My Weekly Book

The Sandman: The Doll’s House - Neil Gaiman et al

I’ve just read the second volume in the amazing Sandman graphic novel series and I guess that what impressed me most was the incredible sense of cohesiveness and authorial confidence that it already has about it. Since this book collects issues 9-16 of the 75-issue run, it is fair to say that we are still pretty early on in the scheme of things. Nevertheless the overarching story arcs are in place, the art has settled down and there’s a feeling of a big, powerful engine pushing things forwards. The whole contraption does pull to the side of the road once or twice (to extend the metaphor, perhaps unwisely) to take an excursion into African tribal myth and to an Elizabethan theatrical drinking den. But apart from that, it’s action all the way.

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Having got the pieces on the board in Preludes and Nocturnes (including identifying the right creative team to work with him on this project) Gaiman is now free to press ahead with his extremely sure-handed story. Dream has now regained his stolen powers and returned to his realm to take responsibility once more and to sort out the problems caused by his absence. He discovers several troubling things - four archetypal dream-creatures are missing, for starters, loose in what we humans think of as reality. From the truly terrifying to the venal and cunning, they must be located before they can tear the fabric of the Dreaming even further asunder. Perhaps more troubling still is the absence of part of the realm itself - a place called Fiddler’s Green, described by the Dream Lord as “the heart of The Dreaming”.

But, however much Dream would like to dwell on these problems, worse is in store. We learn, through a conversation with his faithful servant Lucien, how he has encountered a vortex within his realm - a human who crops up once in an era with the power to destroy the barriers between dreaming minds, and thus The Dreaming itself. Dream is empowered to protect his realm by killing the vortex that each era throws up - the only time, we are told, that he is permitted to take human life. The identity of the vortex and how that was established, Dream’s method for dealing with it and how it affects relationships within his family, The Endless, is the major story in this volume.

And it’s an enthralling, complex and thought-provoking story, just as we would hope. While it may sound somewhat abstract and unengaging when described above, it is brought to life through the characterisations within it. Chief among these are Rose Walker, a girl recently and unexpectedly reunited with a family she never knew she had, on a quest to find her lost brother. The people that she encounters, and who help her on her way, are a motley crew - including a windowsill-dwelling raven who goes by the name of Matthew, a self-effacing landlord who doubles as a flamboyant drag queen, a pair of silent arachnophiles who dress only in white, the infamous Barbie and Ken (yes, you probably have encountered them already) and the kindly Gilbert, a large, fatherly attic-dweller who soon assumes responsibility for Rose’s welfare.

Important future plot dynamics are introduced in the person of Lyta Hall, and we also see the episode which has made this particular volume of Sandman stories notorious - the serial killers’ convention, a narrative that’s every bit as disturbing as 24 Hours in the first volume. It has been said that Dream’s story in itself is not that compelling, being a fairly basic quest narrative, but that Gaiman’s execution is remarkable - and I wouldn’t see much to argue with in that. After myriad complaints that the art wasn’t doing its job in the first volume, we come across some truly stunning panels here. For personal preference, I would like to see the image of Dream in his realm that appears on pages 50 and 51 of my Titan Books collected edition blown up to four times its actual size, hung on the wall and framed.

Next up: Dream Country, which I have actually read before out of sequence, to my great confusion. It will be interesting to see what it looks like in context.

My Weekly Book on Preludes and Nocturnes

Some other links:

• The Annotated Sandman: The Doll’s House
• Rambles: The Doll’s House
• The Doll’s House on LibraryThing
• Vertigo: The Doll’s House (contains four-page downloadable preview)
• h2g2: The Sandman
• TV Tropes: The Sandman
• Outside of a Dog: Sandman overview
• Captain Comics forum: Sandman discussion
• Bob’s Comics Reviews: The Sandman
• Time to meet the family: Endless picture gallery
• Wild River Review: Myth, Magic and the Mind of Neil Gaiman
• British Fantasy Society: Interview with Neil Gaiman

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Death’s Acre: Inside the legendary Body Farm - Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson

An interesting read about the career of a prominent American forensic anthropologist, Dr William Bass. But with a somewhat misleading premise. Setting up the famous Body Farm at the University of Tennesee is undoubtedly the author’s most high-profile achievement and the thing that will pull in the readers. It is, after all, the reason I picked up the book myself. But the truth is that this book does not just tell that story. It is, in fact, Dr Bass’ memoirs - and arguably a much more interesting and enlightening read because of that, strongly comparable to Dr Michael Baden’s Dead Reckoning: the science of catching killers that I read towards the end of last year.

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The Body Farm is more properly called the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Facility - it’s widely known as The Body Farm thanks to Patricia Cornwell who named her fifth Dr Kay Scarpetta novel after it, after hearing the term used as police slang. She also supplies the introduction, which you can read on the official website listed below. Its the place where donated bodies are allowed to decompose under controlled conditions to provide detailed information for scientists and crime scene investigators. Television documentaries have been made - and, from what I’ve seen, it looks like a pretty peaceful way of finding your final rest.

Unsurprisingly the book reveals a man with humour, determination and perseverance - all necessary qualities, I would imagine, in his line of work. It makes the science accessible and Dr Bass is never afraid to laugh at himself - most notably in the famous Colonel Shy case, when he managed to wrongly estimate the time of death of a Civil War veteran by 113 years - due to extraordinarily unusual circumstances, it must be said.

It was the embarrassment of this case, plus finding a way to shut up smart-ass defence attorneys for the next 30 years, that led to the Body Farm’s creation. Other fascinating cases mentioned here include a complex fire-related insurance scam that *nearly* worked and a crematorium that was taking, shall we say, a slightly slipshod approach to its duties. An interesting read that touches on some of the big philosophical questions of life and death - but not necessarily exactly what you expect when you pick it up off the shelf. No worse for that, however.

- - - - -

Half way, hurrah.

- - - - -

Some links:

• The book’s website - packed with extras and detailed information
• The Forensic Anthropology Centre, University of Tennessee at Knoxville
• Wikipedia: Body farm
• Wikipedia: The Body Farm (Patricia Cornwell novel)
• Crime Library: profile of Bill Bass and the Body Farm
• CNN: Pastoral putrefaction down on the Body Farm
• Wired: Spoiled rotten at The Body Farm (article about a similar facility in Iowa)
• The Age (AU): Dead people do tell tales

I’ve been reading my way through Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City sequence this year and have enjoyed it greatly - as the reviews on this blog will demonstrate. I was able to do this because a very kind Bookcrosser decided to share her copies by making them available as a spiral. This means sending out each one, separated by gaps of approximately a month to the first name on a list (on this occasion, mine). Each book is then posted on to the next person on the list until the spiral is complete and each book is returned, touch wood, to the person who began the spiral. Such is the generous nature of the people taking part in Bookcrossing.

Yesterday I faced up to the inevitable and took the fourth volume, Babycakes, off the shelf where it had been sitting, sealed it up in an envelope and dispatched it off unread to the next person on the list. Then I emailed the kind and generous bookcrosser and asked her not to send me the last two. And I cannot tell you how relieved I felt. But, at the same time, immensely guilty, for reasons I will explain below. If you don ‘t know what happens in Tales of the City in general and Babycakes in particular, and you wish to remain in ignorance, please don’t read any further, since I intend to go into the plot in quite some detail. You have been warned.

It’s been obvious to me for quite a while that I really wasn’t going to enjoy this book. It’s here that I have to admit to a little sleight of hand. Two of us have been reading in this household - absolutely reprehensible if it slowed things down for other people. I hope very much that we are both such quick readers and that these books were so easy to get through that nothing of the sort happened and everyone else was able to detect nothing but normal service. That means, thanks to the good offices of Beloved Other Half who had put his shoulder to the wheel and actually read the damn thing, I had more intelligence about the plot than the back of the jacket was able to offer.

Mind you, the jacket was enough. A large chunk of the story concerns the quest of two recently-married characters to have a baby - not an emotional journey that ever particularly engages me, especially when undertaken by two characters that didn’t particularly engage me in the first place. I’m also generally irritated no end by ‘Britporn’ - ie classic slices of British life such as the Royal Family repackaged for the American market in ways that render them pretty much unrecognisable to inhabitants of these islands. Suffice it to say that several members of The Firm apparently feature as actual characters in this book. (I could also mention another pet hate here, which is that we NEVER actually refer to ourselves as “Brits” - we are English, Irish, Scots, Welsh, and a host of other things depending how far down the regional ladder you want to descend, or how far back up the family tree you want to climb. But Brits? Just doesn’t happen. Pretty much entirely an American term, both in usage and understanding.)

Plus, and this is the most serious by far, I looked at the plot summary on the back of the jacket and saw one word which made my heart sink through the floor: “grieving”. From that I extrapolated that someone was dead and who that someone had to be. If I was right, one of my favourite characters was gone, off-camera and without so much as a final farewell. I consulted with Beloved Other Half who confirmed I was right. The prospects of this book ever being read by me were receding by the second.

So, my objections to Babycakes can be summarised thus: babies, Britporn and tragic death. Seems fair enough, why should I feel guilty? Well, here’s the reason. The six books in the Tales of the City sequence divide neatly into two similarly-themed trilogies and I have just crossed the halfway point. This marks a really significant divide in the subject matter too. Armistead Maupin was not only one of the first authors to deal with gay relationships in fiction. He was also the first to deal with the HIV infection and its terrible consequences, and Babycakes, published I think in 1984, was the book in which he did it. I believe it contains the first recorded instance of a fictional treatment of AIDS - the death mentioned above. And I read in an interview he gave that it was a response to losing a real-life friend very early on in the epidemic.

So, having read and enjoyed the earlier, lighter instalments of this series, is it not a great moral weakness on my part to back out at exactly the point when things get tough? When they are drawn from the author’s personal experiences? Especially since all those people there at the time being written about weren’t exactly able to act in a similar way? And isn’t this going to seriously impair my understanding of the books that I did read? Well the answer to all these questions is probably yes. And enough of an imperative to make me carry on.

Were it not for the babies and the Britporn, which really are two steps too far.

So I’m going on my way feeling somewhat chastened by the above reflections, but basically remembering the maxim that, while we shouldn’t shy away from uncomfortable reading, life really is too short for books you won’t enjoy. Mind you, I’m feeling very complacent about seeing Mary Ann coming. In the earliest pages of the first book, when she drops the old school friend like a hot potato as soon as she ceases to be useful, I was thinking “Hang on a minute, that’s a bit of a nasty thing to do…” How right I was about her… ;- ))

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Don’t Look Now and other stories - Daphne du Maurier

On the face of it, this looks like a quick and easy read - five short stories, each about 50 pages long, a book by a favourite writer neatly broken down into easily-digestible chunks. In reality, it is anything but. It is not quick because I found that, without exception, I had to stop and think hard about every one of the five tales it contained, sometimes taking two or three days to get it clear in my head exactly what had happened in each one. And not easy because each story, to different degrees, is challenging and disturbing. If I had to assign a genre I would be tempted to say ‘horror’ since the supernatural features to some extent in every single one - however these are not horror stories in the conventional sense.

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The best approach seems to be to deal with the stories one by one. Don’t Look Now is possibly the most cohesive in the anthology and it is not at all surprising to find it has been filmed. It tells the story of a couple mourning the death of a child who attempt to draw a line under tragic events with a holiday in Venice. A disturbing brush with the supernatural piles on the pressure and soon causes events to spiral out of control. It has an almost noirish preoccupation with brooding location, of the dank canal and looming tenement variety, and the pacing and gradual generation of suspense is masterful. As reader we have to try to decide whether the character viewpoint that we are being presented with is objective or not and, if not, what is actually going on. An excellent piece of psychological drama.

Not Before Midnight gave me a lot of trouble in figuring out what on earth was supposed to have happened. This, I think, is down to an overly modern sensibility - I’m not going to spoil things by stating it outright but the vice succumbed to by the schoolteacher protagonist and referred to in the opening pages is considerably less serious than one might initially imagine. I have heard it referred to as ‘coy’ by other reviewers - but it is a du Maurier trope to sometimes write an exceedingly puzzling introduction to a story that only becomes explicable when you’ve read the whole thing (Frenchman’s Creek being the perfect example). This is a clever tale that again uses its location superbly and which showcases the author’s wonderful knack in evoking character voice. And the fact that this took a while to figure out rather added to it, I thought.

A Borderline Case was, to my mind, both the least appealing and by far the most disturbing of the stories in this book. It concerns a fey young actress, possessing the all the supposed indestructibility of the young, the death of her father and a chain of events put into action as a result. I found this the most far-fetched and unlikely of the stories in terms of the events depicted although, as above, the ability of the author to switch between characters of all ages and sexes is clearly evident. And a theatrical milieu is something you’ll find du Maurier using a lot. It’s typical of this collection of stories in that the character faces truly life-changing events - but I turned the last page with a shudder and then spent several days trying to forget about it.

The Way of the Cross is, thankfully, less of a struggle. This story is perhaps less conventional in form than the others, containing multiple character viewpoints, and I feel it might have proved less popular with readers as a result. It follows a collection of (I thought fairly unpleasant) individuals on a trip to Jerusalem on the eve of Passover. The adults are initially so preoccupied with their own concerns that they might as well have travelled to the Isle of Wight, or Rhyl, for all the Holy City has the power to affect them. But gradually it works its magic and each of them returns home having had a character-altering experience. All painful, some with positive effects and some decidedly negative. We are also invited to enjoy the irony that the only member of the party capable of truly appreciating his surroundings is a young child. Again this story may suffer from its lack of obviousness - put the book down and you may find yourself thinking: “So, what was that about?” But let your mind run on it for a day or two and it will become clear.

The collection concludes with The Breakthrough, a science-fiction tale very much in the same vein as the author’s full-length novel The House on the Strand. It’s probably the most self-contained of the stories here and one that I found very satisfying to read. It deals with a very particular form of sci-fi - not of the Mulder and Scully alien-invasion variety, but more of the kind written by John Wyndham in the 1950s where existing and imaginable science is taken to its logical conclusion and beyond. I like this kind of thing when written elsewhere both by Wyndham and du Maurier, and I liked this too.

I’m not sure that I would recommend anyone with no acquaintance whatever with du Maurier’s work to go in via the short stories. With some authors this is a safe bet, but I feel that she used the shorter form in a freer and more experimental way which means that new readers will not necessarily get a good feel for what she is about. Many of these experiments are hits, but some are misses. This collection contains, in my view, a very successful collection of stories but not one that is particularly representative of her work.

I can never come up with a really sure-fire reading order for her novels either, despite lots of time spent trying. But I think I would suggest starting with either Rebecca or Jamaica Inn followed by Frenchman’s Creek, My Cousin Rachel, The House on the Strand or The Scapegoat. If it’s the ‘romance author’ tag putting you off then opt for one of the last three and avoid Frenchman’s Creek like the plague; if you don’t like historical novels make it one of the last two which are a sci-fi story (much like The Breakthrough, above) and a thriller respectively.

But, naturally, you might have a completely different approach.

Some links:

• The Guardian: Mistress of menace
• Wikipedia: Don’t Look Now
• DuMaurier.org fansite – a summary of the stories
• Penguin readers’ notes (intended for teachers)
• The Guardian: on the challenge of adapting the title story for the stage
• Cornwall Guide: The Lady of Kilmarth - recollections of an interview with Daphne du Maurier
• Penguin authors: Daphne du Maurier

The Assassination of Princess Diana – Noel Botham

I found it appropriate that this book has a purple cover with fat white lettering that is almost painfully reminiscent of a great big bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. I read it in the space of an evening after a hard day and then felt exactly as you do after scoffing down said big bar of chocolate – slightly bloated and nauseous but on an alarming buzz. In other words, unapologetic recreational reading at its very finest, of the sort that caters exactly to my quirks and prejudices. I find, and have always found, conspiracy theories (and theorists) fascinating - and this book has some crackers, the best being that an alliance of influential arms dealers had a hand in Diana’s murder to halt her anti-landmine campaign and, through it, her strong influence on Bill and Hillary Clinton. I also remain profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of Prince Charles as King, largely due to his utter inability to refrain from interfering in politics. Dislike of him, his horrible second wife and his offspring (boys who think that dressing up as a Nazi is a jolly good joke) has come close to turning me into a republican.

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I have a funny feeling that if the British monarchy actually survives Charles’ accession then it is not destined to continue down a line descended from him. It is my observation that our royal family has proved to be most stable in the hands of women (Two Elizabeths and a Victoria to be precise, plus the argument that they wouldn’t have made it this far without the hard work of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in shoring up her husband George VI). Therefore I think that if it is going to survive for the next 50 years it probably needs either Princess Anne (a popular public choice but way down the succession) or Prince Andrew’s eldest daughter Beatrice (currently fifth, and the first woman in line) to be Queen.

Which is not as unlikely as it might sound, actually, when you consider what a perfect re-run of history that would be - the exact circumstances under which Elizabeth, eldest of two daughters of the Duke of York, acceded to the throne herself. Charles himself is nearly sixty now; there is some evidence that William might not be too keen on the top job; and a definite question mark exists over the paternity of his younger brother. Therefore you see how, as things stand now, the death of one elderly man, one hissy fit and one DNA test are all that stand in the way of the British monarchy departing from the Wales line and going off down the York one for the second time in a hundred years. You heard it here first, although whether public support for the whole motley crew would collapse completely under the strain of these events, and whether William would ever be allowed by family and the pressure of public opinion to walk away from the throne, are both moot points.

Hang on a minute. This is not the conspiracy theory du jour. What does all this actually demonstrate in terms of this book? That the author of a tome on royal conspiracy theories is totally preaching to the choir with me as a reader and I in turn am not being challenged in the slightest by reading it. This is what I mean by recreational reading that’s probably about as nutritional as chocolate, but does have a huge feelgood factor attached, something I suspect we could all do with a bit more of in our lives.

On a serious note, the book spends about half its 250 pages surveying the events leading up to Diana’s demise (including her oft-repeated claim that The Family would have her bumped off in a car crash) and the other half summarising what happened on the night of her death and subsequently. It has strong opinions and does not shy away from expressing them. It is mildly, but not very, critical of Diana herself. There are major questions raised that deserve answers - the provenance of Henri Paul’s blood sample, the conduct of the French and British investigations, the opening up to judicial inquiry of files on the case held by the security services, American surveillance of our royals and whether Charles and the charming Camilla really are fit to serve as head of state and consort (I would say not, but that will not come as a surprise to readers by this point in the narrative). Maybe the latest attempt at an inquest will bring us some answers but, as the author of the book states, the truth is that we will probably never learn the full truth about Diana’s death.

Some links:

• Wikipedia: Diana’s death
• BBC’s The Conspiracy Files: How Diana Died
• Transcript of The Conspiracy Files programme
• Scotsman article quoting the author
• BBC conspiracy theories quiz
• Wikipedia: Line of succession to the British throne
• Wikipedia: Republicanism in the United Kingdom

Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine

The history of this book, like everything else connected with Douglas Adams, is anything but straightforward. It appears to have started life as a spread about an endangered lemur in the colour supplement of a Sunday newspaper, moved on to become a radio series, transmuted into a companion book for that series (what we are dealing with here), and been recorded as an audiobook before finishing up as a CD-ROM with photographs, radio excerpts and a sound track of the author reading his text aloud. In fact, according to the Wikipedia article on the subject (see links below), this is a very apposite time to be reading it as a television series featuring Stephen Fry revisiting the species it features to see how they have fared appears to be in the pipeline. Just for the amusement of hardcore Adams fans, I shall also quote this bit: “Many of the excursions were written into the companion book, though not all, allegedly due to Douglas’ notorious writing delays. An example is that of the Amazonian Manatee, covered in a radio episode first transmitted on 18 October, 1989, but not in the subsequent book.”

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As far as hardcore Adams fans go, I would definitely count myself among them. Which means that it is a major oversight that I have not read this book before. I had a lot of expectation built up and, for some reason, possibly because I have been looking forward to it literally for years, I feel just a little bit underwhelmed by it. It has always been my pet theory that Adams is not actually a writer of science fiction novels, although he assumed that disguise with extreme cunning in order to propagate his work to a very wide and appreciative audience. No, I think that Douglas Adams was a philosopher, probably an absurdist philosopher, and a very, very important thinker whose true importance was just starting to be noticed when he bloody inconsiderately went and dropped dead. And Last Chance to See was an important step on his path from humorist to someone who the world needed to take a damned sight more seriously, actually, because he was saying things that we really needed to hear.

There are flashes of truly wonderful, often comical, always challenging original thought in here - for instance, when Adams realises the importance of deconstructing his Western habits of mind in order to accustom himself to being in China - and ends up with a complete set of duty-free aftershaves as a result. Or the time when he comes face to face with a gorilla and attempts to analyse his own reaction to this seemingly uncannily human creature, particularly his desire to see it as uncannily human. But there is also a great deal of what Adams’ biographer Nick Webb calls something like an elaborate shrubbery of anecdotage that surrounded him on all sides. Forgive me, I can’t find the exact quote, even after speed-reading the entire 350 pages of his book, Wish You Were Here. (There is an extensive chapter on the whole Last Chance to See adventure in this book which is recommended reading for anyone who would like more background on how it came to be written and on the relationship between the authors.) But I was hoping, frankly, for slightly more profundity and thought-provoking stuff and slightly fewer funny stories.

It appears from the biography that Adams had his usual towering dose of writers’ block when it came to getting stuck into this one, and that he managed to infect Mark Carwardine with it as well. It is also pointed out that this work, like so many of his others, may have suffered from the problems of format jumping. It is important to remember that in the early 1990s the arguments set out here were groundbreaking and not nearly as widely understood as they are today. In summary, there are lots of excellent reasons why this book is a great read and many more why we are lucky that it is as great as it is. But I’d like to see Adams’ reputation properly secured for posterity. And while this book does a lot in this direction, the published evidence of his brilliance is contained in a few hard-to-find articles, letters, lectures - a far slimmer collection of work than is ideal. It would have made me happier to find more of it here.

I read this because a very kind Bookcrosser made it available as part of a book ring - sincere thanks are due.

Some links:

• h2g2: Last Chance to See
• BBC Cult TV: Last Chance to See
• Wikipedia: Last Chance to See
• Last Chance to See official website
• Mark Carwardine’s website
• Wikipedia: Mark Carwardine
• Information on the third Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture (given by Mark Carwardine)
• Another Chance to See blog
• The Digital Village online memorial to Douglas Adams

Further Tales of the City - Armistead Maupin

It’s the eighties, the dawn of a brand-new decade for our friends at 28 Barbary Lane. And, to my initial dismay, much of the innocence of the seventies has already flown. Ronald Reagan is all but in the White House and Mona, always in the vanguard of the advancing zeitgeist, has forsaken San Francisco for Seattle never to appear more in this tale. Mary Ann has exchanged her yellow walls and wicker furniture for gun-metal grey carpeting and industrial shelving and her job as a secretary for a power-suited television career. Michael also has a most unlikely steady job, and his walls are no longer eggplant-coloured, a demonstration of domestic changes that were clearly inevitable at the end of the last novel, but which are nonetheless sad to see realised - one of the things that made me put off starting to read this book. Brian is having doubts on an existential scale about his career as a waiter and is feeling the need for a power suit of his own, even if it means going back to practising the law. Only Mrs Madrigal remains more or less unscathed, still with a lush cannabis patch in the back yard and a fine line in silk kimonos and scarlet azaleas. “I’m a cranky old hen,” she tells one of her surrogate children. “I like all my eggs in one basket.” And she works very hard throughout this story to bring this situation about.

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When we find something we like, we often hope it will go on for ever. But it’s a sad fact that stories, or film sequels, or television shows that actually do this soon lose all their creative fire and become sad parodies of their former selves. So I am delighted to report that Armistead Maupin rises wonderfully to the challenge of a both a new decade and a new instalment of his story. His characters are now thirty-somethings with a different set of values and preoccupations. But this doesn’t make them any less engaging or endearing – rather the opposite. We might think of this series as domestic and conversational but, in reality, he’s never been afraid of big, dramatic stories and this one is his most audacious yet, taking current affairs of a fairly recent vintage and rewriting them with his characters as part of the sequence of events. This could misfire horribly, and some readers may be less than convinced. Personally, I thought it worked a treat. As well as our Barbary Lane friends and the surviving members of the Halcyon family, we meet a few new faces in Further Tales of the City - once again, a welcome hot top on our coffee. There’s Prue Giroux, the arriviste society columnist who’s just a simple country gal from Grass County, Father Paddy Starr, the peculiarly San Franciscan Catholic priest and Bill Rivera, the Latino cop with shockingly bad taste and a penchant for Abba and Air Supply. We even get to catch up with old friends like D’orothea.

All in all, the series appears in fine form and manages to rise above ‘just another sequel’ into what is actually one of the most satisfying instalments so far. I feel optimistic about its future as I set out to read Babycakes.

One tip, though, especially if you’ve got the classic Black Swan edition, the one with the montage-style cover. DO NOT READ THE BACK OF THE JACKET before you’ve read the book. It’s got more spoilers than a sports car convention in Spoilersville, Spoiler County. And these are things you really don’t want to know about in advance. Trust me. It’s not pretty. Avert your eyes, already.

Portrait of a Killer - Patricia Cornwell

I picked this up off the library shelf knowing that it was going to be an extremely controversial read. This is the book, after all, in which best-selling crime author Patricia Cornwell turns her hand to non-fiction and attempts to build a case for an extremely well-regarded Impressionist painter, Walter Sickert, being Jack the Ripper. This is not the first time his name has been linked with the Ripper case but is, I believe, the first time anyone has gone as far as Cornwell does towards accusing him.

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Wanting a little bit of background before I started reading, I consulted the Internet and what I found almost unanimously condemned Cornwell about equally for her theories and for her presumption in committing them to paper – this last leading to many accusations that she has developed an obsession with the case. For instance, here’s a passage from a review in the New York Times (see links at bottom of page) by Caleb Carr, an American novelist and military historian with an interest in Victoriana and Sherlock Holmes:

Her belief that the efforts of all Ripperologists before her have been misguided is unsettling, too. ”I have avoided the recycled inaccuracies that have metastasized from one book to another,” she declares — a somewhat tasteless way of saying that she hasn’t bothered to study thoroughly such scholars of the case as Donald Rumbelow, Martin Fido, Paul Begg and others.

Now, here’s my problem with this. Having since read this quote from Cornwell in context, I don’t believe this is a very accurate representation of what she is saying. It seems to me to be about previous attempts at Sickert scholarship rather than Ripper scholarship, as Carr presents it. It occurs on page 62 of my hardback edition at a point where Cornwell is suggesting that Sickert’s estate has had a powerful influence on preserving his posthumous reputation and that, due to its control, biographies of the author published so far are more like hagiographies. When I come across things like this in reviews it leads me to one of two conclusions: either the reviewer has read the book in a hurry and made a simple error or they are trying to twist the material to fit their own purposes, something I do think should be avoided on occasions when the author under review is being accused of exactly this same sin.

And here’s a second example. This from the same NY Times review:

Cornwell notes that as a boy Sickert underwent several surgeries to correct a ”fistula” of some kind. If that fistula was penile, Cornwell posits, then the three painful surgeries could — provided they were failures — have left Sickert genitally deformed, impotent and incapable of having children, all of which would indeed be rich soil out of which to grow a frustrated sexual predator. Therefore, Cornwell simply decides that not only was Sickert’s fistula in fact penile, but that the surgeries were bungled. Small matter that the surgeon who performed the procedures was an expert in rectal and venereal diseases, and that there is no record of his ever having performed surgery for a penile fistula on anyone. Even smaller matter that, later in life, one of Sickert’s friends would scold him for fathering illegitimate children, or that at least one of those alleged children would eventually turn up. No, the penile deformity is postulated, and very soon it is treated for all practical purposes as a fact.

All well and good. Maybe Cornwell has made unwarranted assumptions. Or maybe the reviewer has done the same, in light of the following paragraph of Cornwell’s book, also on page 62, in which she says:

I must admit that I was shocked when I asked John Lessore about his uncle’s fistula and he told me – as if it were common knowledge – that the fistula was a “hole in [Sickert’s] penis.”

Rather an important piece of corroborating evidence, this statement from a family member, I should have thought, and yet Carr treats it as if it simply does not exist. This is not the first time I’ve noticed this kind of thing in the NY Times books section – another example is AS Byatt’s famous attack on JK Rowling which merely succeeded in demonstrating a marked ignorance of her source material and suggested that Byatt really should have taken the time to acquaint herself slightly better with Rowling’s work before launching such an intemperate and public attack. I am, of course, very wary of trying to define a trend based on just two examples but feel this may be a symptom of an unpleasantly elitist view of what constitutes worthwhile culture and I find that it merely serves to make me feel more favourable towards the subject of the attempted hatchet job, as it has done on this occasion. And more confident about making my own mind up as opposed to relying on the opinions of others.

However, one statement made by Carr I fully agree with. Early on in the piece he says: “this book is a prosecution, not an investigation” and, if you read it with this in mind, I think you will find it much more satisfying. All Dan Brown’s troubles (as far as a man who has earned that much money can be said to have any) appear to me to stem from the decision to put the words “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate” inside his most famous book and then to back this up with further, similar statements on his website. This has provided a handy cross for every one of his agenda-ridden critics to nail him to, and I fear that Patricia Cornwell’s publisher has done exactly the same by putting the subtitle “Case Closed” on the cover of this book. This is by no means an objective account of the evidence for Walter Sickert being Jack the Ripper but that does not mean it is necessarily an invalid piece of work. What it does very successfully is to argue the case in the adversarial fashion that is the basis for both the English and the American legal systems. It takes every clue that could point towards Sickert and explores its possible relevance to the fullest extent.

As the readers, we able to act as armchair judge and jury and we can employ some of the checks and balances usually found in a courtroom. We can decide if we find a piece of evidence compelling, whether we think a defence lawyer would be able to strike it down or if we believe it should not be put before the jury at all. We can differentiate between direct and circumstantial evidence and we are also able to imagine ourselves into the role of prosecutor – on the weight of evidence presented here, would we be happy to see the case against Sickert taken to court? Let’s have a bit of faith in human nature and assume that most people interested enough to take the book off the shelf and to plough through its nearly-400 pages have sufficient wit to make up their own mind about what Cornwell has written without needing self-appointed cultural guardians to tell them what to think.

For what it is worth my view is that it is a really interesting and disturbing read by an author who goes a long way towards immersing herself and us in the historical realities of Victorian London, who writes with considerable sympathy for the Ripper’s victims and who can bring a fascinating and entirely genuine perspective on some of the modern techniques of forensic science to this historic series of crimes. I read her comments about possible reflections of the crime in Sickert’s art and writing with considerable interest although I am not sure whether this comes under the category of stuff a good defence brief would be able to take down. I was interested in the sections dealing with the letters written to the police about the Ripper murders and in Cornwell’s reasons for believing they may have been written by Sickert (linguistic signature and the fact artists’ materials were used). As to the reliability of the DNA evidence Cornwell claims to have uncovered, I simply don’t feel competent to judge this bearing in mind the havoc that the interpretation of expert testimony has wrought in several recent court cases relying on probability, especially those examining mothers accused of child abuse. I think there are many occasions on which she draws overly slender parallels between what are most likely unrelated events, and many others when she has compelling points to make.

Having taken some time to familiarise myself with the controversies surrounding the book before sitting down to read it, I found that it stood up considerably better than I was expecting, and I am now wondering whether the critical reaction may indeed have been provoked by some degree of snobbery towards a very successful woman crime writer involving herself in an area considered inappropriate for her talents. This is not to suggest that the book is perfect or that her hypothesis is necessarily right. Just that I wish I hadn’t allowed myself to be distracted by the snobbery of a gang of largely male and very self-satisfied critics before I started reading it.

Some links:

• Author’s website
• Wikipedia: Patricia Cornwell
• Wikipedia: Portrait of a Killer
• Wikipedia: Jack the Ripper
• Wikipedia: Walter Sickert
• Bookreporter.com: Portrait of a Killer (positive to neutral)
• NY Times review (negative)
• USA Today review (neutral)
• Washington Post webchat
• Artcyclopedia: Portrait of the artist as a serial killer
• Casebook: Patricia Cornwell and Walter Sickert - a primer
• BBC News: Author denies Ripper ‘obsession’
• The Guardian: Sickert’s nemesis returns to the scene
• The Independent: Throwing Down the Gauntlet - Cornwell challenges critics
• Slate: Pat the Ripper

The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe

The gothic novel, of which The Mysteries of Udolpho is the definitive example, is possibly the first ever instance of genre fiction. And, like much of the genre fiction that followed it, gothic novels were ridiculed as the stuff of weak minds and female susceptibility, imparting unnatural thrills that could undermine the constitution and rot the intellect, of being sensationalist rubbish only fit for silly women and those unable to find any more worthwhile way of filling their time

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But Gothic fiction, especially the superior sort written by Mrs Radcliffe, also had its admirers – including, according to the introduction to my World’s Classics edition, Keats, Thackeray, Coleridge and, of course, Jane Austen. She famously satirises the format in Northanger Abbey where her heroine Catherine Morland has had her head turned so thoroughly by her choice of reading matter that she starts re-envisioning her own rather tame existence in Gothic terms. Until, increasingly, she finds herself facing real-life difficulties and challenges that cause her re-examine the differences between real life and fiction and to take a more critical and discerning view of the people who surround her.

I decided I wanted to read this book after burning through Northanger Abbey, some years ago now. I was delighted by how modern a sensibility it had, how accessible the humour was and how gripping the story. Udolpho is also famous wherever two or three English Literature students gather together for a particular plot device known as The Veil – drawn aside in a dark and deserted locked room by the ingénue heroine who is stranded in the ruined castle in peril of her life and honour to reveal – what? Nameless terrors which are not defined for a considerable number of pages afterwards. This is undoubtedly a literary phenomenon that deserves to be witnessed at first hand.

The Mysteries of Udolpho, like all the best examples of genre fiction, has endured because it has a really solid plot (disguised as a cracking good story) and excellent characterisation (spoilers may follow from this point). Written in 1794, it appears to be set in a Europe of at least a century earlier when Italy was still composed of warring city-states. We follow the fortunes of the young Frenchwoman Emily St Aubert who, a year or two off coming of age at the outset of the tale, leads a modest, quiet and happy life in the heart of rural Gascony with her doting parents and an eminently suitable lover on the horizon who even manages to garner the parental seal of approval. Having carefully composed her canvas, the author then proceeds to dismantle Emily’s life step by step through the death of her mother, the ruination of her father’s fortunes, the death of said father while off taking the air in the distant Pyrenees, the breaking of her engagement the day before her wedding and her eventual removal to a distant castle in Italy by the villainous Montoni, a wicked schemer and fortune hunter who secretes her far beyond the reach of her lover and everyone who previously knew her.

Emily is held under this man’s tyrannical control at Udolpho, his ruined castle in the Apennines, after the aunt who is her last surviving relative and therefore her guardian, married him unwisely and in haste. As a result Emily and her estates look likely to be sold for marriage to the highest bidder in a desperate plan to restore to Montoni what he has lost four-fold at the gaming tables of Venice and Paris. Having arrived at this point (approximately 250 pages into this 600-odd page novel) it is then the reader’s pleasure to discover how Emily will be restored to her homeland, the arms of the man she loves and to her ancestral seat, with some dark family secrets and a murder mystery to be resolved along the way.

In Northanger Abbey the following exchange takes place:

They determined on walking round Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath.
“I never look at it,” said Catherine, as they walked along the side of the river, “without thinking of the south of France.”
“You have been abroad then?” said Henry, a little surprised.
“Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?”
“Why not?”
“Because they are not clever enough for you — gentlemen read better books.”
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days — my hair standing on end the whole time.”
“Yes,” added Miss Tilney, “and I remember that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume into the Hermitage Walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it.”
“Thank you, Eleanor — a most honourable testimony. You see, Miss Morland, the injustice of your suspicions. Here was I, in my eagerness to get on, refusing to wait only five minutes for my sister, breaking the promise I had made of reading it aloud, and keeping her in suspense at a most interesting part, by running away with the volume, which, you are to observe, was her own, particularly her own. I am proud when I reflect on it, and I think it must establish me in your good opinion.”
“I am very glad to hear it indeed, and now I shall never be ashamed of liking Udolpho myself. But I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly.” Read on here…

This gives us a number of ways into discussion about Udolpho. Firstly Austen very kindly summarises the contemporary attitudes to (Gothic) novels for us and puts the arguments for and against reading them – arguments that she lightheartedly resolves in their favour. Secondly we hear about the graphic descriptions of wild mountain scenery which are so important in Radcliffe’s narrative and which amount almost to interludes of landscape painting within the text – here parodied in “Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object.” Thirdly she points out, quite accurately, that the book is extremely hard to put down when you are involved in one of its lengthy action sequences. There are some things that make it difficult – the rather free-and-easy approach to the history of the early modern period in Europe, an attitude to the comma which can best be described as profligate (you learn to read through them pretty quickly), a tendency in young Miss St Aubert to faint rather more often than is fashionable among young ladies today and a sensibility and a set of moral values that make precious little sense to us now (although it does have a logic and internal consistency that means, when characters such as Emily, her suitor Valancourt and her father Monsieur St Aubert debate the correct course of conduct or talk about moral behaviour it is perfectly possible to intellectually appreciate the points they make). It is not quick or easy reading, but it is gripping and satisfying. Here’s a little taster so you can make your mind up for yourself if it’s likely to be for you:

Towards the close of the day, the road wound into a deep valley. Mountains, whose shaggy steeps appeared to be inaccessible, almost surrounded it. To the east, a vista opened, that exhibited the Appenines in their darkest horrors: and the long perspective of retiring summits, rising over each other, their ridges clothed with pines, exhibited a stronger image of grandeur, than any that Emily had yet seen. The sun had just sunk below the tops of the mountains she was descending, whose long shadow stretched athwart the valley, but his sloping rays, shooting through an opening of the cliff, touched with a yellow gleam the summits of the forest, that hung upon the opposite steeps, and streamed in full splendour upon the towers and battlements of a castle, that spread its extensive ramparts along the brow of a precipice above. The splendour of these illumed objects was heightened by the contrasted shade, which involved the valley below.

“There,” said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, “is Udolpho.”

Read more of Udolpho at Project Gutenberg

Let’s wind up by talking about a modern cultural reference. It is a matter of public record that JK Rowling is a very big fan of Jane Austen. And Jane Austen, as we have seen, definitely tipped her hat towards Ann Radcliffe. While I have never particularly agreed with AS Byatt’s vituperative characterisation of Rowling’s work as “made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs,” is it too much of a stretch to see two clear instances of this veil motif appearing in her work? Both appear in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - one being the painting in the hall of the Grimmauld Place house that shrieks vile abuse at anyone who passes unless it is kept covered. The second is the famous Veil in the basement of the Ministry of Magic through which Sirius Black falls to his death.

Just in case you were wondering what on earth a book published in 1794 has to do with you…

Selected list of Gothic novels:

• The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole
• The Romance of the Forest - Ann Radcliffe
• The Italian - Ann Radcliffe
• The Monk - Matthew Gregory Lewis (available at Project Gutenberg)
• Caleb Williams - William Godwin (available at Project Gutenberg)
• Melmoth the Wanderer - Charles Maturin
• In A Glass Darkly - Sheridan Le Fanu
• Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
• Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
• The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allen Poe
• The Phantom Ship - Frederick Marryat
• Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
• Gothic Tales - Elizabeth Gaskell
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stephenson
• The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
• Dracula – Bram Stoker
• More Gothic novels from Wikipedia

Some links:

• Wikipedia: The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Project Gutenberg: The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Wikipedia: Northanger Abbey
• Great Gothic Horror novels: an Amazon list

Thanks to England’s dismal performance in the cricket today, I have learned a new word, always a pleasing activity. Here it is:

nurdle v. To get runs sedately by gently nudging the ball into vacant areas of the field (thanks to Wikipedia, as ever, for the definition).

Cricket, of course, has a whole wonderful terminology of its own. To see a nurdle (and lots of other obscure fauna including an off-drive, a reverse sweep, some back-of-a-length bowling and an easy catch to gully) at large in its native environment, read this BBC match report…

I would also like to refer the reader to the definition of cricket that my good friend Mr Random mentioned to me the other day, which may prove particularly helpful for any members of non-cricketing nations who may be reading. It is this:

“There are two teams. The Australians win.”

Blood, Sweat and Tea: Real Life Adventures in an Inner-City Ambulance - Tom Reynolds

Not part of the plan. I have been hijacked by this book, which I thought I didn’t need to read at all because I had been following the blog. Wrong. Beloved Other Half bought it on an impulse and then read it in about half a day, sequestered in the bathroom most of the time, come to think about it. No, it’s not that sort of book. Unless you get off on some very strange things and I’ve known him for nearly 20 years now… One bad habit he does have, however, is leaving books he has finished reading lying about in the bathroom. Which is how I came to find myself sitting on the toilet reading it (and I can report that it is definitely much more entertaining than the back of the proverbial Vim tin).

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And it’s very, very hard to stop reading once you’ve started, which (probably) accounts for Beloved Other Half’s long absences. As you may guess from the title, Reynolds is an operational member of the London Ambulance Service (LAS) as well as being one of the BNFs of the blogging world, among the earliest and most mainstream of the work bloggers. And, of course, successfully making the transition into print which didn’t harm his reputation one little bit. I thought the format worked just fine on the printed page, almost indistinguishable from books that are written in this style to start with - there are plenty of epistolatory or diary-style works going back centuries, after all. A feature that works particularly well is the insertion of comments and brief updates in the text in a paler ink, allowing the reader to see what was written contemporaneously and how circumstances or the author’s thoughts have changed since. This includes updates on the fates of some of his patients, reunions with colleagues, ironic and referential comments or a look with hindsight on how a particular event affected him - the most striking being the time he had a three-month HIV and hepatitis scare after swallowing infected blood.

Reynolds is blessed with two essentials for good blogging and any other kind of writing - a readable style and interesting subject matter. Any glimpse into a closed world normally beyond public access is a winner with me, and the health service is no exception. And there’s a nice streak of ‘emergency services humour’ - slightly black and cynical, of the sort that keep police and firefighters going in bleak circumstances as well as ambulance personnel. Additionally, his bosses appear to at least tacitly regard him as an asset and not a liability, which is a lot more clear-sighted than many employers manage to be. So he’s got a good story and he tells it grippingly and engagingly. What more could any writer ask for? So, you would imagine that this review should end here. I’ve said what I think, you can make your own minds up, end of story. But no.

One of the most interesting and important aspects of this whole saga is the fact that Reynolds, having turned his freely accessible blog into a book in the first place, then chose to publish this book under a Creative Commons licence which leaves all of us, that’s right, all of us, free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, as long as certain conditions are fulfilled. It is not only available as blog posts but in one coherent piece from the book publisher’s site as a downloadable PDF. You can just turn up and download it for free. Here’s the link. Go on, try it. And, guess what? Rather than adversely affecting book sales Reynolds believes that this is actually stimulating them.

Free culture rules… After all, a blog is quite hard to read while sitting on the loo.

Some links:

• Tom Reynolds’ blog
• Download the book for free here
• LAS official site
• Wikipedia: LAS
• The Guardian: Random Reality Bites
• About Creative Commons
• Publisher’s blurb

Espresso Tales - Alexander McCall Smith

I had flu for much of March which meant my consumption of relatively undemanding books went through the roof. I’m going to Edinburgh in April which means my consumption of books about that city was similarly high. How kind of Alexander McCall Smith, then, to provide me with both in one neat, easy-to-read package…

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Espresso Tales is the middle volume in the trilogy-so-far of the author’s 44 Scotland Street series based on Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City and written in instalments for The Scotsman newspaper. In it we follow the fortunes of several residents of the flats at the eponymous address, people whose acquaintance we made in the first volume. Thus we watch six-year-old prodigy Bertie’s progress in his quest to shed his pink dungarees and yoga classes and become a normal little boy, here played out through a bonding moment with his father as they set out to solve the mystery of where the family Volvo is parked.

We wait with baited breath for the self-righteous Bruce Anderson, disgraced surveyor and wine merchant manqué, to fall on his well-proportioned arse and we watch Pat MacGregor learn the hard way that no good-looking single man ever comes without baggage of one sort or another. We follow Domenica MacDonald in her quest for a satisfying new area of anthropological research and catch up with many of our favourite non-residents including portraitist and failed art restorer Angus Lordie (never without his dog Cyril, naturally), Matthew the gallery owner and Pat’s employer, Big Lou the coffee shop proprietor, Ramsey Dumbarton, Tory stalwart and the author of some truly scintillating memoirs that we are privileged to catch a glimpse of, and the conflicted child psychotherapist Dr Fairbairn.

I think this series works on all sorts of levels: as an experiment in writing serial novels, as what The Scotsman describes as “a send-up by an insider, revealing the everyday lives of characters in a literary soap opera,” as homage to Tales of the City and as sheer enjoyment. Each volume is finished in a way that suggests the author intends it to be the last but as far as I know he hasn’t been able to stop writing them yet and I believe a fourth is now on the way. This book is an easy read but not one that lets the reader off too lightly - an important distinction. I will certainly be buying the next instalment as soon as it comes out in paperback.

Some links:

• The Scotsman review
• A fourth volume?
• Author’s website: Espresso Tales
• My Weekly Book review of 44 Scotland Street
• My Weekly Book review of Tales of the City
• The Joy of Google (ie completely unrelated but rather interesting in its own right): Espresso Stories

The Three Evangelists by Fred Vargas

I am in a terrible position. I am going to have to dust off my creaky schoolgirl French and go and learn the language properly and it is all down to Fred Vargas. Not that I have anything against the translators of her novels. By and large I think they have done an excellent job. It’s just that only four of these strange, witty, primal, original books have been published in English and now I’ve read three of them. Always the contrarian, I started with one of the later in the series - Have Mercy On Us All and then worked back courtesy of the local library to Seeking Whom He May Devour.

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The Three Evangelists is an even earlier story, containing entirely different protagonists (although they do make a cameo appearance in one of the later books when some historical expertise is needed). Marc Vandoosler is the very prototype of a man defined by what he does rather than what he does for a living. A mediaeval historian and expert shoplifter, he is professionally underappreciated, close to being homeless and struggling to come to terms with a failed marriage so at the start of the book it is proving really rather hard for him to keep the flame alive. Until, by a gorgeous piece of serendipity featuring a pebble, he finds himself at the gates of a ruined house in a far-flung Paris arrondissement known to its neighbours as ‘the disgrace’.

It is immediately obvious to Marc that he needs to move in. He solicits help from his best friend Matthias Delamarre (a prehistorian, but Marc doesn’t hold that against him) who is his opposite in every respect apart from his relationship to employment, women and potential eviction. To pay the last third of the rent they round up a thoroughly disreputable chap, Lucien Devernois, a garrulous historian of the Great War no less, who they nevertheless know has the funds to make their scheme a reality. In a sly archaeologists’ in-joke, they arrange themselves stratigraphically in this four-floor building, with Marc’s godfather, or uncle, or something, Old Man Vandoosler representing the modern era at the top (to the irritation or occasionally outright fury of the others he coins the terms St Mark, St Luke and St Matthew to describe them and encourages everyone who calls to do the same).

A senior policeman expelled from the force for corruption, Vandoosler père represents a window into the world of police expertise that gives these latent detectives their excuse to get involved in a mystery plot. And it comes along in the form of a mature beech tree planted anonymously in the garden of the operatic superstar living next door. She is deeply concerned by this development - rightly as it turns out, and that’s no spoiler because there are certain assumptions you can definitely make about any detective tale - and falls back on her neighbours after her husband refuses to take her seriously. From here the story proceeds along the alleys, byways and side-streets of the thirteenth arrondissement, many of them blind, as each of the evangelists proves himself incapable of looking past whatever tree he is currently sitting in to discern the existence of a surrounding wood. Not until one of them is able to overcome this distinctly un-rigorous and un-academic habit of mind will the mystery be solved. Which of them will it be? And will the saint in question have the scales fall from his eyes in time to save his colleagues from harm?

But trying to write all this down is like trying to pin a butterfly to card. A good book review, I understand, is obliged to tell you what a book is like and what it is about. While we have the bald facts above it in no way gets across the delightful nature of Vargas’ work. The characters are so full of flaws, quirks, obsessions and manias that they feel like members of your own dysfunctional family - Old Man Vandoosler’s manipulative charm, Marc’s latest bout of hysteria, Matthias’ habit of wandering out into the street stark naked without noticing anything amiss or Lucien’s repeated urge to talk hard enough to have the leg off a very solid piece of furniture and always at the most inappropriate times. Another atmospheric tool that Vargas always seems to have available is a powerful sense of community - this is a world in which, whether you are talking about urban Paris or a far-flung Pyrenean village, neighbours know each other, pop in and out of each others’ homes, bring each other presents of food and drink and know unerringly when something has gone wrong with one of their number. It’s the most wonderful mixture and it comes highly recommended.

So, where’s my French textbook? I’ve only got one left to read now, after all…

Some links:

• Random House: Fred Vargas
• The Independent: Digging up the past
• The author wins an award
• Guardian review
• Eurocrime review 1
• Eurocrime review 2
• International Noir Fiction review
• Amazon Best European Crime list
• My Weekly Book review of Have Mercy On Us All
• My Weekly Book review of Seeking Whom He May Devour

More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

Reading this book reminded me of the experience of watching one of those wonderful circus acts where a seemingly impossible number of plates are kept spinning on poles for longer than you would have thought possible. In this second volume of the Tales of the City series we meet all our old friends from 28 Barbary Lane – and life has certainly not stood still for any of them. Mary Ann and Michael continue their respective quests for Mr Right and become entangled in an unsettling mystery for their pains. Mona goes to the desert to find herself and comes back with more than she bargained for. Mrs Madrigal reveals a big secret and Brian finds he’s taken on more than he can handle when a mystery woman appears in his life. Outside the Barbary Lane coterie, DeDe Halcyon Day finds her life going in directions that she could never possibly have imagined and the corpse of Norman Neal Williams refuses to stay buried. As far as it ever was buried in the first place, that is.

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The thing that’s so incredible is that barely any of these stories are relegated to a subordinate position in the narrative. And they’re well-paced enough to ensure that once again it’s virtually impossible to put this book down once you start reading it. It’s an impressive juggling act. All those characters not caught up in truly life-changing events are on the trail of an incredible criminal conspiracy instead. As soon as you take your eye off one of them, another has a crisis, a triumph or a revelation. Despite the fact it was written as a serial the book has arguably more overall coherence and a better narrative structure than its predecessor and I was agreeably surprised at how cohesive it felt, how well the climaxes to the various stories built and how tidy the ending was. Also I found that I really cared about these characters and what happened to them, especially when one or two of them found themselves in a particularly dark place.

The mix includes plenty of wonderful humour – Mona, for example, deciding that a particularly surreal turn of events is best explained as an acid flashback and resignedly waiting for the big purple caterpillars to start crawling up the walls, or Michael pursuing his favourite gynaecologist round an airport arrivals lounge on roller skates (this truly was a more innocent time - he’d probably be shot if he tried that now). But I think it has a darker tinge than the previous volume and I know that, if I’m honest with myself, it’s pretty likely that people are going to get hurt and have their illusions shattered as the series continues. So it was good to leave them in a pretty well-resolved state at the end of this novel without trying too hard to second-guess what life and Mr Maupin has in store for them next.

The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes - Neil Gaiman

Another one of those reviews that is damn-near impossible to write. What do you say about a classic of its genre on which everything worth saying has already been said? I suppose giving your personal reaction is all there is left and, if people do read a blog like this one, then I suspect it is often because they will be interested in others’ personal reactions to books they have read or would like to read. So I guess that answers the question, eh?

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Time to get writing then. This was not my first exposure to The Sandman, as I had already read Dream Country (volume three), the spinoff Death: the High Cost of Living and also Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion (see link at the bottom of this entry). My decision to buy and read the companion was informed by Dream Country, which is a set of highly-acclaimed short stories rather than a continuous narrative that materially furthers the plot. I read it first for the simple reason that it was sitting on the shelf in my local library and I was curious. But I came away from that feeling that I didn’t get it at all, and in retrospect I am not surprised.

A result of reading the companion is that I am well and truly spoilered, and I am glad that this is the case. I know broadly what happens right the way through the series and now, equipped with the plot arc and with some idea about what the hell is supposed to be going on in a broader sense, I at last feel able to approach the actual story. A few well-established basics about Preludes and Nocturnes: it is widely held not to be the best of The Sandman but the volume in which Gaiman and various other members of the team were finding their feet. It also contains numerous important plot points without which it would be mighty hard to follow the rest of the series, an important reason for reading it. Several elements of the DC comics universe are incorporated in this volume, but as the series continues Gaiman becomes much more independent of this, and it is arguable whether it actually works here. It certainly looks and reads much more like a conventional comic book series at this point than it will later on. One of the most significant things that happens is a change of artist six episodes in - this is described by many as the point when the series really takes flight. And it introduces that fatal thing, the supporting character that ends up way, way more popular than the supposed hero (think Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer). The character in this case is Death, big sister to our actual hero, Dream. You’ll have a lot of exposure to this character if you decide to read the series, so I won’t say much more about her here.

So, does The Sandman live up to all the extraordinary claims made for it? Just eight issues in, I am inclined to say that it does, in that it attempts something that I can’t recall seeing in any other comic book story. Like many others before me I am astounded by the scope of what is being covered in this series. It is no less than the creation of an entire mythology and anyone familiar with Gaiman’s later work, the stuff that tends to get published in conventional book format, will hardly be surprised to see where he started out. In other seminal graphic novels, and here I’m thinking mainly of stuff by Alan Moore, the superhero genre is subverted and played about with. Conversely, The Sandman is simply not a superhero tale, nor a conventional horror comic (although it arguably contains elements of both these genres), and Gaiman’s great achievement was to get those readerships as well as people who weren’t normally card-carrying members of the comic-buying public to become faithful readers. It is famous for having a far higher female readership than DC comics could usually command.

So, what is it about, roughly? Well, we start off in Edwardian England in the company of a magician with ideas above his psychic station. Like so many hubristic fools both before and after, Roderick Burgess (think Aleister Crowley) fancies having a crack at binding Death to do his every bidding. Unfortunately he gets his magicks a bit wrong and is saddled with her younger brother, the Sandman of the series title, instead. And he’s an uncommunicative bastard, as Burgess and his son discover to their chagrin and eventual bitter regret. The path taken by Dream to free himself from his imprisonment, track down his tools and regain his kingdom are the substance of this tale.

But I’m not going to tell you any more. Because I’m almost certain that you’ll want to read it for yourself. And just to prove that Sod’s Law is alive and well in west London, I went into Borders a day or two ago after spending ages and ages trying to track this volume down, by means both virtual and physical. Eventually, after a wait of months, Amazon had been able to sell me a copy. But, on that day, there were no less than four copies of it on the bloody shelf. There. If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is…

Some links:

• Grovel.org.uk: Preludes and Nocturnes
• Bureau42.com review
• ArtBomb review
• Neil Gaiman’s website: Sandman FAQ
• Wikipedia: Sandman overview
• Wikipedia: Preludes and Nocturnes
• Wikipedia: The Endless
• Wikipedia: Dream (DC Comics)
• Wikipedia: Death (DC Comics)
• MyWeeklyBook review of Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion

The Sunday Philosophy Club - Alexander McCall Smith

A cursory glance at other people’s reviews of this rather lovely book suggests it has come in for a quite unwarranted amount of stick. One, for not being yet another volume in the already quite well-populated No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, and two, for not being a very good detective story. There’s not really a lot you can say to those people complaining about the first. They illustrate perfectly the problem of an author having a big literary success in a particular genre – no-one wants to see them deviate from it ever again, and it will be fascinating to see if JK Rowling, for example, is ever allowed by the public to move on from Harry Potter. To the second, I say, you know precious little about the crime genre if you believe that this book really is a murder mystery.

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Crime stories, and especially those with pretensions to being a cozy, have some very specific conventions. One, the murderer usually has to come from a fairly tight circle of suspects who are on camera from very early on in the proceedings (the entire population of the city of Edinburgh doesn’t really count). Does that happen here? No. Secondly the mystery has to be resolved in a satisfying way, even if the full force and majesty of the law is not necessarily invoked (for instance, the guilty party may end up dead as a result of natural justice). Does that happen here? I’m not sure that it does, actually. Does the reader have enough clues in the text to work out the solution for herself? I think she’d have trouble. And lastly, going back to this term natural justice. Do the good triumph and the bad come unstuck by the turn of the last page? Emphatically they do not. Several of the bad, naming no names and uttering no spoilers here, walk away scot-free and many of the good are left looking a little bit crumpled and tear-stained.

The Sunday Philosophy Club seems to me to be an excellent illustration of the author as victim of both his own success and of book marketing in general. To carry on with our Harry Potter analogy, JK Rowling has been heard to say that she never intended to write a children’s series, that’s just how the publishers saw fit to market her work. You might feel this is a bit disingenuous but it does help to illustrate how these days an author needs to have a unique selling point that the industry and the public can get hold of, and then not to deviate from it. And this unassuming professor of medical ethics from Edinburgh is now pigeonholed as a crime novelist, and therefore mysteries are what he must be writing, regardless of the facts of the matter.

I think this is, quite simply, a book about philosophy and its practical applications. The mystery plot and the demands it places on the characters seems to be a kind of extended framework for philosophical discussion. Isabel Dalhousie, heroine, heroic consumer of hot beverages, amiable busybody and lady of means, is the part-time editor of the Journal of Applied Ethics (I’m wondering if there’s a philosophers’ in-joke here that I’m not getting – any philosophers reading this are welcome to enlighten me). She finds the raw material for closely-argued ethical dilemmas in all kinds of everyday situations, from the etiquette of talking to a stranger who has fallen over in the street or to the person who has bought the painting one intended to purchase oneself at a gallery opening to the propriety of exposing financial cheats or disguising one’s intense dislike for someone that a loved one holds in high regard. She argues through these dilemmas at length, in her head, with her housekeeper, with friends or on occasion with complete strangers. And we, dear readers, are with her every step of the way. Approximately a third of your reading time will probably be devoted to following such arguments. I found it very enjoyable and interesting - and whether or not you feel the same will probably govern whether you sing this novel’s praises or condemn it as a tedious bore.

But, understated and perhaps not even obvious until you’ve put the book down, are the sharp contrasts between Isabel’s abstract high-mindedness and her practical actions. Her relationship with her niece Cat for example – what are her true motives in interfering so thoroughly in that young woman’s life? Isn’t she hoping to rewrite history and somehow prevent Cat making the mistakes that she, Isabel, has made? They are so pervasive that she’s spent much of her adult life alone following a disastrous early marriage. And has she any idea that she’s doing this? I didn’t get the feeling that she does. And what of the powerful attachment Isabel has formed for Jamie, Cat’s ex-boyfriend, who is barely half her age? She makes enormous demands on his time and patience and I wonder how her motives regarding him would stand up to her own otherwise clear-sighted philosophical scrutiny were she not so emotionally involved in the situation. Isabel has enough self-knowledge to know she finds him very attractive and that to try to act on this attraction would have disastrous consequences. But not enough to back off discreetly and leave the poor boy alone to live his own life instead using her power as a confidante of Cat as leverage for his attention and affection. When she’s faced with a real-life ethical dilemma, involving an unfaithful young man (of a type who would be extremely familiar to any reader of 44 Scotland Street) can she maintain her detachment and put her principles into practice? No, it all flies straight out of the window. And I think that, in this contrast between what Isabel says, what she thinks and what she does lies the true interest of this book.

I am concluding, having read three of Alexander McCall Smith’s books from three different series in quick succession that he has a rare and unusual gift for a male author – that of writing convincing and multi-dimensional female characters. And I am struck by the parallel he seems to draw again and again between those for whom we feel a powerful sexual attraction and those who are good for us in a practical and emotional sense. The perfect example is Mma Precious Ramotswe’s appalling first husband, the feckless and vicious jazz musician Note Makoti, and her kind, but entirely sexless and excitement-free second husband JLB Matekoni, with whom she is able to build a fulfilling and stable life but who appears to share no more physical or emotional intimacy with her than you’d expect from the average business partner. This does not seem to me to be so far from Isabel Dalhousie’s dichotomy - between her charismatic but thoughtless and unfaithful ex-husband John Liamor (who never puts in an appearance but is constantly mentioned) and the strange, awkward simulacrum of a relationship she’s got herself into with Jamie. Meanwhile, over on Scotland Street young Pat MacGregor is experiencing a seemingly inexplicable sexual attraction to an intolerably vain and arrogant young man who, she knows rationally, she dislikes powerfully but still fancies like all hell, so much so that she seems incapable of sane behaviour in his presence.

What is it that the author is trying to tell us?

Some links:

• Amazon.com reviews
• New York Times review
• Wikipedia: applied ethics

Masquerade - Kit Williams; and The Quest for the Golden Hare - Bamber Gascoigne

I’ve been taking a renewed interest in treasure hunting recently. It’s all down to my good friend Mr Random and the conclusion of a certain treasure hunt cum alternate reality game known as Perplex City. And February 24 was the 25th anniversary of Masquerade’s golden hare being dug up (just 20 days after Perplex City’s lost Cube came out of the ground). Plenty of food for thought, all this, and definitely time to have another look at this book.

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Some basics for those who, unlike me, have not spent the last 25 years obsessed with this saga. Masquerade is the wonderful picture book created in 1979 by eccentric artist Kit Williams around a central riddle that gave the whereabouts of real, live buried treasure - a golden hare-shaped jewel that was buried near a monument to Catherine of Aragon at Ampthill Park in Bedfordshire. Bamber Gascoigne, who shared a publisher with him, was called upon to act as a kind of independent arbitrator and reassure the nation that the treasure really had gone into the ground and was recoverable. Thus he was (somewhat unwillingly) drawn into the whole mad two-year worldwide quest for the buried treasure, even though he had grave private doubts about the chances of the riddle ever being cracked. He was the only living soul apart from Kit himself who knew where the golden hare could be found. In the absence of any encouragement from the artist or from Jonathan Cape, some treasure hunters turned to him for confirmation of their wild and wonderful theories. Thus he was in a unique position to document the Masquerade phenomenon, which he did in Quest for the Golden Hare.

The result is almost an anthropological study into all the vagaries and delusions of human nature. As well as telling how Masquerade came to be commissioned and produced, and how its riddle was conceived, it tells the story of a number of treasure-seekers including at least one that began to suffer from psychotic delusions, several Americans playing the numbers game - that is bombarding Kit with a huge number of solutions in the vain expectation of miraculously hitting the correct co-ordinates, the many people who were wildly successful in imposing their own thinking on the book, but not in identifying the riddle correctly and, tantalisingly, the three sets of people who came within an ace of identifying Ampthill Park and claiming the hare for themselves. Gascoigne has a wonderful way of dealing with these disparate accounts, always respectful and open-minded but still approaching the motley crew of interviewees with a dry wit and a sceptical cast of mind. The results make fascinating reading.

Another area he explores to great effect is the astounding role played by coincidence in the whole Masquerade saga. Thus we hear about the two separate treasure hunters who arrived respectively at Ampthill Park and a monument to Catherine of Aragon to be visited at the equinox. Neither of them had solved the central riddle and so neither was working with a full set of information. Both had come to their conclusions in ways undreamt-of by the author. The first wrote to Kit but had to be politely turned down as he had got within 20 feet of the golden hare but had no way of getting any closer. The second went off down another line of inquiry and so away from the scent altogether. But reading these stories, however many times I do it, brings me out in goose bumps. The facts of the matter are that what we perceive as coincidences are nothing of the sort - it’s just that the human brain functions by making patterns of th