My Weekly Book

Books this post is based on:

Introducing Jungian Psychology – Robin Robertson

1992, part of the Newleaf Popular Psychology series

The Saga of the Exiles series by Julian May

Titles include The Many-Coloured Land, The Golden Torc, The Non-Born King and The Adversary. Published between 1981 and 1984 by Houghton Mifflin in the United States and Pan in the UK.

A year or so ago, I read and greatly enjoyed The Saga of the Exiles, on the recommendation of someone who had first come across them in childhood. Much more recently I became interested in Jungian psychology as one of the very few areas where science meets mysticism on terms that are not complete and utter nonsense. I read Robin Robertson’s Introducing Jungian Psychology which proved to be an excellent overview of a very complex subject. I was aware that May had reportedly written her series with reference to Jungian archetypes and I read the Robertson book with that in mind.

A basic summary of Jung’s ideas on personality types

Robertson says that Jung identified four basic components to the personality – the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. His contention was that these exist in opposed pairs, so thinking is the opposite of feeling and sensation the opposite of intuition. Each of us has one function that is our primary way of relating to the world, but is forever incapable of properly developing its opposite. So, if you are primarily a thinker you will be weak at feeling and vice versa. Secondary functions can be developed, but the inferior function never can. However, most excitingly, Jung saw what he called the “inferior function” as the gateway to the collective unconscious.

In addition each of us is either an introvert or an extravert, something which adds an extra dimension of complexity to the above system. Extraverts relate to the world through external factors such as people and situations while introverts like to have a good think about things in order to understand before acting. So, taking this into account, if you are an introverted sensate your inferior function will be extraverted intuition.

For more information on Jungian personality types click here.

This was later extrapolated into the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. Learn more here.

Jung and May’s characters

It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to see how the eight characters in Group Green fitted into this system. And they fitted well enough that I thought it worthwhile to write this blog post. Now, some of the group matched up very obviously, examples being Elizabeth, Claude, Aiken and Bryan. Others, such as Amerie and Stein, seemed a lot less obvious and required considerable thought. I’m not claiming to be an expert on Jung – just someone who read a few books and saw some similarities. I’m also not claiming that the attempt to match up May’s characters with the personality types is perfect or definitive in any way. But I found some of the similarities striking and interesting (thinker that I am) and I hope you will too. I also dealt with the characters as they are at the beginning of the series, especially using the descriptions of each which is used to introduce them, as they undergo considerable development in the course of four books.

If you have not read the books, you might find that one or two plot details are given away in the following, so avoid reading further if you wish to remain in complete ignorance.

With those provisos, here it is:

Extravert thinker – Elizabeth Orme

According to Robertson, the extravert thinker is a character who like rational conclusions, tidiness, order and rules by which to organise their lives. They often seek roles in life such as executives or government officials. Elizabeth, the star redactor who was in goverment service before her journey into exile, and whose arc through the series involves her coming to terms with her inferior function of feeling, is a classic extravert thinker.

Extravert feeler – Aiken Drum

Robertson seals the comparison on this one with the use of just one word: “flamboyant.” He also says that the extravert feeler is a “people person,” comfortable in any social situation and rather prone to tell people what they want to hear rather than presenting them with uncomfortable reality. They only feel fully alive when surrounded by other people and will acquire philosophies and belief systems wholesale rather than doing the hard work of sorting them out for themselves. Aiken’s arc through the book is a journey from complete irresponsibility to ultimate responsibility – something that forces him to engage with his inferior function and become more thoughtful.

Extravert intuitive – Felice Landry

Intuitives are never interested in the past or present, always what is coming next over the horizon, a characteristic personified by Felice’s pursuit of the golden torc. Felice is another person who never feels truly alive unless surrounded by others and has the extravert intuitive characteristic of picking out similarities where most would only see differences – most notably between herself and Amerie. Among many other very, very damaging aspects to Felice’s personality she is poor at dealing with life’s practicalities and, indeed, at some points during Group Green’s journey expects these things to be taken care of for her by the others while she keeps her eyes fixed on the (to her) far more interesting possibilities of the future.

Extravert sensate – Claude Majewski

The typical career for an extravert sensate is in science where these people can put their talent from drawing physical data from the world around them to its best use. Robertson also says that extravert sensates are the ultimate realists, who accept the world as it is and deal with it – as Claude accepts the death of his wife and the decision of Amerie to go into exile.

Introvert thinker – Bryan Grenfell

Introverted thinkers are far more interested with the ideas and concepts that occupy their minds than the reality of facts and people around them. And if there’s a conflict, guess which wins! A better description of Bryan’s ill-fated obsession with an idealised Mercy, one that bore little resemblance to the actual woman, is hard to imagine. With feeling as an inferior function, he also struggled to articulate his emotions. And, when presenting his thesis on the consequences of human-Tanu hybridisation, he had no concept of its practical consequences for him, only of the importance of his ideas.

Introvert feeler – Stein Olesen

This is one of the more unlikely-sounding of the psychological types, since Robertson suggests that it is almost invariably female, and a more masculine figure than Stein is hard to imagine. But, even so, the similarities are striking. Introvert feelers judge the present by comparison with the past, something Stein does constantly in his yearning for former days. They cannot articulate their feelings or easily express them – Stein experiences many humiliations and frustrations which are revealed to the reader through his internal monologue, but never expressed to those around him. Such people often appear outwardly banal or childish while possessing a profound internal depth. Robertson describes them as “the consciences of the world,” a role Stein plays in particular when trying to dissuade Felice from genocide. Perhaps most importantly, Stein’s arc through the book leads him to find a soulmate who teaches him to articulate his feelings.

Introvert intuitive – Richard Voorhees

Richard’s complete failure to live in the present is his downfall when, with his eyes fixed on the prize of a huge bonus for delivering a cargo on time, he ignores the distress calls of another ship. Before his exile his whole life has been lived in this way, a study in perpetual motion, always going forward, always seeking whatever is over the horizon. His assumption of the guise of the Flying Dutchman could not be more apposite. And that Richard is an introvert is not in dispute – until he arrives in the Pliocene his idea of fulfilling contact is the functions on his spaceship that are programmed to have human voices.

Introvert sensate – Sister Amerie Roccaro

Robertson characterises the introverted sensate as like a photographic plate soaking up information with the senses. One of our first proper views of Amerie is of her sitting silent and immobile on a hillside with Claude shortly after the death of his wife, doing exactly this to the exclusion of all else including Claude’s words to her. I struggled at first to place Amerie as an introvert, as I did Stein, since her vocation is one of the ultimate ‘people’ roles. But then I realised that part of her journey through the book is to the realisation that her vocation was misplaced and an attempt to compensate for highly traumatic events early in her life. The key is the internal processes of the character rather than the face they present to the world.

So there it is. Comments, feedback and politely-expressed contrary views are, of course, very welcome.

More kudos for whoever stocks the graphic novel shelf in my local library – I hereby send you another “ook” of cyber-approval. Knowing about the Alan Moore connection, and having read The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, I just had to give this one a try and ended up thoroughly satisfied that I had.

It’s not for those with weak stomachs, however, this being good old-fashioned supernatural horror of a particularly gory sort perpetrated on the reader by a bloke who (although technically Liverpudlian) immediately looked, sounded and behaved to me exactly like the evil twin of Danny Blue from Hustle. If you want another popular culture reference, Constantine seems to me to share a certain amount with the Tenth Doctor as well – in that he is a profound humanist, however the lives of anyone he comes into close or prolonged contact with seem to end up crumbling to dust. But all these nods from the 2000s are hopelessly inappropriate anyway, since the man himself was created in 1985 and based on Sting in Quadrophenia.

This volume is a trade paperback collecting the first nine episodes of Hellblazer and including an introduction by Delano published in 1992 in which he says: “My personal response to the state of our civilisation has been to acquire a boat to live on. Then, when the oceans rise, I shall be able to sail cheerfully about, sneering at the capitalists marooned on their skyscraper-islands in the flooded financial districts of the northern hemisphere, basking contentedly in the solar radiation pouring, unfiltered, down upon a sterile ocean from a pure blue ozone hole.” Prescient chap. The storylines in this volume include the task of dealing with a hunger spirit set loose by some unwise meddling by an old acquaintance of Constantine’s; a cabal of demons exploiting the greed of yuppies to stage a power grab; the introduction of the sinister Resurrection Crusade and their Pyramid of Prayer selling scheme; Constantine’s missing ten-year-old niece and the introduction and later fate of the enigmatic Zed.

Things get a bit complicated at the end of the book, when Constantine encounters the Swamp Thing and collides with the wider DC universe and is sent off like a pinball on a new story arc. But that doesn’t impair the enjoyment, and although the stories in this volume are a bit variable in quality (Going For It didn’t work so well for me, perhaps it’s just too much of it’s time, although actually I do seem to remember being there at the time) it’s a pretty gripping read overall. The art rises to meet it with a gritty, rough-grained apprearance featuring plenty of hard pencil-marks and visible shading, and a palette that ranges from sepia to downright garish, often indicating the psychic temperature of proceedings. Definitely a worthwhile investment of time for those with a strong stomach and an imagination within the normal range of activity…

2007 Reading Challenge: Book 63

When I was talking about Modesty Blaise stories a few entries back, I pointed out that to read them you had to be prepared to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Well, this book is constructed around one of them – the idea that one of the protagonists has genuine, reliable and unforced psychic powers, probably best described as a form of precognition.

This is a subject that clearly interests O’Donnell greatly as it frequently crops up in the books in a multitude of ways from Willie Garvin’ sense that trouble is on the horizon that manifests semi-humorously in his ears prickling to Sir Gerald Tarrant’s entirely accurate hunch that the disappearance of a large amount of mercenaries from general circulation means that someone, somewhere is collecting them up for nefarious purposes.

If the notion of a plot predicated on belief in precognition doesn’t bother you too much, then the rest of the book should be a treat. Modesty stumbles across one end of the caper after having to save the life of a dear friend, the head of French intelligence, when he is attacked by a band of hired killers. As her and Willie’s attention turns to sorting out who on earth is trying to kill him, Tarrant is able to get information that leads our heroes to a former trusted member of their own organisation The Network now doing hard labour in a Yugoslav prison camp.

He is able to provide a name that takes them on towards a Scandinavian island to check the lie of the land – and it looks like a piece of clever deception by Modesty will serve up the solution to their puzzle on a plate. Until a desperately unfortunate coincidence blows her plan wide-open. She is taken prisoner and, while Willie searches for a way to free her, she becomes more deeply entangled in the villains’ schemes than she could ever have envisaged – and has to attempt a coup in order to get herself and those she cares about out of danger.

This, I am told, is vying for the title of ‘best Modesty Blaise novel’ and, on what I’ve read so far, I wouldn’t argue with that. It’s got a much-needed lighter tone after the grimness of Sabre Tooth and a difference of scale in its plot which is also rather important. It’s funny, offbeat and has just the right balance of action, romance and danger. It also creates two of the most grotesque villains ever to grace the pages of a novel. A welcome addition to the series and a very good read.

2007 Reading Challenge: Book 58

Every year, on assorted reading challenge blogs, readers’ forums and mailing lists, the question comes up of what represents a book. For instance, is it permissible to count childrens’ books towards your total? Graphic novels? Audiobooks? And so the list goes on.

And there is the tedious necessity, before embarking on anything of this kind, to decide what you are going to count and what you are not. Personally, I am a keen reader of graphic novels but tend to only count them if they take a reasonable investment of time and have something to say. Thus individual volumes of The Sandman are in, while Angel and Buffy comic collections tend not to be. I almost never listen to audiobooks, so no problems there. And any children’s book that’s well-enough written to command adult attention is just fine by me – examples that have appeared in this blog include Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth, Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass and Kit Williams’ wonderful Masquerade.

But here’s a dilemma I haven’t seen covered anywhere. Does it count if someone reads the book out loud to you? Well, this is what Beloved Other Half very kindly did, over a period of several evenings. Knowing that wherever two readers gather together these things can be argued about, and that there is no single answer that will suit everyone, I will state definitively that I am delighted to include books that are read aloud to me (and ones I read aloud to other people).

So, to the book and the reason why this is quite a daunting review to write. Beloved Other Half has been a fan of these books since he was in his early teens and is a pretty obsessive collector, with hard-to-find comic strip reprints, original 60s paperbacks and even bits of original artwork all either lining the bookshelves or on his list of things to acquire.

So, in the face of all this expertise, what can I say about it? Well, to love these books you will have to love genre fiction. The genre under discussion is that peculiarly 60s class of action-adventure that encompasses James Bond, The Saint plus The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and is the sort of thing that Mike Myers now attempts to send up in the guise of Austin Powers. And maybe, just maybe, has informed JJ Abrams and the scriptwriters of Alias in developing the Sydney Bristow character.

Modesty Blaise herself, at the outset of the series, is a retired criminal mastermind who has made her fortune and now, aged roughly 26, has disbanded her gang and is leading the life of the idle rich from her London penthouse and her villa in Tangier. Her former right-hand man and best friend Willie Garvin has similarly left it all behind and settled down to become a respectable pub landlord in Thames-side Berkshire – at the aptly-named “Treadmill.”

Except this sensible plan has backfired. Both are restless and dissatisfied – Willie so much so that, unknown to Modesty, he has lost his head, turned the pub over to a manager (who does a better job than him, anyway) and signed up with a gang of South American mercenaries in a desperate quest for a bit of excitement. And, as always when she’s not around to help him keep things straight, he’s got himself into terrible bother. Now he’s sitting in a godawful prison in the middle of the jungle waiting to be executed and without the will to do much about it.

Meanwhile, back in London, Modesty learns she has not remained as anonymous as she might have hoped: Sir Gerald Tarrant, a gentleman with a top-level remit for British overseas intelligence, has been reading her dossier. He wants Modesty’s help with a little problem involving oil revenues, a foreign potentate and a literal crateful of diamonds.

In the newspaper strip he holds the means to bring her whole world crashing down around her ears – a piece of information that calls her immigration status into question – and he intends to use it to blackmail her into working for him. But, on meeting her and finding a poised and lovely young woman completely unlike the one he was expecting, he simply hasn’t the heart to do it. In the book it’s Willie’s predicament and whereabouts that he plans to hold over her. Instead he gives her the information freely, enabling her to act on it and rescue her lieutenant from certain death. (Both are regarded as canon, to make it particularly confusing).

From these acts a powerful friendship grows between him, Modesty and Willie that is the springboard for the events in this first book and in the series in general: the kind of espionage assignments that Sir Gerald’s ‘regular’ agents are unable to bring off, revenge-fuelled encounters with criminals that the pair have done down in the past and who don’t respect the notion of ‘retirement’, scrapes got into by acquaintances of Tarrant’s, lovers of both Modesty’s and Willie’s and other friends in need, or even mere casual acquaintances who have to be fished out of life-threatening situations. For Blaise and Garvin have a knack of just walking into the middle of trouble even without the aid of a top-ranking intelligence officer, a decade spent generating grudges among their fellow-criminals, a web of contacts all around the Mediterranean and Near East plus a taste for living dangerously to generate plots for them.

So, why is this stuff any good? O’Donnell is undoubtedly asking us to believe six impossible things before breakfast and to travel any distance in this series you will have to not be snobbish about reading for pleasure and escapism, to enjoy genre fiction and to be prepared to suspend the requisite amount of disbelief for a novel of this kind. But there are several reasons why the author makes this rather easier for you than you might fear.

For one, he is an absolute master at highly complex characterisation. Modesty in particular is given a past history and set of motivations stemming from her presence as a small, unaccompanied child in a Displaced Persons camp in the Balkans in 1945 that more than satisfactorily explains her mindset and abilities. It is based on an actual child that O’Donnell once encountered at an army camp in Persia while on national service. Her unusual relationship with Willie – based on trust, mutual respect and a vast well of shared experience in areas undreamt-of by the vast majority of people, and completely untarnished by any shred of possessiveness or sexual jealousy, is set up beautifully.

In Sir Gerald we see a man who is tortured by the demands of his job – an urbane, courteous, thoroughly British gentleman who nonetheless must occasionally send his agents into certain-death situations, while he stays safe behind a desk, and sacrifice individuals for the common good. If that extends to allowing Modesty to put herself into horrible, violent, life-threatening positions – well, he always promises himself ‘never again’ and is rarely able to keep that promise. Not only the principal players get this treatment. The villains, the sidekicks and members of the supporting cast who are barely sketched in are all treated with a lavish amount of authorial attention.

Additionally, the characters have a cast-iron moral code that consistently governs all their decisions and behaviour. When Modesty and Willie were in business they were jewel thieves, art thieves and brokers of industrial secrets. They never touched drugs, kidnapping or prostitution and would be brutally unforgiving towards those who did. While they will both kill people from their dark world without compunction (they tend to either be ’signed off’ or ‘put down’ depending on how badly they’ve behaved – but I guess this is a fairly meaningless linguistic distinction to the victim) as well as taking out people whose continued existence they see as harmful, they will never kill ‘civilians’ or hurt them more than they have to. And while they lead extremely latitudinarian personal lives they never seek to misrepresent the situation to potential partners or to represent that there is more on the table in commitment terms than there actually is.

O’Donnell backs up his skill in characterisation with the most assured plotting imaginable – he always seems to me to send the story exactly where it ought to go next. So, while his characters find themselves in unbelievable situations battling desperate circumstances, readers should have no problems following them as long as they’re reasonably signed up to the whole enterprise and have followed each step on the way. Add in a generous dash of humour and a keen understanding of the power of a good tension-breaking joke and you’ve got a formula that has been keeping thriller-readers entertained for a good 40 years now.

The Wine of Angels – Phil Rickman

My first venture into this author’s work and, on the strength of it, I would definitely come again. The Wine of Angels is a dark and complex story about the forces – both supernatural and considerably more prosaic – that are unleashed in the Herefordshire village of Ledwardine on the appointment of its new priest in charge. She’s a nicotine-addicted single mother by the name of Merrily Watkins.

The powers-that-be in Ledwardine react in their different ways to Merrily. Some resent her and seem only too ready to find an excuse to reject her. Others, with roots that stretch back every bit as far if not further as these supposed traditionalists, welcome her as a catalyst for profound change.

In the meantime Merrily is rattling around a huge and unsuitable vicarage grappling with the expectations set by her supine predecessor, a profound lack of self-confidence, periodic crises of faith, the personal problems of parishioners, the first risky voyages out of the harbour of her teenage daughter, the unwelcome attentions of a sex-crazed organist and the appearances of a positively shamanic gift-shop proprietor who certainly far knows more about what’s happening than she’s letting on.

Too much for one person? Of course it is, especially when her life has hardly been a bed of roses in recent years. As the strain mounts, and Merrily starts to buckle, she threatens to bring the village status quo crashing down with her. And the consequences of that are murderous.

Rickman makes an excellent fist of writing female characters and his two major protagonists, Merrily and her daughter Jane, are alive on the page with a sparky relationship that’s easy to believe in. Bits of their dialogue are laugh-out-loud funny – not least Jane’s spoof of pensioners complaining in the post office queue, and also her mother’s admission of how she got her name.

But I certainly wasn’t laughing for very long. The book is shot through with a black, supernatural chill that doesn’t stop much short of outright horror and the author does a cracking job of swiftly building characters you really care about and then really putting them through the wringer. You end up terrified for the two women and their allies, not wanting to put the book down, but not really fancying turning the page, for fear of what it will reveal.

I love books that produce this effect. Highly recommended.

Some links:

• Phil Rickman’s website
• An interview with Merrily Watkins
• An interview with Phil Rickman
• Wikipedia: Phil Rickman
• Phil Rickman bibliography
• BBC Inside Out: Deliverance ministers

* This year’s challenge is now complete, and this was a fine book with which to do it…

Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

Whoa. The classics. These are the ones that intimidate me. Not reading them, that’s generally highly enjoyable. It’s just finding something to say afterwards that hasn’t been said a thousand times already. When all the analysis has been done, all you can generally add is your personal reaction, I guess.

So, here goes.

I love Jane Austen, I truly do. From the point a while back when I first picked up Northanger Abbey and realised that, far from being a book to slog through the pages were just turning themselves. It had pace, humour and a delightfully wicked modern sensibility that made it laugh-out-loud funny in places. I think I followed it up with Pride and Prejudice which is as luxurious and self-indulgent as a long wallow in a hot bath full of expensive smellies, with a glass of red wine and a big box of Belgian chocolates conveniently to hand. And, all the time you are enjoying this gorgeous reading experience, you can tell other people you are busy with Serious Literature instead of high-class chick lit! It’s just great.

After this I strayed into a slightly more serious Austen byway – the one containing Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Both of these books have a serious tone and a sad inflection that is not present in the two works mentioned above. The first of these is the story of Fanny Price, a poor girl who is taken in then ruthlessly patronised and done down by her richer relatives. Despite its fascinating references to the sugar and slave trades, it is not the most popular of Austen reads due to its highly ambiguous heroine. It seems obvious from the first few pages what the outcome of the plot must be, and the tension in the book is thus from seeing how this outcome will be achieved. The author indicates where our sympathies should lie, and then makes it hard to sympathise with the people she suggests because they are, to be frank, such dreadful prigs. This is an intensely multi-layered narrative – we seem to see the endorsement of a set of values about society and morality which are then torn down to their foundations by the end of the book. The theme of romantic happiness, which seems at some points to be given such significance, and which figures so profoundly and satisfyingly in other works by the author, not least Pride and Prejudice, is ultimately treated almost superficially.

Persuasion is a bit easier on the reader, being the story of attempts by diffident lovers Anne Elliot and the poor but ambitious young naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, to live happily ever after despite the best efforts of their family and friends. Again, the romantic theme one might expect predominates but its progress through the book is characterised more by a mood of disappointment and unhappiness than by the humour and fighting spirit of an Elizabeth Bennet, or the imagination and vivacity of a Catherine Morland.

So, having formed a most perfect acquaintance with these two contrasting sides to the works of Miss Austen did I thus approach Sense and Sensibility.

And it was a great experience. I loved the wry humour, the authorial asides (especially on the subject of besotted parents and their annoying kids), the gripping plot, the sense that the good ended well – but not too well, while the bad got their just desserts – to a degree. I rediscovered all the pleasure I had found in the first two Austen novels I read, was thrilled, entertained, amused and saddened.

Go and read Jane Austen, is what I’m saying, dear reader, or you will sadly regret all the wasted years in which you did not…

Some links:

• Project Gutenberg: Sense and Sensibility
• News on the BBC’s planned adaptation (April 07)
• Pemberley (Jane Austen fan community): Sense and Sensibility
• Was Sense and Sensibility originally an epistolary novel?
• Wikiquote: Sense and Sensibility
• The Austen Blog
• Penguin reading guide
• Random House readers’ guide
• Jane Austen Society UK: Sense and Sensibility
• Wikipedia: Sense and Sensibility
• There’ll be questions later… a Sense and Sensibility crossword

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)

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 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 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

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

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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This is a story (adapted from a television series) for anyone who’s ever wondered about the court of the Earl’s Court earl, thought of meeting an angel called Islington or understood the awful perils of crossing Night’s Bridge. It’s required reading if you’ve ever experienced a frisson of fear at the mention of the shepherds of Shepherd’s Bush, or wondered what exactly it is that lives in The Gap that you have to be so very careful to mind. To my everlasting delight, there is a train that calls at British Museum – a relic of underground history you can still spot to this day from the windows of a Central Line train travelling between Holborn and Tottenham Court Road. This might sound a little bit foolish – but really, this book is based on a terrifying premise that is the stuff of nightmare. It is this: that as we go about our lives in London Above something might happen to make us fall down the cracks to London Below – thus becoming dispossessed, invisible, in danger. It is the guilty secret of every adult who still recalls exactly why stepping on the cracks in the pavement used to seem like such a very bad idea. It has a tightly woven plot, some terrible villains hidden neatly in plain view and appears to have acted as a powerful piece of inspiration to the writers of a recently popular cop show… hang on, that’s a spoiler. Ignore me, please. (Or maybe there really are only so many stories in the world.)

One thing that resonates all the way down to the soles of my feet with this book is the way bits of good solid fact are woven into the outrageous fantasy for the reader to bite into in the same way that you might encounter a great big bit of fudge or lump of chocolate in Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. The introduction to Neverwhere shows the protagonist (why do I hesitate over the term hero? Probably because he’d be so uncomfortable with it himself) sitting on the kerb outside a pub fighting down the urge to vomit after an extravagant leaving party given by colleagues and a good deal of drink taken. An old lady comes up to him, mistakes him for a homeless person and gives him fifty pence. A moment’s consultation of Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion reveals how art is imitating life and that this exact same course of events was visited on Neil Gaiman himself. Only that, instead of a pub, it was a restaurant. And the cause of the nausea was not over-partaking in alcohol but comics guru Alan Moore telling the assembled company a particularly lurid and sanguinous tale about a Jack the Ripper murder. Neil Gaiman, fearing for the future of his dinner, had to leave the table, and was later found outside sitting on the kerb in exactly the circumstances described above, attempting to persuade a well-wisher that he was not a beggar. Which just goes to prove that, the very best stuff, well, you just couldn’t make it up. Another example occurs on page 96 of my Headline paperback edition and is quoted here for convenience:

The deep tunnels had been dug in the early days of the Second World War. Troops had been quartered there in their thousands, their waste needing to be pumped up by compressed air to the level of the sewers far above. Both sides of the tunnels had been lined with metal bunk beds for the troops to sleep on. There had been plans to assimilate the tunnels into a high-speed extension to the underground system, but these plans had come to nothing and when the war ended the bunk beds had stayed in the tunnels, and on their wire bases cardboard boxes were stored, each box filled with letters, files and papers: secrets, of the dullest kind, stored down deep, to be forgotten. Economies had closed the deep tunnels completely in the early 1990s. The boxes of secrets were removed, to be scanned and stored on computers, or shredded, or burned.

If this isn’t hard, solid fact then it is so believable that you couldn’t get a cigarette paper between it and the truth. It’s the little details – the compressed air, the underground extension, the scanning or shredding of the old papers as a cost-saving measure, that makes this so utterly convincing. All in all Neverwhere is a highly-recommended, very good read, and not just for the Londonophiles and Tube trivia nuts in the audience. A great introduction to Mr Gaiman’s work in novel form (even though he inadvertently posted a great big fat spoiler for this very tale on his blog just the other day, right about the time I was coming to the relevant bit in the plot…) and arguably now accepted as much more successful than the TV series, conceived with Lenny Henry, that caused it to be created. Thanks to the kind Bookcrosser who made this available through a book ring.

Some links:

• Wikipedia: Neverwhere (novel)
• h2g2: Neverwhere
• The SF Site: Neverwhere review
• Neverwhere: Harper Collins reading guide
• Wikipedia: British Museum Tube station
• Underground History: disused stations

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

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

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

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

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