I wrote of the TV story that this book is based on:
I was in Glasgow planning the Worldcon for the showing of 73 Yards, and a bunch of us clustered together to watch it in someone’s room. This too was tremendous, a Doctor-lite episode that called on Gibson (who turned 20 last week) to portray her character aging through the decades, with one of those timey-wimey plots that can actually go awry rather easily but in this case didn’t.
This time the old school actor who I cheered for was Siân Phillips, who was of course Livia in I, CLAVDIVS, almost half a century ago, but has done some more recent Big Finish work as well. She too is in her nineties but clearly in her element as the sinister old woman in the pub.
Watching it again, one is stunned especially by Millie Gibson as the aging Ruby. Apparently these were the first scenes that she filmed for the show.
Second paragraph of third chapter of the novelisation:
For an hour, it seemed her expedition would never end. Step after countless step, her feet were cold and damp, icy snowflakes soaked into her collar, and her ragged breath formed misty clouds in front of her face.
I am slightly surprised that this is Scott Handcock’s first Doctor Who novel, possibly his first book-length work at all; he has been writing, directing and producing for Big Finish since 2006. 73 Yards was one of my favourites of this year’s stories anyway, and Handcock has done it justice, focussing necessarily on Ruby’s story (since the Doctor is hardly in it) but also giving some neat extra bits – back-stories for the people in the Welsh pub, a scene with Ace, the ultimate fate of UNIT revealed. Very enjoyable. You can get it here.
Just to add, as I commented on social media soon after the story was shown, that the fictional Robin ap Gwilliam looks eerily like the real prime minister of Georgia.
Irakli Kobakhidze, prime minister of the Repulic of Georgia; and Aneurin Barnard, who played the fictional prime minister Roger ap Gwilliam, in last weekend’s Doctor Who episode, “73 Yards”.
As usual, a disturbing comic book from Clowes, this time looking at the life of a woman called Monica, trying to discover the truth about her origins after her mother abandoned her as a child. The images are vivid and the stories deliberately a bit obscure, so that you have to concentrate on getting the links. I thought it was great, if anything a bit more accessible than some of Clowes’ other work. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is volume 5 of Once and Future.
SF 4 (YTD 76) The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett A Friend of the Earth, by T.C. Boyle Austria in the Year 2020, by Josef von Neupauer
Comics 6 (YTD 28) The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al Monica, by Daniel Clowes Sunstone, vol 2, by Stjepan Sejić Return to Kosovo, by Gani Jakupi and Jorge González Barcelona, âme noire, by Ruben Pellejero, Eduard Torrents, Martín Pardo, Denis Lapière, Gani Jakupi Superman & Batman Generations 3: The 21st Century!, by John Byrne
5,700 pages (YTD 57,900) 4/22 (YTD 102/236) by non-male writers (Uglow, Jagger, Ashe, Fitzpatrick) None (YTD 26/236) by a non-white writer 3/22 rereads (1066 and All That, Night Watch I think, Burning Heart)
267 books currently tagged unread, down 15 from last month, down 77 from October 2023.
Reading now The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling Tudor Court Culture, eds. Thomas Betteridge & Anna Riehl The Geraldines: An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald
Coming soon (perhaps) The Ripper, by Tony Lee Synthespians™, by Craig Hinton Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman Ascension of the Cybermen & The Timeless Children, by Ryan Bradley The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee Lost Objects, by Marian Womack What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah Marriage, by H.G. Wells Authors of their Lives, by David Gerber Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin 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 How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling 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
‘There’s some evidence that Christina Chorley might have been a practitioner,’ I said and explained Dr Walid and Vaughan’s fibrings, which led to Stephanopoulos asking the same questions I had. So I shared the same lack of answers that Dr Walid and Vaughan had given me – this is known in the police as intelligence focusing. First you identify what you don’t know. The next step is to go and find some likely sod and question them until they give you some answers. In the old days we weren’t that bothered whether the answers had anything to do with the facts, but these days we’re much more picky.
Sixth in the Rivers of London sequence, which I have generally enjoyed a lot. The drug-related death of a teenager turns out to involve the daughter of the goddess of the river Tyburn (the river which waters the roots of the original Hanging Tree) and Peter Grant and colleagues are brought in to sort things out. Also the Americans; also the Faceless Man, antagonist in a couple of earlier books. It ends with a grand magical shoot-out in a luxury apartment block. I quite enjoyed it, but got a bit of a middle-book vibe, as if the pieces are being put in place for something more to come. You can get it here.
I am a bit surprised to see that readers on both LibraryThing and Goodreads rate this higher than the previous book, Foxglove Summer; I’d have put them the other way round. Users of both systems agree in ranking the next in sequence, Lies Sleeping, top; so I have that to look forward to.
These horrors lurked for Kosovo, too. Arkan, rewarded for his slaughtering crusade in Bosnia, was put up as a candidate for Kosovo in the Serbian parliamentary elections. Surrounded by his thugs, he took up residence in Pristina’s Grand Hotel. Milošević, brushing off Arkan’s crimes to a Croatian envoy in November 1993, declared: ‘I too must have people to do certain kinds of dirty work for me.’ Then he laughed out loud. They weren’t laughing in Pristina. The candidacy of Arkan, says the Harvard-educated Minister of Dialogue Edita Tahiri, a formidable negotiator, ‘held up a mirror to the future of Serbian democracy.’
One of those books where I know the subject, and the subject matter, reasonably well. Hashim Thaçi emerged from the shadowy world of Kosovo exile politics to become one of the political leaders of the new polity after the war of 1998-99 (the West likes to think of the NATO conflict of 1999, but it started a year earlier). the biography is by two journalists from The Times of London; I got my copy from Thaçi himself at a book launch in London in 2018; the Albanian translation came out earlier this year.
The book is unashamedly partisan, but I did not spot any factual inaccuracies, and it covers all of the main events fairly. It digs into Thaçi’s own perceptions and intentions in depth. There aren’t a lot of first-person narratives from actors in the Balkan wars (though I did also read an extended interview with Ramush Haradinaj, twenty years ago). The book therefore shows the biases you would expect – including consistent hostility to Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovo’s pre-war leader, who I must agree was way out of his depth. (On the shelf in my office, I keep a rock that Rugova gave me the first time I met him.)
One of the areas where the book needs to tread gently is its coverage of the horrifying organ-smuggling allegations against Thaçi made by a former war crimes prosecutor and by members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I have always been astonished that anyone took these allegations seriously. It is an improbable scheme in the first place, and any attempt to implement it would have left an undeniably clear logistics trail. The EU was unable to find any evidence for it, likewise the Kosovo Specialist Chambers tribunal. It seems to me to be another Martinović case writ large. (If you don’t know about the Martinović case, lucky you, and I advise you not to Google it.)
Unfortunately the book doesn’t quite deliver on the promise in the blurb to explore how come the Kosovo intervention was largely successful when Iraq and Afghanistan failed. But there is a repeated emphasis that Thaçi was planning for the day after victory – how to get to independence, and also how to avoid the trap of becoming a mono-ethnic society. It’s fair to say that the Kosovo Liberation Army went in much less for civilian reprisals than its counterparts on all sides in Bosnia, and its leadership should get some credit for this. It’s also fair to say that Thaçi became the most important political figure in post-conflict Kosovo for a time, though his dominance was never complete or unchallenged, and that his rhetoric on ethnic relations was always responsible.
Anyway, I think that there are more comprehensive books about Kosovo and the Balkans out there, but I don’t think there is a more comprehensive book about Hashim Thaçi. You can get it here.
This was published in 2019, at the point when Thaçi was President of Kosovo but was also under pressure from the Kosovo Specialist Chambers tribunal in the Hague, which duly indicted him in 2020 for war crimes. The book obviously doesn’t cover that but I just want to say up front that the prosecution evidence is remarkably poor, and the key points have been refuted by the ranking US diplomat in Kosovo at the time. Like his rival Haradinaj, Thaçi surrendered immediately on his indictment, and Kosovo has complied fully with its obligations under international law. Not every state in the region has as good a record.
This was the shortest book on my shelves acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is The Geraldines; An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald
To be honest, not one of the more memorable Sixth Doctor novels. The Doctor and Peri land in a crumbling authoritarian society, closely aligned with the setting of the Judge Dredd comics. Peri ends up with the rebels and the Doctor (after flirting with death) with the Adjudicators. Lots of running around and biffing. You can get it here.
From 1969 onwards every nuance of every utterance by anybody of note, in all parties in the South, but especially in Fianna Fáil, was analysed for the minutest divergence from stated policy on the North. Any inconsistency led to an avalanche of publicity, followed by another avalanche of restatements of official policy by virtually everybody concerned; there was then relative calm until the next occurrence. Along with the Taoiseach, the Department of Foreign Affairs had overall responsibility for Northern issues, but the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Garret FitzGerald, spent much of his time abroad (much to the satisfaction of some of his own cabinet colleagues, according to one of my sources in the Department of the Taoiseach), so Conor Cruise O’Brien was given a free run at Fianna Fáil. He seemed to have Liam Cosgrave’s permission to badger the party about its Northern policy and could not resist stirring the pot from time to time.
A really interesting insider account of Irish politics particularly in the period from 1974 to 1982, when the author started out as press secretary for Fianna Fáil, then in opposition, and was then appointed spokesman of the government when they unexpectedly won a huge majority in 1977; under the Fine Gael / Labour coalition, he was not as central but still had plenty of scope to observe.
I found the first two thirds of the book totally gripping. Dunlop had a front seat as Jack Lynch built Fianna Fáil up from its bitter defeat in 1973, and takes us through the 1977 election campaign and the stunning result. He then sees Lynch slowly losing his grip over the next couple of years, until he is forced to resign in 1979 and replaced by Charles Haughey (“Charlie” to everyone). His description of the Lynch government, having won an unexpectedly huge majority which was in fact built on a very fragile electoral margin, is grimly reminiscent of the problems faced by Keir Starmer and the Labour Party in the UK today.
Dunlop defends Haughey strongly against all allegations of corruption and wrong-doing, and tells stories of his humanity – and also of monstrous behaviour and gross political misjudgements. It’s clear that Haughey was his favourite Taoiseach. Alas, Dunlop’s defence of Haughey’s probity rings a little hollow in the light of his own subsequent criminal conviction for bribing Dublin councillors, not to mention what has since come to light about Haughey. But for me, coming from a perspective where my family were distinctly not Haughey fans, it is healthy to read another view. (Even if it is wrong.)
Dunlop was less close to the centre under Garret Fitzgerald, and spent most of his time in the coalition governments of 1981-2 and 1982-7 assisting the Fine Gael minister John Boland (I must admit I had completely forgotten about him). He then retreated into private sector public affairs and lobbying, though was recruited again by Fianna Fáil for the 1992 election. The book was published in 2004, ten years after the events it describes, and contemporaneous with Dunlop singing like a bird to the Mahon Tribunal.
There is very little about ideology here and a lot about political character, psychology and motivation. In particular there’s very little about Northern Ireland, other than complaining about the difficulties it raised, praising Haughey’s attempts to build a relationship with Thatcher and explaining his own perfunctory contacts with British diplomats, and regretting the (peripheral) impact of the hunger strikes in the first 1982 election. It shows how little the reality on the ground in the North mattered for Dublin (and other southern) politicians.
I am personally sympathetic to the anthropological approach to politics, and I love gossip anyway (who doesn’t?) so I generally enjoyed Dunlop’s account. It is occasionally a little too hand-wavey – he never quite says what he thinks the facts were behind the Arms Trial, except that in his view Lynch was more guilty and Charlie less so than most people think. But some of his observations about the relations between politicians and the media, politicians and the voters, and indeed politicians and reality itself, are spot-on. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that rapidly dwindling pile is Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis and R.B. McDowell.
Concluding the series of albums featuring the Twelfth Doctor, library assistant companion Alice Obiefune, and sentient tree The Sapling, here we have the showdown between the TARDIS crew and The Scream, a Silent so silent that even the other Silents can’t remember him. I felt the previous volume a bit lacking in energy, but it really picked up here to race us towards the conclusion of the story. You can get it here.
I guess this is saying good bye to Alice as well – a nicely developed comics only companion, with perhaps a bit more consistency than some of them (indeed, than some of the TV companions). She’s also in The Lost Dimension which I haven’t got to yet.
When [James] Watt was born on 19 January 1736, his father was a substantial figure, a general merchant, builder, shipwright, carpenter and cabinet-maker, and part owner of several vessels. He made the first crane in Greenock for unloading the heavy, scented bales of tobacco, and into his workshop the captains brought their instruments for repair. This was the trade Watt set his heart on. Instrument-makers were the unsung heroes of the scientific revolution. The sixteenth-century burst of exploration had fostered the mathematics of navigation and the improvement of astrolabes, quadrants and compasses, while on land surveying instruments were vital to map new territories.¹ Meanwhile the clock- and watchmakers were developing their craft, and the spectacle-makers and glass-grinders were working on new optical instruments, telescopes and microscopes. Yet the theoretical aspects of their work had little status: in Cambridge in the 163os, ‘Mathematicks … were scarce looked upon as Academical Studies, but rather mechanical, as the business of Traders, Seamen, Carpenters, Surveyors of Land, or the like.’² ¹ For a survey see Gerard L’E. Turner, ‘Scientific Instruments’, in Pietro Corsi and Paul Weidling (eds), Information Sources in the History of Science and Medicine (1983) 243-58. ² John Wallis, in Heilbron, 10; see her careful introductory survey.
A lovely in-depth look at the men behind the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment in the mid-19th century West Midlands of England, focussing especially on Erasmus Darwin as the key figure, but also looking at Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, James Watt, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Samuel Galton, and a number of others whose names I was less familiar with. They were all members of the Lunar Society, which met monthly in Birmingham from the 1760s to around the end of the century.
There is a lot of loving detail about their lives, with common threads including Methodism and other minority Protestant traditions (especially Quakers); pottery; lots of children (Darwin had fourteen with his two wives, and maybe more besides); investments; the abolition of slavery; and of course engineering. It could have been overwhelming, but it’s broken up with black-and-white illustrations and some lovely plates. I was particularly struck by Joseph Wright’s paintings of the orrery and the air pump.
A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (1766)An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768)
I learned a lot from this; in particular I realised how well the author had managed to gain my sympathy when I found myself horrified by the 1791 Priestley Riots, where a right-wing mob targeted the local religious minorities in Birmingham, including especially the vulnerable and visible Joseph Priestley; the local authorities appear to have colluded in the outbreak of violence and then (as usual) blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves. Some things never change.
Anyway, this is a tremendously engaging book about a part of history that I should have known more about; and now I do. You can get it here.
There was lots of time for Matt to do what he intended and then get on to his homework.
A YA novel, the first in a sequence related to the series of Net Force novels (and TV movie) by Tom Clancy, published in 1998 but set in 2025. I think I probably got enough of a flavour from this not to need to try out the rest of the series of 18 books. Our protagonist, Matt Hunter, tracks down a bunch of hackers who are not only disrupting important cultural events like baseball games, but also infiltrating embassies in Washington and stealing information. The virtual world in this version of 2025 is much more hologrammy and immersive than we have actually managed to generate in real life. It’s the least dystopian future of any of the books and films set on Earth in 2025 that I have tried so far – the future of John Varley’s Titan also seems fairly rosy, but it’s set among the moons of Saturn. You can get it here.
The vagaries of my reading list threw up two short pieces with some similarities, so I am bracketing them together.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Desdemona and the Deep::
She read the article through twice: headline, byline, lede, body, conclusion, then straightened up on a sharp inhale.
A novella that came with the 2020 Hugo packet, which I have now reached as I drill down through that pile. It’s set in an alternative 1920s; Desdemona is the daughter of an evil mining magnate, who does a deal with the underworld, and she pledges to undo it, along with her trans best friend. Lots of mythic resonances with legends from all over the world, and of course a critique of capitalism and gender conformity. I found it rather refreshing. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020, from the Hugo packet that year. Next, from the same source, is Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow. (Which is a bit longer.)
Second paragraph of third section of “They Will Dream in the Garden”:
—Oye, ¡no hagas eso, Tomás! Todavía ni la conoces. Salúdala, dile cómo te llamas primero –el tono de la auxiliadora no será de reproche y procurará ignorar los pucheros del niño producidos por la corriente eléctrica.
“Hey, don’t do that, Thomas! You don’t even know her yet. Greet her, tell her your name first” the tone of the assistant will not be one of reproach and she will be able to ignore the pouts of the boy produced by the electric current.
Translated by Adrian Demopulos
A short but powerful piece about how commemorating the women killed by men, using AI to bring their stories to life, can play a role in transforming society, told from a number of perspectives with characters seen from different angles. At less than 5000 words, it must be the shortest piece to have won the Tiptree / Otherwise Award, but it packs a heck of a wallop. You can read it here (and original Spanish, “Soñarán en el jardín”, here).
This was the last winner of the Tiptree Award under that name, with the translator getting a special citation from the judges. Also on the Honor List were six novels, three short pieces and a magazine issue, none of which I have read, and also Janelle Monáe’s superb album Dirty Computer. I have to say I’d have voted for Janelle Monáe if I’d been on the panel.
That year the Arthur C. Clarke Award went to Rosewater, by Tade Thompson; the BSFA Award to Embers of War, by Gareth L. Powell (I voted for Rosewater); and the Hugo and Nebula to The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (I was the Hugo Administrator). Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik, and Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse, were on both Hugo and Nebula ballots. Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee was a finalist for the Hugo, BSFA and Clarke awards.
The first winner of the Otherwise Award, and so next in this sequence for me, is Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi.
Do I decide for myself what to do next, or let someone else decide for me? If I decide for myself it seems I have two options. I can move on from here with Stewart. Or I can return underground.
An Australian YA post-apocalyptic novel, where a teen girl and boy (and his faithful basset hound, Stewart) take the first tentative steps to rebuilding society. Her parents have eked out a living on the surface of a devastated and polluted world for years; his people have retreated underground to hide from the poisoned planet. Nothing very remarkable plot-wise, but the protagonists’ voices are caught distinctively and believably. You can get it here.
We discover at the very end of the book that the whole story is set in 2025, which was my reason for reading it – yet another dystopia for next year…
Second paragraph of third essay (“Wandering Scholars and Saintly Cults: The Liturgical Legacy”, by Ann Buckley)
Waddell never seemed drawn to ‘Celtic’ nationalism and its tendency towards cultural narrowness and isolationism which in the past has so often dogged progress in research on Irish liturgical and ecclesiastical history and the history of the arts in Ireland. And yet her account fully acknowledges and values the critical importance of Irish achievements in early medieval Europe. Her focus is largely on the intellectual impact of these churchmen (we do not know of any women), illustrated through references to literature and poetry. Complemented by her characteristic eye for detail and signs of individual introspection, she also provides vignettes on their thoughts and emotions culled from anonymous marginalia in manuscripts from former centres of Irish activity which still survive in libraries such as Reichenau, St Gallen, and St Paul in Carinthia. These include verses about Pangur Bán (the monk’s cat), the weather, homesickness, a blackbird – being given new voice today in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Ciarán Carson, and the singing of Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin. The excitement at these discoveries took Waddell ‘in the legs’, as she said in a letter to her sister Meg.¹
They have an odd grace, the names of wild earth side by side with the sophistication of the older world, something of the strangeness of the Irish glosses in the ninth century manuscripts of Berne, Leyden and St Gall: ‘We are from Inch-madoc, Cairbre and I’, and most moving of all to one who remembers the low grey ruins on the island in Strangford Lough, ‘Mahee of Nendrum.’²
¹ Quoted in Felicitas Corrigan, Helen Waddell: A Biography (1986; London: Gollancz, 1990), 229; Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (1927; London: Constable, 1980), 34-5. ² Waddell, Wandering Scholars, 33-4.
This is a collection of academic essays about Helen Waddell, who I have written about here occasionally – if you still don’t know who she was, I recommend this short and powerful piece by Kate Mosse. I’m far enough out of the academic game that I rate such pieces for entertainment value rather than resonance with the scholarly Zeitgeist, and I found all of these entertaining and enlightening.
I was struck that several of the essays separately mentioned two crucial points from Helen Waddell’s career: the first, her stay in hospital in Paris in 1924, when she remembered hallucinating as Heloïse; and the second, the death of a rabbit at the end of her Peter Abelard novel. Both are moments of intense personal experience, which connect life and art inextricably. You can get it here.
A little bit of a side track, but I was interested to learn from Helen Carr’s essay that although both Helen Waddell and Ezra Pound translated lots of Chinese poetry, there was only one poem that they both published in English, a “brief, enigmatic poem by the painter-poet Wang Wei“. The two translations are as follows:
Helen Waddell
Ezra Pound
Peach blossom after rain Is deeper red; The willow fresher green; Twittering overhead; And fallen petals lie wind-blown, Unswept upon the courtyard stone.
Peach flowers turn the dew crimson, Green willows melt in the mist, The servant will not sweep up the fallen petals, And the nightingales Persist in their singing.
It took me a while to track down the original, and of course my Chinese is largely machine-translated, but here it is:
The peach blossoms are still tinged red with the night rain, and the green willows with spring mist. The fallen flowers have not been swept away by the boy, and the orioles are singing though the mountain visitor sleeps.
It’s interesting that both Waddell and Pound omitted the sleeping visitor (山客, shān kè) at the end. Daniel Skeens has done a much deeper analysis (based on better knowledge of Chinese than mine) but his headline conclusion is the same as mine: these are both good translations in their own right, which demonstrate the difficulty of translating poetry.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on that pile is Ireland Under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley.
“Just swallow two of these tablets, Peter, to render you more susceptible to controlled hypnosis, then we’ll get to work and knock all that silly sex stuff clean out your head,” Miss Delarge told me confidently.
I read a couple of Peter Pook’s books when I was a teenager and rather enjoyed them, though I remember thinking even at the time that the humour was pretty basic. Out of curiosity I decided to have a look at one of them again, forty years later. I don’t know if it is typical, but this one was dull and sexist. It is 1968, and our hero signs up as the only male out of 600 students at a teacher training college, and boring and unfunny antics ensue. A total waste of time. You can get it here, but honestly, don’t bother.
Румата остановился перед таверной и хотел было зайти, но обнаружил, что у него пропал кошелек. Он стоял перед входом в полной растерянности (он никак не мог привыкнуть к таким вещам, хотя это случилось с ним не впервые) и долго шарил по всем карманам. Всего было три мешочка, по десятку золотых в каждом. Один получил прокуратор, отец Кин, другой получил Вага. Третий исчез. В карманах было пусто, с левой штанины были аккуратно срезаны все золотые бляшки, а с пояса исчез кинжал.
Rumata stopped in front of a tavern and was about to go in, but then realized that his coin purse was missing. He stood in front of the door in complete confusion (he just couldn’t get used to such occurrences, although this wasn’t the first time) and spent a long time digging through his pockets. There had been three pouches, with ten gold pieces in each. He gave one to the procurator, Father Kin, and another to Waga. The third one had disappeared. His pockets were empty, all gold buckles had been carefully cut off his left pant leg, and the dagger had disappeared from his belt.
Translate by Olena Bormashenko
This is billed as a new translation of one of the classic Soviet science fiction novels. Our hero, Don Rumata, has been dropped as an observer into a planet with a feudal society, as one of a team from a future (Communist) Earth guiding the society in the Right Direction. There are actually quite a lot of Western sf books with this sort of theme, but the ultimate concerns here are different to what I am used to; the lurch towards fascism on the planet clearly spelt out as a cause for possible intervention by the Earth folks.
It’s not brilliant on women characters, but it does have both action and thoughtfulness. My edition also has an afterword by Boris Strugatsky explaining the difficulties of sneaking the book through the process of political approval for publication. I’m glad they succeeded. You can get it here.
This was my top unread sf book, and my top book acquired last year that isn’t by Ben Aaronovitch (who I’m breaking out into his own sequence, as I have done with Wells and Pratchett). Next on those piles are The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula Le Guin, and The Light We Carry, by Michelle Obama.
Another of the books set in 2025 which I have been reading through, this one a grim grim dystopia from 1983 where inequality has soared and the public get their kicks from watching a reality TV show where the contestants are hunted to death across the urban streetscape of a decaying USA. Several of the sf stories set in 2025 feature violent reality TV; a couple more to come.
Our hero does his best to beat the system, but the odds are stacked against him. Like Disch’s 334, it starts in New York, but the hunt for the protagonist takes him up the northeastern seaboard as far as Portland, Maine (where the author actually lives). You can get it here. The dystopia hits uncomfortably close to home, and…
.
SPOILER
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…the book ends with a rather prophetic denouement as our hero flies his plane into a skyscraper to wreak vengeance on the system.
War releases other aggressions too — all those hostilities that have been present in peacetime, but restrained — and so when war comes, other, ‘little’ wars come too: the war of the old against the young, the war of the old-fashioned against the modern, the war of the national against the foreign and of the conforming against the non-conforming. It is not surprising, then, that once the Great War had begun, conflicts of values began, and grew violent, or that qualities that cultivated Edwardians had taken to be the very signs of their nation’s civilization were seen to be the symptoms of a national disease.
I enjoyed this tremendously, a survey of the impact of the First World War on British culture – although the subtitle uses the word “English”, I’m glad to say that Ireland at least is referenced throughout. In 470 pages, Hynes looks at the brutal reset of the UK’s way of life that started in 1914, climaxed in 1916 and continued to reverberate long after the guns had formally fallen silent.
Almost every European family has a story here – my grandfather, born in 1880, was wounded three times in combat; his younger brother was gassed; one of his sisters lost her oldest son at Gallipoli, another lost her husband at Ypres. But Hynes’ focus is culture rather than combat, mainly prose writing, but also poetry, theatre, painting, sculpture, architecture and the nascent cinema industry, and he weaves an intense and diverse tapestry of how art responded to crisis and horror.
A lot of the names were familiar to me – Wells and Woolf dominating, of course, and Owen in poetry. Hynes does a great job of connecting them all together, mapping their mutual influences and in particular drawing out the changing perceptions of the war over time – those directly exposed to it realising the true horror of the situation quicker than those at home.
There is plenty of social commentary in the art, including the changing roles of women, and attitudes to sexuality. I had to grimly laugh at one quote from Asquith’s son, prosecuting a court-martial against a soldier for being gay, who he described in a letter to his wife as
a nephew of Robert Ross, lately a scholar at Eaton, who aroused everyone’s suspicions by knowing Latin and Greek and constantly reading Henry James’ novels.
Sounds like a wrong ’un, for sure!
The book gave me a lot to think about, and I picked up a couple of intriguing recommendations. Sonia: Between Two Worlds, a novel by Stephen McKenna, seems to pick up the Irish dimension and do a bit more with it. And the Sandham Memorial Chapel sounds like it is well worth a detour next time I have reason to venture to northern Hampshire.
This is a great summary of an awful time, and the art that it generated, some of which was great and lasting. You can get it here.
The loyalists of Ireland were far more exposed to suspicion for resisting the royal claim to supremacy over the Church than were those of England. In England, refusal to submit might be regarded as the outcome of loyalty to the pope rather than of disloyalty to the king. In Ireland, those at first called on to conform were the inhabitants of the Pale, and resistance to the law was exceedingly difficult for people with such a strong tradition of loyalty. Disobedience to the king’s laws was their perpetual complaint against the Anglo-Irish outside the Pale, and they hesitated to act in any way which might result in their being identified with the older colonists. Hence their tacit acceptance of the ecclesiastical changes. There was an equally tacit acceptance by those Irish or Anglo-Irish lords who were coerced or persuaded into submitting to the royal authority during the course of the reign. In the actual operation of the new laws can be traced the real attitude of each class in the country.
I did not know Robin Dudley Edwards, though I saw him in action, heckling shallow Nationalist interpretations of Irish history at a UCD seminar only a few months before he died in 1988. He published this in 1935 when he was 26; it is the book of his PhD thesis from a couple of years earlier. It’s a remarkable piece of research for the day, looking in detail at the records for the efforts by the governments of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I to impose the Reformation in Ireland (and Mary I’s efforts to reverse it).
He concentrates a bit more on the early part of the period, which I am less interested in, rather than the 1560s and after, but I can understand first of all that any writer have more energy for dealing with the earlier bit of research and second that there was simply more going on in the 1530s, 1540s and 1550s in terms of the dynamics of religion and government.
There are two stories here. The first is that the government of Ireland was weak and London was not prepared to put in enough resources to make it effective, so the story of Tudor Ireland is of one chief governor after another failing to make much impact until the very end, in 1603. The second is that the Protestant side was unable to find resources to staff the religious effort; most Irish people spoke Irish, but the state was constrained to operate in English; any sensible rising Protestant evangelist stayed in England where it was safer and the monetary rewards better; and the ability of the state to enforce religious behaviour (let alone belief) even in the most loyal areas was correspondingly weak.
Despite its weight I also found it quite a quick read. I know that much more research has been done on the topic since, but it’s good to go back to basics sometimes. You can get it here (at a price); I was lucky enough to get my father’s copy.
This was the shortest unread book that I added to my shelves in 2018. Next on that pile is New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Roger Boyes.
And, sure enough, when the rescue team pulled the car out of the Dula, all the passengers in it — a bull, a goat and a rooster — were indeed found dead, the bodies still strapped to their seats. But there was no sign whatsoever of the vice president. While the rescuers painstakingly searched for him, those who really know about things ventured to declare it a waste of time; the horse had most probably been saved by his talismans and escaped. They weren’t, in fact, too, too far from the truth. By the time the car landed at the bottom of the Dula, Tuvy’s hooves were busy eating the road, tholukuthi bearing the vice president to the safety of his sorcerer’s homestead.
One of the Clarke Award submissions from last year that was clearly fantasy rather than science fiction, but which I found interesting enough to come back to. It’s a parable of politics in a post-colonial African country with a strong resemblance to the author’s native Zimbabwe, but with the difference that all of the characters are animals; the old president and his successor are horses, the central character is a politically aware goat, and we have dogs, hens, cows, everything.
Obviously the root is Animal Farm, but it’s a bit less heavy-handed and the plot is more complex; also the language is effervescent, with the word “tholukuthi ” frequently interjected – it means something like “you find that…” in Ndebele, but seems to be used here to mean something more like “that is to say” or the German “beziehungsweise”; also “Tholokuthi Hey” was a massive hit song at the time of the 2017 revolution in Zimbabwe, which is part of what the book is about.
So, quite a lot of fun. Also shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year, and for a couple of other awards, so I don’t feel too bad that we overlooked it for the Clarke. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white author. Next on that pile is The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang.
The Happiness Patrol, from the dying days of 1988, is a fairly standard rebels against the system story, lifted by some fairly memorable characters and concepts – especially Sheila Hancock as the dictator, and her vicious pet Fifi. It comes close to looking convincing – the coherent style of the Happiness Patrol themselves is almost genius. I started off being quite impressed by how well the Candyman worked, but I had completely gone off him in the end, and the musician and the census official, while nice touches, didn’t quite seem to integrate into the whole thing. Not awful, but definitely not one of the great ones either.
When I came back a couple of years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
Continuing along this theme of rehabilitation [after Remembrance of the Daleks], I found The Happiness Patrol an excellent piece of sinister dystopia, following on from Paradise Towers. The interaction between Helen A and her retainers and servitors is tremendously engaging, with Fifi one of the great non-speaking parts (like the dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona, only much more vicious); and one wonders why it came as a surprise to anyone to learn that it was a deliberate though not hugely accurate tilt at Thatcherism. Doctor Who does not do space opera terribly well, but this is not space opera, it is allegory played with bitter ironic comedy, and fits McCoy’s portrayal beautifully.
Watching it again I find myself somewhere in between. Great performances, but a lot of running around in circles in terms of plot, no real sense of how the various bits of city connect with each other, and people just standing around to be captured or executed. We’ve had more violent assaults on our willing suspension of disbelief in the Moffat and Chibnall and Davies years since, but it felt like the director was working more on the script than the audience perception.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Graeme Curry’s novelisation of his own script is:
She could not believe her eyes – the TARDIS was pink. From the shadows of Forum Square they had a clear view of the Happiness Patrol carrying their pots of paint and putting the final touches to their work. Daisy K stood some distance from the others, overseeing the job.
I wasn’t overwhelmed by the original TV story, but Curry has produced a novelisation which is passionate and convinced – the rather odd plot holes remain, but liberated from cheap-looking special effects, it turns into rather a good yarn. Definitely one of those where the book is an improvement. Also an easy pass for the Bechdel test, with Helen A and her women warriors running around after Ace.
Nothing more to add. You can get it here. (Incidentally I tried tracking Bechdel passes and fails for all the fiction I read this year, but ran out of steam in June.)
Mike Stack’s Black Archive monograph on the story looks at its reception rather than its creation, which is fair enough given the changes in public notoriety the story has enjoyed. The first chapter, “Evaluation” looks at how poorly the story was rated by fans at the time and since, and asks “So, Is it Any Good?” He disarmingly admits its weaknesses: the padding of the plot, the unambitious design, the controversial Kandyman, the ambiguous postcolonial treatment of the Pipe People, Fifi; but comes back to the good performances.
The second and longest chapter, “Political Readings”, starts with the media flap in 2010 when several British newspapers discovered that the story had a critique of Thatcherism, and goes on to point out that spoofs of Thatcher were so universal on TV in 1988 that The Happiness Patrol easily slipped below the radar of contemporary critics. The real target, Stack argues convincingly, is authoritarianism of all kinds.
The third chapter, “Queer Readings”, addresses one of the other key points about the story. Its second paragraph, with the quote it introduces and its footnotes, is:
However, such bold statements are not universal or uncontested. In The Television Companion, Howe and Walker gave only a brief mention to the interpretation of gay themes, tentatively noting ‘some commentators have suggested that there is a gay rights message here’⁴. They do not take this observation further. Tat Wood, in About Time, went further:
‘While we’re debunking fan lore, the dispatched Andrew X (or Harold L, it hardly matters) isn’t wearing a pink triangle badge. Novelist / new series writer Matt Jones’ reading of the story as being explicitly and exclusively about gay rights misses the point, although none of his evidence (except the mention of the triangle badge) is actually invalid.’⁵
⁴ Howe and Walker, The Television Companion, p518. ⁵ Wood, About Time 6, p252.
The chapter points out that the story is actually very ambiguous in its use of queer / gay imagery. Pink is the colour of the oppressor here, not the liberator. The two main male villains escape together at the end – romantically, perhaps? On the other hand, the enforcement of happiness has echoes of the Section 28 debate of the 1980s (weirdly being played out again in attacks against trans people today). Personally I think that the ambiguity is itself rather successful.
The fourth chapter, “Happy Readings”, starts by citing the Easter 2011 sermon delivered by then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in which he mentioned the story in the context of the importance of happiness as a societal aim. (I met Lord Williams once, in passing, as I was heading to a meeting at the House of Lords and bumped into him at the entrance to Parliament.) Stack looks at the concept of happiness, and why Helen A is doomed not to find it. (Certainly she ain’t gettin’ much from Joseph C.)
A Coda comes back to the question of whether the story is any good. Admitting his own personal love for it, Stack concludes:
I leave myself open to the criticism that I have credited The Happiness Patrol with more intellectual clout than it deserves. However, what strikes me is the story more than holds its own when held up to scholarly scrutiny. It elegantly depicts totalitarianism, anticipates the reclaiming of the word ‘killjoy’, and provides a parable about the need to negotiate our emotions.
Again, the Black Archives have given me new appreciation for what a Doctor Who story I don’t especially love. You can get this one here.
Incidentally, the Seventh Doctor is proportionately by far the best represented in the Black Archive (apart from the special cases of the Eighth and Shalka Doctors). 64% of the Seventh Doctor’s episodes are covered in Black Archives as of late 2024; the closest of the rest is the Thirteenth with 46%. The gap is even bigger just counting stories: 7 of the 12 Seventh Doctor stories now have Black Archives, 58%, twice the score of the Fourth Doctor, with 12 out of 41, 29%.
(Since you asked, the end of the table has the Second Doctor, with only 13% of his episodes and 14% of his stories, though we have also yet to see any Black Archives covering either the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Doctors.)
Second paragraph of third chapter (and the quote that it illustrates):
The pattern and character of local government must be such as to enable it to do four things: to perform efficiently a wide range of profoundly important tasks concerned with the safety, health and well-being, both material and cultural, of people in different localities; to attract and hold the interest of its citizens; to develop enough inherent strength to deal with national authorities in a valid partnership; and to adapt itself without disruption to the present unprecedented process of change in the way people live, work, move, shop and enjoy themselves (Royal Commission on Local Government in England, 1969a, p. 1). This is a typical statement about the functions of local governments. Sharpe (1976), for example, recognizes three major functions for local governments. The first is the liberty function, with a strong local government system providing a division of power and responsibility and preventing the growth of a centralized autocracy. Secondly there is the participation function, with local government allowing individuals to participate in local democracy-often as a training-ground for later service in higher levels of government—and diffusing power amongst the populace. Finally, there is the efficient provision of services function. Certain services are local in scope, being concerned with local consumers only, and are best provided by local governments.
I had some very friendly correspondence with the late great Ron Johnston, professor of geography at Bristol, back in 2015-2016, culminating with him sending me an old paper of his, in which I spotted that he quoted from a document I had written twenty years earlier. Sadly he died in 2020, two months after his 79th birthday. (Though not from COVID, I understand.)
This is a basic undergraduate-level textbook looking at the politics of human geography, examining political systems in the UK and USA, getting deep into the weeds of why more government money is spent in some places than others, and the difficulties of designing good systems for the sharing of resources. I got it for the bits about electoral systems and gerrymandering, but I stayed for the wider analysis of the role of state and local governments in society. It’s all stuff that I more or less knew, but it was helpful to have it laid out like this. It would have been good to see some nods towards gender and geography, and some more countries than the USA and UK, but it is what it is. You can get it here.
I got this second hand (obviously) and, to my delight, I spotted that the previous owner is a retired Cambridge don who was a university official during my years in student politics. I have sent him a note but he hasn’t replied; he must be in his eighties by now.
This was the last of the stash of books acquired in 2016 that I had mislaid when I thought I had reached the end of that pile. Though I am still looking out for a couple that have not turned up yet.
Information emerges on a computer screen as lines and dots, but there are pieces missing. The DNA extracted from this tooth has spent more than a millennium in the ground, resulting in incomplete genome coverage.3 It doesn’t show the individual’s eye colour or provide information on their appearance. However, while the minute sequences of the DNA prove difficult to decipher, the chromosomes are clear. The team members search repeatedly, yet across every sample they find no evidence of a Y chromosome anywhere. Instead, there is a clear pattern of two X chromosomes. 3 Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson et al, ‘A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 164, No. 4 (2017), pp. 853-860.
A book asserting that there are lots of interesting stories to tell about the centrality of women in the Middle Ages, which basically is preaching to the converted as far as I am concerned. It starts however in 1913: Emily Davison, who was trampled to death by the King’s horse when her suffragette protest went wrong at the Derby, was a qualified and enthusiastic medievalist who saw the political empowerment of women as fully consistent with history.
Ramirez goes on to look at the Loftus Princess; Cyneðryð and Æðelflæd of Mercia; the Viking woman from Birka; Hildegard of Bingen; the women who made the Bayeux Tapestry; the women of the Cathars; Jadwiga of Poland; and Margery Kempe. It’s a solid piece of work which simultaneously rides the two horses of “these were remarkable individuals” and “women in general were much more important in the Middle Ages than you have probably been told”.
I didn’t know much about any of these particular cases, and had never heard of some of them – and I’ve read quite a lot of medieval history in my time. So I felt enlightened and encouraged by the end of the book. You can get it here.
The crowd apparently hardly knew at first how to receive the Sultan of Turkey, but the universal good feeling was in his favor, and finally rounds of hand clapping and cheers greeted his progress along the splendid avenue.
This is a rollicking 1898 Edison fanfic sequel to The War of the Worlds, in which the nations of the earth, shocked by a Martian attack on New York, fund a retaliatory mission to Mars led by Thomas A. Edison and Lord Kelvin, with the author putting himself in first person in the middle of the fray. Edison has conveniently invented both a disintegration ray and an anti-gravity drive, so the large Earth expedition is ultimately successful despite tribulations along the way. (This is not a spoiler – the end of the story is given away by the title of the book.)
There’s an amusing fantasy diplomacy bit at the beginning with the rulers of the world converging on Washington and Queen Victoria dancing with President McKinley (she turned 79 that year). The cliches of space travel and war with other planets are explored here for the first time; the Martians are subhuman savages, with all that that implies; there is a beautiful human hostage, the last of her kind; and Thomas Edison wins the war, for humanity. (Apparently he was consulted about being made the hero of the book, and consented.)
The Project Gutenberg version is enlivened by the illustrations created by Bernard Manley, Jr, for the 1947 printing of the story. Manley lived to 91 and died as recently as 2012. You can get it from Project Gutenberg here.
Having enjoyed my return to Cart and Cwidder last year, I thought I should read the complete Dalemark cycle by Diana Wynne Jones. The Spellcoats was new to me; although the third published of the series, it’s the first in internal chronology, set in “prehistoric Dalemark” where the only written language is runes woven into garments – hence the “spellcoats” of the title.
It’s a different sort of society to most of DWJ’s books – a low-tech country coming into being, with indigenous inhabitants in conflict with newcomers, and evil men trying to take advantage of the situation, including through magic. Like a lot of DWJ’s stories, there is a long and transformational journey; like a lot of DWJ’s stories, there are siblings who have different talents and find different destinies. But there’s something attractively raw and pared-back about the setting here, along the banks of a primeval river, and there is a nice framework of telling the story as a woven rather than written text. Sorry it took me so long to get around to reading this. You can get it here.
This was the top unread book by a woman on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, but I’m also adding a small pile for the other two Dalemark books, Drowned Ammet and The Crown of Dalemark.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 63) South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917, by Ernest Shackleton Truss at 10: How Not To Be Prime Minister, by Anthony Seldon with Jonathan Meakin Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston The Happiness Patrol, by Mike Stack Church and State in Tudor Ireland: A History of Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1543-1603, by Robert Dudley Edwards A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, ed. Jennifer FitzGerald
Non-genre 3 (YTD 25) Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse Shame, by Annie Ernaux Pook at College, by Peter Pook (did not finish)
SF 11 (YTD 72) Titan, by John Varley A Crack in Everything, by Ruth Frances Long The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo The Running Man, by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky The Lake at the End of the World, by Caroline Macdonald Desdemona and the Deep, by C.S.E. Cooney “They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals, by Diane Duane
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 26) Grave Matter, by Justin Richards Doctor Who: Space Babies, by Alison Rumfitt Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol, by Graeme Curry
Comics 1 (YTD 22) The Sapling: Roots, by George Mann et al
6,700 pages (YTD 52,200)
11/26 (YTD 98/214) by non-male writers (Ramirez, FitzGerald, Ernaux, Long, Wynne Jones, Bulawayo, Macdonald, Cooney, Damián Miravete, Duane, Rumfitt) 1/26 (YTD 26/188) by a non-white writer (Bulawayo) 3/261 rereads (Steppenwolf, Grave Matter, Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol)
282 books currently tagged unread, down 18 from last month, down 70 from September 2023. At this rate I’ll have cleared the unread shelves in four years’ time.
Reading now The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, by Jenny Uglow Yes Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors, by Frank Dunlop The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al
Coming soon (perhaps) Burning Heart, by Dave Stone Doctor Who: 73 Yards, by Scott Handcock Midnight, by Philip Purser-Hallard New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Roger Boyes and Suzy Jagger Ireland under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, ed. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch Monica, by Daniel Clowes Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin 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 Marriage, by H.G. Wells How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman
He wasn’t entirely sure if Ruby was listening to him. She was standing still with the toes of her shoes touching the edge of the cliff, completely enraptured by the dinosaurs. Of course she was! Who wouldn’t be?
When I wrote up the most recent season of Doctor Who, I commented of this story:
The actual premise of Space Babies is very silly indeed, but was executed with poker faces by all concerned. The flaw in the plot (alas, not the last time I will use that phrase) is that if Jocelyn has been hiding in a storage room all along, why did she not make herself known earlier?
I watched it again before reading the book and writing this post, and what struck me is the mismatch between, on the one hand, brilliant effects and performances, and on the other, a really poor story concept. Nothing about the situation makes sense, and re-watching it only draws your attention more firmly to the plot flaws. No doubt this is why they slipped it out as part of a double on the same night as Eurovision.
Alison Rumfitt is new to Who writing but has a couple of horror novels under her belt. This is a decent novelisation, adding a little top-and-tail narrative about a child and a monster, and digging a bit more into Ruby’s background and the resonances of the babies for her. There are also a couple more poo jokes, I think (I didn’t go back and check.) It may be difficult for an established writer to stamp their own authority on a Doctor Who story that they did not actually write, but I guess that wasn’t the point, and it’s perfectly serviceable. You can get it here.
Les deux grandes villes de par chez nous, Le Havre et Rouen, suscitent moins d’appréhension, elles font partie du langage de toute mémoire familiale, de l’ordinaire de la conversation. Beaucoup d’ouvriers y travaillent, partant le matin et revenant le soir par « la micheline ». À Rouen, plus proche et plus importante que Le Havre, il y a tout, c’est-à-dire des grands magasins, des spécialistes de toutes les maladies, plusieurs cinémas, une piscine couverte pour apprendre à nager, la foire Saint-Romain qui dure un mois en novembre, des tramways, des salons de thé et des grands hôpitaux où l’on emmène les gens pour les opérations délicates, les cures de désintoxication et les électrochocs. À moins d’y travailler comme ouvrier sur un chantier de reconstruction, personne ne s’y rend vêtu en « tous-les-jours ». Ma mère m’y emmène une fois par an, pour la visite à l’oculiste et l’achat des lunettes. Elle en profite pour acheter des produits de beauté et des articles « qu’on’ ne trouve pas à Y. ». On n’y est pas vraiment chez nous, parce qu’on ne connaît personne. Les gens paraissent s’habiller et parler mieux. À Rouen, on se sent vaguement « en retard », sur la modernité, l’intelligence, l’aisance générale de gestes et de paroles. Rouen est pour moi l’une des figures de l’avenir, comme le sont les romans-feuilletons et les journaux de mode.
The two big cities from around these parts, Le Havre and Rouen, arouse less suspicion; they are inscribed in the linguistic memory of all families and belong to ordinary conversation. Many factory hands work there, leaving in the morning and coming back in the evening on the micheline, a small local train. In Rouen, the larger city, closer to us than Le Havre, they’ve got everything you need – department stores, specialists for every type of complaint, several cinemas, an indoor pool for learning how to swim, the Saint-Romain festival lasting the month of November, tramways, tea rooms and huge hospitals where people are taken for major operations, detoxification programmes and electroshock treatment. Unless you happen to be a labourer working on a building site, you would never go there in your ‘everyday’ clothes. My mother takes me there once a year to visit the eye specialist and buy me a pair of glasses. She takes advantage of the trip to purchase beauty products and other articles ‘you can’t get in Y’. We never feel quite at home there because we don’t know anyone. People appear to dress and speak better than in the country. In Rouen, one always feels slightly ‘at a disadvantage’ – less sophisticated, less intelligent and, generally speaking, less gracious in one’s body and speech. For me, Rouen symbolizes the future, just like serialized novels and fashion magazines do.
Translated by Tanya Leslie
Out of curiosity, because Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, I went to Filigranes near my office and got hold of this – I think because it was the cheapest on the shelf of English translations of her work. It’s a very intense story of a teenager in provincial Normandy in 1952 and the poisonous relationship between her parents – the very first sentence is “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” The environment is dominated by social inequality and unthinking piety, not a million miles or a million years from the Catholic Belfast where I grew up. Clearly autobiographical, and I understand it’s rooted in Ernaux’s bigger project of re-examining her entire life in fictional form. But I suspect this is a good taster, at only 85 pages. You can get it here (and here in French).
His instincts stirred, the deep-seated ancient knowledge of hunter and hunted, intuitive and primal. Standing still as a statue, the late afternoon crowds flowed around him. Light broke through a far off gap in the clouds and fell on her. She glowed with it – special. He couldn’t shake the sense that she was special. And that discomfited him more than he could say. Mistle had already noticed her, after all, and it took something mighty special to get him to crawl out of whatever bottle he was currently drowning himself in.
Fantasy novel set in Dublin – very much in Dublin, firmly moored to the city’s landmarks, and yet also a Dublin that exists in parallel to the supernatural world of Dubh Linn where the Sidhe keep an eye on us mortals and often intervene. Our teenage protagonist discovers that she is connected to both worlds and has a destined role to play in the battle between evil and not-quite-so-evil factions on the supernatural side. Well observed, in terms of both human and physical geography. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018 and also the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. (Sorry Ruth!) Next on the former pile is Yes Taoiseach, by Frank Dunlop; next on the latter is Lost Objects, by Marian Womack, but it will have to wait until I have finished all my 2018 books.
‘I think you could do with a good stiff lemonade,’ the Doctor told Peri gently.
My rereading of Who books which I failed to blog on first reading them a decade ago has thrown up some interesting finds, and this is one of them: the Sixth Doctor and Peri land on a Scottish island where something is up, specifically the islanders are turning into mind-controlled zombies; Doctor Who meets The Wicker Man meets Night of the Living Dead. The setting is very vividly evoked, and the solution to the mystery gradually revealed; but it’s the portrayal of a small isolated community under siege from ‘orrible forces that really sits with me. A good ‘un. You can get it here, at a price.
Der Steppenwolf hatte also zwei Naturen, eine menschliche und eine wölfische, dies war sein Schicksal, und es mag wohl sein, daß dies Schicksal kein so besonderes und seltenes war. Es sollen schon viele Menschen gesehen worden sein, welche viel vom Hund oder vom Fuchs, vom Fisch oder von der Schlange in sich hatten, ohne daß sie darum besondre Schwierigkeiten gehabt hätten. Bei diesen Menschen lebte eben der Mensch und der Fuchs, der Mensch und der Fisch nebeneinander her, und keiner tat dem andern weh, einer half sogar dem andern, und in manchem Manne, der es weit gebracht hat und beneidet wird, war es mehr der Fuchs oder Affe als der Mensch, der sein Glück gemacht hat. Dies ist ja jedermann bekannt. Bei Harry hingegen war es anders, in ihm liefen Mensch und Wolf nebeneinander her, und noch viel weniger halfen sie einander, sondern sie lagen in ständiger Todfeindschaft gegeneinander, und einer lebte dem andern lediglich zu Leide, und wenn Zwei in Einem Blut und Einer Seele miteinander todfeind sind, dann ist das ein übles Leben. Nun, jeder hat sein Los, und leicht ist keines.
And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional one. There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog or the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and the fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one even helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to such enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or the ape in him than to the man. So much for common knowledge. In the case of Harry, however, it was just the opposite. In him the man and the wolf did not go the same way together, but were in continual and deadly enmity. One existed simply and solely to harm the other, and when there are two in one blood and in one soul who are at deadly enmity, then life fares ill. Well, to each his lot, and none is light.
My record-keeping is not always perfect, and I discover now that I actually read this back in 2007. I wrote then:
It’s fundamentally a depressing German psychological-mystical novel, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to. I was very much drawn into the narrator’s story of reconciling what he imagines to be the two sides of his own nature, and coming to terms with music, dancing and sex while remaining true to himself. The ending is a bit peculiar but that is in keeping with the tone of the rest. As I look back at my entries about Nobel prize-winners I see that I’ve ended quite a lot of them with the feeling that I might read more by that author, but this time I really mean it!
In the following 17 years my tolerance for whiny male protagonists has decreased, and I’m afraid I found this very unsatisfactory on a reread. I found the protagonist dull, self-obsessed and needlessly unpleasant to other people. It is mercifully short at least. You can get it here.
I (incorrectly) thought that this was my top unread book acquired so far this year, and my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on both of those lists is The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck.
