Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

Second paragraph of third chapter:

For today a crew of four is on its way to the moon and has just surpassed the space station’s shallow orbiting distance of two hundred and fifty miles above the planet. The lunar astronauts are catapulted past them in a five-billion-dollar blaze of suited-booted glory.

This book surprised a lot of us by winning the Booker Prize. It’s a short, intimate, realistic account of a day in the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station. I almost hesitate to classify it as science fiction, since it’s a description of people in today’s world dealing with today’s technology. But there is also a fictional lunar mission happening in the background, which perhaps pushes it over the edge into sff.

I liked it a lot; quietly humorous, good observation of human nature in a very peculiar environment, sensible treatment of Russian language phrases (unlike some), reflection on What It All Means, also capturing the sensawunda of just having a semi-permanent human outpost in outer space. I’m still surprised that it won the Booker Prize, but I am familiar enough with how juried awards operate that I can see how it could happen.

Recommended, and digestible. You can get it here.

Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie

I finished rereading Midnight’s Children almost two weeks ago, but had not yet got around to blogging it until yesterday’s terrible news pushed me into action. It’s good to hear that Salman Rushdie is likely to survive this dreadful attack, but awful that he has been grievously wounded in the course of what should have been a normal professional engagement.

I fear that there are lessons here for anyone involved with organising cultural events; none of us is safe from a determined malefactor. I know that the internal culture of sf conventions is increasingly conscious of security risks, both internal and external. It sucks but it is necessary.

It should also be noted that the risk comes from all extremes. No ideology or belief system has a monopoly on the use of political violence. Christians, Jews, atheists, leftists and right-wingers all use terrorism. Anyone who says that it is a uniquely Muslim phenomenon can go forth and multiply with themselves.

This particular incident is almost certainly rooted in the fatwa pronounced against Rushdie back in 1989 by Ruhollah Khomeini, shortly before his death. I have always suspected that it was an outworking of Iranian politics at the time; the dying Ayatollah wanting to reinforce the place of his regime as a champion of Islam against the West, as the world in general was undergoing revolutionary changes, and therefore picking on a very prominent Westernised Muslim writer as an easy target of opportunity.

The practical effects for Rushdie were devastating even before yesterday. I recommend reading the account he wrote (in the third person) for the New Yorker ten years ago. He makes a very interesting point about the real problem as he saw it:

When friends asked what they could do to help, he pleaded, “Defend the text.” The attack was very specific, yet the defense was often a general one, resting on the mighty principle of freedom of speech. He hoped for, felt that he needed, a more particular defense, like those made in the case of other assaulted books, such as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Ulysses,” or “Lolita”—because this was a violent attack not on the novel in general, or on free speech per se, but on a particular accumulation of words, and on the intentions and integrity and ability of the writer who had put those words together.

I don’t feel well informed enough to comment in much more detail. I read The Satanic Verses fifteen years ago and found the critique of Islam pretty mild stuff, at least to what I am used to reading about Catholicism. I hope that Rushdie survives to write more.

My copy of Midnight’s Children was given to me 35 years ago by a dear friend who I have since fallen out of touch with. Opening it again was a return to the better times of that relationship, and I felt a warm glow of nostalgia just from the title page. I enjoyed it over Christmas in 1987, and I enjoyed it again now. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug – that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust. That is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)

This weekend is the 75th anniversary of the Midnight of the title, the moment of India’s independence in 1947. The book is the story of India in the last years of British rule and the first thirty-odd years of independence, and it covers also Pakistan and Bangladesh, because you can’t tell the full story otherwise. We know we are onto a good thing in the second chapter, when hereditary nasal problems prove an unexpected blessing to the narrator’s grandfather during the Amritsar massacre:

As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather’s nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up positions, twenty-five to Dyer’s right and twenty-five to his left; and Adam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. ‘Yaaaakh-thoooo!’ he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life.

The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is one of the thousand children born in the first hour of India’s independence, all of whom are endowed with supernatural powers of one kind or another. He is perpetually conflicted about his own identity, unaware that in fact he was swapped at birth with the child of a poorer neighbour. His life loops in and out of Indian (and Pakistani and Bangladeshi) history; his powers prove more a curse than a blessing; the political becomes personal and the personal political. It is tremendously engaging; sometimes funny, sometimes very bleak, sometimes both.

If you don’t know a lot about India (or Pakistan or Bangladesh), as I did not in 1987, you’ll learn a lot from this and enjoy the process. If you do know a bit more, I think you’d still enjoy it. I think the one point that has not aged all that well is that the protagonist is actually not a very pleasant person, especially to the women in his life (who are in general as well drawn as the men), and that gets a bit tiresome. But overall I can see why it was acclaimed at the time and why it remains popular. You can get it here.

This was the top book on my shelves which I had read but not yet written up on line. Next is a much older magical book, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The English Patient

The English Patient won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1996, and eight others: Best Director (Anthony Minghella), Best Supporting Actress (Juliette Binoche), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score and Best Sound. That year’s Hugo went to the Babylon 5 episode Severed Dreams.

I have not seen any of the other Oscar nominees that year; they were Fargo, Jerry Maguire, Secrets & Lies and Shine. I have seen eight other films made in 1996: the three Hugo finalists, Independence Day, Mars Attacks and Star Trek: First Contact, and five others: Trainspotting, Multiplicity, Brassed Off, Michael Collins and My Fellow Americans. They’re all good, apart from Multiplicity, but The English Patient is the only one that has Juliette Binoche.

So, actors in The English Patient who were in previous Oscar or Hugo winners, or in Doctor Who, do not include Juliette Binoche.

The do include Willem Dafoe, who is Carravaggio here and was Sergeant Elias in Platoon ten years before.

Clive Merrrison is Fenelon-Barnes here, but only one of his scenes was not cut from the film and I could find only one half-decent shot of his face. He is not seen on-screen with Juliette Binoche. He was also in two Doctor Who stories, Tomb of the Cybermen (Second Doctor, 1967) as crewman Jim Callum, and Paradise Towers (Seventh Doctor, 1987) as the unnamed Deputy Chief Caretaker.

There’s another Whovian: Lee Ross is Spalding, the soldier at the booby-trapped statue, here, another scene that for some reason does not have Juliette Binoche in it, and went on to be the Boatswain in The Curse of the Black Spot (Twelfth Doctor, 2011).

And although Juliette Binoche won an Oscar for her performance here, she has not been in any other Oscar-winning or Hugo-winning films, or in Doctor Who. (Did I say that already?)

I’m afraid that I didn’t really get The English Patient, even though it has one of my favourite actors in it. (You’ll never guess who that is.) It scores better than some Oscar winners in that one of the lead characters is Indian, Kip the sapper, played by Naveen Andrews, and he actually has an interracial relationship with Juliette Binoche’s character.

The title character is of course male, but the two women who interact with him get a lot of agency, both Katharine, played by Kristin Scott-Thomas, and Hana played by, who is it again, oh yes that’s right, Juliette Binoche.

There are some lovely landscape scenes, particularly in the desert (though these do lose a bit by not having Juliette Binoche in them).

I liked the intercutting timelines, even though only one of them has Juliette Binoche.

And Ralph Fiennes’ make-up as the horribly burned English Patient is very impressive.

But I confess that the film as a whole didn’t grab me by the feelings as I had expected it might. Maybe I was just too tired. Still, because I particularly like one of the actors – you’ll never guess who, I’m keeping that as my special secret – I’m putting it just under a third of the way down my ranking, below The Sting but above Ben-Hur.

Edited to add: Elaine’s take.

I also of course read the original book. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Cats slept in the gun turrets looking south. English and Americans and Indians and Australians and Canadians advanced north, and the shell traces exploded and dissolved in the air. When the armies assembled at Sansepolcro, a town whose symbol is the crossbow, some soldiers acquired them and fired them silently at night over the walls of the untaken city. Field Marshal Kesselring of the retreating German army seriously considered the pouring of hot oil from battlements.

I found it really evocative of the times and places of the settings, and liked the integration of the plotlines as representing the healing of the protagonist. But again I found myself curiously unmoved by it. I am a bit surprised that the book won the Booker and the film the Oscar. But there’s no accounting for taste, and I know mine is sometimes a minority opinion.

Next up: Titanic. I wonder what that’s about?

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Schindler’s List

Schindler’s List won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1993, and six others: Best Director (Steven Spielberg), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score (John Williams), Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction. It lost in another five categories, all to different films, including one to that year’s Hugo winner, Jurassic Park.

That year’s other Best Picture nominees were In the Name of the Father and The Piano, which I have seen, and The Fugitive and The Remains of the Day, which I haven’t. Apart from the two just mentioned, I had seen another six films made that year: Jurassic Park, Groundhog Day, Philadelphia, The Three Musketeers, Much Ado About Nothing and Dave. I must say I really like them all, but I do think that the Oscar voters made the right choice. IMDB users rate Schilndler’s List top film of 1993 on one system and second to, bizarrely, Dazed and Confused (a film I don’t think I had even heard of) on the other. Here’s a trailer.

I spotted no actors who had previously been in a Hugo-winning flm, or in Doctor Who, and only one actor who had previously been in an Oscar winning film. It is Ben Kingsley, here the most prominent Jewish character, accountant Yitzhak Stern, and eleven years ago in the lead role in Gandhi.

In case you didn’t know, it’s the story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist during the second world war, who rescued over a thousand Jews from extermination at Auschwitz. It is based on a Booker Prize-winning novel. I think it is the only Booker winner to also be an Oscar winner; I count four based on Pulitzer winners (You Can’t Take It With You, Gone With The Wind, All the King’s Men, and Driving Miss Daisy).

It’s also almost entirely in black and white. The last film in black and white to win the Oscar was The Apartment in 1960. Schindler’s List is the most expensive black and white film of all time, and also the highest earning. It’s a tremendous device to make us feel simultaneously distanced and involved in the action, especially combined with the handheld camera documentary style filming. Life happened in colour in the 1940s, of course, in Eastern Europe as everywhere else. But our historical memory of the period in general is in black and white. The colour Nazis of Spielberg’s earlier films Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are a bit comical. These Nazis are not, just as the black and white Nazis of Casabalanca are not. And the film’s exceptions to the black and white rule are all the more memorable as a result.

I have to say that it’s a rather male film. The women are not as central to the action as the men. I was interested that one vivid incident, when the engineer Diana Reiter is shot dead for offering structural advice, was based on fact. It is also interesting that the real Diana Reiter was 40 when she died, and she is played by 26-year-old Elina Löwensohn.

We’ve had several Oscar-winning films which looked at Jewish identity and anti-semitism in different times and places. (The Life of Emile ZolaGentleman’s AgreementBen-HurAnnie HallChariots of FireDriving Miss Daisy; the word “Jew” is not mentioned in Casablanca, but the subtext is very present.) Schindler’s List is at its heart the story of Schindler and his antagonist Goeth, and only then of the people he saved, but it is such a long and wide film that we get a much much better exploration of these issues than in any of the others. The story is brought home to us directly at the very end, where the real survivors saved by Schindler, accompanied by the actors we have just seen playing them on film, honour Schindler’s grave in Jerusalem.

Apart from that caveat, the film is indeed a masterpiece, telling a grim story at length (still leaving out a lot of what’s in the book), exploring the ambiguity of Schindler who did things that are normally considered bad (fraud, theft, forgery) to ameliorate something much worse (genocide). The settings are convincing. The music is unforgettable. Here’s Itzhak Perlman playing it in concert.

It’s also carried by Liam Neeson in the central role. Schindler is complex but I think not ambiguous; he enjoys the pleasures of life, but is also shocked and repelled by what is happening to the people around him, and is in the position where he can make a small difference to some.

It’s difficult to know what else to say. I’m putting it right at the top of my rankings, in fifth place overall, just behind Chariots of Fire, but ahead of Rebecca.

I also went and read the novel by Thomas Keneally, first published as Schindler’s Ark and then retitled Schindler’s List to capitalise on the film. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

With some hundreds of other captured Polish officers from Przemyśl, Pfefferberg was on his way to Germany when his train drew into his home city of Cracow and the prisoners were herded into the first-class waiting room, to remain there until new transport could be provided. His home was ten blocks away. To a practical young man, it seemed outrageous that he could not go out into Pawia Street and catch a No. 1 trolley home. The bucolic-looking Wehrmacht guard at the door seemed a provocation.

It’s a great book, and the great film that was made from it inevitably cut out some important details. The core of the story is still the same – the sensualist Schindler, who succeeds in saving a few lives, with perhaps more of an emphasis on the people he saved as well as the people he opposed and the women he loved. But the book has time to show us the overall context. There’s an interesting cameo in an early chapter from a policeman who complains that the entire railway system is being diverted to transporting Jews, rather than the soldiers who might actually help win the war. It made me wonder briefly if the Germans could have won the war if it had not been accompanied by a policy of genocide. But of course, if there had been no policy of genocide, there would probably have been no war.

There’s another interesting moment in the book when Schindler goes to Budapest to brief the Jewish Relief Organization on what was happening to Jews in Poland. This again is based on fact. In these days of instant news, which I guess we’ve had more or less since the 1960s, we forget just how difficult it was to get information, even about mass murder to which there were hundreds or thousands of witnesses. By 1943, the first reports were already out there – the New Republic broke the story in December 1942, rumours had reached Anne Frank and her family in hiding a few months before that. But Schindler was able to provide a dangerous and direct link between the Zionist relief funds and the surviving Jews in his part of the world. I find this particularly brave. Budapest was not home territory, the Zionists were not people who he knew, in the same way that Poland and the Sudetenland were.

But the most striking difference between book and film is the detail of suffering which the book can describe but the film cannot. Actors in 1992 were able to convincingly portray the terror and trauma of fifty years earlier. They could not portray malnutrition and disease. It’s a comprehensive and convincing account of what life was like both inside and outside the camps, when horror and tragedy were everyday occurrences. Really very much worth reading, whether or not you see the film. You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

The Thomas Cromwell trilogy, by Hilary Mantel

I got The Mirror and the Light for Anne's birthday earlier in the year, and before tackling it directly myself, decided to go back and read the two previous books in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. That of course became quite a big reading project, at the same time as I was reading Alan Moore's Jerusalem (1300 pages, to the 1800 pages of Cromwell) and an SF mini-project of similar length which I'll write up tomorrow. It took me about seven weeks to reread the trilogy, but it was well worth it.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Wolf Hall is:

‘Forget where you lived?’

When I first read it in 2010, at the same time as The Other Boleyn Girl, I wrote:

In Mantel's hands Cromwell becomes a fascinating character, carrying the baggage of a brutal London upbringing, always mindful of his family away from court, ascending the greasy pole of power rather in spite of his own best instincts. She really summons up the smell and feel of Tudor London, and the alarming sense of fragility of life – not just from the king's displeasure, but from illness, violence, or accident. The novel ends with Cromwell's ascent to full power; I believe a sequel is brewing which will cover the last five years of his life, and I will certainly buy it.

After reading this and The Other Boleyn Girl, the one person who I really ended up wanting to know more about was Anne Boleyn. Only Mantel explores her character at all positively – she is the villain of Gregory's book, and the depiction of her as the court flirt in The Tudors goes back at least to Shakespeare and Fletcher. But she kept Henry chasing her for years (from their first encounter in 1525 to their marriage in 1533), which is pretty impressive considering that he could basically have had any Englishwoman he wanted. It's also strongly suggested that she was genuinely Protestant in sentiment, which would make her a rather advanced thinker and would perhaps give her an extra motive (besides the obvious personal one) for wanting the Church to be under direct royal control.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Bring Up the Bodies is:

From the amphibian mouth, a juvenile chortle. ‘Simon. Merry Christmas, sir, how do you?’

When I first read it in 2013, I wrote:

This is the second of Mantel's acclaimed trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII. Like Wolf Hall, it is intensely told in the present tense, but it concentrates on a much briefer historical period, the months leading up to the execution of Anne Boleyn in 1536. Again Mantel is very good at getting us into Cromwell's head, but I found it a less satisfying book than the previous one; there is much less variety of setting for Cromwell to react to – it is entirely about the sexual politics of the court, though rooted of course in the wider European context; and the most interesting person in this story is clearly Anne herself, and it is a shame that we do not really get to hear her voice (in this book or indeed in most books about the period, fiction or non-fiction). However, "not quite as good as Wolf Hall" is still pretty good.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Mirror and the Light is:

Early July, the grandi hold a triple wedding, combining their fortunes and ancient names. Margaret Neville weds Henry Manners. Anne Manners weds Henry Neville. Dorothy Neville weds John de Vere.

Rereading the first two books, I think I must resile a bit from my complaint that we don't get enough insight into Anne Boleyn. Actually, given that she is a women liviing a dangerous life at a dangerous time, we get pretty close to her, and the disintegration of her relationship with Henry is captured tremendously well. Wolf Hall has her rise (and the fall of Cromwell and More), and Bring Up the Bodies has her fall. And I think it's pretty clear that she drives the ideology of the King's new approach to religion, until he decides that she can't provide what he really wants, which is a son.

I also now recognise the theme of dynastic fragility throughout all three books. When Henry came to the throne in 1509, he was the son of a usurper who had ruled for less than 25 years, his only brother was dead, one sister was married to the King of Scots and the other engaged to the future Empereor Charles V, which effectively took them and their children out of the succession. (Of course, 94 years later, the English throne did go to Henry's great-great-nephew, uniting the Scottish and English thrones.) So the need to provide heirs for dynastic and social stability was imperative, and other claimants, more closely related to the Plantagenets, were ready to move if the situation developed in their favour; meanwhile the other great families, Norfolk/Howard, Suffolk/Brandon, Seymour, all put their eligible girls in the king's line of sight.

Cromwell, having switched from Wolsey to the king at an early stage, and with no dynastic capital to spend at first, dedicates himself to maintaining the regime. But he seems to me always conscious of two things: first, that he is a smarter and better operator than the King, and second that it could all end rather rapidly; every few pages someone is burnt, hanged or beheaded. One subplot from the second book that I didn't pay enough attention to first time round is Cromwell's rescue of the eldest daughter, Mary, from potential disaster; and by the end of the trilogy it's reasonably clear that Henry is set to rehabilitate his two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, both of whom had been declared illegitimate at the point that their mothers' marriages were annulled. And of course we know that they did both inherit the throne in the end; but Mantel shows us that there was nothing inevitable about it.

I thought the third book a tremendous capstone to the other two. We know how the story is going to end; but until we get to the dramatic denouement, Cromwell continues to consolidate power around himself, and juggles the demands of Henry VIII, the other lords and the foreign powers, not to mention the women in Henry's life – the book is very much centred around managing his third and fourth marriages, and the fifth takes place at the very end (and the future sixth wife is hovering around the edges of the scene as well). There's also a great sub-plot about a long-lost Belgian daughter, and the dead Thomas Becket and the live ambassador Chapuys are fascinating characters too.

The single most powerful scene is in fact reported indirectly – when Anne of Cleves first sees Henry, who against Cromwell's advice has approached her incognito, and reacts badly. The witness is Cromwell's son Gregory (who has incidentally married Jane Seymour's sister); it's very well described. And the blow to Henry's ego because of the failure of the Anne of Cleves plan is enough to end Cromwell as well. His fall was suddent and dramatic: he was made Earl of Essex and Lord Chamberlain on 18 April, and three and a half months later he was dead.

As noted above, it took me a while to read, but the pages came close to turning themselves at various points. I'm also storing up impressions of the Tower for when I finally write something about my ancestor Sir Nicholas White, who died there in 1593. Really memorable stuff.

The Mirror and the Light was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that list is Utopia For Realists, by Rutger Bregman.

You can get Wolf Hall here, Bring Up the Bodies here and The Mirror and the Light here.

The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I loved Tabitha very much. She was beautiful although so thin, and she would spend hours playing with me. We had a dollhouse that was like our own house, with a living room and a dining room and a big kitchen for the Marthas, and a father’s study with a desk and bookshelves. All the little pretend books on the shelves were blank. I asked why there was nothing inside them—I had a dim feeling that there were supposed to be marks on those pages—and my mother said that books were decorations, like vases of flowers.

I've realised there were a few books I read at the start of the year in the expectation that they would get onto the BSFA or Hugo ballots, so I saved writing them up; and then they didn't, so I never got around to it. One of these was The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. I opened it with some trepidation. It's not at all unusual for a sequel to a great work to fall flat, especially if written no less than thirty-five years later (but only fifteen years later in terms of the internal timeline). I'm glad to say that The Testaments thoroughly worked for me. The story of Gilead, the near-future America where women are thoroughly oppressed and treated as breeding machines for the male rulers, has meanwhile been refreshed by the HBO television series (which I haven't seen) – I understand that The Testaments reflects events from the TV show as well as from the original novel.

Whatever, it worked for me, with several parallel narratives between Gilead and the exiled radicals in Canada telling the story of the infiltration and subsequent escape of a young woman who turns out to be key to the internal mythology of Gilead, and the workings of Aunt Lydia who is crucial to the maintenance of the structure of Gilead's society, but possibly has another agenda. It's a happier story than The Handmaid's Tale, which is just as well as we live in much darker times. I did also like the postscript from a future academic conference trying to work out exactly what the hell was going on with Gilead.

The Testaments won the Man Booker Prize last year jointly with Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. It's not quite as good a book, but it is a very good book. I voted for it for both the BSFA and Hugo ballots, alas in vain in both cases. You can get it here.

Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo

Second section of third chapter:

    she’s wearing a light grey pencil skirt and jacket, powder-blue blouse, grey neck-tie, black patent leather court shoes, and her pride
     as she passes through the formidable doors into the wood-panelled entrance
     wide staircases sweep up either side of the lobby ascending to the upper floors
     long corridors extend in two directions either side of her
     she’s way too early, wanders through the empty school, explores its light-filled classrooms, imagines its essence pouring into her soul, yes, her very soul
     she isn’t going to be a good teacher but a great one
     one who’ll be remembered by generations of working-class children as the person who made them feel capable of achieving anything in life
     a local girl made good, come back to generously pass on

A lot of people may have said “Who?” on hearing that Bernardine Evaristo had won the Man Booker Prize this year, jointly with Margaret Attwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. I did not; some years ago I greatly enjoyed The Emperor’s Babe, a narrative poem about a Sudanese girl in third century London. Girl, Woman, Other is a slightly different kettle of fish, with a huge range of characters across contemporary London (with some flashbacks to earlier decades), almost all women, almost all black, all telling their stories from their own perspective, but often those stories intersect and overlap, and we see the same relationships from different angles. I was preparing myself to write here that it was a very engaging, challenging, fascinating read; and then a twist in the last chapter caught me completely by surprise (though it shouldn’t have) and left me sobbing on the train on the way home from work. This does not happen to me very often. A brilliant book. You can get it here.

This was the top book on my unread pile by a non-white author. Next on that list is The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey.

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga

Second paragraph of third chapter ("the Fourth Morning"):

We know each other by now. Plus we don't have the time for formalities, I'm afraid.

I got a little thrown at the very start of this book when it became clear that the narrator's name is Balram, a variant form of Balarāma, the elder brother of Krishna. That was also the name of the house in south Dublin where my grandfather lived with his second wife, my godmother, when I was a child (my grandmother died very young and he remarried). I guess I had never really thought about its meaning – it's not obviously of Irish origin, and I suppose it's quite likely that in this case it was also a reference to the Indian god. This coincidence sent me to the online archives; the original owner and possibly builder of my grandfather's house was an Alexander Malcolm, head of the Dublin branch of the Glasgow plastering company George, Rome & Co; he must have been a master plasterer, and it's not at all unlikely that he had some Indian connection, as almost everyone in Britain and Ireland of his class would have had in those days.

Anyway. The book itself is very dark but also funny. It chronicles Balram's rise from a desperately poor village to wealth and prosperity in Bangalore, via a period as a chauffeur in Delhi working for a rich man from his local village. It's a vivid account of an India where the old ways are breaking down, and new money and urbanisation are creating their own rules. Balram is rather a sympathetic rogue, who commits murder and colludes in other deaths to ensure his own path to the top. The story is framed as a letter to Chinese leader Wen Jiabao, warning him about what India is really like. I don't have enough knowledge of India to critique it, but it was well worth the ride. You can get it here.

This won the 2008 Man Booker Prize, beating five books I haven't heard of: Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs, Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency and Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole. It was my top unread book acquired in 2018, and my top non-genre fiction book. Next on those piles respectively are The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan, and Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot.

Milkman, by Anna Burns

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘I’m confused,’ he said. ‘Is that passage about the sky? If it is about the sky then why doesn’t the writer just say so? Why is he complicating things with fancy footwork when all he need say is that the sky is blue?’

Winner of last year’s Man Booker Prize, this was my first book read in 2019, and a promising start. I am sad but somehow not surprised to learn that Burns is the first Northern Irish winner of the prize in 50 years.

The novel is very clearly set in North Belfast (I was not surprised to see that Burns grew up in the Ardoyne) during the Troubles, in the late 1970s or early 1980s; the author would have been 18, the age of her narrator, in 1980, the year of the first hunger strike and the Dunmurry train bombing. It’s certainly set before the emergence of Sinn Féin as an overt political force in 1982.

And at the same time, it’s a novel without names – the city is not named, none of the characters are named, no organisation or country or religion is named. Often I like books that are set in well-researched locations, but this authorial tactic actually woke me up to the fact that really when I judge other writers by Irish authenticity (and I’ve got a review coming in a couple of days where I will be very judgey on that score) I’m really judging them about their sharing of my own imagination about my homeland. Similarly, the unnamed characters are if anything easier to visualise; I’ve read plenty of books where the protagonist’s named siblings are far less three-dimensional than ‘oldest sister’ and ‘second sister’ here.

The story is about a local paramilitary leader, nicknamed ‘Milkman’, who takes an interest in the narrator, stalking her and becoming an unwanted but unavoidable presence in her life. In conservative Catholic Belfast, of course, these situations are always the girl’s fault, and the closed mindset of her elders provides no support. You are who you are only because of who you are related to, your own identity doesn’t matter. In a sense this is a story of almost forty years ago in dialogue with the #MeToo movement.

At the same time, our narrator escapes through literature (she becomes notorious for walking down the street reading) and has many hilarious observations to make about the day-to-day craziness of the society she is growing up in (the local poisoner is particularly memorable). I see from reviews of Burns’ first book, No Bones, that she took a very similar starting point and slightly lost the run of herself towards the end. Here, everything is under control.

I had a lot to write about this. Even so, I don’t think it will be one of my own top books of 2019; a bit too downbeat and dense for my tastes. But well worth the read. You can get it here.

Moon Tiger, by Penelope Lively

Second paragraph of third chapter:

For a moment we are still concerned with structures, with the setting of the stage. I have always been interested in beginnings. We all scrutinise our childhoods, go about the interesting business of apportioning blame. I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates. I like to contemplate their unknowing inhabitants, busy with prosaic matters of hunger, thirst, tides, keeping the ship on course, quarrels and wet feet, their minds on anything but destiny. Those quaint figures of the Bayeux tapestry, far from quaint within their proper context, rough tough efficient fellows wrestling with ropes and sails and frenzied horses and the bawling of ill-tempered superiors. Caesar, contemplating the Sussex coast. Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Captain Cook… all those mundane travellers preoccupied with personal gain or seized by congenital restlessness, studying compasses and dealing with the natives while they make themselves immortal.

I thought this was a tremendously good book – the story of Claudia Hampton’s life, her lovers, her family, her travels through the world of the twentieth century; there are many memorable scenes, particularly from the wartime section set in Egypt. The narrative style combines first-person, a bit of onmniscience, and tight-third, the last of these sometimes from other perspectives than Claudia’s (occasionally recapitulating the same scene from a different point of view), creating the sense of a life story that consists of many pieces that can be observed from different perspectives and in different ways as they are assembled to make a whole. It really grabbed me. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a woman, and also my top unread non-sf fiction book. Next on those stacks respectively are Byzantium, by Judith Herrin, and Burr, by Gore Vidal.

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders

Second snippet from third chapter:

A clear sightline could not be obtained for the crush; one moved dazed through a veritable bazaar of scents, colognes, perfumes, fans, hairpieces, hats, grimacing faces, mouths held open in sudden shrieks, whether joyful or terrified it was difficult to say.

In “All This Did I See: Memories of a Terrible Time,” by Mrs. Margaret Garrett.

This has already won the 2017 Man Booker Prize, and ought to make a few of this year’s sf lists as well. It’s set in 1862, in the immediate aftermath of the death of President Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, with the main thrust of the narrative being reflections from the ghosts of others who are buried nearby – most of them in denial about their own deaths, sure that they are merely sick – interleavened with quotes from historical sources, some genuine, some invented (the latter includes “All This Did I See: Memories of a Terrible Time,” by Mrs. Margaret Garrett). I thought it was really well done; often stories about the afterlife end up being twee or incoherent, but Saunders has set up a weird situation and exploited it well, mainly for emotional impact but also with some reflections on race and social class, and on the enigmatic character of President Lincoln. There are some points where he misses the right words for the 1860’s, but one has to make allowances. Get it here.

The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

This novel won various awards including most notably the 2013 Booker Prize. I really enjoyed it – it’s a story of various crimes of passion and property in an isolated New Zealand gold rush town in 1865-66, set in a somewhat splintered narrative which only gradually draws together to form a whole picture. I found the intense, detailed portrayal of the raw settler society very compelling, and in particular Catton’s unsentimental depiction of lack of communication across gender and race, driven by the power structures developed and reinforced in a new(ish) society.

I was less convinced by the astrological framework of the narrative, but I am rather picky on this subject as a former historian of astrology. It seemed to me an unnecessary superstructure to what is a very good book without it. But I decided to just ignore it, and to enjoy the rest.

August Books 3) Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre

I know this won the Booker Prize, but it didn’t really work for me; I don’t find capital punishment or spree shootings terribly funny, and I’ve been close enough to media frenzies in real life to know what they look like from the inside and get irritated by inaccuracy. I could see that the author was trying to extract humour from the American Condition, rather like Saul Bellow in Henderson the Rain King, where I had a similar humour failure.

April Books 4) Bring Up The Bodies, by Hilary Mantel

'There is no block, as you see. She must kneel upright and not move. If she is steady, it will be done in a moment.'

This is the second of Mantel's acclaimed trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII. Like Wolf Hall, it is intensely told in the present tense, but it concentrates on a much briefer historical period, the months leading up to the execution of Anne Boleyn in 1536. Again Mantel is very good at getting us into Cromwell's head, but I found it a less satisfying book than the previous one; there is much less variety of setting for Cromwell to Reat to – it is entirely about the sexual politics of the court, though rooted of course in the wider European context; and the most interesting person in this story is clearly Anne herself, and it is a shame that we do not really get to hear her voice (in this book or indeed in most books about the period, fiction or non-fiction). However, "not quite as good as Wolf Hall" is still pretty good.

November Books 12-13) Two novels about Henry VIII’s reign

I'm up to episode 5 of the The Tudors and took the time to get through two blockbusting novels with the same setting, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (which covers the 1527-1535 period in the life of Thomas Cromwell) and Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl (told from Mary Boleyn's point of view, covering a longer period, 1521 to 1536). It's quite startling to compare the two books with each other, with the TV series, and with the historical record; one obvious conclusion is that the relationship between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn was a dramatic affair for the human beings involved which inevitably attracts authors who want to tell a good story. The fact that it also had far-reaching historical consequences which still reverberate today is a bonus for the reader.

The two books are very different from each other, however. Wolf Hall is certainly the better of the two: In Mantell's hands Cromwell becomes a fascinating character, carrying the baggage of a brutal London upbringing, always mindful of his family away from court, ascending the greasy pole of power rather in spite of his own best instincts. She really summons up the smell and feel of Tudor London, and the alarming sense of fragility of life – not just from the king's displeasure, but from illness, violence, or accident. The novel ends with Cromwell's ascent to full power; I believe a sequel is brewing which will cover the last five years of his life, and I will certainly buy it.

The Other Boleyn Girl is, alas, a fairly standard romance novel with well-known characters. Unlike most historical accounts, Gregory makes Mary the younger sister, watching as the older Anne first connives at her own affair with the king and then ruthlessly replaces her; as Anne approaches her doom (which she partly brings on herself by incest and witchcraft), Mary ends up with a nice but humbly born man who takes her away from it all. Mary is such a naive first-person narrator that it gets a bit irritating at times. But it is well-written and perhaps more approachable than Wolf Hall.

The central character of each of the two books is a background figure in the other, and neither is particularly well served. For Mantell, Mary Boleyn is a fading but demanding former royal mistress with important but fraying family connections. For Gregory, Cromwell is a dodgy political figure ensuring Anne's rise for his own reasons. Both of them come out in roughly the same place in portraying Henry VIII as randy, short-tempered, and tough on his advisers (Jonathan Rhys Meyers' portrayal on TV is of a rather younger man).

After reading these, the one person who I really ended up wanting to know more about was Anne Boleyn. Only Mantel explores her character at all positively – she is the villain of Gregory's book, and the depiction of her as the court flirt in The Tudors goes back at least to Shakespeare and Fletcher. But she kept Henry chasing her for years (from their first encounter in 1525 to their marriage in 1533), which is pretty impressive considering that he could basically have had any Englishwoman he wanted. It's also strongly suggested that she was genuinely Protestant in sentiment, which would make her a rather advanced thinker and would perhaps give her an extra motive (besides the obvious personal one) for wanting the Church to be under direct royal control.

Anyway, we have another 33 episodes of The Tudors to go, if we can keep the pace.

February Books 5) Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

This was a book which has generated some discussion previously (here, here and to an extent here) so I was prepared to either love it or hate it.

In the event, I enjoyed it, though not massively. The Pacific Ocean descriptions (and to a lesser but important extent the bits in Toronto) were compelling. I wasn’t quite so sure about the parts in India or Mexico. When we got to the bit with the French sailor, and then the bit with mysterious island, I had a good idea of what was up, and so felt a lot happier about the ultimate reveal than I did with Atonement, especially because we already know from an early stage that the narrator survives. The basic message seemed to me to be about the importance of Story, rather than the deep messages about human nature that some reviewer found.

From the unread books shelf between Earth Logic, by Laurie Marks, and The Shakespeare Handbook, by RW Maslen and Michael Schmidt.

April Books 19) True History of the Kelly Gang

19) True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey

This was recommended to me by someone about six months ago, I think after I was a bit unimpressed by the same author’s Oscar and Lucinda. It really grabbed me; I was only vaguely aware of the story of Ned Kelly, but Carey has given him and his country (the Australian state of Victoria in the 1870s) a resounding voice. The story is dramatic and moving; the underlying theme of the book is the injustice by which Kelly and his family, and their community, were shut out of having their voice heard, and had to submit to the lies and distortions of their more powerful enemies. Kelly becomes a robber and a murderer, but only after the authorities have made him so; he is motivated by love and loyalty for his family, and comes across as flawed but in his own way noble. I believe this won the Booker Prize? A decent choice if so.

September Books 20) The God of Small Things, 21) Beloved

20) The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
21) Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Further to my previous post, these two books turned out to be a pretty effective paired reading, though rather morbid if you are lying in bed trying to forget about feeling ill.

Both are about poor and oppressed families in difficult circumstances – a down-at-heel Syrian Orthodox family in Kerala in the mid-twentieth century for Arundhati Roy, former slaves and their children in Cincinnati in the mid-nineteenth century for Toni Morrison. Both books are about the horrible death of a child which turnout not to be all that it seems. Both are told in a narrative that flips back and forth between the time of the death, the family history leading up to it, and the early adulthood of other children who were around at the time. Both, oddly enough, feature old women called Baby.

Frankly the Arundhati Roy book was much more enjoyable. It is a fascinating portrait of different parts of a diverse society, attractively quirky characters, even shafts of actual humour in among the grimness of the main plot strand. Toni Morrison’s world seemed much more starkly black and white (in several senses); the violence was more horrific, the situation worse, the resolution (for my tired and somewhat ill brain) rather more confusing. But I wouldn’t really recommend either to a friend I was trying to cheer up.