Died to Make Men Free

Books read this week: The Killer Angels 7/10 (Michael Shaara)

As is usually the case over Christmas, I've been pretty busy, and as I've received quite a few books over the holiday period, I've been dipping into several of them, with the net result that I've only finished one of them so far. The Killer Angels is a historical novel about the battle of Gettysburg; it was adapted (very faithfully) into the film Gettysburg, and it's a fairly entertaining read, if you can get past the bombastic pomposity that seems to afflict a huge proportion of American historical works; it's almost as if they feel that because they don't have very much history, it all has to be treated with massively exaggerated respect, and they have to make palpably absurd claims about it (like calling the American Civil War "one of the greatest wars the world has ever seen" - a statement which is self-evidently false to anyone with even a passing knowledge of European or Chinese history).

What I found most irritating about the book was that it buys into the (unfortunately very popular) narrative that the Confederacy were somehow worthy and noble opponents fighting for a way of life, rather than the Nazis v 0.1. This is a common flaw in treatments of the American Civil War, but I was surprised to see it pop up in such an (otherwise very well researched) book: the sequence where the Joshua Chamberlain, the Union colonel and the escaped slave is particularly infuriating - the African-American is presented as having been recently brought across the Atlantic, and therefore having no command of English. Not only is this extremely improbable (the Royal Navy had swept the slave traders from the seas thirty years prior, and any slave trader bringing slaves into the South would have to evade not only the Royal Navy, but also a (very efficient) Union blockade), but it is a literary sleight of hand designed deliberately to deprive the slave of a voice: we get a lot of white men telling us what they think he thinks, or what he should think, or why what he thinks doesn't matter, but we can't actually hear his voice. Of course, the reason for this is very simple: once you have read the histories of ex-slaves it's impossible to feel even the slightest sympathy for the Confederacy, in much the same way that once you've seen pictures of Bergen-Belsen you can't feel any sympathy for the Nazi regime.

Inquisitors, Skeletons and Angry Glaswegians

Books read this week: The Grand Inquisitor 5/10 (Fyodor Dostoyevsky), Gardens of the Moon 7/10 (Steven Erikson), Devil Bones 5/10 (Kathy Reichs), My Shit Life So Far 6/10 (Frankie Boyle)

Bit of an odd mix of books this week. The Grand Inquisitor is, of course, an extract from the Brothers Karamazov; a sort of strange story within a story where Christ returns to earth for a day to visit Spain at the height of the Inquisition. I didn't find it particularly interesting, or, indeed, in any way enlightening; possibly because the translation I was reading was abysmal (littered with "thees" and "thous" which, unless you're transliterating the speech of someone with a strong Yorkshire accent is either an unforgivable attempt to sound olde timey or a lazy attempt to translate from a language which maintains the formal and informal second person pronoun distinction). It also possesses a common flaw in alternate history works in that Dostoyevsky doesn't know his history (this is why I tend to avoid alternate history like the plague): the Spanish Inquisition was entirely subordinated to the needs of the Spanish monarchy - had he written about the Roman Inquisition his points might be more valid - which further increases the irony of the piece, as the Tsarist government (which Dostoyevsky supported at this stage of his career) had a very similar relationship with the Russian Orthodox church at this point in time (in fact, it is the total subordination of the church to a tyrannical regime which led to both the Catholic Church in Spain and the Orthodox Church in Russia taking such a pasting when the tyrannical regimes were overthrown). Perhaps the story would make more sense in context (and it would definitely make more sense in a better translation).

Gardens of the Moon is the first installment in Erikson's gigantic Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Erikson says in the introduction he set out with the aim of writing something like Dune. In this he has definitely failed; Dune is a stupendous book, with fascinating multifaceted characters and a deeply strange, but also comprehensible and believable universe. Gardens of the Moon is a fairly good and decently well written fantasy novel; but Erikson has failed (thus far; obviously there are nine more books to go in the series) to construct a world that I find complete and immersive: that said Erikson does avoid the cardinal sin of fantasy and science fiction writing, which is over-explanation and over reliance on a single concept.

I can generally divide fantasy and science fiction books into two categories: the fantasy/sci-fi novel and the novel in a fantastic or science fiction setting. It's not a hard and fast distinction, but basically the fantasy/sci-fi novel skates by on elves, magic or spaceships: the science fiction drives the plot (because the characters can't); the novel in a fantastic setting on the other hand is more about well developed characters who face interesting dilemmas (which just happen to involve elves, magic and/or spaceships). Basic questions that can be used to separate the two: would I still want to read this if the characters were transplanted to present-day Slough? (If yes then it's a novel in a fantastic setting) Can the plot of the novel be reduce to "What if XXXX"? (If yes then it's a sci-fi novel) Does the world feel complete? (If yes then it's a novel in a fantastic setting) Does the author explain exactly and explicitly how the setting differs from the everyday world in the first chapter (If yes then i) it's a sci-fi novel and ii) it's a bad sci-fi novel). So I would label Dune, The Song of Ice and Fire, and everything Richard Morgan has ever written as novels in a fantastic/sci-fi setting, whilst Charles Stross and David Weber write sci-fi novels (this is not to say Stross' work is bad, quite the contrary, but that he puts the emphasis on the science fiction rather than the novel).

Gardens of the Moon seems to me to fall very close to the boundary. Erikson doesn't fall into the sin of over-explanation, which means it does take about a quarter of the book to work out what's going on, but I do feel that in this novel at least the fantasy McGuffin was driving the plot overmuch (which is partly why it took so long to work out what was going on; the more transparent motives of greed, ambition and self aggrandisement in a Song of Ice and Fire, for example, are much more transparent), and I certainly didn't feel like there was a complete world and that I'm just seeing flashes of it, the way I do with the Song of Ice and Fire and the Takeshi Kovacs books (and even with the Lord of the Rings). Partly this is because we don't really see anything that isn't immediately plot relevant; in many ways I think the needs of writing a tight, sparse plot are in direct opposition to those of developing a fully realised fantasy world (not that Gardens of the Moon is a short book): all those discussions of types of pipe-weed and elvish languages in the Lord of the Rings and the fragments of the Butlerian Jihad and the Bene Gesserit mantras in Dune don't actually add much to the plot directly, but they do create the impression that there's a whole world out there, and we are just seeing one very small part of it: this is something Erikson doesn't manage in the Gardens of the Moon. That said, I did enjoy the book, and I'm certainly going to keep working my way through the series (and I always like to have a nice long series to plough my way through ahead of me)

Devil Bones was a disappointing book. It's one of those crime stories where the main detective doesn't seem to do much detecting, and also seems (for someone who's supposed to be a top rank forensic anthropologist) to be extremely dense. I dislike mysteries that are solved in the last chapter by Deus Ex Machina; it seems very much to defeat the point of a detective novel. I also dislike detectives who are less perceptive than me (because, frankly, I'm not that perceptive). I think Reichs intended the book as packaging for a message that Santeria and Wicca are legitimate religions; this is, of course, true, but I doubt anyone is going to be convinced of that by reading a mediocre crime novel: frankly, if actual reality can't dispel your delusions, an train station shop thriller isn't going to do the job.

My Shit Life So Far is Frankie Boyle (of Mock the Week fame)'s autobiography. He is a very angry man. It's not a brilliantly good book, but it's not an awful book either. Obviously there's a fair amount of material recycled from his standup routines: I do find it interesting that some comedians (Mark Steel springs to mind) write excellent books, but are somewhat lacklustre on stage: Boyle is in many ways the opposite. Partly I think it's that black rage and bile are excellent in small doses (which is why he was so excellent on Mock the Week), but are somewhat overwhelming when repeated continuously for 300 pages.

Candles In The Dark

Books read this week: The Demon-Haunted World 8/10 (Carl Sagan)

I first read The Demon-Haunted World twelve or thirteen years ago. There was a (rather battered) copy in the local library, rather ironically filed with the books on alien abductions and the razor-blade sharpening properties of pyramids (I've always wondered why it is that pyramids are supposed to sharpen razor blades specifically - why not knives or forks?). The Demon-Haunted World had a profound effect upon me; it is probably one of the two or three most influential books I have ever read and I very much doubt I would have studied science at university had I not read it. There is a certain symmetry then, in returning to it now, when my thesis is almost done and I'm nearly done with the scientific part of my life.

The Demon-Haunted World is Carl Sagan's plea for better scientific education as a buttress against superstition and stupidity and for teaching sceptical thinking as a tool for preserving democracy. I remember that it moved me when I was young - but I am older and more cynical now. Not that I don't still think scientific thinking and scepticism are important things to learn' in fact, I think one chapter of this book  - "The Baloney Detection Kit" - should be compulsory reading for all school children, as it contains the best and most succinct summary of the ways in which people (let's be honest, primarily politicians) try to lie to us. Of course, that is why, the world being as it is right now, no one is going to give it to them. This is why I find the book less impressive than I did when I first read it: yes it would be nice if the general level of scientific education was higher. Yes it would be nice if fewer people believed in astrology/homeopathy/etc. Yes it would be nice if people were more sceptical and less willing to take pronouncements from authority on faith. But what we really need is a way in which to make that happen, and Carl Sagan comes up a little short on policies. Partly this is a matter of timing: the book was written in 1996, during that brief, odd, hopeful decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 when economic growth was high and international politics were relatively quiet (insert the obvious caveat about Rwanda and Yugoslavia) - it's a decade when we could have fixed the world's problems and chose not to. I'm sure that in the future historians will look back on the 1990s as the Wasted Decade and ask why we didn't do more about poverty and climate change and whatever other crises are hurtling towards us. But as I said, it was a hopeful time, and I think that's why I saw it so positively back when I first read it - it seemed like all we had to do was identify the solution, and then implement it. Now I recognise that you also need to work out how to implement the solution.

Looking at the book with a more critical eye, I also notice now how American-centric the book is: it was rather surprising, for example, to be told that the concept of a trial by jury was an invention of the Founding Fathers, when we've been using it in one form or another in England since at least 1100, and probably since before the Norman Conquest. Also, were I constructing a list of "Fathers (and Mothers) of Democracy" I have to say that not only would Thomas Jefferson not be at the top of the list, I doubt he'd be on the list at all. Certainly Cleisthenes, Pericles, the Gracchi and John Lilburne come above Jefferson. I'd also rate Robespierre, Danton and Saint-Just as well as Marx and Tom Paine far above Jefferson. I'd also take issue with any description of the USA as a "democracy" before about 1965 (in the same way that the UK can't really be described as a democracy until at least 1918 (universal male suffrage and women's suffrage) and probably, really 1928 (when women were granted the vote on the same universal terms as men)).

That said I am forever endebted to Sagan for introducing me to both Frederick Douglass and Tom Paine, both of whom are heroes of mine. I have relatively few heroes, but I have always found Frederick Douglass, in particular, an enormous inspiration: a testament to the power of human determination and the indomitable human spirit. His autobiography is a brilliant account of the power of literacy and knowledge (the message Carl Sagan takes) and also of the way in which absolute power corrupted the slave owning aristocracy of the antebellum south absolutely: Douglass' description of a previously pleasant woman turning slowly into a monster when she inherited slaves is one that has always stayed with me. I have often been struck by the similarities between the Confederacy and the Nazi regime - both were essentially regimes of bullies, and fundamentally cowardly ones at that, and both had a strongly antagonistic relationship with the truth.

Ultimately, for all the imperfections I found reading The Demon-Haunted World again after all these years it remains a fascinating book, and an excellent introduction to Science (with a capital S) and to sceptical thinking, and it has a brilliant dissection of the alien abduction and witch hunting crazes that swept the world. The book is worth reading just for "The Baloney Detection Kit" alone. I just wish I could still be as optimistic as I was the first time I read it.

This Is How The World Ends

Books read this week: The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF 6/10, The Book of Were-Wolves 7/10 (Sabine Baring-Gould)

Not a cheerful set of books this week. The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF is exactly what it says on the tin: an anthology of short stories divided fairly equally into stories about the end of the world as we know it, and stories set after the end of the world. I found the former generally more interesting than the latter: how people behave under extraordinary circumstances is fascinating, whilst predictions of life in the far future often aren't (especially when you suppose that as we've used up all our fossil fuel reserves any post-apocalyptic society will be necessarily neolithic, something which flies in the face of all human experience: it's not like the Romans or the ancient Greeks made extensive use of fossil fuels - certainly not to the extent that their societies couldn't function without them). Particular highlights include "The Clockwork Atomic Bomb",  which is probably the best story in the book, but not really about an apocalypse per se: more about the years leading up to it: it's also one of the few stories here that isn't based entirely on a European or American perspective of the apocalypse, which made of a bit of a change. "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" and "Fermi and Frost" were also pretty good. "A Pail of Air" was memorable, but stretched my suspension of disbelief. "World Without End" is a fairly nice updating of the old myth of the Wandering Jew and the curse of immortality; the tale of an immortal London street walker with a vagina capable of mass-to-energy conversion. I wonder if the author drew from the sections of the Gilgamesh epic on Shamhat the Harlot for that story (I've always felt that Shamhat got a very raw deal).

It is also interesting the range of scenarios for the end of the world we have here: we have nuclear and biological as well as nanotechnological ragnaroks here, as well as out of control global warming and cosmic disasters. I wonder had this book been written twenty or thirty years ago, would we have so many different ways to destroy ourselves? Generally I'm very pro-technology, but it has to be said that as well as all manner of good things, science has also given us an ever-increasing variety of ways to destroy ourselves: as is so often the case, David Low put it perfectly: http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/record/LSE1258

Armageddon is depressing enough; somehow what people do when the world isn't about to end is that much more depressing. The Book of Were-Wolves is a fascinating 19th Century monograph: in theory it is an examination of the werewolf myth across the world, which would be interesting enough, but it is actually an examination of the way in which pre-enlightenment societies dealt with the kind of people we call serial killers today: Baring-Gould makes a very convincing argument that (unlike the various folk beliefs surrounding witchcraft) folk belief in werewolves is based upon the observation that occasionally individuals turn up who kill (and sometimes eat) other people for no readily apparent reason. With the knowledge of psychiatry we have today, we can begin to understand what can go wrong with someone, and how mental illness can lead them to commit otherwise inexplicable acts, but obviously if you're a medieval peasant and you find your neighbour eating your other neighbour you're probably just going to blame the devil and burn them. There is some discussion of the triggers for what we would call a psychotic break, and one gets the feeling that the first hesitant steps towards modern psychiatry are being taken.

The last part of the book is an interesting, although not very relevant digression into the history of some of the more famous mass murderers of the middle ages; there is a section on Elizabeth Bathory, which isn't particularly interesting, mainly because her crimes are sufficiently titillating that there's plenty of information about her life scattered across libraries, bookshops and the internet. However, the chapters on Gilles de Rais are far more interesting - not for the details of the crime themselves (horrific though they were; the descriptions of the silent villages where all the children had been stolen are like something out of a twisted fairy tale - except they were real and there was no happy ending) but rather for the way in which the investigation was conducted, and the efforts the secular authorities made to cover things up: in many ways the case reads like a lot of the child abuse scandals that hit the news today (although thankfully these usually end with a lower body count). First there is a reluctance to investigate such a high profile figure at all, then there is a failure to believe the evidence that is presented, and then, finally, there is an attempt to cover things up, because otherwise it'll be embarrassing. One also gets the feeling that de Rais found that, being part of the French aristocracy, most of the laws and conventions that ordinary people had to abide by didn't apply to him, and all he did really was to push the limits of what a rich aristocrat could get away with: he didn't realise that there were some actions so heinous that even his fellow aristocrats would (eventually) turn on him: one sees something similar in the Elizabeth Bathory's case. That said, the Duke of Brittany consistently tried to hush things up: it is to the eternal credit of the Bishop of Nantes that he refused to allow de Rais to creep away into a monastery, even when it would have been financially advantageous for him to do so. I almost wonder if there was a class aspect to this: the Duke of Brittany was (obviously) part of the French aristocracy, and displayed their typical contempt for the ordinary people of France. The Church, on the other hand, has always  had a far more meritocratic structure, and so the Bishop may well have come from a relatively poor family himself (compare Henry II's early life with that of Thomas a Becket). Either way, it is fascinating how little the response of a large and powerful institution to a crime of this nature has changed over the centuries.

Books Without Heroes

Books read this week: The British Revolution 7/10 (Robert Rhodes James), Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles 5/10 (Kim Newman), David Copperfield 6/10 (Charles Dickens)

Something of a miscellany of books this week, united only by their almost total lack of heroism. The British Revolution is a history of British politics covering the period 1880-1939. As something of a politics junkie myself, I found it fascinating, entertaining and terrifying in turn. It cover a tumultuous period; world wars and economic crises, the suicide of the Liberal party and the birth of the Labour party, the introduction of old age pensions, universal suffrage (a death blow to the Liberal party) and unemployment benefit. But it was also a period of intensely personal politics; a period when a personal antipathy between Joseph Chamberlain and Gladstone could shake the entire nation and destroy political parties, and also a period when the ability to  perform in the House of Commons was the skill and up and coming politician had to develop; something that changed during the period the books covers, as electorates became larger, and the mass media developed, but never entirely went away. It is the personal nature of the politics here that gives rise to most of the humour;    that and the leisurely lifestyle of the upper classes, which gave plenty of time for the refinement of barbed wit, and the construction of bon mots; a particular high point is Kitchener's observation that "All of my cabinet colleagues discuss military secrets with their wives - except X, who discusses them with other people's wives."

It has to be said that Rhodes is more charitable to Asquith, Baldwin and MacDonald that I would be; Baldwin's admission in the House of Commons that he had lied to the electorate about his policies because otherwise they wouldn't have voted for him is particularly damning, and of course Ramsay Mac occupies a place in the popular conscience of the Labour party somewhere between Judas Iscariot and Nick Clegg.

I said the book is terrifying, and it is, mainly because it all feels so familiar; we have misbehaving press barons, and economic stupidity on a grand scale (Churchill's return to the gold standard was a massive low point in what was a very chequered career), collusion between the Liberal and Conservative parties to lock the nascent Labour party out of power, by fair means or foul (Lloyd George even proposed the Alternative Vote as a means to that end), coalitions and mass unemployment. The book was written in the late 70s, and is absolutely damning about the prevailing wisdom in the 20s and 30s that it was possible to cut your way back to prosperity (whoever would think that now?) and about the ability of the upper classes to ignore mass unemployment. But the main failure we see in the book is one of political leadership: there was a long succession of governments very happy to blunder carelessly from disaster to disaster, enthusiasm undimmed, with no plan and no strategy, except a (misplaced) confidence that if they waited long enough eventually "something would turn up". This is really what scares me: not the prospect of long term mass unemployment (although that is a terrifying, soul-destroying thing) but of the extremism that it gives rise to. This is a dance we have been through before and we know how it ended last time - and yet no one seems to want to stop it.

My second book, Moriarty has no heroes but plenty of villains: it's an anthology by Kim Newman (of Anno Dracula fame) of stories about Dr Moriarty and Col. Moran - it includes "The Adventure of the Six Maledictions" which was the stand out story in Gaslight Arcanum which I read last week; unfortunately this is by far the best story in the book, although the rest does have it's moments. However I found the book's tendency to put in footnotes explaining or pointing out allusions to other works of Victorian fiction, and to minor aspects of 19th Century history quite grating: if I can't spot the allusion without a hint I don't really to spot it - the story should be enjoyable without needing a knowledge of esoteric Victoriana (not that I don't have a knowledge of esoterica Victoriana, but it really shouldn't be necessary) and the constant footnotes distract from the flow of the story: Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen does this much better (or did, at any rate, before it turned into pornography: impeccably referenced, period appropriate pornography, but pornography nonetheless).

And rounding off a Victorian-heavy entry, my final book this week was Dickens' David Copperfield. I have read relatively few of these gigantic mid-nineteenth century doorstoppers; the books where the author was paid by the work, and which were published in serial form. The only other ones I've read are Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo - both of which are on my list of best books of all time. Other than that, I tend to read older novels (Austen, Laclos and Scott) or newer ones, so this was something of a departure for me. I found David Copperfield interesting, and I'm certainly going to read more Dickens now I've started, but it didn't really compare to the Count of Monte Cristo or Vanity Fair for me. I read Orwell's stupendous essay on Dickens a long time ago, and having finished David Copperfield now I'm strongly inclined to agree with him: Dickens writes phenomenal, memorable caricatures. This is a great strength: Mr Micawber and Uriah Heep and Mr Murdstone will stay with me (although in the case of Mr Murdstone this is mainly because he could almost be the ur-example of a domestic abuser: all the signs they tell people to look out for are there) but also a weakness: caricatures don't develop, and they don't mature: they turn up, speak their catch phrases, and then retire. So although I'll remember them, the characters don't feel rounded enough that I care deeply about what happens to them; you can contrast this with Vanity Fair, which, when I read it for the first time, I stopped reading for two weeks when half way through because I didn't want bad things to happen to Dobbin and Becky Sharp. In fact, once past the part of the book on David Copperfield's early life, the only passage that moved me was when Uriah Heep tells David that for generations his family have been sent to schools where they teach them nothing except to by "umble". But I think the main thing that I found strange about the book is that David Copperfield never really seems to do very much - certainly he does almost nothing to move the plot forward. He is an observer; brought in to witness other people's actions and reactions. Obviously, when he's a child this is understandable, but when he grows up I kept waiting for him to actually do something, and he never did: of course, that statement probably ultimately applies to most of us, but I typically hold the protagonists of novels to a higher standard of being interesting. Indeed, I was reflecting on how the characters of Vanity Fair and The Count of Monte Cristo would deal with a man like Mr Murdstone: Becky Sharp would leave his reputation in tatters and his bank account empty, whilst if he dealt with Edmond Dantes, he would be lucky just to end up penniless and insane, his life's work in ruins (and I don't mean an entertainingly eccentric urge to write memorials on Charles I, but rather the screaming, raving strait-jacket wearing insanity that lands you deep in the Bedlam). Certainly neither of them would be content to let him live unmolested with a new family.

Of course, what David Copperfield shares with Vanity Fair is estwhile heroines who are stulifyingly boring (although Agnes shows a little more spark than Amelia Sedley, which is remarkably wet); it is, I think a very strange commentary on Victorian social mores that being as dull as ditch water was seen as something to aspire to: Jane Austen and Walter Scott's heroines, by contrast, have far more fire in the belly (although Rowena in Ivanhoe has something a little drippy about her, of course Rebecca is the real heroine of that book). The introduction assures me that Dickens' approach to "fallen women" was, for the time, extremely progressive, but his attitude toward Little Em'ly does not compare well with Thackeray's treatment of Becky Sharp (either in terms of modern ethics or sensible character development).

The only other thing I have to note is the strange belief Dickens expresses at the end of the book that the "separate system" in Pentonville where Uriah Heep and was somehow more humane than the unsanitary Georgian prisons that it replaced (the type of prison where you could pay the gaoler for food and rooms - the kind of prison you see in Hogarth prints); of course, the reason why the separate system was scrapped soon after it was introduced wasn't because it was too kind - it was because the sensory deprivation drove a sizable proportion of the prisoners mad.

God Bless Us, Every One!

Books read this week: A Christmas Carol 8/10 (Charles Dickens), Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes 7/10

Strange to say, I've never actually read any Dickens before now, and yet A Christmas Carol seems very familiar - a little like reading A Midsummer Night's Dream or Julius Caesar for the first time so many of the phrases and ideas in the book have entered the popular conscience that it feels like reading a book I already know. There is, near my parents' home, a church which goes by the wonderfully Dickensian name of the "Ebenezer Strict Baptist Church", a name which I can associate in my mind only with an elderly miser shouting "television is the work of the devil!"; indeed it's probably true to say that Dickens has ruined Ebenezer as a name forever more.

It is, of course, extremely good, and when I get time I'm going to work through some more Dickens (probably starting with some of the shorter stuff), and Dickens knows exactly how to push our emotional buttons. That said, whilst reading A Christmas Carol I was struck by the essential bankruptcy of the Dickens' nineteenth century liberal approach to social problems, and of the political philosophies which base themselves on it today. It's all well and good that Scrooge has his epiphany, and obviously it is a good thing for Scrooge that he starts doing good works to counteract his previous ill deeds, but it is a terrible thing that Bob Crachit and Tiny Tim are so totally dependent on his whims in the first place.

Indeed this is the fundamental problem with relying upon philanthropy to provide social services: the emphasis tends to be upon making the philanthropist feel good about themselves, rather than actually relieving distress; we can see this in that the Christmas Carol is about Scrooge's redemption - it's not about the Cratchit family's survival, except in so far as that impacts upon Scrooge's state of grace. Add to that the voluntary nature of philantropy, and the requirement to adhere to social norms that tends to be an unspoken requirement for receiving charity, and you have a system I can't embrace; indeed, one of the better passages of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a brutally cutting attack on the Organised Benevolence Society from someone who's had to sit on the other side of the table.

Gaslight Arcanum is a compendium of short stories which pit Sherlock Holmes against the weird, the wonderful and the exotic. I do like short stories - they are a format not much used today, and I do not read so many as I would like. However I was torn about what grade to give it; most of the stories in it are actually pretty bad, some because they miss the fundamental point of Sherlock Holmes, which is his mighty brain and his ability to always to know more than both Watson and the reader (something which could be done well with supernatural themes, but really isn't here), and some because they really aren't anything to do with Sherlock Holmes, but he's been shoehorned in so they fit into the anthology (the story in which Holmes is murdered before the first line by superintelligent killer bees is a particular low point. And yes, it is quite as bad as it sounds). This reinforced my usual resolution to avoid fan fiction, in all it's forms (except when it's written by William Makepeace Thackeray).

On the other hand the book only cost £2 and concludes with a marvellous tale by Kim Newman, "The Adventure of the Six Maledictions", which is absolutely brilliant, laugh out loud funny and gleefully dark. Of course, the reason it can manage this is that it is not, strictly, a Sherlock Holmes story - in fact the man himself does not appear once - it is, rather a Moriarty story. This gives Newman an almost blank canvas to work from; all Conan Doyle tells us of Moriarty is that he is i) "A Napoleon of Crime" and ii) formerly a mathematics professor. And of course we also have Colonel Moran, who (in Newman's tale) fulfils the role of Watson, giving a wonderfully cynical and roguish perspective on life, which is (I'm fairly sure, although I've not actually read the books) modelled on the Flashman series. I don't think it's entirely coincidental that the only other Holmes story not written by Conan Doyle I've really enjoyed is Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" - also a Moriarty story. I think using characters connected to, but not fully described in a work of literature in a homage helps because I don't know enough about the characters to know that they're not acting right - if I did know that it would wreck my enjoyment of the story. Of course, I'm now going to have to track down Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (and read Hamlet) to test my theory.

At The Movies

Books read this week: Your Movie Sucks 5/10 (Roger Ebert)

So this week I'm reviewing a book of reviews: slightly post-modern I know. Your Movie Sucks is a collection of reviews of bad movies: some of which I have seen and liked (51st State, Constantine), some of which I have seen and hated (Fantastic Four, Doom) and some of which I have no desire to see (Crossroads). A truly scathing review can be a thing of beauty to behold: it's unfortunate that none of the reviews here rise to that level - partly I think because Ebert strives to be fair and even handed, which, whilst laudable, prevents him from rising to the true heights of invective which make a bad review a work of art. What is more surprising really is the strange gaps in Ebert's knowledge of popular culture: I find it hard to believe that someone could never have heard of Scooby Doo, and never seen the Thunderbirds. Still, I finished the book so it wasn't that bad, and I now have a larger list of movies to avoid. A short post this week I know: hopefully I'll have finished something a bit more beefy next week.

Poppies

Books read this week: Up The Line To Death (9/10)

I think it was Orwell who said that the Great War carefully selected and murdered the million best men in Britain. Around this time every year, I make it a habit to reread Brian Gardner's Up The Line To Death; it's by far my favourite poetry anthology and it never fails to move me.

There's a wide range of different poets here; Sassoon and Owen, obviously, but also Thomas Hardy, Kipling and Yeats, as well as a dozen or so lesser known poets, some of which are superb. As Gardner points out in the introduction, it's impossible to know how many first class poets were cut down, their masterpieces unwritten. It is the feeling of waste, of a criminal waste of talent and youth and innocence, that defines this book.

T.M. Kettle's "To my Daughter Betty" ends with the note "written four days before his death in action, 1916"; even the footnotes are tragic. Looking through the potted biographies at the end, I was struck by how many of the poets were younger than I am now when they died, and it just served to heighten the sense of wasted youth. Wilfred Owen is probably the best poet the English language has ever produced, and he was dead at 25.

The different responses to the horror of war are fascinating; we have Sassoon's bitter satire, Owen's despair, Gibson's superb blending of the horrific with the mundane ("Ginger raised his head/And cursed, and took the bet, and dropt back dead./ We ate our breakfast lying on our backs / Because the shells were screeching overhead.") and Kipling's all-encompassing grief and guilt ("If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.")

Particular standouts are Owen's Strange Meeting (oddly prophetic in retrospect: I can never read the line "None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress" without thinking of the fascist regimes of the 20s and 30s) and Dulce Et Decorum Est, obviously, as well as The Sentry, Patrick Shaw-Stewart's Untitled poem, which contains one of my favourite couplets ("Was it so hard Achilles, / So very hard to die?"), Wilfred  Gibson's three poems Breakfast, Mad and In The Ambulance, Gilbert Frankau's The Deserter ("And the shameless soul of a nameless man / Went up in the cordite smoke."), Isaac Rosenberg's The Dying Soldier ("We cannot give you water / Were all England in your breath."), Richard Aldington's Sunsets, and most especially E.A. Mackintosh's In Memoriam, which never fails to bring tears to my eyes. There isn't really anything more for me to say, so I'll close with the first verse of In Memoriam:

So you were David's father,
And he was your only son,
And the new-cut peats are rotting
And the work is left undone,
Because of an old man weeping,
Just an old man in pain,
For David, his son David,
That will not come again.

It could stand as the epitaph of a generation.

The First Time As Tragedy

Books read this week: The Strange Death of Liberal England 9/10 (George Dangerfield)

Political parties rarely die except by their own hand. Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England is the story of the four tumultuous years between 1910 and 1914 when the old Liberal party discovered that it had to change, or to die - and elected to die. I say story rather than history because The Strange Death of Liberal England really reads more like a novel in which Dangerfield is trying to capture the feeling of an age and I think he succeeds very well. Of course, I have no first hand knowledge of pre-war England, and it lies at that grey intersection between human memory and proper history: I have met and spoken with people who were alive then , but I have much less of a feel for the time than I do of even the 1920s. Partly this is because of the immense shadow the Great War casts back in time, rendering the political arguments of the preceding years petty and insignificant. The overarching feeling one gets is of a pot about to boil over, a society bubbling and seething with tensions almost to the point of explosion, before plunging itself into the icy waters of war. Dangerfield's digression on the Great German Airship Panic - a flurry of what would be UFO sightings today - seems to sum up the character of the time perfectly.

The Strange Death of Liberal England is a truly superb book: by turns witty, scathing and tragic, and a perfect portrait of the death of the Victorian Respectable middle class which was the Liberal party. Dangerfield divides that death into three acts: the Tories' Rebellion (more properly the Ulster Rebellion), the Women's Rebellion and the Worker's Rebellion. In all three cases one gets the feeling that things were spinning wildly beyond the government's control, and yet Mr Asquith sat serenely in Downing Street while the country sped towards catastrophe. And yet the Liberal Party was willing to countenance a surprising amount of brutality (for a 'Liberal' party): the descriptions of force-feeding of suffragettes are very disturbing, and the passage George Lansbury's desperate attempts to get the government to stop (attempts which culminated in Lansbury being expelled from parliament and losing his seat in a by-election) are very moving. There is also some very black humour to be had: "What was to be done? Since Women's Suffrage was not a party question, the honour of the whole House seemed to be involved. Some members maintained that the women should be left to die; Lord Robert Cecil thought that deportation might answer: only Mr Keir Hardie suggested, as a logical solution, that women should be given the vote."

Fundamentally, the Liberal Party suffered from two political maladies which combined to kill it: a belief that politics was a game and not a matter of life and death and a chronic inability to keep the promises it had made. The second problem to a certain extent flowed from the first: the Liberals did not realise how important change was to the Irish, to the workers, to women, and so they though they could play their little games and people would accept the status quo. They were wrong and it is the strange persistence of these errors which has ensured that the Liberal party has never won a general election since the introduction of universal suffrage. It is perfectly encapsulated in an anecdote given in the Strange Death of Liberal England: Asquith, when Home Secretary, gave orders for troops to fire on striking workers. When confronted with a heckler who condemned him for "those men you murdered in 1892" Asquith's reply was "You are quite wrong - I murdered them in 1893". How witty! How urbane! How utterly morally bankrupt!

I have often thought the failings of the 19th Century Liberal party can be encapsulated in their approach to the problems raised by prostitution. A truly laissez-faire approach would be to do nothing. A social democratic approach would be to commission reports to look into the problem, to set up organisations to help the communities involved and to strengthen the welfare net so no one is forced into prostitution. The Liberal approach? The octogenarian prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, personally wandering the streets of Soho at night, preaching the Gospel to "Fallen Women".

The Strange Death of Liberal England also left me with a renewed respect for Sylvia Pankhurst, Keir Hardie and George Lansbury, and a huge amount of admiration for George Askwith (a totally different, and far more interesting figure than Asquith the Prime Minister), the government's chief (indeed, apparently only) labour negotiator who seems to spent most of 1911 and 1912 dashing around the country patching up agreements between striking workers and their employers. It is just unfortunate for him that pretty much everyone higher up in the government (with the partial exception of Lloyd George, and the full exception of Winston Churchill) was so utterly useless.

Not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come

Books read this week: The Cold Commands 8/10 (Richard Morgan), Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti 7/10

The Cold Commands is the latest entry in Morgan's fantasy trilogy, and follows on directly from The Steel Remains. It's not quite a good as his debut, Altered Carbon, but as this is Richard Morgan we're talking about, that's a bit like saying A Midsummer Night's Dream isn't as good as Julius Caesar: I think Altered Carbon is the best science fiction novel, if not the best novel full stop, of the last decade.

It may be that I like The Cold Commands less than Altered Carbon because I like science fiction more than fantasy: not that I don't read both (as regular readers will know) but I generally find I only enjoy very good fantasy, whilst I can get a quite a lot of entertainment out of even quite bad sci-fi (David Weber, I'm looking at everything you've ever written). Partly this is because science fiction is, by it's very nature, a forward looking genre (apart, of course, for the small but significant Frankenstein inspired Things Man Was Not Meant To Know stories, like most of Michael Crichton's stuff), whilst fantasy tends to be backward looking at best, and positively reactionary at worst. Some of this can be put down to Tolkien's immense influence on the genre - science fiction doesn't really have a similar colossus in it's early history (HG Wells is influential, but you have the equally influential Jules Verne at the same time, whilst Tolkien doesn't really have any peers). I like the Lord of the Rings as a book, but the wholesale contempt for the modern world is a little hard to take, even if you ignore the comically unsubtle attacks on the Attlee government in the Scouring of the Shire. Why do we never hear about how Saruman's plumbing has eradicate dysentary in Isengard?

However, I think a larger contributing factor is the escapism many fantasy fans are looking for: they want to imagine that they are barbarian heroes, or princesses, and don't want to be reminded that for every princess there are a thousand peasants grubbing around in the mud. It's a bit like Marie Antoniette playing at being a shepherdess - it's the fantasy of a bucolic rural idyll without the inconvenience of actually having to be a subsistence farmer. Because the truth is that life in a European* pre-industrial agrarian society is shit. It's shit if you're the king. It's even more shit if you're not. It's yet more shit if you're a woman, or if you're gay. If you're both, it's even more shit than that. And if you're a member of a religious or ethnic minority, well.... you get the idea. Now, we can argue about why that is, we can argue about whether it's an inevitable consequence of the religion, or the climate, of the shape of society or the type of agriculture but the fundamental fact remains that the life expectancy was thirty if you didn't happen to live through a historically important and interesting famine or plague: there's a reason why all the characters in fairy tales have stepmothers. And it's fundamentally dishonest to write about a medieval European society (which is what most fantasy is about) and ignore that. To his credit, this is one of Martin's main targets in the Song of Ice and Fire (the other is the whole concept of hereditary rule, but that's something for another day), but even he is so far tied into the typical fantasy world view that he can't give us a viewpoint character outside of the aristocracy. I've even seen complaints that basically boil down to: how dare the Song of Ice and Fire dispel my cosy medieval fantasy with it's inconvenient use of actual history and real facts.

This is why I enjoyed the Cold Commands so much: it takes a large number of irritating fantasy conventions and drop kicks them out of the window. We have three protagonists: two are gay, and one is also a black woman (although not disabled, thus cleverly side stepping all those stupid jokes about diversity). We have an interesting examination of sexuality within an oppressive almost theocratic society, and how people can bend the rules if they are sufficiently useful to those in authority. We have 'elves' who are  (probably - I'm pretty sure that the helmsmen are in fact AIs) using technology, not magic, and who are black. It's not a big thing in the novel, but I don't think I've ever come across a work of fantasy where elves (or their analogue - the wise, calm, ageless and magical people who are better than ordinary humans) are assumed to have anything other than white caucasian features: I'm hard pressed to think of a work where they don't look like Nazi poster boys. And we have a society based quite heavily on the Mongol khanate and Yuan China, rather than medieval England.

Of course, this is all coupled with Morgan's trademark bleakness, cynicism, sex and ultraviolence, as well as his flair for memorable phrases. There's nothing here that quite matches the extracts from "Things I Should Have Learnt By Now, Vol. II" in Altered Carbon, the Patchwork Man rhyme or Kovacs' resolution that ends with "For all these, and more, someone was going to pay.", but there's some pretty good stuff nevertheless. A personal favourite of mine is the full name of the sword Ravensfriend:

I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors. I am Friend to Carrions Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me, and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave.


So, thoroughly recommended, although I should put in a word of warning: when I say sex and ultraviolence, I'm not kidding. It's not for the easily upset, not really for those who like happy, shiny endings, and some of the protagonists walk so close to the line between anti-hero and villain that it's hard to tell when they've skipped over it (we're told that "A Dark Lord Will Rise". It's entirely possible, indeed probable, that it refers to the main character.)

My other book this week was a Wordsworth Poetry Library Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti. I've always enjoyed Pre-Raphaelite art, and so I guess it's not really surprising that I found Rossetti's poems to be so enjoyable (the earlier work at least, I've never really enjoyed religious poetry). I was particularly struck by the influence of traditional ballads on her work: Maude Clare is effectively a retelling of the Nut Brown Maid from the nut brown maid's perspective (and also less death, in the time frame covered by the poem at least) whilst The Poor Ghost is a retelling of another common ballad where the ghost cannot rest until his lover ceases to mourn and the escalating question and response format of the Noble Sisters is strongly reminiscent of the ballad Edward, and fairly similar to a couple of other ballads. A lot of the language is also of the ballad type (probably one reason why I enjoyed it so much). And of course the Goblin Market is using the traditional, malevolent image of fairies, rather than Shakespeare's mischievous elves. Of course the Goblin Market also has a homoerotic subtext so blatant that frankly it's text: we have the repeated references to the evil goblin-men, rather than to just plain goblins, and the dramatic climax of the poem where Lizzie entreats her sister to "Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you / Goblin pulp and goblin dew / Eat me, drink me, love me". Of course, one could argue (a la Lewis Carroll) that Victorian standards for this sort of thing were different from our own, but I'm unconvinced.

I was also struck by the bleakness and cynicism on display in Rossetti's work, especially when compared with her contemporaries: contrast the fate of the protagonists in Cousin Kate, Maggie a Lady and The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children with that of Tennyson's Lady Clare: I have to say, I think Rossetti is rather more realistic (not that one necessarily looks for realism in poetry).

* Non-European pre-industrial agrarian societies may have had less inequitable distributions of power between genders and across classes: the same amount of shit, but more equally spread, if you will.

Smiley Happy People

Books read this week: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 7/10 (John Le Carre)

It is a strange thing how some works have such a titanic impact on the collective consciousness that they undercut their own references: before reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I hadn't heard the nursery rhyme, but I had of course heard of the book. It's the first in Le Carre's Karla trilogy, and a very good (although scarcely cheerful) look at espionage at the height of the Cold War. It's something of a curiosity to me: a glimpse into what life was like in a large bureaucracy before computers. Most of the time is spent tracking and stealing files and notes, in a way that just doesn't happen today: everything is on a network, so a comparable thriller today would have far more hacking, and far less tense walks through shabby libraries.

I also find it peculiar how local in space and time the espionage genre is: really, all the great espionage novels are set during the cold war, and most of them in the 60s and 70s, and they were pretty much all written by British intellectuals who were in intelligence during the Second World War. It's not as though there haven't been other periods where there's been a lot of undercover shenanigans and great power antagonisms: Francis Walsingham ran a first class intelligence network, and there was a lot of spying during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (handled well in O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, but not the main focus). And even just looking at other combatants in the Cold War, the Americans had plenty of well educated spies during WWII, and presumably not all of them stayed on afterwards (I would guess the USSR was similar, but given the Soviet government's institutional paranoia, I doubt they'd have let anyone reveal anything about espionage tactics and strategy, even in novel form, so the lack of good spy novels there isn't that surprising).

The closest thing the US has to a spy novelist is Tom Clancy, and he's too stupid to write a great spy novel: the essence of a good spy novel is an understanding of psychology - your's and your opponent's, and to do that you really need to both respect and to understand the other side. This is, I think, the crux of the issue: the prevailing view in the USA was always that the US was Right, and the Soviet Union was Wrong and that was All Right. Such a black and white view doesn't really lend itself to the study of the other side's point of view: if you enemy is the devil, you can be confident that everything they say or do is evil, because, well, they're evil. This makes for good action films, and poor spy novels. By contrast, there's been a tendency in British literature to respect a worthy opponent for a long time: you can see this in Owen and Sassoon's poetry, which always has more contempt for the generals behind the line than for the soldier's on the other side of No Man's Land, and also in Wellington's respect for the French army, but the best example has to be Kipling: partly because he is a very good poet, but more because he is the poet that best personified the jingoistic late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the generation that claimed an empire and then watched it's children die in the mud and blood at the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres. It is precisely because Kipling was such a cheerleader for the British empire and invading, well, anywhere Britain hadn't got round to invading yet, that it's notable that he does respect the other side: in his "Fuzzy Wuzzy" (which I'm not going to pretend isn't racist, because it really is) he describes the Sudanese as "A First Class Fighting Man": I can't imagine Clancy (who occupies a similar position as author best representing the pro-invading countries we've never heard of position) writing a similarly positive portrait of the martial qualities of a Taliban fighter (and after all, the Sudanese Kipling is talking about were the army of the first modern Islamist movement).

Bellamy's Veal Pies

Books read this week: William Pitt the Younger 6/10 (William Hague)

Caesar read a life of Alexander the Great and wept because he was 30, and by 30 Alexander the Great had conquered the known world. One gets the impression, reading Hague's life of Pitt, that more than anything else, Hague would have liked to be William Pitt the Younger. This is not a problem: to write a truly first class biography, one must sympathise with one's subject. I think this is why so many of the good political biographies I have read were written by politicians: Jenkins' Gladstone and Hattersley's Lloyd George immendiately spring to mind. Longford's Wellington is also a favourite of mine, and although Longford was not herself a politician, she came from a family of politicians (specifically, Lloyd George's). The exception is Blake's Disraeli, and that had the advantage that Disraeli was a truly fascinating individual.

Unfortunately, William Pitt the Younger is not a fascinating individual. Raised from birth to be a politician, he seems to have all the faults you see today in people who go straight into full time politics from university, just magnified: above all, he was incredibly dull. He never had an intimate relationship with a woman or a man, he never had a friend outside politics and he never had a life outside politics: he spent his life alternately politicking and drinking himself into a stupor (consuming 3 bottles of port a day: something else which endears him to "16 Pints A Night" Hague). He was phenomenally good at gaining power (Prime Minister at 24): unfortunately, he didn't really know what to do with it. As Hague continually points out, Pitt's first instinct when confronted with a short term political problem was to conceive some enormous, intricate and complicated permanent solution, which would promptly fall apart once it encountered the real world, leaving everyone no better off than before (Exhibit A: Ireland). The net result of this is that for all the effort Pitt put into being Prime Minister, his actually achievements were fairly minimal.

The other problem Hague has in maintaining our sympathies with Pitt is that the causes he was defending were fundamentally bankrupt: Pitt died shortly after Napoleon rose to power, and so he spent years fighting the French Revolution: he was responsible for the last suspension of habeas corpus in British history in order to deal with the London Corresponding Society, and their evil demands for universal suffrage and free speech (those bastards!). Of course, Wellington was a similarly reactionary figure, but he possessed enough of a life outside politics (and enough of a sense of humour) that one can sympathise with him, despite disagreeing with his politics (also, Longford's life of Wellington is superb): Pitt had no life outside politics. In many ways, this was a personal tragedy for him, and it's probably ultimately why he drank himself into an early grave. His only longstanding attachment appears to have been to his niece, who appears to have been a thoroughly unpleasant woman: the only example of her cutting wit we are given is mocking an elderly lord for his limp.

My ultimate verdict on the book is this: it is as good a biography as could be expected about a very dull figure in the middle of some extremely interesting politics. I'd be interested to see what Hague makes of a life with more life in it, and I'm going to try and track down his life of Wilberforce.

Peasants and Kings

Books read this week: The Struggle For Mastery 5/10 (David Carpenter)

The Struggle for Mastery is part of the Penguin history of Britain series, and covers the years 1066-1284: a choice which is a little peculiar. Starting in 1066 I don't have a problem with, but the book stops abruptly halfway through the reign of Edward I, in a place which really isn't one of history's natural break points. It is however a very ambitious book: unlike many purported histories of Britain, this volume does dedicate considerable space and time to Scottish, Welsh and Irish history, which I found interesting, as I know relatively little about any of them (I couldn't, for example, list the kings of Scotland). It is unfortunate that it gives the book something of an episodic feel: the narrative frequently jumps from one country to the next mid-chapter. A far better approach would have been to divide the book clearly into sections on English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish history, as the sections on each country tend to be clearly delineated in any case. Apart from these minor irritations the book is interesting enough, and I will try to track down the other books in the series. The main thing I took from the book is that it's really a misnomer to identify the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil War as being distinct periods of civil strife: up until about 1260, the countries that make up Britain experienced continual low-grade civil war. The reason we remember the Wars of the Roses as civil wars is because they came at the end of a  long (extremely unusual) peace.

By The Rivers of Babylon

Books read this week: Ancient Iraq 8/10 (Georges Roux), Fairy Folklore 7/10 (Anna Franklin and Paul Mason), Changeless 5/10 (Gail Carriger)

Time is a strange thing; it's been a very long time since there's been a Sargon in Akkad - in fact, it's been a long time since there's been an Akkad full stop - and yet somehow Roux's Ancient Iraq manages to make the Babylonians, Sumerians and Assyrians seem very contemporary. Which is a stunning achievement considering the gigantic scope of the book; it covers over 5000 years of history, most of it urban, all of it very complex. I found it a brilliant introduction to a little studied period.

It is strange that I find it far easier to relate to ancient and classical figures than to medieval ones; I can imagine holding a conversation with Octavian or Socrates, and I can understand how Hammurabi or Odysseus thought, in a way I really can't with someone like Martin Luther, or Bernard of Clairvaux. I think partly this is a product of the shape of society. The Romans, the Greeks, and especially the Sumerians lived in what was fundamentally an urban society, and moreover, an urban society with a highly developed system of government; pretty much no one in the middle ages (apart, perhaps, from the Venetians - who I do understand) di.

In Mesopotamia (and Egypt), this was totally unavoidable - as a peasant, if your neighbour doesn't clear out his irrigation ditches properly, your fields salt up and you starve: some form of government is essential. That said, I found the degree of central planning used by the Sumerians quite surprising: a phenomenal degree of organisation must have been required. Of course, one of the great benefits the student of Mesopotamian history has is the amount of material that has been preserved - as everything was written on clay tablets, and clay tablets, when baked, last essentially forever, there is a huge wealth of material on the every day life of ordinary people available, in a way there really isn't for the middle ages, the Romans or even the Greeks. So we can read personal letters, see markbooks from schools and even look at doctor's textbooks (although this last is a little repetitive "If the patient turns yellow, the patient has jaundice and will die. If you see a black cat, the patient will die. If you see a white cat, the patient will die. If you see a red cat, the patient may recover - but will probably die in great pain." They were apparently very good at determining what was wrong with you - less good at fixing it). This also lets us see the personal side of historical figures, again something that we tend to lack, except in the last century or two - so we have, for example, a king sending letters berating his ne'er-do-well son for spending his time with fast chariots and loose women when his brother has been out conquering Babylon, and the Hittite king being told that the omens are not favourable - and then insisting that the priests take the omens again, and again, and again, until they come out right (a very pragmatic approach to augury).

Fairy Folklore does exactly what it says on the tin: a collection of popular beliefs about the Fair Folk, some harmless ("jam must be stirred with a rowan twig, else the Fairies will steal it"), some less so: in particular, the section on changelings is quite hair-raising. If you believed that your child might be at risk from Fairies, you were advised to suspend a pair of scissors over the unfortunate child's cradle, and feed it digitalis. In the (unlikely) event the baby survived these ministrations, it would presumably be safe from abduction. The treatment suggested when the child has actually been replaced with a changeling is even more unpleasant - and the child was even less likely to survive. If the stories are actually true (and there's always a risk that country folk have made them up to screw with the folklorists), it's quite disturbing. I was struck however by the similarities between the symptoms of autism and those associated with a changeling child: a previously normal child (apparently) undergoes a dramatic change in personality, and becomes withdrawn, appearing to lose their language skills. I almost wonder if the changeling myth was a socially acceptable explanation for the infanticide of children with developmental disorders.

Changeless is the next book in the Parasol Protectorate series. It's OK, but not as funny or as interesting as the first book.

Of Men and Monsters

Books read this week: Beowulf 7/10, The Poem of the Cid 7/10, Soulless 7/10 (Gail Carriger), In the House of the Worm 7/10 (George R R Martin)

Beowulf is, of course, the Old English Epic, just about the only survivor of the (mostly) pre-Christian English oral tradition and a cracking good story in it's own right. It is interesting to compare it with the Iliad and the Gilgamesh Epic; Beowulf is shorter than either, and, with all the various digressions (fascinating as they are), spends much less time with the main characters and so we get a much fuzzier picture of the protagonist and his companions. Achilles, Odysseus and Agamemnon are developed, distinct characters with their own strengths and foibles, as are Gilgamesh and Enkidu; I didn't really get that sense with Beowulf. There just seemed to be a succession of blokes with axes hitting each other. This is unfortunate, as it robs the story of some of it's pathos: Enkidu's death in the Gilgamesh epic is genuinely moving in a way that Beowulf's just isn't. This is not just a product of length - some of the ballads are capable of building sympathy and pathos in just a dozen lines (see Twa Corbies or the Cruel Mother). The other thing missing from Beowulf is a clear overarching theme; this isn't to say that there are no themes, just that both the Iliad and Gilgamesh have a strong, single overarching idea: in the Iliad it is rage and jealousy (as Homer tells us right at the start: "Sing O Muse of the Rage of Achilles") and in Gilgamesh the inevitability of death. The closest thing to an overarching theme in Beowulf is "if you're a king and your warriors won't fight for you, you're in trouble".

The Poem of the Cid is one of the Spanish stories about Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, El Cid. It has the feel of one of the Robin Hood stories, if Robin Hood had reacted to his exile by travelling to Scotland and stealing Aberdeen. You can tell from the repeated epithets ("the Campeador", "the Cid of the flowing beard") that the poem was originally transmitted orally, and there is (much as in Robin Hood) an interesting undercurrent of social conflict; we're reminded several times that El Cid comes from relatively humble origins, and the villains of the piece are the two (very aristocractic) Infantes of Carrion, who marry and then abandon the daughters of the Cid, rather than the Moors. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that a more accurate translation of the title of the work ("El Poema de mio Cid") would be "The Poem of My Cid", Cid being a word of Arabic origin meaning "Lord". The most entertaining passage of the poem by far is the incident where a lion gets loose in the palace, the commotion wakes El Cid, who then proceeds to stare down the lion, which then creeps back to it's cage and closes the door. Comedy gold. Both the Poem of the Cid and Beowulf I read in Penguin Classics translation.

Soulless is a fairly light and frothy supernatural comedy/romance, set in Victorian London. It's nice to see the werewolves get some love (both figuratively and literally, in this case), and even nicer to see a heroine who responds to being leapt upon by a vampire by finding the nearest heavy object and smacking it in the nuts. I was again struck by the way in which American books on the supernatural tend to assume that it will be handled by the free market; the government is at best indifferent, and at worst actively malicious. British books, on the other hand, tend to assume that supernatural occurrences will be investigated by Her Majesty's Constabulary, and that if Queen Victoria finds out people are being murdered with magic she Will Not Be Amused. I think it's an interesting commentary on our assumptions about the role and limits of government on either side of the Atlantic.

Finally, In The House of the Worm is a fairly short post-apocalyptic piece by George RR Martin, he of A Song of Ice and Fire fame; it's entertaining enough, and probably best described as a morlock's-eye view of the end of the world.

Turbulent Priests

Books read this week: A History of Christianity 6/10 (Diarmaid MacCulloch)

I've been reading it off and on since Christmas, and this week I finally got round to finishing MacCulloch's History of Christianity. It would be, I imagine, something of a doorstopper if I weren't reading it on the Kindle. It covers something like 3000 years of history (as it follows both the Jewish and Greek roots of Christianity) in a surprising amount of detail. There's plenty here: martyrs, saints, sinners and a whole lot of hypocrisy. MacCulloch is (understandably) very careful not to tread on anyone's toes, especially when it comes to terminology, and naming the various denominations. I understand why he does it, but it did take me a while to adjust. I've spent fifteen years reading about the monophysites, and so calling them miaphysites took a little getting used to. And the odd reference to "The Church of Rome" does creep through (a phrase I hear in my mind in the voice of an angry Ian Paisley). MacCulloch is also, in my opinion (and quite understandably for a religious historian) unreasonably unsympathetic to the French and Russian revolutionaries. He fails to take account of the close relationship between the Ancien Regime and the Church in both cases: if the Church maintains (as the Russian Orthodox Church did) that the old ruler was "Equal of the Arch-Angels and God's Vice-Gerent on Earth" then they're not going to get a very sympathetic hearing from the people who've just been compelled to bump off that ruler. Also, the characterisation of Nicholas II as "well-meaning and amiable" is one I have to take exception to: when discussing that monarch phrases like "bloody handed butcher", "criminally incompetent" and "evil little bastard" are rather more accurate. I think this tendency was most grating in the discussion of the suppression of the Greek Catholic Church in the Ukraine in the late 1940s. There's a lot of condemnation of Stalin's suppression of the Church, which is all well and good (after all, Stalin was a very unpleasant man who did some very unpleasant things), except that only two pages earlier MacCulloch was telling us how the Greek Catholic Church spent the early part of the 1940s murdering tens of thousands of Polish (Roman) Catholics as part of a program of ethnic cleansing: something which, in my opinion, should really get your church suppressed.

Which leads quite neatly into one of the other things I took from the book: the phenomenal ability of Christians and Christian Churches throughout the ages to persecute each other (and other faiths), even when they have recent experiences of persecution themselves: the funniest passage in the book is one which reads (more or less) "24th March 323 CE: Christianity recognised as the official religion of the Roman Empire. 25th March 323 CE: First official persecution of heretics by the Roman Empire." We also have the Bishop who said "You know back when Christians were a persecuted minority and we were made to wear coloured strips of cloth so we could be identified?" "Yes?" "I was just thinking, that was a really good idea!". I actually read a blog post the other day which suggested The Song of Ice and Fire wasn't really like Medieval Europe because there's religious persecution in the books. I would suggest telling that to the Albigensians, except you can't because they're all fucking dead.

I think the final thing I took from the book was a renewed dislike of Augustine of Hippo (do you have a picture of a hippopotamus in a dog collar? Because I do.). He wasn't top of my list of favourite theologians to begin with, but according to MacCulloch, basically everything I don't like about Christianity comes directly from his work: hang ups about sex, forcible conversion, even predestination. I single out predestination because I consider it a particularly odious piece of theology, and moreover, absolutely impossible to reconcile with the concept of a benevolent God. Not that it matters to me, being an atheist, but nevertheless the point stands. MacCulloch casts the Reformation as a battle between Augustine's doctrine of the Church (on the Catholic side) and Augustine's doctrine of Faith (on the Protestant side): as far as I can tell, Augustine is in the unenviable position of being responsible for the worst ideas on both sides of one of the larger and more bloody conflicts in human history.

My Kingdom for a Horse!

Books read this week: Shakespeare's Kings 8/10 (John Julius Norwich)

The first Shakespeare play I can remember seeing is Olivier's Richard III. It's a very 1950s performance, extremely static and nothing like as good as McKellan's version, but I still remember it fondly; Richard III is still one of my favourite (if not my favourite) plays. Norwich's Shakespeare's Kings is a brilliant combination of literary criticism and history, following English history from about 1300 up until 1485 viewed through the lens of Shakespeare's two tetralogies (Richard II, Henry IV Parts I & II, Henry V, Henry VI Parts I, II and III and Richard III) as well as a very early play, Edward III, which has only recently been attributed to the Bard.

I often think it is strange that we spend so much time at school on Shakespeare's comedies; the underlying themes are far more complex, and the social structures they critique and parody are quite alien to us. Also, to properly appreciate them one needs an understanding of sixteenth century dirty jokes, a knowledge which is sadly lacking in today's youth. By contrast, the themes of the tragedies and the history plays are more universal; ambition, jealousy, revenge. Also, you don't have to get the jokes to enjoy the play (but it helps!). The lessons learnt from the tragedies in particular have general applications: Mark Antony's speech at Caesar's funeral is one of the best pieces of political manipulation ever written, and (on a more prosaic note) I guessed the twist in the Usual Suspects because I have a deep affection for Richard III (which lead to a knowledge of the figure of Vice in the medieval morality plays, which lead to Keyser Sose).

More generally, reading this book also led me to reflect on the abysmally low standard of king- (and queen-) ship this country has endured since the Norman conquest; of the 40 odd monarchs we've had since 1066, only 10 have really been halfway competent and most of those had distinctly shaky claims to the throne (Henry VII, I'm looking at you....). Mostly, Shakespeare's Kings, much like the Song of Ice and Fire (which draws a huge amount of inspiration from both the real Wars of the Roses and Shakespeare's version of them), is a gigantic argument against the concept of hereditary monarchy. Which is, incidentally, why I tend to support the Yorkists (their argument being that of the two candidates for the throne, the more competent one should be king; it's not quite accepting democracy, but it's edging closer than the pseudo divine right of kings endorsed by the Lancastrians). So, in conclusion: Shakespeare's Kings is a good book for anyone interested in Shakespeare or kings (or both). It's also recommended reading for anyone who's started the Song of Ice and Fire, and is having trouble understanding why it is people don't act like characters out of the Lord of the Rings, and why it turns out the living in the middle ages was shite, even if you were the king.

When A Man Is Tired of London

Books read this week: The Wasteland (T.S. Eliot) 9/10, Rivers of London (Ben Aaronowitch) 8/10, Moon Over Soho (Ben Aaronovitch) 8/10, Summer Knight (Jim Butcher) 7/10, First Lord's Fury (Jim Butcher) 7/10

London is an old city. Dozens of neighbourhoods, rivers, myths and legends all it's own; Spring Heeled Jack and Jack Ketch, Gin Lane and Tyburn. Two millenia of history lies thick on the streets like a victorian smog. And that's why Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series is so brilliant. It's an urban fantasy set in London, focusing on a black police constable who just happens to also be a wizard in training. It's strange that so much urban fantasy is set in the states; there's not really any proper urban history there, and so the author always has quite a difficulty trying to explain why scary old and eldritch horrors have decided to take a vacation to some dull city in the American midwest, but I guess authors write what they know. Rivers of London is probably most similar to Charles Stross' Laundry series, but it's a more serious take on things. It is also interesting to compare the British and American approaches to supernatural terror; Americans tend to assume that private investigators or some other non-government organisation will deal with the supernatural beasties using swords, axes and magic; the government is at best ignorant of the supernatural, and at worst actively malicious.

The British series, on the other hand, and rather more sensibly, tend to assume that the government knows and actively tries to manage the supernatural, and that if a threat is sufficiently severe a transit van full of guys in balaclavas will turn up and shoot it to death, and then burn it (it's the only way to be sure). It's also nice to see a protagonist in an urban fantasy book who isn't white and middle class (and doesn't, as yet, seem to have any massive destiny coming to him). The British series also focus more on the massive impact the Second  World War would have had on the supernatural community in Britain; American novels tend to gloss over it; assume that somehow the wizards could remain aloof, or that the war didn't have much impact. To the US, the war happened half a world away; it was something men were sent away to fight in and it never touched the  American mainland. In the UK, on the other hand, Churchill was willing to use chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, if necessary; had the Nazis invaded, he would have set the sea on fire; any possible weapon, no matter how odd, no matter how far fetched, no matter how forbidden would have been investigated, would have been tested, would have been used. A further advantage the British series have is the distinct lack of lycanthrope porn (yay!).

Of my other books this week, The Wasteland is one of my favourite poems; the opening line of the fourth section "Phlebas the phoenician, a fortnight dead" is one the most beautiful lines in English literature. The charm of the poem lies in the beauty of the language; kind of like opera, even if you don't know what it actually means, you can still appreciate the the exquisite craftsmanship that went into making something that sounds so harmonious.

Dark Satanic Mills

Books read this week: Daily Life in Victorian London 7/10 (Lee Jackson), Anno Dracula 6/10 (Kim Newman), Academ's Fury, Cursor's Fury, Captain's Fury and Princeps' Fury, all 7/10, all (Jim Butcher).

I've been ill this week, so I've had quite a lot of time for reading. As you can see, I re-read most of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera. Reading the books for a second time, so soon after finishing the Dresden Files, I was struck by the overt similarities between the main characters (both begin the series as apparent orphans, both find out that someone in authority is their grandfather, and both are selected by their bloodline for some higher destiny). They're both quite fun series, but I think one of the reasons that I have a problem with fantasy in general is the rather lazy (and fundamentally anti-democratic) tendency it has to focus on lost heirs, and true royal blood and chosen ones. People tend to forget that just because your father (or your grandfather, or his father) happened to be a good king, that doesn't mean you're going to be one; in fact, the historical record is full of total fuckwit children of competent monarchs (take a bow, John, Edward II and Henry VIII). And that's before we even consider the inbreeding.

I call it lazy, because it provides a ready made excuse for involving the hero in whatever crisis of the month the author has come up with; why are they involved? because God/the gods/destiny says so! It also discourages the reader from trying to change the world themselves; after all, I'm fairly sure I'm not the secret heir of the last king of Norfolk, so how can I make a difference? I guess what I'm really saying is I prefer heroes that are made, not born; those that achieve greatness, rather than those that are born great.

<Song of Ice and Fire Spoilers>

It's interesting to contrast this with Martin's approach in the Song of Ice and Fire. I think, when the series is finished, we are going to see that one of the overarching themes is that hereditary succession is an absolutely terrible way to decide who gets what job; of the Stark children, Jon Snow is clearly the most like Ned, and would be the best successor - and he's also almost certainly not Ned's son. Likewise, from the hints Martin has been dropping, I'm fairly sure Tyrion is not Tywin Lannister's son, but he is, of the Lannister children, the one most like Tywin (as many other characters have observed). Likewise, the problem with Joffrey as a king isn't that he's not the son of King Robert; the problem is that he's a psychopath.

<\ Song of Ice and Fire Spoilers>


My other two books are mutually complementary; Daily Life in Victorian London is a fascinating anthology of press clippings, letters and diary entries about all aspects of life in Victorian London (hence the name...). Anno Dracula, on the other hand, is a massive mash-up of every possible character, both historical and fictional, who ever walked the streets of Victorian London; the main framing device being a showdown between Mycroft Holmes and Dracula whilst Jack the Ripper stalks the streets of London. It's quite a fun book, and reminded me heavily of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (much the better book, it has to be said - even if the film was an abomination).

The anthology was fascinating because it illustrates the whole spectrum of experiences in 19th Century London; the marvellous, the inspiring and the horrifying. We have the opening of the first tube line, and the shipping of ice across the Atlantic to cool food. We have operas and the first photographs. We have killer smogs, and vitriol throwers. We have pregnant maidservants killing themselves, and we have factories where girls would start work at 15 and die of lead poisoning before their 17th birthdays. It's a reminder that even without vampires and werewolves and Spring Heeled Jack, 19th Century London was a terrifying, nasty, violent place to live - especially if you were poor.

The End of the World As They Knew It

Books Read This Week: Millenium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom 7/10 (Tom Holland)

I have very much enjoyed Tom Holland's books in the past; Rubicon (on the fall of the Roman republic) and Persian Fire (on the Greek-Persian wars) are among my favourite works of popular history. Millenium is his first venture outside the realm of classical history, and it is something of a disappointment; his first two books had a clear and very certain narrative thread running through them; Millenium just seems to meander from country to country, and decade to decade, occasionally passing by some interesting facts or figures, but it lacks a firm direction. This is a pity, as Millenium discusses a period of history much neglected; it is centered on the period between about 900 and the First Crusade in 1096 (i.e. it concentrates on the end of the first Christian millenium, and the fervor which this excited).

Much of the book focuses on the struggle between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope for supremacy; somewhat surprisingly, Holland seems to favour the papacy. He seems to believe that the triumph of the Pope lead to the separation of church and state, and hence to modern democracy. This is something of a Whiggish interpretation, with two major flaws i) the aim of the papacy was the subordination of the state to the church, not the separation & ii) (rather more crucially) the Pope didn't win. I'm also somewhat puzzled by his affection  for William the Conqueror; or perhaps I should say rather his distaste for Harold Godwinsson. I've always found the Godwinsson a very sympathetic figure; brave, daring and possessing a good sense of humour (in marked contrast to the Normans who wouldn't know a joke if it got up and beat them to death with a battleaxe*). English historians have generally tended to agree; it is a strange thing that despite the fact that William won, and that he got to write all the history books, there has always been a feeling in England that really, Harold was the better man, and that he should have won. It may have something to do with Harold being the last actually English king England ever had; nevertheless it has been over 900 years, and you'd think we'd have gotten over it by now.

I also think that Holland is far more sympathetic to the Church of the middle ages than I can be; possibly I'm just not capable of the moral relativism that's required. It may be true that everyone was a violent, irrational religious bigot with a taste for murdering people who disagreed with them, but as far as I'm concerned the fact that everyone else was doing it (something which Holland maitains, but of which I am not convinced) is no excuse. After all, if all the other global religious leaders were jumping off a cliff, would you do it? (Don't answer that one Gregory VII).

And partly I just find the medieval mind very alien, in a way that (for example) the Roman mind isn't; Holland describes how a starving ill-clad shepherd boy found a gold coin in the mud, and rather than spending the money on food, or shelter, or warm clothes, went to a priest and paid for a mass for his father's soul. And somehow we're supposed to support the church that sees this as praiseworthy behaviour and crucially, actually took the boy's money. It's something I just can't do; I have a similar problem when I visit cathedrals. I find them inspiring and beautiful and stupendous, but there's always a little voice in the back of my mind saying how much better the lives of the artisans who built them would have been if a tiny fraction of the wealth put into building those prayers in stone had gone into social housing, pensions or healthcare.

* Housecarls FTW!

Mere Anarchy Is Loosed Upon The World

Books read this fortnight: Sten 3: The Court of a Thousand Suns 6/10 (Chris Bunch and Allan Cole), The Boys: Volume 7: The Innocents 7/10 (Garth Ennis et al.), The Boys: Volume 8: Highland Laddie 7/10 (Garth Ennis et al.), The Cellar 5/10 (Richard Laymon), The Graveyard Book 8/10 (Neil Gaiman), The Steel Remains 8/10 (Richard Morgan), Cryoburn 7/10 (Lois McMaster Bujold), A Dance With Dragons 8/10 (George R R Martin), Judge Dee at Work 6/10 (Robert van Gulik), Rule 34 7/10 (Charles Stross), The Lost Fleet: Dauntless (Jack Campbell) and The Dresden Files; (deep breath) Fool Moon, Grave Peril, Death Masks, Blood Rites, Dead Beat, Proven Guilty, White Night, Small Favour, Turn Coat, Changes, Ghost Story and Side Jobs, all 7/10, all (Jim Butcher).

As you can see, I've had the chance to do quite a lot of reading over the past couple of weeks. I've not time to go into detail about all of these books, so I'm going to try and write something brief about each book.

The Court of a Thousand Suns is the third book in the Sten series, a pulp sci-fi series from the mid-80s. It's  quite entertaining and moves fairly quickly, and provides a fascinating insight into what we thought the future would be like before the internet.

The Boys is Garth Ennis' gleefully anarchic series about superheroes and the black clad eccentrics employed by the CIA to keep tabs on the 'supes'. The series began brilliantly, but has begun to tail off slightly; that said, it's still very funny (and exceedingly violent), and I do retain a lot of sympathy for Ennis' basic thesis; if superheroes were real, they would be like rock stars. Can you imagine Michael Jackson with the power to destroy buildings?

The Cellar is a straight-up horror story, a genre I read only very rarely. Tis a pity it's not very good.

The Graveyard Book is Neil Gaiman's homage to the Jungle Book, but with vampires. It's by turns creepy, humorous and moving. Classic Gaiman, in other words.

The Steel Remains is Richard Morgan's first foray into the fantasy genre, and it is excellent. I think Morgan is one of the best science-fiction writers working at the moment, and as far as I'm concerned his debut, Altered Carbon, is the best novel of the past decade. However, writers can stumble when moving into a different genre and I was pleased to see that this didn't happen here. On the other hand, Morgan moved from gritty, cynical and ultra-violent cyberpunk noir to gritty, cynical and ultra-violent dungeonpunk noir, so possibly is wasn't that big a step.

Cryoburn is the latest entry in the Vorkosigan saga. The series remains what it always has been; light, breezy, entertaining and fairly cheerful. With (in this case) and added pinch of ripped-from-the-headlines trading in dodgy futures (in this case deep-frozen citizens not mortgages).

A Dance with Dragons is the newest novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series; a dramatic improvement on the fourth novel (much more Tyrion!), I'm beginning to get a feel for how Martin wants to end the series. That said, I'm not sure how he can do it in two books. The book is primarily devoted to tearing down the two decent characters who were actually doing well so far, and also to Martin demonstrating that he will not permit things to improve in his world (this is particularly blatant in the epilogue where a character is killed by a deus ex crossbow purely for trying to make things better). This makes the bad guys seem quite a lot less threatening; if they succeed solely because the good guys are afflicted with a bizarre streak of bad luck, they aren't particularly scary; as soon as Martin makes that streak end, the bad guys are going to go down hard. Not that that won't be entertaining, but a little more challenge would be more dramatic I think.

Judge Dee at Work is a collection of short stories about a Chinese detective under the Tang dynasty (about the year 700). The protagonist is based on a real historical figure; the main point of interest really is the level of sophistication in administration and society that is on display in the stories compared with the (total lack) of sophistication on display in Europe at the same time.

Rule 34 is Charles Stross' latest, a sort of pseudo-sequel to Halting State. It's not a bad book, but nothing like as good as Halting State, and I felt that the plot didn't really seem to go anywhere (and neither was it properly explained). Still fun to read.

Dauntless is the first book in the Lost Fleet series. I found it quite dull.

The remaining twelve books are all part of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. I (as you can see) found them  quite gripping; extremely entertaining, with a well-evolved mythology that develops through the series. There's also a strong undercurrent of humour, despite the increasingly dark tone of the books as the series progresses.  I have tried to get into the series before, without much success, but something did just click this time, and I chainsawed through them in short order. Unfortunately I'm going to be in for a bit of a wait until the next one.

Doctors and Dragons

Books read this week: The Great Hunt 6/10 (Robert Jordan), Confessions of a GP 6/10 (Benjamin Daniels)

The Great Hunt is the second in Robert Jordan's gigantic Wheel of Time series. It's a marked improvement on the first book, as it reads much less like a cheap knock-off of the Lord of the Rings. The characterisation is still a bit lack-lustre, but the plot rolls on quickly enough, and it's interesting enough that I'm willing to start the third book. I also found the description of the damane in the book genuinely disturbing; something of an achievement (and it also makes the people responsible much less sympathetic and more evil than the nebulous Satan-analogue  who is the Big Bad of the series, but doesn't really appear to do much but loom ominously).

That said, I'm not sure how I'm going to get on with the larger cosmology of the Wheel of Time as the series develops; I'm not generally a fan of the idea of cyclical time, of presdestination, or, frankly, of destiny in general; I'm very strongly of the opinion that the world is what we make it; appeals to destiny always seem like a cop-out to me. The only treatment of prophecy in fiction I actually enjoy is Babylon 5, and that's because (due to time travel) it's not prophecy, so much as memory.

First appearances to the contrary Confessions of a GP isn't low-grade 70s porn; it's a fragmentary book, which reads like a series of blog posts, by a locum GP. It's fairly interesting and very entertaining fluff. The main take home message (for me, at least) is simple: targets work. They are something of a blunt instrument, people don't like them, and they complain about them, but if you want to make something better you have to be able to measure how good things are now, and how much better they get. The other thing message I took away is that the BMA is the best trade union in Britain at the moment. If only they would take non-medical members....

I'll be on holiday for the next couple of weeks, so the blog will be on hiatus until I get back.

Fragments

Books read this week: Fragile Things 8/10 (Neil Gaiman), Smoke and Mirrors 7/10 (Neil Gaiman), Winterfair Gifts 7/10 (Lois McMaster Bujold)

Fragile Things and Smoke and Mirrors are short story and poetry collections by Neil Gaiman. I am very fond of short stories; they are a style I think unfortunately neglected today - partly due to the lack of large, respectable periodicals that publish fiction (like the magazines that published the Sherlock Holmes stories, or Vanity Fair chapter by chapter). I'm fairly hopeful that this is going to change with the advent of the Kindle however; microstories for micropayments is I think a very valid business model. That said, the restricted nature of the short story format can be constricting, and not every author can manage it.

Gaiman can, of course (it's Neil Gaiman - what did you expect?), but good as these stories are, they're not his best work; I feel that he does best on a large canvas, and with more space to develop his mythology. That said, I do wonder how these short stories compare in length of text with his graphic novels; those pretty pictures take up a lot of space, but then again a picture is worth a thousand words (and they usually don't take up that much space), so I guess my point still stands. I also enjoyed the first anthology (Fragile Things) rather more than the second, but I don't know whether that's because Smoke and Mirrors is a worse book, because I'd hit Gaiman overload or because a combination of a hangover and sunburn had ruined my mood. A few particular favourites; "A Study In Emerald" (Holmes meets Cthulhu), "October in the Chair", "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire", "Closing Time", "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", "Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot" . All but the last two are from the Fragile Things.  There is a tremendous range and variety of subject matter here; I was very much reminded of the failing artist in the Sandman who, having kidnapped and raped a muse, is cursed by Dream with continuous inspiration,  and is left unable to do anything but spout off ideas for stories, novels and movies (and, if I recall correctly, ends up in a straight jacket).

Winterfair Gifts is a fairly recent entry in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga - a fairly lighthearted but always entertaining sci-fi series. It is also a perfect example of how the Kindle will change the way in which we consume literature; it's a novella - far too short to be economically sold in print (especially given that, good as the Vorkosigan saga is, the books aren't major blockbusters; I'd guess the ratio of price to book length for something like Harry Potter could be somewhat higher), but of course that's not a problem if you have a Kindle, so I pay a couple of quid, and get an hour or so's entertainment from the story. Long term, hopefully this type of model will lead to more diversity in the length of fiction on offer (in both directions, actually - I know there have been problems with the Song of Ice and Fire because George RR Martin keeps handing over manuscripts too long to be bound; again, not a problem with the Kindle). And now that's been said, I'm off to spend some quality time with my Precious Kindle.