of the O’Neills.
Just to warn you that there are a number of Irish history books working their way through my bookblog at the moment, as the tail-end of my 2018 purchases and some recent academic acquisitions come together.
This is a book-of-a-PhD-thesis, a genre that I’m sympathetic to; it takes the Faerie Queene as its core, and looks also at other writing by Spenser and his contemporaries, teasing out particularly what is said about women and gender identity, and how this relates to Spenser’s understanding of Ireland and the Irish. Spoiler: Spenser was not very convinced of the good points of either women or the Irish. There’s also a particularly good chapter on Spenser’s take on the wild Irish landscape. Substantial stuff which I’m not really equipped to judge more thoroughly. You can get it here.
Set in 2025, this comic from 2003 brings Knight-Wing aka Clark Wayne, the grandson of Superman and Batman, and his daughters Lois and Lara, aka Supergirl Red and Supergirl Blue, into conflict with Lex Luthor, who is now a disembodied brain who escapes from their mother on the third page of the story. There’s a rather confusing conflict with aliens and deity-like creatures and at the end of it Lex Luthor sets off a bomb that destroys all technology. (Though this is not really made clear until the next installment.)
Luthor’s bomb tips this one into the apocalyptic category of stories set in 2025, but until then the world seems rather pleasantly technologically advanced, with skyscrapers and flying cars etc.
I also found the advertisements for games in the comic really fascinating – EverQuest (which is still going), War of the Monsters and Black & Bruised (this last including vouchers for in-game purchases). There are also advertisements in favour of drinking milk and against using marijuana.
Look, this is a list of records which are banned here… You should be able to find them easily in France, especially the first three, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Benny Goodman.
Gani Jakupi kindly gave me a copy of this graphic novel as well as his Kosovo book when we met earlier this year. It is not available in English, unfortunately, though it has been translated from the original French into Dutch, Spanish and Catalan. It was co-written by Jakupi, who lives in Barcelona, and Denis Lapière, who is Belgian; the three artists are all Catalan, and Pellejero, who was born in 1950, has been exorcising the ghosts of the Franco regime for much of his career. Here’s a Youtube trailer for it:
Barcelona, âme noire (Barcelona, dark soul) tells the story of the rise and fall of Carlos, son of a grocer, whose mother dies in a bomb attack on their shop in (we guess) the immediate aftermath of the Civil War; he grows up to be a smuggler, crime boss, and lover of many women. The story apparently was originally intended to be a six-volume series and got cut back to 144 pages, and there is a bit of a sense of compression towards the end. But the art conveys a lot, and one gets a real sense of Barcelona as a seething centre of crime and subversion under the oppression of the Falange. The sexual politics is perhaps a bit traditional, but perhaps that also represents the times we are looking at. You can get it here in the original French.
How am I feeling? Moist. Moist in the tear ducts and gonads, swelled up like a lungfish that’s been buried in the sand through a long desiccated summer till the day the sky breaks apart and the world goes wet again. The smell of coffee is taking me back—I don’t drink it myself anymore, too expensive and it raises hell with my stomach—and I feel myself slipping so far into the past I’m in danger of disappearing without making a ripple. She’s snoring. I can hear it—no delicate insuck and outhale, but a real venting of the airways, a noise as true in its way as anything Lily could work up. The rain slaps its broad hand on the roof, something that wasn’t tied down by somebody somewhere hits the wall just above the window, the world shudders, Andrea sleeps. It’s a moment.
A novel from 2000, this is another environmental crisis dystopia, set in two timelines; 1989 through to the mid 1990s, when it all goes wrong, and 2025-26, when our protagonist starts to pick up the emotional pieces again (though the world is still catastrophically damaged). I found it very well done – the protagonist’s ex-wife comes back to him in the first 2025 section, and the history of their relationship, and the fate of his daughter from a previous marriage, all play out against the damage being done to the natural world by humanity, both directly through logging and indirectly through climate change. A lot of my 2025 novels have been very depressing, and this is too, but I Iike it the most of any of them.
The dead frog on the cover was rather disturbing to see every time I opened the book on Kindle though.
I met Gani Jakupi at, of all things, a mutual friend’s standup comedy gig in Brussels a few months ago, and he kindly gave me two of his books; he is a comics writer based between Paris and Barcelona, and this was originally published in French as Retour au Kosovo. It’s a tremendous first person account of being in exile and seeing your home country on the news, not knowing if family are surviving; and then going back after the war is over to see what remains, and what can be reconstructed. It was published in 2014, but obviously has contemporary resonances at the human level with the Gaza war, even if there are significant differences in the geopolitics.
Jakupi’s take is humane and sane; he finds space for his traumatised relatives (several of his cousins were killed in a massacre) but also for the surviving Serbs; he has a wary approach to the internationals and to Kosovo’s new leaders. Jorge González has produced a tremendous artistic accompaniment to Jakupi’s script, with pastels conveying the shades of uncertainty in the situation, and some slippage into darker areas. Jakupi himself is a recognisable protagonist on every page, and I was pretty sure that I recognised a couple of other people who I know personally in the story.
This is one of the most remarkable graphic stories I have read this year. The French original is available here, but I don’t know how the average punter could get hold of the English translation; it was commissioned and published by the ProArte Institute in Kosovo, but that doesn’t even seem to have a website.
Most of the Watch got buried there. Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see.
I thought that I read all of Discworld, but I was wrong; this was published in November 2002, and I started tracking my reading quite carefully around then and began actual book blogging a year later, so I think I’d have noted it – and more crucially, I don’t remember encountering any of the plot points before.
Samuel Vimes, the head of the Watch, is yanked back through time to the early part of his career while pursuing a criminal, and finds himself roped into leading the earlier version of the Watch at a moment of civic unrest. He successfully engineers a de-escalation of the conflict, resulting in the elevation of Lord Vetinari to leadership of the city, and returns to his home timeline in the nick of time to help Sybil deliver their child.
There are some tremendously effective moments here. At the beginning we see the Watch, and several others, commemorating the moment by gathering in the graveyard of the Small Gods, but we readers are not told what this is all about until it becomes clear to us througout the book. The scene sets an emotional tone for what follows, very effectively.
The clash between security forces and peaceful (if politically radical) protesters has a lot of precedents. Pratchett would have known the Amritsar Massacre scene from Gandhi, but writing in 2002, he would also have known of the two films about Bloody Sunday that came out earlier that year. The discussion of barricades is also a callback to Les Miserables – Victor Hugo spends an entire chapter on the subject. Most of all, of course, he gives his fictional clash the same name as the famous 1936 confrontation between fascists and anti-fascists in London, the Battle of Cable Street. You are left in no doubt about what side Terry Pratchett was on.
I’m surprised that it took me so long to get to this, but very glad that I did in the end. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third document (‘A Letter from Sir John Davies, Knight, Attorney-General of Ireland, to Robert Earl of Salisbury, touching the state of Monaghan Fermanagh and Cavan, wherein is a discourse concerning the corbes and irenahs of Ireland’):
After the end of the last term my Lord Deputy took a resolution to visit three counties in Ulster, namely, Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Cavan, which, being the most unsettled and unreformed pasts of that province, did most of all need his Lordship’s visitation at that time.
This is rather an interesting collection. The foreword gives the reader the following instructions:
first, read the last chapter
then read the second chapter as far as page 330
then read the first chapter
then read the rest of the book from page 330 to the end of the second last chapter
and finish with the appendices if you like.
I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a non-fiction book suggesting that you read the chapters out of order. (Of course, it’s standard for Choose Your Own Adventure type books, but they are not usually non-fiction.)
It’s a collection of Irish historical documents from late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, really from 1596 to 1610. The documents themselves are printed in chronological order of composition, but Edward Morley, the editor, was right to suggest that you should start with Fynes Morison’s description of Ireland, then go to John Davies’ potted history of Ireland under British rule (which was what tipped me off to the existence of the Duke of Ireland), then go to Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland with that background fresh in your mind, and then read the remaining 80 pages of material from John Davies (and 15 pages of appendices).
The centrepiece of the book really is Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland, the first chapter in composition order. It’s well written and brutal, and argues that the English just need to destroy Irish possessions and traditions until the Irish become tractable; the beatings will continue until morale improves. He did not live to see this put into practice by Mountjoy at the end of the Nine Years’ War, but he would certainly have approved. One senses Motley, as editor, putting this and the other pieces on the pacification of Ireland forward as a contribution to the Whig theory of Irish history, that enlightened rule from London was the inevitable and desirable end point.
Still, important primary material which I’m glad I have handy. You can get POD copies in various places.
My eye was caught by one of the observations by John Davies, that in the new settlement, the judges “do now every half-year, like good planets in their several spheres or circles, carry the light and influence of justice round about the kingdom”. It’s a really interesting astronomical metaphor. One can speculate about the likelihood (or not) of an Irish administrator in 1612 knowing about the Copernican system; Kepler’s Astronomia Nova was published in 1609, and one can imagine that even if copies were not available, it would have been the talk of educated circles in Dublin, especially around the new university.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on that pile is Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell.
This was a period of astonishing disparities in wealth and living. A typical workman’s daily wage in the 1380s was 4d, giving an annual income of around £5 (100s), assuming he could find work at least 300 days a year; a gallon of good ale cost just over a penny, as did two chickens or two dozen eggs. In London a goose was supposed to cost 6d, but sharp-eyed salesmen often asked seven or eight. A year’s tuition at Oxford University in 1374 cost 26s 8d, though lodgings there were significantly pricier at 104s a year (when annual rent for a cottage might be 5s, or 20s for a craftsman’s house), and the student would need 40s for his clothing. Meanwhile a merchant’s house in London (such as the one in which Geoffrey Chaucer was born) might be rented for two or three pounds a year, which was about what it would cost to send your son to a monastery school. Higher up the social scale, the numbers lose purchase. A knight’s two horses, without which he couldn’t function as a knight, would cost him about £10. His armour could total nearer £20. In 1397 Thomas, Duke of Gloucester owned armour worth £103. If a man were attendant at court he would need a fashionable gown, in silk or fur: it would certainly cost £10, and he could easily spend £50. The life annuity granted to Chaucer in 1367 (paid until 1388), of £13 6s 8d, would make him wealthy in the city of London, yet would barely support him at all at court. But as a courtier he was the recipient of largesse – robes, livery, gifts – and appointments to administrative offices from which, it was understood, he would profit. In 1389 Richard II made Chaucer Clerk of the King’s Works in London; in 1393 he presented him with £10 as a gift for good service, and in 1394 awarded him an annuity of £20.⁴ ⁴ Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social change in England c.1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 215 (daily wage), p. 58 (ale), p. 208 (annual rent), p. 75 (monastery school), p. 76 (armour and horses), p. 77 (duke’s armour); A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger, English Weapons & Warfare, 449–1660 (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1979), p. 78 (chickens and eggs); A. R. Myers, London in the Age of Chaucer (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p. 198 (geese), p. 186 (Oxford), p. 53 (fashionable gowns); Douglas Gray, ‘Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1340–1400)’, ODNB.
I was inspired to get this by my detour into the history of the Duke of Ireland a few weeks back, and also by my good friend Conrad’s reviews of the Penguin Monarchs series, of which this is one. It’s a very short and digestible book, which doesn’t waste time on chronology but just jumps straight into the question of what went wrong with Richard’s reign, assuming that the reader is familiar with the basics.
There are four chapters, each dealing with an area of kingship as practiced by Richard. In her prologue, Ashe makes the point that the court is not one of those four, because it was carried by the king wherever he went. The four areas are Parliament, the battlefield, the City of London (where Richard hand-picked his namesake Richard Whittington as Mayor), and the shrines connecting the King with God.
The overall thesis is that Richard was driven by a concept of kingship where he was divinely appointed to lead, and did not need to keep people like the other magnates and the citizens of London on board with anything that he did. He felt this very deeply and it informs the Wilton Diptych, which is a personal statement of his religious beliefs which we can only dimly understand. Of course, it was not sustainable; he made too many enemies and was overthrown and (probably) killed.
It is worth reflecting that British constitutional history was a close run thing. If Richard had been even slightly more politically adept, or luckier, he could have assembled a coalition of favourite lords combined with urban stakeholders to support his personal rule without institutional safeguards, provided that there was something in it for them; and that could have proved a lasting political settlement. He was in fact lucky in how the Peasants’ Revolt played out, and that the Lords Appellant in the late 1380s also pushed their cause too far and allowed him to regain control for another decade.
As it was, the fact that Parliament successfully overthrew him one and a half times (counting 1388 as well as 1399) consolidated the English constitutional theory of Parliament as a sovereign institution which constrained the monarch, to the point of deciding who the monarch could be. Richard was clearly not interested in constitutional theory. If he had been, he might have lasted longer.
One point that I wished the book had spent more time on: Richard’s reign was a really good time for the arts in England. This is the age of Piers Plowman, Chaucer, Wycliff, Gower and the Pearl poet; and as mentioned the Wilton Diptych and the funeral monument in Westminster Abbey that Richard built for his first wife and where he was eventually laid to rest. I don’t think you would find a similar flowering of the arts in England for a century or two either before or after. Richard himself doesn’t deserve a lot of credit for this, but it’s worth noting.
There is a page on Richard’s temporarily successful campaign in Ireland in 1394, and half a page on his unsuccessful return in 1399. These were the only visits to Ireland by a reigning English monarch between King John in 1210 and William III in 1690.
That wasn’t the first time that had happened, Gottfried’s grandmother told her. People often misjudged her grandson as slow and stupid. His cruel classmates christened him with a nickname that made her flush with rage: Gottfried the Fool. She knew that they were wrong about him, because he was so clever and earnest when his teachers called on him in class. But she had to admit that she, too, was often confused by his behavior.
A big thick prize-winning book by the late Steve Silberman, looking in detail at the history and practice of autism and neurodiversity, and how American society (and by extension, Western society) is coming to terms with making accommodations for people who, as he puts it, ʎlʇuǝɹǝɟɟᴉp ʞuᴉɥʇ.
There were a couple of chapters that really grabbed my attention. One was a section about Hugo Gernsback, who set up science fiction fandom as a safe space for people to be geeks and nerds, and whose own behaviour is recognisably on the spectrum now – for instance, his invention, the Isolator, allows you to concentrate on the text you are reading without sensory distraction and even has its own air supply.
The other striking chapter is very much less fun, looking at the early twentieth-century eugenics movement and at the Nazi policy of killing neurodiverse children. The psychiatrists responsible for these murders survived into successful post-war careers in Austria. It is pretty stomach-churning.
The story of the struggle for autism is generally pretty tough, though it has a hopeful end. I can see both sides; in the initial grief and confusion after B’s diagnosis back in 2000, I too was desperate to find a way that she could be ‘cured’, and I know of other parents in a similar situation who spent vast amounts of time, money and emotional labour on snake oil solutions for their children.
I fairly quickly came around to acceptance that our family was following our own path, and that society needs to adapt to our children’s needs more than the other way round. It’s a tough path all the same, and I felt many moments of solidarity with the people whose lives are discussed in Neurotribes; though the book doesn’t include much on those who are as cognitively disabled as our daughters.
The book also concentrates very much on the US policy landscape with only brief looks at what is going on in other counties (and nothing at all about Belgium). But I found it helpful in understanding my own thinking in any case. You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is The Light We Carry, by Michelle Obama.
For convenience, here is a reading list of other books I have read about autism:
We rewatched Midnight last night. I wrote previously that I couldn’t understand why this story didn’t get a Hugo nomination this year; I am still baffled.
I think it’s the best episode of the season, and certainly the best ever written by Russell T Davies. The sources are good sources – The Edge of Destruction, also written at the last minute by Old Who’s first script editor, putting the Tardis crew in a single set for 50 minutes; also I think Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust, where a group of tourists is trapped on the Moon, though without the sinister alien presence. (The eye of faith may detect inspiration also from Delta and the Bannermen, or The Leisure Hive, but personally I don’t.) Davies takes this and puts his own particular interpretation onto the situation, and for once his writing remains tight up to the last moment.
He’s helped by a couple of stellar performances – Lesley Sharp as Sky and the unnamed baddie, and Rakie Ayola as the hostess in particular; also from the past we have David Troughton as the Professor, and from the future Colin Morgan as Jethro. The scenes with Lesley Sharp first echoing, then synching with, then anticipating the other cast members’ lines are just incredible. (The only irritating moment is Rose’s brief appearance, which is difficult to reconcile with what we later find out she’s been doing – the similar moment in The Poison Sky is at least set in the present day.)
Quite apart from the creepiness of the basic concept, it’s a story where the Doctor’s normal cockiness and air of mystery, which normally seem to get authority figures magically co-operating with him, work against him; and his fellow passengers end up baying for his blood. It’s notable that they are not, particularly, authority figures; and the one who is nominally in charge, the Hostess, ends up being the one who saves them all. And the specific point where the Doctor’s credibility breaks down completely is when he tries to urge compassion, which rather more often works to shame other characters into cooperating. It’s a great subversion and stretching of the show’s usual assumptions.
After two stories where we’ve had the Doctor’s own intimate relations (his daughter and River Song) on screen, here we have the Doctor observing and interacting with several other family dynamics – Biff, Val and Jethro; the Professor and Dee Dee; Sky and her absent ex; perhaps also the Hostess and the crew. (Indeed, it might have been better if this had been shown between The Doctor’s Daughter and Silence in the Library, as was originally planned.)
Midnight was Russell T Davies’ nineteenth story for Who, which puts him ahead of the 18 stories written entirely or partly by Robert Holmes. [We are far past that now.] Andy Murray suggests (in his piece in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space) that we can see the frustrated attempts of the tall, fair-haired Chancellor Goth to hunt down and destroy the Doctor as the tall, fair-haired Holmes working through his own frustration with the central character of the show. Note that in this story the Doctor loses his authority over the other passengers and even his voice, and that he is actually killed off at the beginning of the next story; am I going too far in detecting a subconscious desire to get rid of him on the part of the executive producer and chief writer? (Not that there is the same physical resemblance between RTD and the villain of either story.)
Two further pieces of trivia from the BBC via Wikipedia: it is the first story since Genesis of the Daleks where the Tardis does not appear, and the only Who story where the villain is never named.
(Robert Holmes’ 18 stories: The Krotons, The Space Pirates, Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, Carnival of Monsters, The Time Warrior, The Deadly Assassin, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Sun Makers, The Ribos Operation, The Power of Kroll, The Caves of Androzani, The Two Doctors, and The Mysterious Planet plus also The Ark In Space, The Brain of Morbius, Pyramids of Mars and the first episode of The Ultimate Foe. Of course, in screen time he is still well ahead of RTD, since all but one of the above were at least the equivalent of four 25-minute episodes.)
I also just rewatched 73 Yards, another of RTD’s best scripts, but I still think that Midnight has yet to be surpassed among his stories. (Though my favourite New Who story remains Blink.) Since then we’ve seen a couple of the actors elsewhere – Rakie Ayola, the hostess here, was Persephone in Kaos, and Ayesha Antoine, who is David Troughton’s sidekick Dee Dee here, has been Bernice Summerfield’s companion Ruth in the Big Finish audio series, and was also a lead in the DALEKS! webcast by James Goss.
Philip Purser-Hallard’s Black Archive is businesslike and looks at the reasons for the story’s success (including off the screen, live on stage). The first chapter, ‘A Failure of the Entertainment System’, recounts the very brief history of how the story was written, drawing comparisons with The Edge of Destruction, and touches on how it subverts the generally heroic and successful portrayal of the Doctor.
The second chapter, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, and Variations’, looks at each of the guest characters in the story, exploring what they are telling us about their society and about the Doctor. Purser-Hallard draws a comparison with RTD’s more recent drama Years and Years, which also has a very tight ensemble of central characters (and which I also enjoyed very much).
The third chapter’s title is ‘He Started It, With His Stories’. Its second paragraph, with footnotes, is:
Moffat and his interviewer, Christel Dee, were considering the themes, concerns and narrative techniques that Doctor Who shares with its folkloric precursors, rather than its more superficial aesthetic trappings. The latter, being primarily futuristic and scientific, contrast with the magical otherworlds of traditional fairy stories, and the imagined pasts, whether agrarian or courtly, from which their protagonists hail². Marina Warner’s history of fairytale, Once Upon a Time (2014), speaks of these stories being constructed from ‘building blocks includ[ing] certain kinds of characters (stepmothers and princesses, elves and giants) and certain recurrent motifs (keys, apples, mirrors, rings and toads),’ and while most of these items may be found in specific Doctor Who stories, they are hardly emblematic of the series as a whole³. However, her identification of fairy tales as consisting of ‘combinations and recombinations of familiar plots and characters, devices and images’ describes Doctor Who’s overall approach just as well⁴. ² Given Doctor Who’s eclectic nature, individual stories may be identified as exceptions, but the overall point holds. ³ They can, however, be indicative of more fantasy-inflected stories: for instance, The Keeper of Traken (1981) includes a stepmother and a ring; Kinda (1982) features both apples and mirrors; and a mirror and a frog, if not a toad, appear in It Takes You Away (2018). ⁴ Warner, Marina, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, ppxx-xxi.
This chapter considers the (multiple) fairy tale and mythic roots of Midnight, with a look also at Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
The fourth chapter, ‘Not a Goblin or a Monster’, looks at invisible evil in the context of Davies’ other work (Years and Years again, and The Second Coming) and also Steven Moffat’s story Listen.
The fifth chapter, ‘The Cleverest Voice in the Room’, looks at the less heroic aspects of the Doctor as a character and notes that some of the most popular Who stories actually show the central character in a less than positive light. Again, other RTD work is mentioned; I noted particularly A Very English Scandal., but Purser-Hallard also looks at how the Fourteenth Doctor stories form a coda to the Tenth Doctor era.
An appendix, ‘What’s the Next Stage?’, looks at three theatrical productions of Midnight, which out of the whole 61 years of the show’s history is surely the story best suited for a stage production.
So, a thought-provoking monograph on a great Who story; and when you unpick the reasons for why it is so great, the greatness is still there. You can (probably) get it here.
The conversion of England was thus effected by the landing of St Augustine in Thanet and other places, which resulted in the country being overrun by a Wave of Saints. Among these were St Ive, St Pancra, the great St Bernard (originator of the clerical collar), St Bee, St Ebb, St Neot (who invented whisky), St Kit and St Kin, and the Venomous Bead (author of The Rosary).
A cheerful return to an old favourite: the spoof version of English history, cantering through two thousand years with a series of unlikely and yet very probable misreadings. There’s not much more to be said; some of the humour has dated, but a lot of it remains very funny.
He also invented a game called “Bluff King Hal” which he invited his ministers to play with him. The players were blindfolded and knelt down with their heads on a block of wood; they then guessed who the King would marry next
I am particularly alert for Irish references, such as:
The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).
[King John] had begun badly as a Bad Prince, having attempted to answer the Irish Question by pulling the beards of the aged Irish chiefs, which was a Bad Thing and the wrong answer. N.B. The Irish Question at this time consisted of: (1) Some Norman Barons, who lived in a Pail (near Dublin), (2) The natives and Irish Chieftains, who were beyond the Pail, living in bogs, beards, etc.
Henry VII was very good at answering the Irish Question, and made a Law called Poyning’s Law by which the Irish could have a Parliament of their own, but the English were to pass all the Acts in it. This was obviously a very Good Thing.
[James I] also tried to straighten out the memorable confusion about the Picts, who, as will be remembered, were originally Irish living in Scotland, and the Scots, originally Picts living in Ireland. James tried to make things tidier by putting the Scots in Ulsters and planting them in Ireland, but the plan failed because the Picts had been lost sight of during the Dark Ages and were now nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile the Orange increased its popularity and showed themselves to be a very strong King by its ingenious answer to the Irish Question; this consisted in the Battle of the Boyne and a very strong treaty which followed it, stating (a) that all the Irish Roman Catholics who liked could be transported to France, (b) that all the rest who liked could be put to the sword, (c) that Northern Ireland should be planted with Blood-Orangemen. These Blood-Orangemen are still there; they are, of course, all descendants of Nell Glyn and are extremely fierce and industrial and so loyal that they are always ready to start a loyal rebellion to the Glory of God and the Orange. All of which shows that the Orange was a Good Thing, as well as being a good King. After the Treaty the Irish who remained were made to go and live in a bog and think of a New Question.
Gladstone .. spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question…
It’s a firmly liberal approach: satirising the total lack of knowledge and misunderstanding of the neighbouring island by England’s rulers, and admitting that Irish policy failed for centuries. The same approach is not really shown to other places formerly part of the Empire.
Second volume in the story of the loving and kinky relationship between Alison and Lisa, this one mainly punctuated by flashbacks to Alison’s previous experiences with best friend and former lover Alan. Again, very tastefully done. You can get it here.
