My Weekly Book

Love and War in the Apennines - Eric Newby

This is regarded by some aficionados as the finest book of a writer that was one of the absolute greats in his genre. Eric Newby, traveller and travel writer extraordinaire, was also a sometime tall-ship crew member, advertising executive, spy, fashion buyer, special forces operative, prisoner of war, photographer, and, last but not least, the travel editor of The Observer. He died almost exactly a year ago, aged 86, and left behind him a legacy of excellent (and, towards the end of his writing life, sadly not so excellent) books. He was survived by his wife Wanda who, since anyone reading this will be making her acquaintance extensively, I shall not mention further for fear of spoilers.

It starts as a bona fide boys-own war story and here Newby’s irrereverent humour slots in perfectly beside other contemporary writers who have recorded their own amused frustration at wartime exposure to military incompetence. But his SBS mission to sabotage an Italian airfield fails to account for the unexpected presence of 1,000 German troops - rather a fly in the ointment, this.

He and his colleagues failed to reconnoitre with their submarine, were instead hauled half-drowned from the Mediterranean by fishermen, captured and taken to a rather genteel and relaxed Italian prisoner of war camp. The Italians, as Newby points out, made somewhat more effective guards than the Germans and very few Allied prisoners got away from them. He, famously, was one of them.

In the summer of 1943 the dismissal of Mussolini provoked an armistice and the theoretical Italian exit from the war. At this point all the Allied prisoners walked out of the camp. (Except Newby himself, who had had a silly accident and broke his ankle - but more details might spoil your enjoyment, so I will desist, leaving you merely to ponder the possible consequences of applying a lighted cigarette to a horse’s arse.) Many Italians, by this point, were failing to see the continued relevance of the war and, with their connivance, the prisoners dispersed around the nearby countryside. The remaining three-quarters of the book are devoted to exploring Newby’s increasingly desperate attempts to retain his freedom because, naturally, there was a large contingent of the German army in Italy that felt quite differently. And the invading Allied armies were some way off…

Newby says, in the introduction, that he thought his story worth telling as a tribute to all the courageous Italians who helped him - overcoming the ideological battles that were tearing Europe to shreds with the simple maxim that they had menfolk of their own fighting in Russia and they hoped someone was being equally kind to them. It’s a remarkable story that’s found its way into the hands of an equally remarkable storyteller, and the result is a book that repays every minute that it takes to read.

Highlights include the German officer who meets Newby while out butterfly-collecting but is disinclined to spoil his day off as well as Newby’s sojourn as a labourer a farmhouse higher up a mountain that anyone had any right to be living. There the inhabitants can only communicate over the vast distances of the farm by bawling at the top of their lungs and where he nearly eaten alive by a dog and then cornered in a hayloft by a Rubenesque peasant girl out to get one over on her best friend. Like the author’s equally famous A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush it describes circumstances that are full of tension, interest and drama but does this in an ironical, understated and self-deprecating way. This is at the heart of Newby’s success as a writer, as was argued earlier, but it bears repeating. An uncommon man who had the knack of putting himself in uncommon circumstances.

Some links:

• Eric Newby: Guardian obituary
• The Guardian: Memories of Eric Newby
• Eric Newby: Telegraph obituary
• The Independent: Journey’s end
• First person: Newby recalls Wilfrid Thesiger
• Wikipedia: Eric Newby
• Extract: A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

E is for Evidence, F is for Fugitive, G is for Gumshoe - Sue Grafton

Kinsey Millhone, thirty-two and twice-divorced, ex-cop and wisecracking loner, a California private investigator with a penchant for lost causes — one of which, it is to be hoped, is not herself.

I know that some people have had trouble getting into this series, but I have to say that I am really enjoying it - hence my latest three-book binge. Just when lead character Kinsey Millhone was in danger of getting a little bit tried-and-tested, running through the same old routines, Grafton pulls the rug from under her by making her (and us) question some of the basic assumptions about her life.

In E is for Evidence it’s her symbiotic relationship with the California Fidelity insurance company, provider of continuity, colleagues and office space, that comes under threat after, one morning, she discovers an unsolicited payment of $5,000 in her bank account. Somebody’s trying to set her up - but who is it? And will they succeed? Meanwhile, she’s required to come abruptly to terms with several unsavoury aspects of her own past as she investigates an arson and then a murder.

In F is for Fugitive the boundary between Kinsey-as-detective and Kinsey-as-subject is blurred once more as she’s retained for the unenviable task of trying to prove the innocence of someone convicted of murder who has then gone ahead and escaped from custody. An interesting facet of this is her appearance at a motel in a washed-up, run-down seaside town run by clients who couldn’t be further away on the social scale from her employers in the previous volume. This is a tactic I think Grafton uses a lot to vary the texture of the books, often married up with equally striking contrasts of location - exclusive neighbourhoods, run-down suburbs, trailer parks. Last time our heroine was clearly the victim of a set-up; this time she’s truly on the wrong side of the law as she’s cleverly manipulated by her employers and others among the town’s inhabitants.

G is for Gumshoe was easily my favourite of the three. Having undermined Kinsey’s professional status then made her into the eponymous fugitive, now Grafton goes to work on almost everything else in her life. She has become the target of a cut-price professional assassin for the tiny part she played in putting some gangster away. And this guy enjoys the work a little bit too much, which is why he’s prepared to accept an insultingly low sum of money for doing it. At the end of the previous story Kinsey’s garage-conversion apartment was blown to perdition by a bomb. Landlord Henry Pitts has, characteristically, gone to town with the replacement. But before Kinsey can really enjoy her luxurious new surroundings, she’s forced to enlist the services of a professional bodyguard, a man. Who tells her what to do. And Kinsey’s not very good at taking orders, and especially not from men. The actual case she investigates seems almost a sideline at times but it’s a particularly cleverly-crafted mystery and it ends up being seamlessly woven into an overarching plot alongside the assassination story. Cracking stuff, and highly recommended.

I think the first three Millhone novels do a great job of establishing the characters and setting. The fourth, in which Kinsey has to find the murderer of a great candidate for California’s most hated man, I felt was maybe a bit of a ride on cruise control despite having a very clever plot and a nailbiting conclusion. So I was really glad to see Grafton raising the game again in this latest batch.

I’m really looking forward to finding out where she’ll go next in this mother of all extended narratives.

From Sue Grafton’s website:

• E is for Evidence
• F is for Fugitive
• G is for Gumshoe

Love Over Scotland - Alexander McCall Smith

This is the third installment of Alexander McCall Smith’s gentle and self-referential love affair with Edinburgh and its people - a romance he is also quietly carrying on in the pages of the Isabel Dalhousie novels. And, like the others, it is amusing, poignant, pensive, occasionally hilarious and inexpressibly sad by turns.

Our cast of characters has shifted and developed: Bruce Anderson is continuing his brilliant career in London and is (thankfully, I thought) absent from these pages. Pat MacGregor is starting a new life as a student while her boss, diffident gallery owner Matthew, has been reborn as a millionaire and is having to come to terms with his changed status and the way people react to it. Big Lou, coffee shop doyenne and dispenser of wisdom, is adapting to life with her long-lost American lover Eddie back on the scene while child prodigy Bertie is coping with the strain of having his teenage years visited upon him by his pushy mother while he is still only six. Domenica Macdonald is in the field, doing risky anthropological research on piracy in the Malacca Straits. Will she return unscathed? Angus Lordie is certainly hoping so, although it’s questionable whether his gold-toothed dog Cyril gives a damn…

Something that interests me greatly about McCall Smith’s writing style is the way it is episodic, in the moment and quite disrespectful of narrative conventions in some places. Aspects of the story that might, under other circumstances have been developed into major narrative threads fall by the wayside at the expense of other storylines. Narratives don’t start and end within the covers of one book, and things that the characters become greatly exercised about turn out to have been mere storms in teacups. Just like real life, actually.

This is undoubtedly due to the fact that these lovely books are written as proper series novels and published by installments in The Scotsman newspaper. They were, according to an introduction written by McCall Smith for the first volume, inspired by a conversation at a party with none other than the Tales of the City writer Armistead Maupin. Tales of the City was famously published in this way in a San Francisco paper and McCall Smith claims them as a direct inspiration. Certainly this method gives his tales an immediacy, a verisimilitude and a marvellous excuse to drop in cameos of Edinburgh’s great and good as they go about their everyday lives.

I understand that volume four is currently being serialised, I hope I am right and that the author goes on with it for as long as he continues to find it so entertaining.

Some links:

• The Scotsman: Love Over Scotland
• Author’s website: 44 Scotland Street series
• Love Reading: Love Over Scotland
• Random House: Love Over Scotland
• My Weekly Book: photographs of Scotland Street

Titus Groan and Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake

These are books I read in my teens, and wanted to revisit as an adult. How do you describe the extraordinary world of Gormenghast? I think as the wonderful product of imagination unlimited by scope or scale. This, however, isn’t very helpful for readers seeking information or enlightenment.

Gormenghast is a place and Groan a dynasty. The former is a huge rambling estate with lakes, forests, swamps, caverns, a mountain and a vast, unchartable, decaying castle as big as a country in which a handful of aristocratic protagonists live alongside the army of servants and retainers that support them. Clinging to the walls is a village of untouchables living in filth and abject poverty known as the Mud Dwellers. The Groans are earls, or at least 76 of them have been, at the point at which the series starts. Lord Sepulchrave, the current incumbent, occupies the castle with his family: his abstracted wife, his artless daughter, his unswerving servant - and his infant son, the newly-born Titus, a clean slate and heir to all his peculiar blue eyes survey.

We can imagine that the advent of this male baby must have been an unspeakable relief to every member of the Gormenghast entity. For primogeniture is alive and well here. And Gormenghast’s guiding principle is this: there must be no change. Tradition must be observed unto the last minute of every day, however meaningless its rituals now appear. And it is this observance that has sent Lord Sepulchrave three-quarters mad and made the Countess Gertrude withdraw so far into herself as to be almost incapable of speech. It is this that leaves Fuschia, the daughter without a role (and to my mind one of the most sympathetic of Peake’s characters) trapped in the world of an eight-year-old even when she is past twenty.

Titus’ birth is not the only instance of change that heralds the opening of the first novel. The other is a tiny act of rebellion - small in itself but gargantuan in the world of Gormenghast and in its implications. Steerpike, a 17-year-old scullion, tires of the abuse directed of him by his master Swelter, a nauseating clot of corpulence and spleen that oversees the castle kitchen. He flees. Steerpike’s motto is undoubtedly that you make your own luck; and the good fortune he creates for himself propels him rapidly to the heart of castle life.

The intertwining fates of Titus and Steerpike lead us through the first and second novels and provide the premise for the third.

In the Gormenghast stories we have an extraordinary setting and a cast of vividly-imagined and utterly original characters (who, delightfully, often speak in the most perfect 1930s English idiom, despite their fantastical surroundings). The third remarkable thing is Peake’s prose style, so dense, visual and adjective-laden that you might find it rather strong medicine - or, alternatively, an entirely absorbing and wonderful experience. These three elements combine, in Titus Groan at least, with a tight plot that’s almost worthy of a thriller.

Gormenghast by contrast, entered abruptly after a cliff-hanger propels the reader straight out of the first book and into its pages, seems far more concerned with themes (a possible comparison is with Arthur Ransome’s first two novels - the plot-driven and occasionally suspenseful Swallows and Amazons and the thematic and impressionistic Swallowdale.) I, personally, was alight to know the outcome of the main plot and did not entirely welcome a long diversion into Gormenghast’s educational arrangements and the marital prospects of its headmaster. But the threads are picked up, the story is resolved and, in the closing pages and as Titus Alone begins, the castle faces a crisis the like of which it has never encountered before (at least, as far as tradition can inform us). The title of this third book may leave the reader not entirely unaware as to the precise nature of the catastrophe.

It is a well-used aphorism that fantasy novels generally give us a new perspective on an old problem. In the Gormenghast trilogy this problem is the urge of each and every one of us to rebel against the norms of family and society. It is about the act of becoming a distinct individual, as opposed to merely a member of a caste or clan. In this sense it might be considered almost banal in its outlook and conclusions. After all, this is a topic that has been pretty well-done. But consider that it was written in 1946 - directly after the war, the agent of some of the most seismic social upheavals that European and American society have seen, and the subject gets a little more interesting.

Also very important to consider is that Peake never intended it to remain a trilogy. Titus Alone had to be reconstructed by editors after he became too ill to complete it. And a fragment of his intended next, Titus Awakes, in which the 77th Earl would presumably have had to face the consequences of his actions in the previous volume, was completed. Nevertheless, a trilogy is essentially what we have. As well as one of the towering achievements of post-war literature, and a must-read for every serious student both of the period and of fantasy literature in general.

Some links:

• Official author site
• Wikipedia: Mervyn Peake
• Gormenghast Castle fansite
• Peake Studies: Mervyn Peake FAQ
• Titus Awakes
• SF Reviews: Titus Groan (links to the rest of the trilogy)

The Sandman: The Dream Hunters - Yoshitaka Amano and Neil Gaiman

This, as you will perceive from the title, is a Sandman story, although you wouldn’t necessarily realise it on first glance. Gaiman’s collaboration with the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano has produced, rather than your standard-issue comic book, an object that is exceedingly beautiful in its own right. Full of exquisite paintings of all shapes and sizes, the quality of the artist’s contributions, and the foresight of the publishers in making this such a lovely book, means Gaiman’s prose story (as opposed to comic-book script - this really is a departure) needs to work very hard to compete.

Luckily, it is equal to the challenge, and it is positively unsettling how easily this seemingly-traditional Japanese folk tale segues into the Sandman universe. The story starts out by telling the tale of how a fox and a badger (the Japanese kitsune and tanuki) set out to make life difficult for a young Buddhist monk tending an out-of-the-way temple. It soon becomes apparent that fate has more trouble in store for the monk than the fox and the badger could possibly have imagined. Before you know it, our old mate Dream has turned up and… well, I’d better leave something for you to find out for yourself.

If you had to come up with a one-word summary of Neil Gaiman’s style it would undoubtedly be “mythic”. (How many authors can be summarised in a word?) This story continues that theme - the seemingly trivial wager between the two animals that starts the story is skillfully ramped up into a truly universal story in a way that appears seamless. It’s fascinating to see the Dreamlord portrayed by an artist from a totally different tradition both for the differences and the similarities that are portrayed. It’s very hard to see how anyone but the most blinkered and die-hard comics fan would be disappointed for this. For everyone else it’s a visual and imaginative treat on a scale not often encountered.

Some links:

• Wikipedia: The Dream Hunters
• CNN review: a dark tale of ‘enduring charm’
• Vertigo: The Dream Hunters (includes link to excerpt)
• Rambles review
• Neil Gaiman’s website
• Yoshitaka Amano’s website

Sleeper - Paul Adam

Two things attracted me to this book - a positive feeling about the author from having read his novel Unholy Trinity some years before, and a glance at the back of the jacket which revealed that, actually, the world of international violin trading was rather an interesting milieu for a thriller. Admittedly, Unholy Trinity did appeal to me because of its strong resemblance to that other excellent thriller about the Vatican’s Secret Archives, the Tetramachus Collection by Philippe Van Rjndt. But that’s no bad thing - it’s a plot with quite enough excitement to spread across two thrillers - and, I am sure, many others that I haven’t read yet.

Come to think of it, wasn’t Angels and Demons… never mind.

But it’s a bit unfair to start a review of Sleeper by going on about the plot of Unholy Trinity. So, what’s special about this former book? For one, it’s got a nicely unusual protagonist, an elderly Italian luthier, or violin-maker disposed to look back reflectively over his life while deciding to make the most of the years left to him. Secondly it starts out in the violin Mecca of Cremona, in Lombardt, Italy (things in common with several of Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen novels here) before taking a tour around a large swathe of Europe as the hero tries to track down the murderer of a dear friend. Inevitably he becomes involved with a bunch of the most unscrupulous violin-dealing characters you could ever hope to meet and reveals a little about his own insalubrious past in the process. The novel comes to a climax as he finds himself on the track of the most elusive treasure of all - an elusive undiscovered Stradivari violin.

There’s enough meat in the murder to make the plot go without it being stomach-turning, the plot ties up into a beautifully neat bow and, perhaps most satisfying of all, the good get a helping hand by the time the last page is turned while the bad get their come-uppance. It’s an atmospheric and unusual page-turner and I’m glad to have read it. Definitely on the look-out for more by this author.

Some links:

• Italian Mysteries: Sleeper
• The Guardian: A Virtuoso Performance
• Fantastic Fiction: Paul Adams bibliography

Time for some fingers to be pulled out around here. I have actually read as far as book 50 - but am suffering a hopeless block when it comes to writing the blog post for each one. Here’s a list of recent reading, in hopes that it might pop the cork:

• Book 41: Sleeper - Paul Adam
• Book 42: The Sandman: The Dream Hunters - Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano
• Book 43: Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
• Book 44: Love Over Scotland - Alexander McCall Smith
• Book 45: Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
• Book 46: Love and War in the Apennines - Eric Newby
• Book 47: E is for Evidence - Sue Grafton
• Book 48: Two-and-a-Half Pillars of Wisdom
• Book 49: F is for Fugitive - Sue Grafton
• Book 50: G is for Gumshoe - Sue Grafton

Two more to go to meet the challenge! I’ve been meaning to fill in the gaps in my Jane Austen reading and I came across a copy of Sense and Sensibility in a long-unopened box of books recently that had just come out of storage. So it would be nice if that was one of them. And I guess Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone is another logical choice. There’s a copy of Annie Proulx’ The Shipping News lying about also - another recent re-surfacer from the book storage box, plucked from the heap after I read Close Range and was astounded. And I’ve just been sent Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation as part of a Bookcrossing book ring.

Or maybe something else entirely will come along. Last year’s total was 63 books and it’s my perception that I’ve read a little less this year. Also NaNoWriMo is coming up, which always drives a coach and horses through reading time. We’ll just have to see what occurs…

An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears

This is one of the most unusual books I have read for years, possibly ever. It may seem only too easy, even trite, to make this claim. But in this case it is absolutely sincere, and the book comes very highly recommended. Iain Pears’ remarkable historical novel set in England during the 1660s tells the story of a murder from four different perspectives - each of the narrators was deeply entangled in the events that led to the death. Gradually we are led deeper and deeper into the story - but whose version of events should we believe? And is there ever such a thing as a reliable narrator?

As well as a whodunnit and a disquisition on the nature of objective truth, it’s also an epic and stunningly-imagined account of life in Restoration England, with the country recovering from years of civil war followed by military dictatorship, and religious orthodoxy rigorously enforced as the only path to continued peace. Deviations in the direction of either nonconformism or Catholicism are stamped on extremely hard and we are shown what this means from the perspectives of characters right across the religious and social spectrum.

As a final flourish the author starts off with what seems like a paltry, provincial little tale of a traveller barely coping abroad - and winds up broadening and broadening his horizons until he is operating on a truly international stage. I picked this up in a bookshop because I knew that if I walked away from it there was a very good chance I would never be able to find it again or indeed even remember its title. I hesitated over reading it - it’s a mighty long book and I feared it would be as dry as dust. Fear not.

This story, written in 1998 and looking to be Pears’ breakthrough novel even though it was a very long way from being the first thing he’d written, is an absorbing page-turner. It has the kind of coherent internal world that you can occupy to the exclusion of most of the rest of your life while you are engaged in reading it. The author does a great job of distinguishing between the different character voices and sends his plot sailing across oceans rather than confining it to the local riverbank - while doing just enough to anchor it in credibility.

If you read nothing else this year, read this.

Some links:

• Wikipedia: An Instance of the Fingerpost
• Mathematical Association of America: An Instance of the Fingerpost
• An Instance of the Fingerpost: reading group guides
• Iain Pears on Library Thing
• Barnes & Noble writers: Iain Pears (read a chapter here)
• Wikipedia: The English Restoration

The Sandman: Season of Mists - Neil Gaiman et al

Volume four of Neil Gaiman’s comic-book epic The Sandman opens with the sort of family party we all wish we could avoid - bickering siblings who know exactly how to tug each other’s leashes. Only when it’s happening among a group of anthropomorphic personifications covering the big issues like Death, Destiny and Desire, the consequences spread a little bit further than cousin Deirdre’s wedding next summer.

This is the first time we see all the Endless siblings gathered together in one place - with one important exception, the missing “prodigal” who is referred to but not explained (that’s one for later episodes). Inevitably they can’t stay civil for more than five minutes and a bust-up between Dream and Desire, egged on in a very passive-aggressive fashion by Destiny, throws cold water over the proceedings.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case with family gatherings, Dream’s had to hear a few home truths about his character and conduct that he really doesn’t like - and it takes a homily from his favourite sibling, Death, to convince him it’s not all hot air and noise. This sends him on a journey to right an injustice that will have profound implications for many different tribes - humanity for one, angels for another, several pantheons of deities and, not inconsiderably, the legions of the damned and the ruler of Hell itself.

This is an epic and, with one brief and astonishing digression, a very linear quest narrative. Dream wants to accomplish something, he goes to look for it and he deals with the fall-out from his actions. It’s a deceptively simple story where everything appears to be drawn with a few bold strokes which suggest much more than they actually portray. (That’s metaphorical, by the way; I had a few issues with the actual art for this episode, feeling that it lacked a little of the subtlety of earlier volumes, especially in the inking. But given some of the scenarios that artists Mike Dringenberg and Kelley Jones were asked to realise… well, I wouldn’t say they did a bad job, on the whole.)

It’s often described as one of the best volumes in the Sandman series and I would agree - there’s a simplicity and cohesiveness to the story which makes it very satisfying, especially when combined with the ambitiousness of the author’s mythic vision. Perhaps that would mean it would work if read as a standalone volume; as the fourth instalment in the series it’s a triumph.

Some links:

• Wikipedia: Season of Mists
• Good Reads: Season of Mists
• Silver Bullet Comics review
• Rumbles review

Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner

Ten observations about Freakonomics:

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1. This is a zeitgeisty little book and it’s easy to tell that because it has made it onto the three-for-two table in every single bookshop that I go into. This has probably got as much to do with why I am reading it as anything else.
2. It is billed, and raved about by its fans, as ‘a different way of looking at the world’. Is there any truth in this statement? I think so - the book stresses the importance of going beyond conventional wisdom and easy answers and to ask what the data is actually telling you. The tools it uses to do this are economic ones because one of the authors, Steven Levitt, is a noted economist.
3. But is his approach just another form of snake oil? There have been attempts by other economists to deconstruct aspects of his work and overturn his more controversial conclusions. Levitt admits freely that he is not the world’s greatest mathematician and the odd mathematical error appears to have crept in here and there. However, this hardly invalidates his entire corpus of work (if it did I would have become a social outcast many years ago). All you can really do is read it and make your mind up for yourself.
4. So, what is Freakonomics actually about? It is an enjoyable canter through a whole range of topics that Levitt and his co-author journalist Stephen J Dubner found interesting. More famous one include the economics of crack dealing, the honesty or otherwise of estate agents and the effects of legalised abortion on America’s crime rates.
5. The book claims to have no unifying theme and, furthermore, to strike a blow for the publication of other books with no unifying theme. Is this actually true? I thought it was perhaps less the case than the authors think, or say they think - see point two where it is proved perfectly possible to summarise in a sentence what this book is about. This looks to me like one of these cases where the requirements of publishers and the requirements of readers are two entirely different things - and the requirements of publishers came close to taking priority.
6. The wide-ranging subject matter means the book is interesting, quirky and a page-turner. If you don’t like one area of the discussion you can be fairly sure that the narrative will move rapidly onwards towards something you will enjoy.
7. Most of the people who have got annoyed with Levitt’s work seem to be under the impression that he takes a political position on the issues he discusses - which he doesn’t. Therefore the reader is that much less likely to find themselves throwing the book across the room in disgust, and even topics that you fear won’t engage you can prove interesting.
8. What about the tone of voice? You might find it chatty and engaging, or possibly smug and annoying. I found it was a pretty fine balance between the two. But if the adjective ‘geeky’ puts your back up then I would definitely steer clear.
9. Pet hate time: this edition (which is revised and expanded from the original one: the authors found they had been misled by the reputation of a bloke called Stetson Kennedy) has got the worst case of back-end infill that I have ever seen. It is 320 pages long and the narrative actually winds up on page 191. That’s right, more than 100 pages of stuff at the back - or a third of the book. This includes columns, blog posts, extensive notes and the index - interesting and useful stuff but, blimey, if you don’t expect it you may find it really unbalances the book.
10. So, it worth reading? I thought so. It’s interesting, challenging and it makes you think. It’s also amusing and not too taxing. You just need to take the authors’ own advice to heart - don’t believe the hype, judge for yourself.

Some links:

• Freakonomics blog (now swallowed up by the New York Times)
• Crooked Timber blog: academic discussion of Freakonomics (cited by the authors as a good link to visit)
• Levitt’s University of Chicago homepage
• Time Magazine profile of Levitt
• Stephen Dubner’s website

The Maul and the Pear Tree – PD James and TA Critchley

They say that nothing under the sun is new, but I am quite excited. I have discovered a genre that I never really noticed existed before. It is historical true crime and this is the third example that I have read in quite a short space of time, so I must be enjoying it greatly. First up was Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer, which claims to solve the Jack the Ripper murders - a bit unwisely in my view, because if she’d been less ambitious in her scope she’d probably have come in for a lot less stick. Just my humble opinion. But anyway, I really the book and found the conclusions she came to fascinating. Then, plucked off the local library shelf was an excellent account of London’s Cock Lane Ghost written by Paul Chambers. This one isn’t about a murder as such, though one of the protagonists only just got away with his life after a barefaced attempt to pervert the course of justice nearly saw him hanged.

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The third of these historical true crime stories has been sitting around for some time. It occupies part of the extensive section of real estate on my bookshelves dedicated to PD James (almost everything is there now, apart from The Children of Men, the premise of which leaves me cold). It seems apt that the modern-day Queen of Crime should turn her hand to the true-crime genre, but she doesn’t do it in some trashy, tabloid fashion, oh no. In fact every example of this genre I have read has been the subject of meticulous research and the James contribution features a return to all available primary sources plus a collaboration with a noted police historian, Tom Critchley. The book is a tour of the dark streets of riverside Wapping and most of the locations, such as The Highway, Pennington Street, the church of St George in the East, New Gravel Lane (now Wapping Lane) and the area that was once the London Dock will be perfectly familiar to anyone who knows the area today. I used to work in neighbouring East Smithfield and spent countless lunchtimes prowling round here trying to relate historical and contemporary geography. A task that is a lot easier now the Museum of London has opened its outpost in Docklands, but that is another story.

This tale is about seven brutal murders, of two families and their servants, and then a subsequent suicide that all took place shortly before Christmas in 1811. It documents the public panic and moral outrage that followed and the confusion and muddle-headedness that characterised the official investigation. It also attempts to tease out any threads of evidence from the confusing and contradictory depositions given at the time that might lead modern-day readers to make a guess at the identity of the killer - or killers. If anything the authors err slightly on the side of meticulousness, allowing themselves very little speculation to the extent where I finished reading it and thought: “Is that it? Aren’t you even going to say what you think happened?” TA Critchley’s interest in police history is very evident, as is PD James’ sure hand with a story and we are rewarded for our attention with a convincing hypothesis which, tantalisingly, is never likely to be proved. An interesting and satisfying book which also proved a surprising page-turner.

Some links:

• NY Times book review
• Contemporary Writers: PD James
• Crime library: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders
• Thames Police: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders
• EastLondonHistory.com: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders
• Wikipedia:The Ratcliffe Highway murders
• The Museum of London in Docklands

The Gardens of the Dead – William Brodrick

I thought this book was going to be responsible for me having the following horrible experience: an author whose first novel you devour and whose second you keenly look forward to, writes something that you snap up as soon as it comes out in paperback. And which leaves you feeling gravely disappointed upon reading. I really did think that The Sixth Lamentation was one of the best things that I had come across during 2006 and recommended it to all comers. And, while I found myself eventually impressed by the direction this follow-up story took, I simply didn’t feel anything like as positive about it. Now I have finally finished it I am marginally more encouraged – the plot was indeed as twisty and turny as the various cover blurbs and reviews promised and did have me exclaiming aloud in places. But I feel people who loved the action and the big historical sweep of Brodrick’s first novel may not have much stomach for this misty, impressionistic tale, and may well have given up long before they come to the meat of it. I was nearly among them myself.

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The story is about a set of relationships and about the past, as well as being an almost theological disquisition on the nature of memory and truth. Father Anselm, the barrister-turned-monk who is this series’ major protagonist, is forced to confront his past actions through a plot conceit that is, frankly, best regarded honestly as such and not examined for verisimilitude. We learn (extremely gradually) how he took certain actions during a trial – he did his job, in fact, as a junior barrister cross-examining a witness – and those actions had unforeseen consequences, as actions tend to do. We are presented with a set of people who seem to be related to each other in a particular way – through a criminal trial, as witnessed by Anselm. By the time this novel has wound its way along a particularly circuitous set of paths to its conclusion we discover how the truth about this relationship is quite different from what we (and Anselm himself) might initially have been led to believe. There’s a good story in here somewhere but trying to keep track of it was a severe test, one compounded by the multi-character viewpoint that left you endlessly trying to work out who knew what and at which point, never mind whose account could be relied upon. This meant that picking it up and ploughing on became a duty, rather than a pleasure, before the narrative paths started to converge in preparation for the ending and the whole thing became readable again.

A lot of my problems with this tale may have been caused by the fact that its author, a former monk turned barrister, may well intend it as an extended Christian allegory on the lines of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I can honestly say that I am not sure how well this sits with a thriller plot and perhaps it is this contradiction that has led to the invention of the rather strained term ‘philosophical thriller’ coined on the cover. In fact, reading various interviews with the author in preparation for writing this review have left me feeling more frustrated with him than otherwise. There is the inversion of his own life history that provides his hero with his unique selling point. Fair enough, as far as it goes. But then there’s the half-French ancestry that Anselm seemingly arbitrarily acquires, the time spent working with the homeless - the parallels between his own experiences and the content of his novels is starting to come across more as writing for therapy or as a kind of compulsion than writing for fun and profit.

I know that all authors draw extensively on their own lives and experiences – but there is a line. And when it is crossed, as Douglas Coupland’s readers could tell you, it is just uncomfortable – a bit like watching the tired and emotional celebrity who breaks down on the television chat show. And I’m not yet sure, after two books, where exactly Brodrick stands in relation to that line, whether he is on the right side of it or not. I fear he is not. As I said on reading his first book, it is very easy to see how he found a publisher, as his voice is so original, witty and amusing. But I’m simply not so sure, on the strength of this showing, that I’ll be as keen to buy book number three as I was book number two. Damn and blast it.

Some links:

• William Brodrick: an interview
• Tangled Web Books: William Brodrick Q&A
• Wikipedia: The Pilgrim’s Progress

The Body Farm – Patricia Cornwell

It’s a long time since a book’s really grabbed me in the sense of my not being able to put it down and go and attend to the far more important stuff that is demanding my attention. But this one did. I’d picked it up and, before I knew it, several hours and two hundred pages had flown past. This is a series novel – I think it’s number five in a saga featuring the forensic scientist and medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta and her crime-fighting state law enforcement and FBI colleagues. The standout feature is a daring and well-executed plot featuring a child murder - and the very last killer you might expect – circled round and about by a thicket of distractions, both personal and professional. These are designed to knock our heroine off the killer’s scent and prevent her from keeping the protective eye on her colleagues, friends and family that she instinctively realises they need. As I understand is generally true of Cornwell, there is a wealth of forensic, medical, geographic and police procedural detail to build the world and make it gripping and absorbing for the reader.

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I decided to pull this off the shelf as a direct result of two books read recently. One was Bill Bass’s own account of the founding of the Body Farm, called Death’s Acre. The other was Patricia Cornwell’s non-fictional Jack the Ripper: Portrait of a Killer - the first book by her that I’d read. Having enjoyed both of these, The Body Farm did seem like the logical next step. In fact, the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Facility only features to a fairly limited extent and its impact on the story is surprisingly muted. I can see how if this was your first exposure to the concept it would be thrilling and shocking in about equal measure. But these days you can read dozens of articles about The Body Farm and its offshoots online, watch documentaries or even enjoy its founder’s own account, as mentioned above. Its shock value has lessened considerably – but it is used well here and I certainly got the impression that Dr Bass has been left with a very positive feeling for the crime novelist who made this respected academic and forensic scientist famous in a whole new field.

I think my main criticisms of the book stemmed from the fact that I read it out of sequence – something that is mightily against my natural inclination, but which I do from time to time in order to stop the towering heights of what UK Bookcrossers know as Mount Toobie (To Be Read) from finally crashing down on my head and burying me. I was a bit misled by the serial killer plot strand – I later realised that I was expecting it to be tied up in a nice, neat bow with the child-murder and the Scarpetta family storyline, simply because I hadn’t appreciated to what extent it was an ongoing thing. This left me turning the last page and feeling damned unsatisfied. “Is that it?” I may have cried aloud, and I think my dissatisfaction was definitely ramped up by that foul habit publishers have of including the first chapter of the next novel at the end of the one you are reading – thus utterly throwing out your expectations of how many pages the author has left to get their house in order, plotwise. One thing I found highly amusing was the depiction of Scarpetta’s family relationships - she can face a killer coolly but a few well-chosen words from her mother has her in a “homicidal rage”. We may not be able to personally identify with Scarpetta’s work in law enforcement, but I think most of us will recognise the sensation of having to deal with family members who know exactly how to push our buttons.

I find Cornwell a real enigma. On the one hand she has undeniable links to the Republican party, the Bush family and the religious right in America. On the other, this novel features both a strong female lead who is in charge of her professional and sexual lives, and a sympathetic and well-rounded (if somewhat damaged) lesbian character. Cornwell’s analysis of the Jack the Ripper murders includes an undeniable feminist sensibility in her bid to recast elements of the story around the experience of the murderer’s female victims, as opposed to merely fetishising the killer himself. Ordinarily the first items in this list would be enough to make me very, very wary of reading her work. But, as the rest of them demonstrate, she seems to be a long way indeed from promoting the kind of political and moral agenda that I had feared I would find – and which would have led to this book being thrown aside within 30 pages. Looked at one way, she’s the perpetrator of Internet censorship for trying to silence her critics while, from the opposite point of view, she’s been the victim of a particularly scary stalker. What we can’t fathom fascinates us, evidently. And, in summary, this was a great read, and definitely enough of an advert for the author to persuade me to start the Scarpetta series from the beginning.

Lower slopes of Mount Toobie, ahoy!

Some links:

• Patricia Cornwell bibliography
• Patricia Cornwell biography
• Wikipedia: Patricia Cornwell

The Sandman: Dream Country – Neil Gaiman

Book three in Neil Gaiman’s epic Sandman saga marks the point where, according to the annotated script that accompanies this volume, the author was “written out” by the need to complete the demanding storyline of The Doll’s House. This may be one reason why this instalment of arguably the most critically-acclaimed comic series ever written consists of just four issues and takes a detour away from the main arc of the series. Instead of concentrating on the overarching narrative, Gaiman writes four short stories that appear to work as a creative tonic, allow him to clear his head of ideas that, while not entirely fitting into the big picture, are still demanding to be written, and which expand on the themes and characters of the work as a whole.

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And, at first glance, they appear a disparate bunch. Calliope, the first in the series, tells the tale of one of the nine Muses of ancient Greece, captured then held prisoner and abused by a writer who needs to get his creative juices going. She is passed on to a second, even more unpleasant character, with promises of her freedom laughed off. Her new captor has, however, reckoned without having to deal with her ex - one Oneiros, better known to us as Morpheus, and newly-freed from imprisonment himself. This story has an important role to play in the comic’s universe - underscoring the hero’s journey from unfeeling bastard to anthromorphic personification who can at least acknowledge the effects of his actions on those around him. It also lays down fundamental plot and thematic points for the author to develop in the future. On the subject of creative juices, and while attempting to draw no parallels whatsoever between the fictional authors portrayed and Gaiman himself, I shall quote a bit of the scene-setting paragraph that artist Kelley Jones received in the post, and which resonates strongly with this storyline:

Welcome to the weird world of Sandman. What we’re doing is a series of short stories for four or five issues here; I’ve finished the Doll’s House storyline, and there was a while towards the end of the storyline when I just couldn’t take it any more - partly because I’d keep getting new ideas for stories and be unable to get them in, and also because I wanted to do a few totally self-contained stories that I could get over with in 24 pages: the worry that I didn’t have a clue how Doll’s House was going to end (which I didn’t, until I got through Sandman 15) was getting pretty nerve-wracking. This is the first of them…

Next up is A Dream of a Thousand Cats; Gaiman himself is a confirmed cat-lover (see his journal for tales of Fred the Unlucky Black Cat). My personal reaction is that this is the weakest of the four tales in the collection, although comic-reading Cat People around the world are sure to disagree with me (and that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s a good story). It tells of cats envisaging the end of a world where they are enslaved by humans and where, as some of our oldest myths and legends suggest, they are gods and goddesses again. Their method of doing this is through dream, thus tapping in to one of the most fundamental themes of the whole series. Maybe it makes me a bad, cynical person that, on re-reading this, I thought: “Aha! So that’s where Russell T Davies got his big season finale idea from this time around!”

The third story is masterful and the one that has made this collection famous. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a reworking of Shakespeare’s play that manages to explain where he got his inspiration and how his stories still manage to resonate with readers 400 years after they were written, as well as hinting at the fate of his son Hamnet, who died in 1596 aged 11. It is famous for winning a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction only to see the rules changed so no other comic book or graphic novel could follow in its footsteps. This is an amazing piece of work for the ease in which it manages to incorporate so many strands of myth, fantasy, folklore, humour and narrative into a few short comic pages. Also for the sense it gives you that this is somehow the right explanation for the genesis of the play. In fact the hobgoblin Robin Goodfellow (”Merry wanderer of the night? I am that giggling, dangerous, totally bloody psychotic menace to life and limb, more like it”) says: “This is magnificent, and it is true! It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?” I couldn’t put it better myself.

The last story is yet another departure - I believe it is the first issue of the comic not to feature Dream himself. It has, however, got his big sister Death as a central character and we’ve all discovered by now how she’s far better company than her gloomy brother. In what may be considered a slightly retrograde step Gaiman returns to one of the discarded techniques of Preludes and Nocturnes. He takes a forgotten superhero from the DC universe and works her into the Sandman mythos. This wasn’t necessarily a very effective step when applied to John Constantine, but here the tale of Element Girl who is alone, disregarded and living on a disability pension with the horrible aftermath of her transformation is affecting and tragic. Especially when everyone’s famous optimistic Goth girl pops along with a few words of advice on remedying her situation. When those words of advice include the offer of a Kleenex, you know you are in the presence of one of the best characters that Gaiman has ever created.

Dream Country was the first Sandman volume that I read - for the simple reason that it was sitting on the library shelf and I was curious. I came away having liked but not really understood it. Now that I return and read it in context it seems an infinitely richer and more cohesive collection. I would therefore recommend reading it in its proper place in the series.

Some links:

• NeilGaiman.com: Dream Country credits
• Wikipedia: Dream Country
• Gaiman talks about the plot of Calliope
• ComicReaders.com: Four Easy Pieces
• Wikipedia: Element Girl

GPS for Dummies – Joel McNamara

I’m one of those classically impatient people that can never bear to read the manual for anything. No, I expect my gadgets to be utterly intuitive and curse them roundly when they are not. Which is why, on becoming the proud owner of a new GPS receiver, I threw this book and its instruction leaflet to one side and went striding around the local park in a bid to master its functions empirically.

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So, having used the GPS with reasonable success for a few months now, I thought it really was about time I came back to find out what I’d missed. I expected to flick through this book, learning a few useful tips here and there and then put it back on the shelf. I was quite surprised to find myself sitting down and reading it from cover to cover.

My first thought was that the title is very misleading, if understandably so. This is because it severely undersells the scope of the book. It is nothing less than a wide-ranging and expertly-written introduction to the whole topic of digital mapping and manipulation, and what the lay user can expect to use these powerful tools for. The use of a GPS receiver is quite a small drop in this fascinating ocean.

Having made this very good start my major criticism of the book, from the point of view of being British, is that large chunks of it are completely useless to me. They deal with US map datums, US map producers and US mapping software. The poor old Ordnance Survey, who are always going to be my suppliers of choice since we inhale their mapping conventions with the air we breathe over here, don’t get much of a mention. Plenty of products that I have never heard of, will never be able to buy and will therefore never use, do. In mind-dissolving detail.

If I was going out to make an informed purchase I would probably, therefore, choose something else that has been written for the UK market. And in so doing I’d miss out on a good deal of insider tips and tricks and invaluable follow-up URLs as well as an introduction to the topic which really engaged my interest and attention and taught me things about my little shiny yellow toy that I didn’t already know.

So, it’s a toss-up. If detailed explanations of specific software is what you need, and you live in approximately the right geographical area, then this is undoubtedly for you. If not, and the overview is more your cup of tea (and I chose that expression wisely) then this is still definitely worth a look, even if you will get infuriated at points at the sheer and total irrelevancy of large chunks of it.

• Publisher information

The Cock Lane Ghost: Murder, Sex and Haunting in Dr Johnson’s London - Paul Chambers

In 1762 London was convulsed by a scandal with all the elements that would have any modern tabloid editor rubbing their hands in glee. Forbidden love, an illegitimate child on the way, a supposedly ill-gotten inheritance, a couple flaunting the conventions of polite society and, most significantly, a cracking good ghost which seemed intent on punishing those who had dared to turn their backs on the marital requirements of the age. Better yet, it had social and political implications that compelled the involvement of the very highest echelons of the literary and political establishment. At this period the established Anglican Church was under threat from a powerful foe - nonconformism. And nonconformism, specifically Methodism, was characterised by a powerful belief and interest in the supernatural. The opposing sides in the battle to prove the Cock Lane ghost real, or otherwise, lined up according to their political and religious affiliation and battle lines were drawn. Would they result in an innocent man losing his life on the gallows?

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This might all seem like so much tabloid fodder. But the immense significance attained by the Cock Lane ghost saga can be appreciated from its surviving cultural references. The opening words of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities reveal him as something of a sceptic, as well as illustrating just how deep into the popular consciousness the Cock Lane ghost had penetrated:

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past(supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

The incident is also powerfully echoed in William Hogarth’s etching Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, a satire on Methodism and its obsession with the supernatural created in the same year as the Cock Lane ghost saga. Clearly this was an affair that attracted the attention of some of the most perceptive writers and artists of the day - but it also became a byword for the gullibility of the London mob and a judgment on those of a higher social order who attempted to exploit this gullibility or use the ghost for their own purposes - including a literary figure of the stature of Dr Samuel Johnson.

Paul Chambers’ book does a very creditable job of untangling all the various strands of the saga, starting with the early lives of its major protagonists, William Kent, Fanny Lynes and the Parsons family of Cock Lane. He establishes what he understands as the facts of the case early on in the narrative in order to make it easier to follow the paths of later half-truths, outright lies and misrepresentations. And he does an excellent job of presenting the whole thing in a readable and accessible fashion. An enjoyable account of a historical incident of some importance which has not necessarily previously received the scholarly attention it deserves.

Some links:

• Wikipedia: The Cock Lane ghost
• Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: Charles Mackay (The Cock Lane story is told from paragraph 12.17 onwards)
• Fortean Times: Scratching Fanny by Sarah Bakewell
• Author’s website and book introduction
• London walks: The Cock Lane ghost
• Fullbooks: Cock Lane and Common-sense by Andrew Lang
• Encyclopaedia.com: We See a Ghost - Hogarth’s satire on Methodists and connoisseurs

I, Robot - Isaac Asimov

I think I should begin this entry with the same words that open the book.

The three laws of robtics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 AD

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In this seminal collection of linked short stories Asimov explores the implications for humankind of developing and implementing artificial intelligence. Because our efforts in this direction have perhaps not progressed so controversially as, say, genetic or some other kinds of electronic engineering, and because Asimov was a scientist as well as an author, this 1950 collection does not feel anything like as dated as some of the other future worlds being dreamed up at this time by his contemporaries. As well as an entertaining story collection, however, it is also a breathtaking piece of reasoning. Framed as the recollections of the Earth’s first and most accomplished ‘robopsychologist’, a woman who admits freely how she prefers robots to humans, it takes us through the complete logical journey from utilising simple domestic robots who are incapable of speech through industrial and increasingly sophisticated scientific applications to the first humanoid robots so indistinguishable from humans that only a complex series of behavioural tests stand a chance of identifying them, and ultimately to our political and cultural domination by machines.

The framework that this process is built around is the piece of text reproduced at the top of the entry. Employees of US Robots and Mechanical Men Inc. must struggle with its ramifications every day of their working lives. If a robot is behaving erratically or is difficult to control the answer lies in its application of these three rules to the situation it faces - because they are hardwired into its brain, to satisfy the demands of anti-robot campaigners who hate and fear the new creations. Naturally, if you are on the baking-hot surface of Mercury, or digging for rare minerals on an asteroid, your robot assistant may be all that stands between you and certain death, so an appreciation of the finer points of these laws of robotics and they are being interpreted is a rather important skill.

But the inclusion of the three Laws of Robotics inside the very fabric of the robots is the thing that ultimately leads to humanity’s enslavement - for what happens when the technology becomes so advanced, and such a breadth of calculations and data manipulations are possible that the human brain has no chance of performing comparable tasks, is that the injunction to prevent humans to coming to harm essentially turns into an instruction about humanity and compels the robots to run the show. This is truly a lesson in the law of unintended consequences but that doesn’t mean it’s dry or difficult reading. Asimov’s skill in world-building is widely recognised but this collection also succeeds in building a cogent plot plus an engaging and believable range of characters - both robot and human - whose fates you do find yourself caring about. This saves the stories from being a dry intellectual reasoning exercise and keeps the pages turning even if the prose is occasionally a bit clunky and the worldview a tiny bit dated.

A classic of science fiction, I understand, and one that no devotee of the genre should leave unread. I certainly felt my time reading it was entertaining and extremely well-spent.

Some links:

• Wikipedia: Asimov’s Robot series
• Wikipedia: The Positronic Brain
• Isaac Asimov homepage
• Asimov’s Laws of Robotics: Implications for Information Technology by Roger Clarke
• SciFiDimensions: I, Robot review
• NASA robotics project
• Oxford University robotics project
• Robots.net robotics website
• Robot magazine
• Robot.org.uk robot builders’ website
• Lego Mindstorms

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 is the story of a man who unravels. Guy Montag is a fireman in a dystopian future world where firemen start fires rather than put them out. His hose is filled with kerosene, not water, and his mission is to burn books before their upsetting and confusing contents can spread dissent and unhappiness throughout the world. And Montag, the son and grandson of firemen whose physical appearance even seems to mark him out for the role, performs it happily until a chance meeting with a teenage neighbour and an encounter with a dissident who would rather die with their library than submit to repression causes him and his life to unravel.

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I first read this book as a teenager. Written by Bradbury at the outset of his novelling career, in fluid and poetic prose, containing big, meaty ideas and coming in at fewer than 200 pages, I would say that it remains an ideal reading choice for that age group while having plenty to offer the rest of us as well. And, like its readers, time has inevitably failed to stand still for this little book. Indeed, 55 years after its initial publication, controversies surrounding it are still alive and well (see the links below). Bradbury has recently most emphatically denied that his book has anything to do with the suppression of free speech - he claims that it’s about the dangers of popular culture, specifically television in this case, overwhelming more intellectual pursuits and thus depriving people of the ability to think critically for themselves.

And this argument is indeed strongly in evidence. It is possible, in this world to install television screens that occupy all four walls of the ‘viewing parlour’ and program them so the characters appearing there (in five-minute bite-sized chunks, generally) address the viewer by name and react to them, even incorporate them into the action. As someone who has no satellite or cable service, who hates many ‘reality TV’ programmes and who feels physically ill when sitting in front of huge, widescreen sets, I can sympathise most emphatically with this point of view. But I think there are some other things we need to take into account. Firstly a crucial factor about all these post-war dystopian worlds is that they entirely failed to predict the development of the personal computer and the computer network which has proved to be the real threat to our privacy and, some would say, to our independence of thought, seeing the television set as the primary agent of our downfall. A possible exception to this is Isaac Asimov, who did explore the notion of the ‘thinking machine’ - but that’s a review for another time.

So, while there are undoubtedly important arguments to be had about the ubiquitousness and quality of broadcast and print media and their effects on our society I think it is fair to say that this is not necessarily the theme of this book that will chime most vehemently with a modern audience. We are in the age of the ‘war on terror’ where a Princeton professor criticising the president of the United States finds his name on a no-fly list, or a Canadian psychotherapist who described having taken LSD for research purposes decades ago is prevented in perpetuity from entering the country and from visiting his children at their home.

In Atlanta a woman is arguing with all the means at her disposal to have a set of children’s books she has never even read banned while a schoolgirl in Texas with utterly and totally unintentional irony has asked for Fahrenheit 451 itself to be removed from a school reading list because of “cussing” and references to “burning the bible”. Her father supported her quest by producing a page-by-page list of reasons why this was an unsuitable set text for teenagers including “cigarettes” and “talking about our firemen” (I’m really not joking - see links below) - calling the book “all kinds of filth” while simultaneously admitting to not ever having read it. Meanwhile in New Hampshire, not exactly regarded as a bastion of reactionaries, a substitute teacher with little experience of using computers is facing 40 years in jail for child endangerment because her school didn’t invest in decent protective software for its network, or give her any training, and then blamed her when indecent pop-up ads made it through and appeared in front of pupils. And then there’s the president who appears to have entirely substituted fundamentalist religious faith for reason-based analysis.

And, lest anyone think that I am having a go at Americans, in Britain we have our outgoing Prime Minister calling for censorship of the Internet because people have used it criticise him, instead of playing nicely, and record industry lobbyists trying to intimidate critical bloggers by threatening to denounce them to their employers - like something from the McCarthyite 50s. In the face of all this, Mr Bradbury, is it any wonder that people have chosen to take what they see as important points about free speech and dissent against authoritarian government as an important message from your book? This is, I state again, not an attempt to underplay the importance of the ‘dumbing-down’ argument or to even to deny its relevance to many of the issues raised above. But I would say it is impossible to address the subject the author says he focused on without also raising these other, critically important issues.

I have also long subscribed to the view, and aired it often and loudly here and elsewhere, that the very last person you should go to for an “objective” (loaded term, that) view of a work is its creator. This is a point picked up extremely well on the wonderful BoingBoing blog by science fiction author Cory Doctorow, who says the following:

Bradbury denies free speech message in Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 was seminal for me, the book that turned me into a believer in free speech, a cause I’ve devoted my life to. It’s pretty heart-breaking to hear Bradbury repudiate the political subtext of the book.

On the other hand, I’ve had my own books subjected to critical scrutiny in which critics pointed out symbolisms and subtexts that I wasn’t aware of when I was writing. These critics make good points, though, and I can’t deny them with a straight face — I think that there’s a lot going on while writers write, and we’re not always entirely conscious of all of it.

Personally, reading the coverage, I think that Mr Bradbury is simply thoroughly enjoying being a crusty old contrarian whose thoughts are stirring up such a maelstrom of media interest. In the meantime I would suggest the only thing I possibly can, after all of the above - go and pick it up for yourself and have a read. I found it delightfully-written, thought-provoking and easy to get through as well as being surrounded by all sorts of preface anecdotage (written by its impoverished author on a rented typewriter in a library basement) which adds to the gaiety of nations. All in all, I find myself thoroughly glad to have returned to it.

Some links:

• Author’s official site
• Wikipedia: Ray Bradbury
• Wikipedia: Fahrenheit 451
• LA Weekly News: Fahrenheit 451 misinterpreted
• BoingBoing.net: Bradbury denies free speech message in Fahrenheit 451
• The Raw Story: Real problem not censorship but television
• YouTube: Religious nuts in Texas seek to ban book about book banning
• BoingBoing.net: Bradbury goes nuts over Fahrenheit 9/11 title
• Salon: Ray Bradbury
• Internet Science Fiction Database: exhaustive Ray Bradbury bibliography and links

Think On Your Feet: 10 steps to better decision-making and problem solving at work - Jeremy Kourdi

Book 29 is a quick read with a purpose. I thought I was a terrible procrastinator, but no. It turns out that I have no trouble at all in making decisions. In fact, like most people, it’s turns out to be the actual putting them into practice that I’m terrible at. This book’s a how-to manual with a business slant which aims to help you find the strengths and weaknesses in your own decision-making style and gives you guidance to improve it.

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I felt the time reading it had been well-spent; as part of a series on business skills the slant in that direction is perhaps a little stronger than I would have liked - I would have preferred a deeper focus on the psychology of problem-solving and decision making. Another criticism is that it’s half a mile wide and six inches deep - in trying to give a wide overview of the subject it covers a lot briefly. There were several areas that I thought I’d like to know more about - but there again I am perfectly free to go off and find out about them.

There’s lots of practical advice applicable to many different situations and I came away with an insight into several issues of my own, both work-related and non-work-related. A practical read which has served its purpose.

Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

Here we are, hot on the heels of The Sandman, and it occurs to me that reading an author’s works back to back like this certainly does give you an insight into their way of doing things. The other day I encountered someone on a blog or discussion group who wanted to come up with an all-purpose name for horror, fantasy and sci-fi. I think ‘imaginative fiction’ was the one suggested but I reckon this should be actually be awarded solely to Mr Gaiman in the same way that Robert Rankin has become the proprietor of the term ‘far-fetched fiction’. It is clearly his job to imagine that little bit further than the rest of us can be bothered to do - and Neverwhere, with its familiar London setting twisted through one hundred and eighty degrees, is the perfect example of this.

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