Notwithstanding inasmuch as which I have been working hard on the first draft of my next book, provisionally entitled The Only Way is Ethics: Moral Philosophy the Modern Way, I have managed to read, or listen to, a surprising number of books over the past two months. I cannot account for this given that my devotion to The Only Way Is Ethics has been little short of monomaniacal. The draft has all the leviathantine lineaments of a behemoth. I’m contracted to produce a 70,000 word text in March. I am just over halfway through and it’s clocked up more than 61,000. Clearly I am having too much fun and I’ll have to take out all the jokes.
Apart from that I have been much engaged with my employment (by day I am with the Submerged Log Company) having spent much of a long, sweltering summer not only trying to keep my own logs submerged but attending to the submersion of the logs of vacationing colleagues. So I’m amazed at the number of logs texts I’ve listened to read consumed submerged experienced. The books I have read in dead-tree form have been delightful. Apart from that I am a confirmed audiobook fan. I listen when I am washing the cats, ironing the hens and performing sundry other household chores. Audiobooks have also, in the past few months, substituted for the news on the BBC, which I loathe. The news, that is. Also, the BBC.
Alastair Reynolds Halcyon Years This veteran SF writer, up there in my personal pantheon of modern space-operateers with the late and very sadly lamented Iain M. Banks, has lately evinced a fondness for noir pastiche (see Century Rain). In Halcyon Years, private dick Yuri Gagarin is contracted to investigate two murders, seemingly unconnected but for the fact that the victims are both young scions of rich and influential families. His client is a femme fatale straight from the Lauren Bacall school of Femme Fatality. Someone keeps trying to stop him, and no wonder — solving this crime will uncover the dirtiest of secrets about Halcyon itself. Because all this happens aboard a generation starship. Of course it does.
Rebecca Stott Dark Earth I discovered this after hearing the author talk about the joys of mud on the BBC, and as it was a novel set in England in the year 500 — the very darkest (and muddiest) of the dark ages and thus my favourite period of history (see How England Began, below) — I thought I’d give it a go. The plot concerns two sisters, daughters of a master swordsmith. When the smith dies the sisters — one witchy, the other whiny — are cast on their uppers and, to flee the brutal son of the local Saxon warlord, flee into the labyrinthine ruins of Londinium. There they become part of a multi-racial, all-female and occasionally sapphic commune, after which the book might as well have been set in the Peace Camp at Greenham Common. In this version of history, all the female characters are wonderful, if fickle and complex, and the men are uniformly and one-dimensionally horrible, except for the smith (who dies early on), and the one who is black. Oh dear. Now, next to nothing is known about that period of history, which gives writers license to write what they want. But it’s always a risk imposing modern morality on a substructure that has not the strength to bear it. Suffice it to say that it was a disappointment. Though perhaps my expectations were too high.
Kyle Harper The Last Animal This remorseless analysis by a professional historian exposes the wholly remarkable fact that a single species of animal has altered the ecosystem of an entire planet in a space of just a few centuries. It’s unputdownable, in the same way that one is transfixed by a road accident in the process of happening. Is this the sixth mass extinction? Not yet—there might still be time to turn the tide. In the meantime, will the last human to leave the denuded husk of planet Earth please turn off the lights? DISCLAIMER: I was sent a draft copy by the publisher.
Stella Rimington Breaking Cover In which our heroine MI5 agent Liz Carlyle battles Russian infiltration, while MI6 across the river hires a Communications Officer, the consequences of which are decidedly mixed.
E. M. Forster The Machine Stops/ The Celestial Omnibus Most people will associate E. M. Forster (1879-1970) with magic-lantern adaptations of his excursions into High Imperial Edwardiana such as Howard’s End, A Room With A View and A Passage To India. A surprise, then, to learn that he had a bash at what we’d nowadays call Science Fiction. The Machine Stops is a short story set in a world in which each person lives alone, each in their own cell, and communicates by video screen (now, take a step back and realise that this was published in 1928). All their needs are met by The Machine. Yes, at the end, it stops (no spoiler here – the clue is in the title). But on the way its capacity slowly degrades, during which the population becomes accustomed to mediocrity. Horribly, horribly prescient, both of the way we live now, and of what Cory Doctorow, with that characteristically American obsession with excrement, calls ‘enshittification‘. The other tale in this small Penguin Modern Classics edition (loaned to me by Mr C. F. of Cromer) is The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and I can’t remember much about it at all.
Stella Rimington The Moscow Sleepers In which our heroine MI5 agent Liz Carlyle enjoys her final adventure and rides off into the sunset. After nine of these adventures I have to say that Rimington knows how to spin a yarn, but it’s very lightweight compared with, say, John Le Carre, and I don’t feel I have got to know Liz Carlyle any more deeply than her LinkedIn profile might have told, had she had one.
Nicholas J. Higham How England Began Now, when I came across this in a bookshop I felt my prayers were answered – a serious, scholarly look at the period between 410, when the Roman legions left Britain; and 597, when Augustine rocked up at Canterbury. This offered a number of perspectives I hadn’t really considered. First, many Britons expected the Romans, once they’d left, to come back again (they were always coming and going). Any sense of finality is only imposed by us, in retrospect. Although eastern England and lowland Scotland became more and more Saxon, the West Country remained fairly Romanized for some decades. Villas were maintained and mosaics laid well into the 5th Century, until enshittification set in, more by slow degradation than sudden calamity. That, and the lack of hard currency. Second, whereas the eastern end of the Empire gave on to many other countries, Britain, at the northwestern extremity, was seen as Ends of the Earth. Romans treated Britons as distinctly third class. Although some Emperors were crowned in Britain (Constantine, notably, at York), no native Briton is known to have risen to any rank in the Empire. This lack of integration may explain why the Celtic languages of Britain survived, and English is a Germanic language, rather than a Romance one: whereas the barbarians who conquered the rest of the Western Empire became Romanised in speech (French, Italian, Spanish and so on), losing any indigenous languages they might have had (except Basque). Third, most treatments of this period concentrate on the archaeology, given that of literature there is almost nothing. So it’s interesting that Higham gets deeply into Gildas’ The Ruin of Britain (composed in the early- to mid- sixth century), showing from his example and close textual analysis that Gildas would have benefited from an elite, Roman education – which must therefore have been available, if only in places, for a century after the legions departed. An eye-opener.
David Mitchell Ghostwritten This novel is so awe-inspiringly accomplished that it’s hardly credible that this, by the writer who went on to write The Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks and others, was his very first novel. Like The Cloud Atlas, and to some extent The Bone Clocks, the novel is less one coherent tale than a series of very loosely connected stories. It starts from the point of view of the cultist who spread deadly nerve gas on the Tokyo underground; moves to a jazz-obsessed youth working in a Tokyo record store; and thence to locations as varied as Hong Kong, London, St Petersburg, rural China and Mongolia, and ranging throughout the twentieth century. One tale features a disembodied head-hopping spirit in search of another of its own kind. I’m still not entirely sure what it’s meant to be about, but it was a hell of a ride. Paperback loaned to me by Mr C. F. of Cromer, though in the end I listened to the audiobook version.
Eric Idle Idle In Provence When writer, musician and comedian Idle found a remote house in the Var in 1971, it was love at first sight, even though the house lacked vehicular access, roof, floor, walls, electricity, water, sewerage or house. It did, however, have a view, and over the next several decades Idle turned it from a ‘shack’ into a ‘shackeau’ (though he didn’t do it all on his own). Although intended as a quiet retreat from the Running-Around Knees-Bend Advancing Behaviour that made his fame and fortune, most of Idle’s friends came to enjoy the view as well, so the story of the Shack is interlaced with pen-portraits of Idle’s famous friends including George Harrison, David Bowie and Robin Williams. But it’s only shits and giggles until someone giggles and shits, and the humour is jagged with sadness, even tragedy. The Shackeau narrowly misses destruction by wildfire; Idle goes through a painful divorce; friends die; and — and this was so poignant I had to stop reading for a while — Idle is up to his neck directing Monty Python’s final live show while his wife, in LA, is trying to get their manic-depressive daughter sectioned so she doesn’t harm herself. Insightful, funny, sad, thought-provoking. Well, I liked it. DISCLAIMER: The author kindly had his publisher send me a copy.
Wilkie Collins The Moonstone Collins (1824-1889) was a near-contemporary, occasional collaborator and longtime friend of Charles Dickens (1812-1870). He also led a thoroughly unconventional life and was addicted to opium. The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859-1860) are the best-known of his many novels, stories and plays, some of which were regarded as ‘sensation’ stories at the time — that is, they are full of high adventure, serpentine plots, oriental exoticism and touches of the gothic and the macabre. The Moonstone, however, is an early example of what we would now call a detective story. It concerns the theft of a precious diamond (the titular moonstone) given to a young lady on her 18th birthday. But the diamond had been looted by British troops from a temple in India, and its guardians strive to reclaim it. It is written as a series of accounts, each by a different person involved in the case, from the genial servant Gabriel Betteridge and the urbane detective Sergeant Cuff to the pamphleteer and poor relation Miss Clack, allowing for many changes of tone and an element of unreliable narration. I suspect that the rather sad, opium-addicted medical assistant Ezra Jennings is a cipher for Collins himself. The Moonstone is as sexist and racist as one would expect given its date, so pearls will be clutched by the sanctimonious and self-selected arbiters of what we are obliged to call ‘taste’. This shouldn’t provide any more than momentary irritation for those less encumbered with over-tightened neck bolts when reading this overstuffed, melodramatic and thoroughly enjoyable farrago.
Robert Harris Agrippa Now, this is how you write a historical novel. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was a real-life Roman general, close friend and confidant of the man who would become the Emperor Augustus, and a prolific builder. Agrippa was a man of action rather than words, so the wily Augustus took the credit for Agrippa’s many achievements, almost writing him out of history. Robert Harris, whose playground is the Roman Empire (his books include Pompeii, a thriller set around the eruption of Vesuvius in 79; and a trilogy of the life of Cicero) has taken this opportunity to write Agrippa’s (fictional) deathbed memoir. And it’s nothing short of wonderful. The audiobook is even more wonderful having been read by Simon Russell Beale, and has a bonus interview between him and the author. Utterly splendid.
