What I Read In January

Screenshot 2025-01-01 at 12.28.31Max Adams: Aelfred’s Britain Max Adams is an archaeologist and writer specialising in Early Medieval Britain (that is, between the departure of Rome in 410, to the Norman Conquest) . His other books include The First Kingdom (on the early English Settlements); The King in the North (on the life and times of Oswald of Northumbria) and In The Land of Giants (a travel journey through the early Medieval  landscapes of Britain. Aelfred’s Britain deals with the Viking Age, between the very end of the eighth century and the middle of the tenth, when the very beginnings of what we might recognise as English, Scots and Welsh identities were forged in response to the depredations of the Danes and the Norse. He tells a compelling story from archaeology and written sources — the often partial accounts of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle and others — to draw a picture of how a countryside of scattered farmsteads slowly evolved into villages and small towns; how early medieval ideas of rule and kingship were rather different from what later nationalist ideas of history would paint; and most of all how the politics, wars and economics of early Medieval Britain were shaped by the landscape, of navigable rivers criss-crossed by the network of Roman roads and earlier cross-country routes. This is important, given that the modern world, with its concentration on cities and fast routes by road, rail and air, ignores the landscape altogether. There is one telling passage in which Adams reveals that an archaeological site of interest is now obscured by a modern motorway interchange. An ancient sense of place has been destroyed by the needs of people to go somewhere else.  The lives of people in what we used to call the ‘dark ages’ were indeed dark, forever scarred by endemic violence and disease. Yet, at the same time, one can’t help but feel a little nostalgic.

UntitledBarbara Davis: The Echo of Old Books Ashlyn Greer, child of uncaring parents, divorced from a philandering husband, sees herself as a victim of circumstances. She does, however, have a gift — she can tune in to the emotional states of the owners of books that come into her rare book store. Over the course of a couple of weeks, two books come in that vibrate her antennae off the scale — books without authors, publishers or any bibliographical details whatsoever. It turns out that each book tells one side of a doomed love affair in wartime America. The novel tells the story of how she tracks down the mysterious authors. It was a good enough listen, though I found the voice of the actor who played the female protagonist, Belle, rather prissy. But I feel that I was sold this under false pretences. I was expecting more of Ashlyn’s preternatural abilities, when these were really an excuse to get into a stock romantic melodrama. I can see that lots of people will love this, but I expect I am not the target audience. Apart from one thing — the book hits hard at the antisemitism of Ford, Lindbergh and their circle in 1940s America, and ends with a Hannukah party, something that is mainstream in America but probably wouldn’t have much traction in contemporary Britain, where the attitude to Jews among the literati is, it’s fair to say, ambivalent.

Untitled(various authors): The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights There’s nothing like an anthology of short stories to introduce you to new authors and get you out of a reading rut. This was a festive gift from Mrs Gee and what a treat it was. It contains one creepy spiderwebb’d tale each from twelve authors. Each tale is an absolute gem and just wonderful for reading next to a fireplace when the weather grows dark and chill beyond the window-pane, and when you know you’ll have to fumble up creaking, darkened stairs to bed, chased by shadows, accompanied by your own dread thoughts, and a candle. I must have been sleeping under a rock for years, or reading different things, for none of the authors was known to me, yet the biographical notes show that all are more or less buried under the weight of awards, plaudits and laurels of all kinds. My favourites (it seems invidious to single any of them out, they were all so good) were The Gargoyle by Bridget Collins; Ada Lark by Jess Kidd; and Carol of the Bells and Chains by Laura Purcell. Each one was suitably wintry and Gothick. I’ll be looking up the oeuvres of all these authors separately, as well as all the others I haven’t mentioned. But the standout (for me) was The Salt Miracles by Natasha Pulley, about mysterious happenings among contemporary pilgrims to a remote Hebridean island sacred to an ancient saint, That wasn’t Gothick at all, but like all good weird tales, it sticks in the mind. The biggest mystery, for me, is that the anthologists of this wonderful collection have remained anonymous…

UntitledMatt Haig: The Life Impossible The world has completely closed in around lonely, retired, twice-bereaved maths teacher Grace. Straitened by routine, sadness and crushing self-doubt, her world is turned upside down when she receives a letter from a lawyer saying she’s been remembered in the will of a fellow teacher with whom she’d worked many years before. The bequest is a small house in Ibiza. Arriving at the house, she finds it sad and neglected. But somehow, she’s expected. There is a reason why she was chosen to inherit this house, and come to Ibiza, for in her lies the ability to save Ibiza from the clutches of profit-hungry developers keen on despoiling the natural beauty of the island. The abilities include such things as – I am not joking – precognition, telekineses, and communion with an alien intelligence. Now, I love Matt Haig, who adds a spice of magic to what would otherwise be tales of the everyday. But this one was, I think, a little over-egged. Think of Shirley Valentine with extra Woo.

UntitledNatasha Pulley: The Mars House Natasha Pulley wrote one of my favourite stories from The Winter Spirits (see above) so I pulled this one down off Audible for a listen. She’s written many books — her first novel was The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, a Victorian steampunk fantasy, more on which later. The Mars House, is, perhaps surprisingly, SF. And it’s really rather good. January is the principal dancer in the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in London. London is flooded, a consequence of climate change, but Londoners are enjoying their new Venice. Until, that is, the floods eventually drive January out and he flees to the colony of Tharsis, on Mars, as a refugee. But refugees from Earth, having three times the strength of a naturalised Martian, have to be confined in body-cages that ramp down their strength so they won’t injure Martians by accident, and have to work in dirty, heavy jobs. January is a labourer in Tharsis’ water factory. By chance he meets Senator Aubrey Gale, a politician on the make, and — one thing leading to another — he ends up as their official consort. After that he gets sucked in to a grand political intrigue. Tharsis is sponsored by China, but is growing apart from it. Tharsese is a strange mixture of Mandarin with Russian and English (there is a lot of interesting exposition on language). The tensions between Mars and Earth throw Aubrey and January into a deadly Great Game. I enjoyed it hugely. The science is more-or-less okay, but what’s key here is the the social mores of Mars. Martians have abolished gender, so they are all ‘they’ (which I found confusing, because I had to keep checking that the author wasn’t referring to more than one person), and androgynous. Separate ‘male’ and ‘female’ genders are only for animals. What stands out is Pulley’s style, which is gentle, bright, breezy, witty, affectionate and very funny. I suppose that her humour is British (as are some of her cultural referents) and this might be off-putting to some, or even misconstrued. I was amazed, for example, to see that she’s attracted the fury of social-justice warriors (SJWs) on Goodreads. She’s a misogynist! (There is only one overtly female character, and she appears near the end). She is guilty of cultural misappropriation! (A white Englishwoman discussing Chinese language and history). She is even — gasp — a Zionist! (Because there’s an AI that has an Israeli accent). Oh, how dismal. I expect that SJWs will prefer Babel by Rebecca F. Kuang (reviewed here) in which social justice warfare comes to the fore and (in my opinion) spoils the story.

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Recording an Audiobook

IMG_8687Here I am in my home studio, Flabbey Road, which serves double triple multiple duty as office, library of SF, repository of ancient and medieval literature, reptile room, and man cave, just about to record the audio version of my next book Demure Mindfulness the Taylor Swift Way The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire. Amazingly, you can already order it, so I’d better get on with it. Last time I recorded an audiobook (A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth), listeners complained that I read too slowly, but mostly that I had had too much fun adding sound effects. This time the publisher wanted me to record with a producer listening in, but after a gentle reminder that I’d be frequently distracted by men women and dogs, and that they’d allowed me to do it unsupervised last time, they backed off, with the advice only that I spoke a bit faster. They didn’t say anything about sound effects (I shan’t add any. Well, maybe one or two). The studio has also improved since last time, when I recorded audio directly into  my trusty but very ancient iMac (OSX Lion was all it could manage, poor thing); a trusty but equally ancient version of GarageBand; and a trusty but very ancient no-name dynamic microphone I’d used for backing vocals in any number of beat combos from the year dot. Today I am using a trusty Untitledbut somewhat newer iMac (OSX Sequoia, noch); a newer version of Garageband; and a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface. You might both remember that I resisted upgrading for some while, but now I have everything set up, the sound quality seems a lot better. This is no doubt due to the interface; and the greater processing power of the newer computer. The coup-de-grace, though, was that my ancient and trusty dynamic microphone was rendered useless as a consequence of having been peed on by one of our three cats (I think it was Elvis, but he’s saying nothing), so I now have not one but two yes two count ’em two microphones, a Samson Q9U and a Shure SM57, which also make the sound better. The former I bought some time ago as it can feed either USB or audio and is great for podcasts. The latter I bought to trigger the vocoder application in my Korg Nautilus synth, but I am pressing it into service here. I balance the microphones in my trusty Behringer Xenyx 802 mixer, which feeds into the Focusrite and thence into the computer. Using two mics at once, simultaneously and both together at the same time gives a nice, warm, intimate sound. And I DO like the sound of my own voice. So now I’m all set. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

 

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My Top Reads Of 2024

This year I read 64 books, the first time since records began (2014) that the number has exceeded my age in years (I am 62). The total might be inflated, though, as some of the books have been duologues or trilogies and I’m never quite sure what to do with these. In addition, I use the term ‘read’ advisedly, as thirty of these were audiobooks. The rest were dead-tree versions — none was an e-book. So here, in no particular order, are my ten best reads of the year, with the overall winner at the end.

UntitledCixin Liu: The Three-Body Problem This (with its sequelae The Dark Forest and Death’s End) evokes nostalgia for SF stories of an earlier age, from authors such as Arthur C. Clarke. It starts in 1967 when a young girl, Ye Wiejie, witnesses her father, a physics professor, beaten to death by high-school students during the Cultural Revolution. This traumatic event shades her future, and — eventually — that of humankind. We see her brutal exile to a remote logging camp; her involvement as a technician in a secret radio-astronomy program of initially unknown purpose; her political rehabilitation, and, finally, retirement as a physics professor at Tsinghua University, where her father had once taught. But there is another strand to this — or, rather, several, as the story is somewhat nonlinear. In the present day, Wang Miao, a materials researcher working on a super-strong nanofilament, is coopted by a bluff, hard-drinking, hard-smoking cop Shi Qiang to investigate the mysterious deaths of several scientists. This leads us, through various diversions, to a secret scientific society charting the very limits of science; eco-terrorism; an eerily realistic computer game set on a planet orbiting chaotically in a triple-star system (hence the title); and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The scope is vast, and some of the set-pieces are truly staggering. Witness, for example, an analog computer consisting of thirty million soldiers arrayed on a vast plain using black and white signal flags as ones and zeroes. And the efforts of alien scientists to create sentience by etching microcircuits inside protons. It shouldn’t really work, but it does. This is a work of SFnal genius in anyone’s cosmos.

UntitledAmor Towles: A Gentleman In Moscow Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, late of ‘Idle Hour’, an estate near Nizhny Novgorod, returns to Russia from Paris after the Revolution to set his grandmother’s affairs in order. He is rounded up by the Bolsheviks, who, rather than shoot him for being a  ‘social parasite’, have what seems to be a worse fate in store. He is made a ‘former person’ and confined for life to the luxurious Hotel Metropol, just opposite the Bolshoi Ballet and within sight of the Kremlin, there to live at the state’s expense, in a tiny attic room, as he is forced to watch the collapse of his privileged world. But the Bolsheviks hadn’t reckoned on the resourcefulness of their prisoner. Rostov adapts to his new life and finds in it contentment as he encounters poets, actors, waifs, strays, journalists, diplomats, party apparatchiks, petty bureaucrats, movers and shakers among the hotel’s guests. His old-world decorum finds him taking a job as Head Waiter at the hotel’s prestigious Boyarski restaurant, as well as advising the New Russians on how best to conduct themselves in foreign company. This perfectly constructed novel is every bit as elegant and well-comported as its protagonist, with wry, funny asides and delicate prose lightly concealing the ups, downs — and horrors — of the Soviet Union from its birth until the early 1950s. A sign of a good book is if you miss it once you’ve finished, and I found myself missing the company of Count Rostov, known to his friends as Sacha, a man with a steely resolve buried beneath his well-groomed exterior.

UntitledAdrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Time (with its sequelae Children of Ruin and Children of Memory) Generation starship Gilgamesh is the last hope of humanity to flee a dying Earth in search of a new home. Eventually the crew discovers a gorgeous green planet that had been terraformed by an outpost of the long-gone human empire, watched over by a half-mad quasi-human guardian determined not to let any human land there and spoil her experiment in generating new sentient life. The life that arises, however, is not quite what the guardian — and the desperate crew of the Gilgamesh — had expected. Who will win the ultimate battle? Terrific, thrilling, madly inventive hard SF adventure.

UntitledLavie Tidhar: Maror People of a certain age will remember James Michener, who wrote vast blockbusters in which historical panoramas were seen through the eyes of a multi-generational cast of characters. One such was The Source (1965), telling of the Holy Land from pre-Biblical times to foundation of Israel. Maror, by Lavie Tidhar, can be seen as its antithesis. Yes, it’s a vast epic about Israel, but it is relentlessly anti-heroic. It stems from the idea that any fully rounded nation must have more than just politicians, heroes, generals, visionaries and pioneers. It must have whores, pimps, gamblers, gangsters, crooks and villains, too, and the boundaries between good and evil are not always clear. It starts with Avi Sagi, a cop so hard-boiled that he makes Dirty Harry look freshly laundered. Avi’s story, in the early 2000s, turns out to be just the first in a series of vignettes set in Israel (or among Israelis abroad) from just after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, through the Lebanon campaigns of the 1980s, up to 2008. The stories illustrate the history of Israel but through the eyes of cops so bent they could be drawn as pretzels; drug lords who are also devoted family men; soldiers, who, once out of the army, find jobs as ‘security consultants’ (please don’t call them ‘mercenaries’) to foreign terrorist organisations; professional drug couriers; politicians and generals who are also serial rapists and embezzlers, and who take advantage of the chaos of the Middle East to indulge in what are euphemistically called ‘import-export’ businesses. At the heart of it all is the mysterious, Bible-quoting Cohen, a policeman who is also a gangster, who plays both sides because, he says, if crime can’t be stopped, it has to be ‘managed’, and this means bending the rules. It turns out that Cohen was born on the day Israel achieved independence, and he can be seen as a kind of genius loci for Israel: sleeves-rolled-up, practical, cunning, doing everything to ensure Israel’s survival by any means necessary. The book is not without hope, though, even if cruelly dashed. In the mid-1990s, the young and idealistic Avi, trying to put a life of petty crime behind him, and fuelled, like all his generation, by the hope of the nascent Oslo peace accords and a peace treaty with Jordan, goes to a rock festival in Arad, in the Negev desert, and makes out with a girl. It all looks lovely… until disaster strikes. This is a portrait of a real event. The collapse of security barriers led to serious injury and death for young festival-goers. And on 4 November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, an architect of peace, was assassinated by a Jewish ultra-nationalist hothead. Avi turns back to crime and after that the course of the book is relentlessly downhill. The story ends, as it began, with Avi, and from the foregoing you’ll not be surprised to learn that it’s not a happy conclusion. To anyone like me who admires Israel, even if they don’t always love it, this novel is deeply unsettling. But I am consoled that there is a message here, too, for progressives, who rightly deplore the fact that women and minorities have to work twice as hard to achieve as much as their white, male colleagues, but, in their hypocrisy (born of deep-seated antisemitism) question the very existence of Israel, because Israelis don’t live up to ethical standards they would not match themselves, or expect in anyone else.

UntitledW. G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn  Sebald was an expatriate German academic who taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The Rings of Saturn is ostensibly a travel journal, made on a walking holiday along the Suffolk coast southwards from Lowestoft, via Dunwich and Southwold. In reality it is a long series of digressions connected together in an almost stream-of-consciousness way, giving it the flavour of that peculiar state of thought one experiences while just on the edge of sleep. There you are, reading (to take one example among many) about a man who spends most of his life making a scale model of the lost Temple in Jerusalem, but before you know it you’re deep into a history of the cultivation of silk moths, with no recollection of how you got from one to the other. There are more literary allusions here than you can shake a stick at, and certainly more than I grasped. The debt to Borges is obvious and acknowledged. There is also a flavour of Joyce, though one should beware (as Borges himself would have warned) of trying to spot influences. In the end, comparisons fade. This book is sui generis: melancholic, marvellous, morose, magnificent.

Screenshot 2024-11-03 at 12.20.41Robert Harris: The Cicero Trilogy (Imperium/ Lustrum/ Dictator) The Imperium trilogy is a fictionalised biography of the lawyer, orator, statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) during one of the most exciting periods of Roman history, when the old Republic gave way to the Empire. That we know Cicero existed is attested by a wealth of material. Perhaps less well-known is that much of it was recorded by his slave and personal secretary, Tiro, who devised a shorthand method of recording speech verbatim. It is also known from other sources that Tiro, who long outlived his master, wrote a biography of Cicero, though the biography itself is now lost. It is this that Harris recreates, with his usual attention to detail, sensitive characterisation and matchless readability. Imperium records Cicero’s early life and training, rising through the political ranks from the relatively junior quaestor, through aedile, praetor and finally consul, during which Cicero made his name by the high-profile prosecution of Gaius Verres, a corrupt governor of Sicily. Lustrum covers Cicero’s tumultuous year as consul and the years immediately following, in which he helped foil a conspiracy to destabilise the Republic, during which he condemned several men to death without trial, a circumstance that was to dog him ever afterwards. Dictator charts the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the various civil wars, and Cicero’s eventual downfall. Characters from ancient history shine out as real people. Not just Cicero, who is supremely clever, cunning and cultured — as well as crotchety, driven and vain — but the majestic if rather dopey Pompey; the fanatically stoic Cato; the vulpine Julius Caesar; Cicero’s ferocious and clever wife Terentia, and, in Dictator, the precocious Octavianus, who becomes the Emperor Augustus. It might not sound like it, but it’s a nail-biting thrill-ride as Cicero navigates the treacherous shoals and sometimes lethal hazards of Roman political life — especially as you just know it’ll all come to a sticky end. The dramatisation of Julius Caesar’s assassination is brilliant because, even though you know what’s about to happen, it’s so shocking.

UntitledJasper Fforde: The Eyre Affair This knockabout whimsy is set in England in an alternate 1985, in which literary investigator Thursday Next has a lot on her plate. A veteran of the ongoing Crimean War, she has to work out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays; find some way to make it up with her equally-war-scarred Crimean veteran boyfriend; and venture into the closed communist republic of Wales to  track down arch-villain Acheron Hades, who has stolen the original manuscript of Jane Eyre.  Hades has also stolen a device powered by bookworms that will allow him to get inside the novel and kidnap the heroine, altering the novel beyond repair. That he has already abducted a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit shows that he means business. It is gloriously silly, and there are episodes that are pure Python (sensu Monty). Fans of Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Spike Milligan and Tom Holt will love it. And so will everyone else.

UntitledIsabella Tree: Wilding Despite her name, Tree is not a tree-hugging eco-warrior. She was forced to rewild when increasing debt forced her and her farmer husband Charlie Burrell into a corner. The Burrell family had been farming several thousand acres on the River Adur in West Sussex for generations. Before that, the area had been a hunting forest, back to the time of King John. By the end of the twentieth century, the thick, clayey soil was exhausted, and no amount of fertilisers, weedkillers and machinery was going to produce the yield of cereals required to meet their growing debts. The Burrells were up against it. Letting the farm go wild was their only option. What was so amazing was the disbelief and occasional hostility of their farming neighbours, who thought that allowing farmland go back to nature was, somehow, against nature. People — and not just the public, but conservationists — think that the countryside they grew up in has always been like that, and therefore should be preserved in that state, as if in aspic. In reality, the environment has always been changing. What conservationists think of as the natural habitat of endangered Species X is, more than likely, a degraded remnant that’s far from that species’ preferred surroundings. Tree tells the story of how the land occupied by the farm was (and is) gradually returning to its natural state. Doing this isn’t cheap, and requires funding from various bodies who, initially (and puzzlingly) were, if not as aghast as the Burrell’s neighbours, still required a lot of convincing. But slowly, slowly, the Burrells are winning. Tree also dispels some modern myths. One is that Europe was once covered in dense, primeval forest, when the habitat was more likely to have been a mixture of woods and open country, what she calls ‘pasture’, an environment kept ever changing by the activities of animals within it, such as wild boar, deer, beaver and bison. Second is the seeming need of all farmers to make every square inch of the land productive, irrespective of  its suitability. She traces this attitude back to the Second World War, when Britain, importing most of its food and completely isolated, had to become largely self sufficient. The ‘Dig for Victory’ attitude has persisted, even though the world now produces more than enough food, and farmers are (or have been until recently) subsidised by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which at one point swallowed more than half the entire EU budget, such that farmers were paid to grow as many crops as possible, with all that implies for use of pesticides and herbicides — when a lot of the food simply went to waste. Rewilding your land still seems to many like a romantic dream. But discussions around land use are needed more than ever to inject a dose of reality into the minds of farmers, conservationists, politicians and the public.

UntitledDaniel Finkelstein: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad I am sure you both know that Daniel Finkelstein is a journalist and Conservative peer, and you probably are also aware that he is, like me, a Red-Sea Pedestrian, whose world view is inevitably coloured by the Holocaust and its consequences.  His perhaps more than most, as the families of both his parents were all but wiped out, one by Hitler, the other by Stalin. His mother’s journey began in Berlin and came to Hendon via Amsterdam and Belsen (her family knew Anne Frank’s family well). His father’s started in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) and progressed via the steppes of Kazakhstan, though his grandfather was transported to the Arctic Gulag. I should say that the little humour this book contains is dark, and very far from books with similar titles such as, oh, I don’t know, Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall by Spike Milligan. It is, though, calm and measured, and the author has trenchant things to say concerning the contemporary airbrushing out of Stalin’s crimes compared with those of Hitler, which tends to allow the modern Far Left an easier time of it than it deserves. That the book is a rip-roaring read, despite its complexities, is a product of the author’s own skill, though I note that the acknowledgements include thanks to Robert Harris, who as you know is one of my favourite novelists, and crafts thrillers from well-researched events, whether in Ancient Rome, Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia.

… and the overall winner is…

UntitledPhilip Ball: How Life Works This magisterial account of the workings of genes, cells and bodies is, first of all, an antidote to the gene-centric view of evolution, in which genes are ‘libraries’ or ‘blueprints’ or ‘programs’ for creating a body out of nothing, and all else is commentary. It turns out that genes are rather less, or more, or. well, something or other, it’s actually really hard to explain, and that’s because it’s almost impossible to describe what goes on at the scale of atoms and molecules without recourse to metaphor. It’s often been a cause of some wonder to me how molecules in cells can do what they do when they are packed in so tightly, and all surrounded by water that cannot possibly behave as a bulk fluid. How can molecules meet and interact in the way they seem to do in all those neat diagrams seen in textbooks when the viscosity regime must be rather like treacle? Such misgivings have similarly long preoccupied Ball, who is trained in physics and chemistry rather than biology, and can appreciate problems that biologists might miss. He  puts it very well when he says that the insides of cells are less like factory floors than dance floors, crowded with excited dancers packed in together and jiggling about and unable to communicate with one another because of all the noise. In such conditions, how can JAK kinase possibly get to JIL kinase across such a crowded room, in order to — well, let’s just think of something, oh, I don’t know, Release Calcium from Intracellular Stores? The intracellular environment is noisy, and very far from favouring the kind of neat networks and diagrams in which abbreviations cleanly interact with other abbreviations. Rather, says Ball, cells make a virtue of the noise and disorder. Molecular interactions are much less precise, much more fleeting, than one might imagine, and tolerate a degree of slop that no engineer would possibly countenance. Because of that disorder, the interactions between the various levels in the rough hierarchy of scales from genes to proteins to cells to tissues to organs to organisms are not always clear. But order emerges from the melee, nonetheless. If that’s all there was to How Life Works, it would be a good book. What makes it a great book is that Ball unflinchingly tackles the really big questions — what is the nature of life? What makes a living thing alive? What is the nature of that vis essentialis,  pneuma, je ne sais quoi? It’s here that Ball gets into challenging and exciting territory. Ball suggests that organisms are living because they make active choices. A dead one cannot. At the most basic level, a cell membrane can admit the passage of some ions, but not others, even against a concentration gradient — Maxwell’s Demon, made (in some sense) real. In the deepest philosophical sense, life is that which gives an assembly of atoms meaning. Given the difficulties of describing the biochemical and cellular processes of life without recourse to metaphor, some will find this hard to take. There is also the issue (which Ball deftly navigates) in which biologists are afraid to use terms such as ‘agency’ and ‘purpose’ for fear of invoking teleological or panglossian explanations, or, worse, welcoming a role for divine intervention. No such things are necessary — yet living things are definitely alive, and conventional prescriptions for the properties of life that we are taught in school (that it reproduces, grows, excretes, blah blah blah) fail to satisfy, and, being that this is biology, are plagued with viruses exceptions. As I was reading How Life Works, I was reminded of Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book What Is Life? subtitled The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, in which the famous physicist attempted to tackle the essential problem of biology. What Is Life? was part of a movement in which physicists became enamoured of biology and, having done so, boosted it into the molecular age (Francis Crick was one such). Ball obligingly discusses What Is Life?, its deficiencies, successes and influence. How Life Works is What Is Life? for the 21st century, and, because we know so much more than people did in Schrödinger’s time, is more successful  How Life Works is a milestone in its field and should be required reading for anyone seeking to take an undergraduate degree in biology.

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What I Read In December

UntitledDaniel Finkelstein: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad I am sure you both know that Daniel Finkelstein is a journalist and Conservative peer, and you probably are also aware that he is, like me, a Red-Sea Pedestrian, whose world view is inevitably coloured by the Holocaust and its consequences.  His perhaps more than most, as the families of both his parents were all but wiped out, one by Hitler, the other by Stalin. His mother’s journey began in Berlin and came to Hendon via Amsterdam and Belsen (her family knew Anne Frank’s family well). His father’s started in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) and progressed via the steppes of Kazakhstan, though his grandfather was transported to the Arctic Gulag. I should say that the little humour this book contains is dark, and very far from books with similar titles such as, oh, I don’t know, Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall by Spike Milligan. It is, though, calm and measured, and the author has trenchant things to say concerning the contemporary airbrushing out of Stalin’s crimes compared with those of Hitler, which tends to allow the modern Far Left an easier time of it than it deserves. That the book is a rip-roaring read, despite its complexities, is a product of the author’s own skill, though I note that the acknowledgements include thanks to Robert Harris, who as you know is one of my favourite novelists, and crafts thrillers from well-researched events, whether in Ancient Rome, Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia.

UntitledBernhard Schlink: The Reader (translated from the original German by Carol Brown Janeway) offers another picture of the war and its consequences though from a very different angle. The protagonist is an intelligent young man growing up in West Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His teenage sexual awakening comes through the chance meeting of a woman more than twice his age and less than half his intellectual accomplishments. It turns out that the woman has a very grim past. At the risk of spoilers, the book is a sensitive examination of the conscience of a country trying to come to terms with its collective guilt, which, while fresh in the memories of some, many others would rather forget. I came across this book in a pop-up book exchange on the route of one of my regular dog walks. I was intrigued as the cover gave very little indication of its contents and so, intrigued, I dived in.

Screenshot 2024-12-08 at 07.06.56The Magnus Archives  You’ll be aware that many of the books I read these days are audiobooks, so I don’t read, so much as am read to. This year I have also begun to listen to podcasts, and my tastes gravitate towards horror (I especially enjoyed The Lovecraft Investigations). I don’t include podcasts in my list of books, because they aren’t, though I felt I should add a note to explain why my recent listings of books have been less full of late, for I am currently consumed obsessed with The Magnus Archives. The schtick is this: The Magnus Institute, centuries old, is dedicated to the recording of paranormal incidents. One of the tasks of head archivist Jonathan Sims is to read the statements made by members of the public onto cassette tape – for some reason, paranormality corrupts digital attempts to capture such testimony. Each episode corresponds to one testament. At first, the stories seem unconnected but as the series progresses, certain themes emerge, and in the climax of series one some of them squish wetly up from the basement. Series One comprises forty episodes – each one is twenty minutes long or so. There are five series. At the time of writing I have reached the end of series four (some 160 episodes in). And then it turns into The Magnus Protocols. I may be some time.

UntitledSimon Toyne: Sanctus Action-packed thrillers with touches of religion, conspiracy theories and secret codes have long stuffed the shelves of departure-lounge bookstores. I picked this one up from the same pop-up book exchange that produced The Reader (above). If you have an aversion to the genre, you should stop reading this now, for if you thought it wasn’t possible to get any worse than The Da Vinci Code — it is. The setting is Ruin,  a fictional city in south-eastern Turkey, dominated by a mountain-sized  monolith in which lives an ancient order of monks devoted to guarding the Sacrament, an object whose nature they have closely guarded since before the dawn of history. But matters get decidedly wobbly when Kathryn (an American investigative journalist) and Liv (a charity worker) get ensnared in the secretive sect’s malign machinations. The action sequences are fine, but come at the expense of characterisation, so much so that I found it so hard to tell the difference between  the two main protagonists (Kathryn and Liv) that I often had to backtrack to discover who was who. Second, the fantasy elements (for there are some) are extremely ill-thought-out. Third, the implausible name of the city should have been a clue to the apparent lack of any kind of research into the setting. Ruin might plausibly be the name of an abandoned gold-mining town in Nevada, but not a city in Turkey. The residents of Ruin are strangely colourless. They talk in Americanisms (which is odd, as the author is English); and live in a town that might as well be Akron, Ohio. I understand that orientalism is a dirty word nowadays, but a town in Turkey should feel — well — Turkish. There is no sense of the heat, the smells, the sounds or even the contemporary politics of a city in the Middle East (and one that’s fairly close to the Syrian border, noch). There are no mosques, no muezzins, no clash of tradition with modern western culture. The police detectives have names straight out of central casting (Arkadian, Suleiman) and behave just like American cops, working in an American law enforcement system. This is a great shame as the concept is a gift for laying on some gothic sensory overload — mad monks in the mysterious East prepared to go to any lengths to protect the occult nature of ancient artefacts — what’s not to like? But it is an opportunity not only missed, but completely abandoned. In his rather good and surprisingly sane essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft writes that the one thing a weird or gothic tale can’t do without is atmosphere. Sanctus has all the atmosphere of the Moon.

Screenshot 2024-12-27 at 09.04.04Peter F Hamilton: Exodus: The Archimedes Engine Another day, another vast epic space opera from Peter F. Hamilton. When the Earth receives a signal from aliens known only as the Elohim of plentiful terraformed worlds to inhabit in the Centauri Cluster, millions of people set forth in giant ark ships. By the time the first ark ships get there, the Elohim are no more, but the planets’ bounty allows the humans to settle. 40,000 years later, the ark ship Diligent finds that the earliest humans to get there have evolved and stratified into a rigidly controlled society dominated by the post-human Imperial Celestials. Finn, a scion of a grand family of post-humans created by the Celestials as planetary administrators, yearns for freedom and, by fair means or foul, seeks to acquire the Diligent and fit it out as a starship. At the same time, an orphan gas giant planet is approaching the Centauri Cluster from deep space. Rich in iron, its presence is likely to destabilise the entire economy. To foil this, various parties seek to subvert the Archimedes Engines (relics of Elohim technology), the only devices capable of steering a planet. Add the usual Hamiltonian mix of detective stories, political intrigue, spectacular action sequences and imaginative locales, and the sesquipedalian author is at the peak of his game. I listened to it on audible — I believe the dead tree version is some 900 pages long, and this is the first of a two-novel sequence.  Books like this pose a problem. Consuming them all at once is rather like being forced to eat an entire selection box of rich chocolates. But taking it in easy stages runs the risk of losing the threads of the labyrinthine plot.

Screenshot 2024-12-27 at 09.27.19Mark Dunn: Ella Minnow Pea Back in the day, I believe trainee typists were often assigned the task of typing the pangram the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Hence this charming novella, set on the fictional island nation of Nollop, just off the coast of the Carolinas, named after one Nevin Nollop, founder of the nation and supposed creator of the one-sentence tale about the swift vulpine’s leap across the body of the indolent pooch. The residents of Nollop love language and are keen letter writers (the entire novel is epistolary). Nollop’s statue has pride of place in the town square, along with the pangram, each letter of which is inscribed on a single tile. When the tiles begin to fall off, the island’s council forbids the use of the fallen tile in any speech, correspondence or reading matter. At first, the losses of Z, Q and J hardly signify, but the situation becomes dire and the increasingly inarticulate Nollopians are forced to bear ever more authoritarian rule, while being less and less able to express their dismay. Ella Minnow Pea is transparently an allegory about authoritarianism, very much in the style of Animal Farm. I am glad it was short, for the effect was tragic and somewhat agonising to listen to. I listened to it as an audiobook, with each letter-writer voiced by a different actor. It was great, but I expect that the paper version would be even more affecting.

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On Migration

Mr Blue Sky‘ is a cheerful pop tune by the Electric Light Orchestra. It is entirely unconnected with Bluesky, the social media phenomenon. It’s been around for quite a while, apparently. The social media phenomenon, I mean, although Out Of The Blue, the album by the Electric Light Orchestra that includes ‘Mr Blue Sky’ came out in 1977. But I digress. Bluesky (the social media phenomenon, please do at least try to keep up at the back), was engendered as recently as 2019 by one Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter (a different social media site), as an experimental platform that allowed the lunatics to take over the asylum users to customise their experience more flexibly than Twitter allowed. but has taken off since the Fall of Western Civilisation (was it really less than a month ago?) with the mass migration from TwiXXtit of many of its more — how can I put this? — ‘intellectual’ — habitués.

Twister was already a bit of a sinkhole. Back in the day, malcontents who wished to express their views had to find a piece of paper and write on it, venting their frustration, often in green ink, and using up every square millimetre of space, after which they’d have to find an envelope; address the envelope to someone (anyone!); buy a stamp, and mail it. In those far-off days when I wrote a science column in the Times (the real one, you know, in London) I’d regularly get mail like that. The sanest letters I received were from inmates at high-security mental hospitals. Not because those correspondents yet at large were necessarily even more dribblingly insane than those who had been incarcerated, but because those who had been locked up were, presumably, taking their medication. With Twittex, anyone at all could say whatever they liked, no matter how hateful, spiteful, ill-considered or loopy, and post it to the world at almost no cost. And they had to do it in 140 characters (ah, those were the days), a limit that doesn’t leave any room for nuance. To be fair, social media have always been prone to such afflictions, as those of us who remember Usenet groups will attest. On the plus side, Tixwart became a great place for people of shared interests to congregate and swap information. People such as scientists, who can rarely afford postage stamps, and, as it happens, mainly lean to the left, and that’s not only those who happen to be Jewish and celebrating Passover (oh, if you insist, here’s a link for the goys).

The clouds gathered when a tech squillionaire called Elon Musk, famous for electric cars and re-usable space rockets, took over Titter and renamed it ‘X’. The cheerful blue bird logo was shot out of orbit by Darth Vader’s ominously black X-wing (Star Wars enthusiasts will no doubt tell me that Darth Vader didn’t fly an X-wing, but I shall ignore them). Mr Musk took perhaps a more active role in the administration of the platform than was entirely appropriate. But it got worse. Mr Musk became rather intimate with the fifthcoming forthcoming next President of the U. S. and A., a person who was voted in by millions despite the fact that his relationship with the truth is, shall we say, elastic. The Fall of Western Civilisation election happened less than a month ago, and how things have changed. Not long after that seismic event I noticed that my tally of followers on X was falling. Looking back, I had not been accruing many new ones for a while. I didn’t think it was something I said, at least, not recently, but then twigged that people were leaving X and moving to Bluesky. I set up an account on Bluesky and now have 1,000 1,100 1,200 followers, a total that seems to be rising faster than house prices in London.

Frank has in these pages talked about alternatives to X for some while (most recently Bluesky), and not long after Mr Musk took over TwitWit I set up an account on an alternative called Mastodon, which, for some reason, hasn’t taken off in quite the same way, perhaps because it’s set up as a collection of independent sub-networks, rather than as a unified entity, but maybe because it is named after an extinct species of elephant. The transition from TwerpTit to Bluesky, on the other hand, is much simpler, perhaps because it was created by the same people. There is even an extension to Chrome which, with a bit of fiddling around, involving drawing a pentagram on the floor in chalk, sacrificing a goat to Ishtar, and earthing oneself to a radiator, allows one to find those of one’s followers on Twix who already have accounts on Bluesky.

I should say that other social media accounts are available (Frank lists some I hadn’t even heard of) and it seems I have five. Or maybe six. Being as I am a recovering palaeontologist, I can reliably count to two, but counting to three or more requires me to lie down in a darkened room afterwards. Each one of my accounts serves a different purpose. Here they are, with tally of my followers.

Bluesky: The trendy alternative to Twerpix. What XTwit used to be like. I have 1,200 followers and rising.

X: The Dark Side. I peaked at just over 3,000 followers. I still have 2,928. Clearly, not all have moved to BlueSky, so I shall be keeping an eye on it still and have no immediate plans to delete it, despite the Muskiness.

Facebook: The time-hallowed way of sounding off, though in a more relaxed way than Twitter. A space which, in my experience, is more for social than professional activities, my feed is forever clogged up with adverts and suggestions for pages to follow which, no matter how hard I try to remove them, keep coming back. I have 1,300 ‘friends’, and a separate page for promoting my books, which has 470 followers.

LinkedIn: Very much geared to professionals, this is not the place where people tend to post pictures of their cats. 1,407 followers and ‘500+ connections’.

Instagram: This very much is the place where people post pictures of their cats. Or in my case, dogs. 487 followers.

IMG_8533

A cat, recently. Also includes a dog.

Mastodon: A social media network that seems to have been eclipsed by Bluesky and is therefore arguably redundant. 48 followers.

These are clearly too many. I have resisted signing up to Threads, and TikTok is for tinies. I’d like to be able to encourage my followers on other platforms to move to Bluesky, but not all of them will. A good friend of mine on X said he wouldn’t move to Bluesky because, he said (and this is the cleaned up version) it was full of pompous sanctimonious self-important lefty scientists who were so up their own bottoms they’d settle down in there with a standard lamp, a comfy chair and a good book. So it’s clear that I am going to have to keep most of my social media accounts. Except possibly Mastodon. I think that species is  due for extinction.

I shall end with a cautionary note. Social media platforms evolve. Some stay around longer than others. Usenet groups are a thing of the past.  MySpace, anyone? Tumblr? Friendfeed? The Tale of Twittr is a cautionary one, and it’s possible, even likely, that Bluesky, too, will soon be riddled with undesirable mastodons  elephants elements. I have a suspicion that at least some of my more recent followers might be bots. Many seem anonymous; are sans profile picture or description; have no followers of their own; have made no posts; and (this is the suspicious part) seem to be following precisely 51 people.

The Electric Light Orchestra predicted this a long time ago. As the lyric to ‘Mr Blue Sky’ has it

Mr. Blue, you did it right
But soon comes Mr. Night creepin’ over
Now his hand is on your shoulder
Never mind, I’ll remember you this
I’ll remember you this way.

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What I Read In November

UntitledJasper Fforde: The Eyre Affair This knockabout whimsy was given to me by a colleague, Mr C. S. of Borehamwood, for my entertainment when I was off work with depression over a decade ago. I cannot say why I picked it up now, but I am glad I did. It’s set in England in an alternate 1985, in which literary investigator Thursday Next has a lot on her plate. A veteran of the ongoing Crimean War, she has to work out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays; find some way to make it up with her equally-war-scarred Crimean veteran boyfriend; and venture into the closed communist republic of Wales to  track down arch-villain Acheron Hades, who has stolen the original manuscript of Jane Eyre.  Hades has also stolen a device powered by bookworms that will allow him to get inside the novel and kidnap the heroine, altering the novel beyond repair. That he has already abducted a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit shows that he means business. It is gloriously silly, and there are episodes that are pure Python (sensu Monty):

‘Home news now, and violence flared again in Chichester as a group of neo-surrealists gathered to celebrate the legalisation of surrealism. On the spot for Toad News Network is Henry Grubb. Henry, how are things down there?’ A shaky live picture came on to the screen, and I stopped for a moment to watch. Behind Grubb was a car that had been set on fire, and several officers were in riot gear… ‘Things are a bit hot down here, Brian. I’m a hundred yards from the riot zone … This evening several hundred Raphaelites surrounded the N’est pas une pipe public house where a hundred neo-surrealists have barricaded themselves in. The demonstrators outside chanted Italian Renaissance slogans and then stones and missiles were thrown.  The neo-surrealists responded by charging the lines protected by large soft watches and seemed to winning until the police moved in …’

Fans of Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Spike Milligan and Tom Holt will love it. And so will everyone else.

UntitledIsabella Tree: Wilding Something happened just after I finished reading this book that made me incandescent with fury rather cross. It was news reports from South Wales where homes and businesses had been wrecked by floods from Storm Bert, mere years after having recovered from floods set off by Storm Desmond [honestly, who thinks up these names? — Ed]. All the talk was of strengthening flood defences, which costs £££, when it seems clear that to me (nobody mentioned this on the news) that this is precisely what one should not do.

Ever since Victorian times, engineers have followed the mantra that surface water should be removed as quickly as possible. To this end they have drained marshes, wetlands and water-meadows, and canalised rivers into narrow, straight courses. So now, when rivers flood, the water doesn’t do what it once did — hang around in pools, soak into the ground, and meander. Instead, rivers, now confined by hard engineering, rise rapidly and overtop their banks.

The solutions are, tragically, close at hand, more effective, and much cheaper. Flood defences should be torn down, not built higher. Rivers should be allowed to relax. If necessary, people should be relocated to higher ground. At the very least, they should be discouraged from paving their front yards to make hard standing, so rainwater can soak into the ground. Trees should be planted on slopes to stabilise soil. Fields should be allowed to revert to wetland. Beavers should be reintroduced to dam streams, slowing river flow.

And if you, as a local planning officer,  really are going to be so idiotic as to allow developers to build on floodplains (the clue’s in the name — well, duh)  dictate that they don’t build yet more depressing estates of identikit boxes, but apply some design and engineering thought, and put them on stilts, with an undercroft, so the water can flow underneath. For goodness sake, Grand Designs has been on our screens for a quarter of a century, but for all that it’s had any influence, developers and planning departments obviously do things with their eyes shut. That nobody seems able to understand this is what makes me so angry. Oh, and farmers should allow unproductive or marginal farmland to go a bit wild at the edges. As Isabella Tree shows in this amazing and inspirational book, doing these things improves biodiversity as well as water quality, softens water flow and prevents flooding.

Despite her name, Tree is not a tree-hugging eco-warrior. She was forced to rewild when increasing debt forced her and her farmer husband Charlie Burrell into a corner. The Burrell family had been farming several thousand acres on the River Adur in West Sussex for generations. Before that, the area had been a hunting forest, back to the time of King John. By the end of the twentieth century, the thick, clayey soil was exhausted, and no amount of fertilisers, weedkillers and machinery was going to produce the yield of cereals required to meet their growing debts.

The Burrells were up against it.

Letting the farm go wild was their only option. What was so amazing was the disbelief and occasional hostility of their farming neighbours, who thought that allowing farmland go back to nature was, somehow, against nature. People — and not just the public, but conservationists — think that the countryside they grew up in has always been like that, and therefore should be preserved in that state, as if in aspic. In reality, the environment has always been changing. What conservationists think of as the natural habitat of endangered Species X is, more than likely, a degraded remnant that’s far from that species’ preferred surroundings.

Tree tells the story of how the land occupied by the farm was (and is) gradually returning to its natural state. Doing this isn’t cheap, and requires funding from various bodies who, initially (and puzzlingly) were, if not as aghast as the Burrell’s neighbours, still required a lot of convincing. But slowly, slowly, the Burrells are winning.

She also dispels two other big lies. One is the myth that Europe was once covered in dense, primeval forest, when the habitat was more likely to have been a mixture of woods and open country, what she calls ‘pasture’, an environment kept ever changing by the activities of animals within it, such as wild boar, deer, beaver and bison.

Second is the seeming need of all farmers to make every square inch of the land productive, irrespective of  its suitability. She traces this attitude back to the Second World War, when Britain, importing most of its food and completely isolated, had to become largely self sufficient. The ‘Dig fo Victory’ attitude has persisted, even though the world now produces more than enough food, and farmers are (or have been until recently) subsidised by the EU’s frankly criminal Common Agricultural Policy, which at one point swallowed more than half the entire EU budget, such that farmers were paid to grow as many crops as possible, with all that implies for use of pesticides and herbicides — when a lot of the food simply went to waste.

Rewilding your land seemed like a romantic dream. In current circumstances, discussions around land use are needed more than ever to inject a dose of reality into the minds of farmers, conservationists, politicians and the public.

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Life, Death and Tolkien

My recent post on Tolkien got me thinking about some more current issues. There are others who are better guides to Tolkien’s moral philosophy than I. However, the person who finally convinced me, many years ago, that capital punishment was wrong, was not a politician or religious leader, but a fictional character — Gandalf.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo declares to Gandalf that it was a pity that Bilbo had not killed the treacherous creature Gollum when he’d had the chance. ‘He deserves death’, Frodo says. ‘Deserves it!’ I daresay he does,’ replies Gandalf:

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

That was then.

More recently, the British Parliament has been asked to consider a bill that would legalise assisted dying. It has this debate every few years. However,  an increasing number of people are in favour of the idea that people who are terminally ill should be allowed to end their own lives at a time of their choice. The current bill introduces safeguards that are meant to prevent terminally ill people being subject to coercion. Safeguards include independent reviews by two clinicians and a high-court judge. Whatever the safeguards, however, there is an argument that people should be allowed to die with dignity.

Tolkien puts it very well in The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, a kind of coda to The Lord of the Rings in which the hero, Aragorn, now more than two hundred years old, decides that the time has come for him to die. As a Númenórean — that is, a human, but of exalted lineage — he has been granted the grace to be able to do this. His wife, Arwen, is full of regret. She is an immortal elf who has traded her immortality for a mortal life, if a long one. ‘Take counsel with yourself, beloved’, Aragorn says,

and ask whether you would indeed have me wait until I wither and fall from my high seat unmanned and witless.

Aragorn knows he will have to die, someday, but it will be at a time of his choosing, when he still has the capacity to do so. The passage also highlights the grief of those left behind, suggesting that although such grief is inevitable, it might be made worse when friends and relations are forced to watch a person die slowly and possibly in agony, losing first one facility and then another, and the greatest loss is dignity.

Aragorn’s words seem to me very wise and, in the end, compassionate. It is notable, though, that Tolkien puts such a speech in the mouth of the hero of his epic tale. Tolkien was a Catholic, and as such would probably be horrified by the idea of assisted suicide. Aragorn, though, has a kind of special license. As a Númenórean, he is also, in a sense, prelapsarian, the descendant of people who were never corrupted by the forces of evil in the world.

My own personal view is that we should not accept our fallen condition. Instead we should strive to regain that prelapsarian state. To that end, it should be a fundamental human right — perhaps the most fundamental — that a person has absolute and final governance over their own body. To be sure, we cannot choose whether to be born, or when. However, as if in compensation, we should have the absolute right to, say, have an abortion, change gender, or indeed, die, without the interference of religious leaders, judges or politicians.

I accept that you might not agree with me. And that’s your right, too.

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Tolkien and Loss

I’ve argued elsewhere that one of the most important themes in Tolkien’s work is loss. Loss of technological ability, loss of lifespan, loss of population, loss of — well, let’s not put too fine a point on it — grace, something that might have resonated with Tolkien’s Catholicism and (I think) inherent pessimism.

But there are more playful examples.

The most obvious is the scene in The Lord of the Rings in which Frodo stands up in a pub and recites a poem about the Man in the Moon, who decided one day to go to the pub (a favourite Tolkien pastime) where he discovers a sportive cow, a cat that plays the violin, a dog with a sense of humour, animated crockery and cutlery and so on … to which Tolkien adds a rare (and teasing) breaking-the-fourth-wall footnote, that only a few lines of this poem are now remembered. In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford, 1973 reprint, page 203), Iona and Peter Opie write of Hey Diddle Diddle that it is probably the best-known nonsense verse in English, which might explain why  ‘a considerable amount of nonsense has been written about it’, before going on to list the various far-fetched theories as to its origin. Some things are, well, just nonsense.

There is a deeper theme here, though, and one that Tolkien, as a scholar of medieval literature, knew only too well — that the literature that survives from ancient times is a tiny fragment of what might once have been current, and that most tales were never written down. Take Beowulf, for example — a poem that Tolkien knew better than most. The only copy of Beowulf that survives is a late manuscript of what was in all likelihood a version of much older story, transmitted orally, whose origins are lost in the fog of the ancient North. The version we have contains hints of yet other stories, and quite a few words, that would have been well known to audiences at the time but of which no other record survives, speaking to a much larger, lost corpus of storytelling. Along with this is the tendency of tales, especially in an oral tradition, to get bowdlerised in each re-telling, progressively worn down until a nonsensical nubbin remains. After centuries of recitation, Hey Diddle Diddle was all that remained of The Man In The Moon. In the same way, Tolkien’s beautiful, powerful and sometimes frightening Elves, and tough, gritty Dwarves, if they were once real, survive only nowadays  as kitsch garden gnomes or filmy fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Tolkien loathed Disney — it is the merest coincidence that The Hobbit came out in the same year as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — yet you could read Snow White as the ultimate adulteration of The Lord of the Rings, with Arwen becoming Snow White; Aragorn, the Handsome Prince; Sauron (or Galadriel!) as the Wicked Queen; the poisoned apple as the Ring; The Wicked Queen’s magic mirror as the Mirror of Galadriel, or a palantir (seeing stone); with all the dwarfs and so on as the supporting cast. One must of course beware of reading too much into what is after all a kind of parlour game rather than serious literary criticism.

In that sportive vein, though, and for reasons I need not articulate here, I was reminded of another nursery rhyme.

I had a little nut tree

Nothing would it bear

But a silver nutmeg

And a golden pear.

The King of Spain’s daughter

Came to visit me

And all for the sake

of my little nut tree.

Anyone who likes me spends more time than is usual or healthy tolkien to themselves will immediately see in the silver nutmeg and golden pear an echo of the Two Trees of Valinor in The Silmarillion: silver Telperion and golden Laurelin, which, after their slaying by Melkor and the giant spider Ungoliant, produced, respectively, a silver flower (that became the Moon) and a golden fruit (the Sun). Nothing else would they bear.

But who was the King of Spain’s daughter, and why would she have gone to all that effort to visit one little nut tree? In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, the Opies (this time on page 330) are much more specific than they were for Hey Diddle Diddle. They suggest that the rhyme may have celebrated a particular royal visit. The Opies write (page 331):

Edith Sitwell in Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) pictures Lady Bryane, governess-in-ordinary to the young Princess Mary and then to Elizabeth, singing this song to her charges, and remembering a black and terrible shadow, the shadow of Juana of Castile the mad ‘King of Spain’s daughter’, who visited the court of Henry VII in 1506. [my emphasis]

Juana of Castile (daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) is known to have visited Prince Henry (later Henry VIII) in 1506. There was a family connection: Juana was the sister of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Juana’s visit, however, was unscheduled. Her ship, sailing from Flanders to Castile, was wrecked on the English coast. As if matters couldn’t get any worse, relations between Juana’s husband Philip and father Ferdinand were at that time extremely strained. Civil war almost broke out to decide who would rule Castile. Although Philip and Ferdinand settled their differences, it suited them both to declare Juana, the legal heir to the throne, as mad, and have her confined. She remained locked up until her death in 1555, aged 75. Whether Juana really was mad, or her madness was a convenient fiction to get a meddlesome female out of the way, is in question. But the story of her madness had a wide currency, and one can see that a memory of her visit to England, combined with the shipwreck, would have cast a shadow.

One is tempted to wonder whether the whole story of Juana of Castile became infused in Tolkien’s mind while working on his legendarium, so that, perhaps, and knowing how his mind worked, the back-story to I Had A Little Nut Tree really relates to the dark, extremely dark, definitively dark visit of Melkor and Ungoliant, who came to Valinor specifically to seek out the Two Trees and kill them, and the story only became attached to Juana as a matter of Tudor historical revisionism. After all, we still don’t know — and the Opies don’t tell us — why Juana, mad or otherwise, specifically wanted to visit that tree, and admire its fruit, so gravely borne.

I do like parlour games like this. Whether they have any literary merit is questionable.

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The Man In The White Suit

I had to write something down on my blog or I’d explode. It’s all about built-in obsolescence; the rate of technology increase; and how technology manufacturers use their customers as free beta-testers rather than taking time to release products that stand the test of time.

I have been through various iMacs, but my most reliable and trusty iMac was until recently a 24-inch machine that was made in 2009 and now runs OSX Lion 10.7.5, which is the tippiest toppiest OS that it can handle. It’s been the stalwart of my home music-making for years. Part of the reason was the profusion of USB-A ports on the back, and  — and this is vital — an audio input. Also, a CD burner. Thanks to this it’s been a breeze to make and produce music on this machine, including two albums released on Apple Music and other streaming platforms, using the inbuilt Garageband (that’s GB 2011, version 6.0.5).

I’ve always known that the day would come when I’d have to replace this machine. Lion 10.7.5 is as sophisticated as the poor thing can manage, and browsers don’t work properly any more. The CD burner has conked out.

THOUGHT#1 What have people got against burning one’s own CDs? Why do you have to upload music to the Cloud, which, as one IT professional told me, means Someone Else’s Server? (And I used to able to watch DVDs, too… that facility conked out years ago. Now you have to stream whatever Apple or Netflix or Amazon deign to make available).

I guess I could still spend £££ on an external CD burner if I really wanted to. But there’d be a learning curve and software and drivers and compatibility issues…

… but my old iMac still has that external audio input, which meant that I could record audio direct to Garageband without an interface. And I could save my projects to a USB stick. And, oh yes, burn a CD. The final knell fell a few days ago when I found I could no longer upload music to Soundcloud.

Luckily I have a second iMac, the one I use for social media and writing and other stuff. (For the day job at the Submerged Log Company, everything is kept separate, on yet a third computer, which is a PC). The second iMac is also 24-inch but was made in 2021. It also has Garageband, but I hadn’t used it, as the only physical way in to the machine is by a pair of Thunderbolt ports (equivalent to USB-C). There is still an audio out… but for how much longer, I wonder?

So this weekend I bit the bullet. I did a very necessary clear-up of my files on both computers. I then put everything I needed from the old computer on to a USB-stick. First hurdle — I had to get an adapter cable with USB-A on one end and USB-C on the other.

THOUGHT#2: what was so wrong with USB-A that they had to change it, necessitating my spending £ on adapter cables?

Second hurdle: I ported my existing Garageband projects over and opened the new Garageband. Amazingly enough they all worked… except for the inbuilt instruments, such as drums. This necessitated downloading lots of software. Which refused to work. Aargh.

That’s when I realised that the newness of my new Mac is relative. It is four years old, and so is its version of Garageband. So I upgraded the software to OSX Sequoia 15.1, and Garageband to version 10.4.1. After that I could download all the drums and so on and my existing projects sounded more or less OK.  However, there is a learning curve, as the new Garageband has a lot more features, and I have yet to find all the bits I’m used to.

I have yet to plug in my remote USB keyboard (using a new adapter cable, naturally) and fully expect that there will be much swearing and gnashing of teeth before it works properly. (UPDATE: I plugged it in, and it worked just fine. Phew).

There remains the issue of the lack of an audio input. My entire system has been assembled and indeed predicated on an audio input. I have an audio sound mixer. I have an audio monitoring mixer. I tend not to use software instruments — I have a rack of old-fashioned keyboards, and occasionally record voices and guitars and other stuff — so I need audio input.

The workaround here was the purchase of an audio-to-USB-C interface (one of these) supplied by my old friend Mr M. F. at PMT in Norwich. As an act of defiance I didn’t order this kit online but went into an actual shop and, you know, actually bought it, from an actual assistant (my friend Mr M. F. as above) and we had a Good Old Chat.

I haven’t plugged this interface in yet. I fully expect to have to download software and drivers and will have compatibility issues, because nothing, but nothing, ever works the way it is supposed to. And all this fuss because my iMac doesn’t have an audio input. (UPDATE: I plugged it in and it worked. Yes, I did have to download some software. That worked, too. It did take a while, and some head-scratching, before I could re-connect everything together such that everything worked as it was meant to. In the end I just ditched the monitor mixer).

THOUGHT#3: what was so wrong with an audio input that they had to remove it, necessitating my spending £££££ on an audio-to-USB interface?

I guess kids these days make music on a laptop and use software plug-ins for most things. But what about most of us who aren’t kids-these-days, eh?

And anyway, what’s all this about The Man In The White Suit? It’s an old film. Starring Alec Guinness. All about how built-in obsolescence is necessary to make the world go round, or something. And yes, you can stream it. Because of course you can. But only so long as they let you.

Mrs Gee, who as you both know is a Fount of All Knowledge and Wisdom, says I should give it all up and take up knitting instead.

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What I Read In October

Screenshot 2024-10-02 at 09.32.36Robert Harris: Precipice This exponent of the well-researched historical and occasionally alt-history thriller, often set in Nazi Germany (Fatherland) or Ancient Rome (Imperium, Pompeii, etcetera) sometimes steers very close to actual reality, dramatising  real events that happened to real people (An Officer and a Spy, Act of Oblivion). And that is the case here. The novel starts in July 1914, a few days after Franz Ferdinand had been shot, and describes, in agonising day-by-day detail, the machinations of Herbert Henry Asquith’s Liberal government as Britain was dragged into the ensuing conflict; and continues until May 1915, after the Gallipoli disaster, when Asquith had to enter into a coalition with Bonar Law’s Unionists. It is told largely through the medium of Asquith’s surviving letters to his muse,  Venetia Stanley, who was very much younger. Asquith discussed government business in his letters, some of it secret, and the letters are, in some cases, the only record that survives of cabinet meetings of the time — stuffed as they were with pointed pen-portraits of Winston Churchill, Lord Kitchener and their contemporaries. Stanley’s letters do not survive, but Harris makes a good stab at reconstructing the prose of an intelligent, well-bred and well-read woman from an unconventional family (her father was an atheist; her immediate relatives included a Muslim convert and a Catholic bishop, and she married a Jew, Edwin Montagu). Harris makes the argument that the downfall of Asquith’s government was linked to Stanley ceasing to write to him and announcing her engagement to Montagu — and also adds a clever subplot involving the nascent secret intelligence services. What struck me most about this novel (apart from the unbelievable privilege enjoyed by a very small group of people, set apart and insulated from the common herd, and all of whom knew one another) was that these were simpler times. The Prime Minister could afford to spend weekends away at house parties, and walk from Downing Street to go shopping without being recognised. And also that there were at least six deliveries of mail a day. As always with his novels, Harris wears his voluminous research very lightly. One does, however, get rather tired of the amatory declarations in the letters, my dearest darling, my only muse, light of my existence, &c &c. And I couldn’t help reading the title as ‘Prepuce’. Other than that it’s terrific.

IMG_8348Alice Thompson: The Book Collector Within the eldritch and be-tentacled genre that is horror fiction lurks a sub-genre, feminist horror, perhaps best exemplified by The Yellow Wallpaper, a story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in which the protagonist, a woman suffering what we’d now called postpartum depression, is locked by her husband, for her own good, so he says, in an upstairs room. The story charts the protagonist’s mental disintegration as she becomes obsessed with the patterns of the room’s yellow wallpaper. As it is told in the first person, the events are recounted by an unreliable narrator, so one is never sure whether they are real, or going on inside the narrator’s own head. The Book Collector is a short novel in much the same vein. A young woman called Violet marries the eponymous Bibliophile, and at first her life is idyllic. A fairy tale, in fact. Fairy tales feature very strongly in this story. Especially the old-fashioned kind. You know, the really gruesome ones that the Grimms and others told before they got cleaned up by Disney. But I digress. After Violet gives birth to Felix, her life falls apart and her husband confines her to a lunatic asylum for similarly ‘hysterical’ women. An asylum from which women are being abstracted, mutilated and killed. The novel has all the trappings of the Gothick: dark forests, secret caves, madness, grand houses, bookcases stuffed with dusty grimoires that one really, really shouldn’t look at, let alone read. The writing style, though, is clipped, well-trimmed to a degree and far from the edge of floridity, dissolution and decay that should match the locales. H. P. Lovecraft (very much at the florid end of the spectrum) wrote that the key feature of horror fiction should, above all, be atmosphere, something that stays with you once you’ve closed the book. Atmosphere doesn’t require that the writing is any more than good enough to drive you through the story. Lovecraft’s writing is so bad, it’s brilliant. Thompson’s writing, on the other hand, is perhaps too well-crafted for its subject. So, although parts of this tale are very gruesome, it doesn’t have quite the effect it perhaps should. Fun fact: connoisseurs of 1980s pop trivia will know Alice Thompson as the founding keyboard player in a combo called The Woodentops.

Screenshot 2024-10-19 at 11.25.01Richard Osman: We Solve Murders Yes, it’s him again, the Man on the Telly, and best-selling author of the deservedly acclaimed Thursday Murder Club series of thrillers that have re-invigorated that subgenre known as Cosy Crime. Osman, being a canny sort of chap, has realised that continuing a successful series can result in diminishing returns, so We Solve Murders is the opener to what promises to be a new series. Amy Wheeler is bodyguard, hired out to protect celebrities. Her current client is Rosy D’Antonio, high-living and bestselling author of raunchy crime thrillers. Amy’s father-in-law, Steve, is an ex-cop living in a sleepy village in the New Forest whose weekly highlight is the pub quiz. All three are involved in a twisty turny plot involving the serial deaths of internet influencers and international money smuggling. I have forgotten the plot already, but I did enjoy the ride, very much. Although the canvas is much broader than in the Thursday Murder Club series — inescapably so, as that was, as you’ll recall, an upscale retirement village in Sussex — Osman’s readers will be comforted that the tone is very much the same. Cool, crisp, deft and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

IMG_8361Elsa Pancirolli: Beasts Before Us Readers with long memories will remember my review of Steve Brusatte’s book The Rise and Reign of Mammals, reviewed here. Pancirolli’s book covers the same ground, and was actually available before Brusatte’s, I believe, but like many things, the plans of mice and men gang aft agley, especially during a pandemic. It covers similar ground, too, concentrating on the oft-forgotten ‘first’ age of mammals that occurred before the ascendancy of the dinosaurs, when the world was dominated by what used to be called ‘mammal-like’ reptiles; before switching to the small, fierce and furry residents of the nocturnal forests when dinosaurs were ascendant in the daytime. It’s a fun and engaging read, especially the parts when the author talks of the often very uncomfortable conditions encountered while prospecting for fossils on windy and rainy Scottish coasts in winter. I didn’t always get the humour, and there was a mite too much political correctness for my taste, but that’s just me. A book done with brio — highly recommended.

Screenshot 2024-11-03 at 12.20.41Robert Harris: The Cicero Trilogy (Imperium/ Lustrum/ Dictator) You’ll have seen I’ve already read one of Harris’ closely-worked historical novels this month (Precipice, above). The Imperium trilogy is a fictionalised biography of the lawyer, orator, statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) during one of the most exciting periods of Roman history, when the old Republic gave way to the Empire. That we know Cicero existed is attested by a wealth of material. Perhaps less well-known is that much of it was recorded by his slave and personal secretary, Tiro, who devised a shorthand method of recording speech verbatim. Some of his shorthand survives today: the abbreviations ‘e.g. and NB’ were his, as well as the ampersand (&). It is also known from other sources that Tiro, who long outlived his master, wrote a biography of Cicero, though the biography itself is now lost. It is this that Harris recreates, with his usual attention to detail, sensitive characterisation and matchless readability. Imperium records Cicero’s early life and training, rising through the political ranks from the relatively junior quaestor, through aedile, praetor and finally consul, during which Cicero made his name by the high-profile prosecution of Gaius Verres, a corrupt governor of Sicily. Lustrum covers Cicero’s tumultuous year as consul and the years immediately following, in which he helped foil a conspiracy to destabilise the Republic, during which he condemned several men to death without trial, a circumstance that was to dog him ever afterwards. Dictator charts the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the various civil wars, and Cicero’s eventual downfall by order of Mark Antony. I learned a great deal about the organisation of Roman life from these books, and grasped how much of modern society, especially the legal system, owes to Roman law: the idea of a constitution; debates in the Senate; the whole concept of prosecution and defence; and trial by jury. The whole courtroom drama scenario, in fact, which this series exploits beautifully. Characters from ancient history, too, shine out as real people. Not just Cicero, who is supremely clever, cunning and cultured — as well as crotchety, driven and vain — but the majestic if rather dopey Pompey; the fanatically stoic Cato; the vulpine Julius Caesar; Cicero’s ferocious and clever wife Terentia, and, in Dictator, the precocious Octavianus, who becomes the Emperor Augustus. It might not sound like it, but it’s a nail-biting thrill-ride as Cicero navigates the treacherous shoals and sometimes lethal hazards of Roman political life — especially as you just know it’ll all come to a sticky end. The dramatisation of Julius Caesar’s assassination is brilliant because, even though you know what’s about to happen, it’s so shocking. I had read Imperium before in dead-tree format but had forgotten much of it by the time I came across Lustrum and Dictator, so I listened to the whole thing as audiobooks.

Screenshot 2024-11-03 at 12.23.46Jonathan Strahan (ed.) New Adventures in Space Opera If you’ve enjoyed Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune,  or practically any popular SF that’s made it to popular cinema, you’ve experienced a sub-genre known as ‘space opera’.  Space Opera is fairly easily defined (by me) as westerns, but set in space. Some of them are really sword-and-sorcery fantasies dressed up with technology (Star Wars is very much in this vein). There is usually a lot of violence, high-tech macguffins (faster-than-light travel, light-sabers, photon torpedoes, matter transportation); what SF nerds call ‘sensawunda’ (fantastic locales, killer robots, Martian princesses, exotic aliens who unconventional word order when they speak, use they must); and plot trumps characterisation. Space Opera used to be the domain of pulp magazine SF from the 1920s to the 1960s, a period that saw the flowering of the careers of many exponents of the genre such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and … er … L. Ron Hubbard. After an eclipse under the ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s (Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss and so on) that used SF to explore more social and political themes, Space Opera enjoyed a resurgence with the works of Iain M. Banks. Justina Robson, Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds, which, although they use all the props, tend to be more cerebral and sophisticated. But Space Opera moves on, finds new writers and audiences (such as Cixian Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy), and it moves on still, to find new means of expression, and, in particular, diversity. New Adventures in Space Opera is a collection of SF stories exploring the outer reaches of contemporary Space Opera. Many of the authors are female (welcome), and there were some creative uses of pronouns (understandable, if sometimes confusing). I have to say, though, I found them a bit disappointing. One of the features of Space Opera — like cheap music — is that it’s catchy. The images it evokes stay in the mind. Nobody who has ever seen The Day The Earth Stood Still will forget the giant robot Klaatu. No-one who has ever read Asimov’s Foundation will forget Gaal Dornick’s first experience of the planet-spanning city of Trantor. No reader of Dune will forget the sandworms. None of the stories in this collection stayed in my mind for more than a few moments after I had finished reading them. Okay, there was one by Alastair Reynolds, but it read like an inferior out-take from his full-length novel House of Suns. The story by Israeli author Lavie Tidhar, like many of his works, resonated with what I shall euphemistically call Current Events. But apart from that — nothing. I think the problem was that I found it hard to engage with the characters. Many of the stories started without context, and this was too hard (for my brain at least) to pick up from the narratives. Maybe I am rather past it, and the new audiences for Space Opera are, to me, like aliens, with philosophies and modes of thought that cannot interface successfully with my own neural structures.

IMG_8389Eric Idle: The Spamalot Diaries I did not realise until recently that Spamalot is a stage musical based extremely loosely on my favourite film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was largely the brainchild of Eric Idle, the Python who wrote a lot of the songs (most famously, ‘Always Look On The Bright Side of Life’). The Spamalot Diaries charts the story of how the musical was brought to life — the backstage drama, the egos, the constant re-writes, the songs written, the songs scrapped, and, poignantly, the wondering why anyone works hard on something they love, only to be frustrated when it never seems to achieve perfection. This could have been a tedious luvvie-fest, but is saved by the touches of darkness that evoke genuine emotion. Oh yes, and there are jokes. Which are funny. I liked the one in which Idle, riding a rickshaw in New York, pretends to be Michael Palin making one of his travel documentaries. You don’t have to know the music to read the book, but it helps, so after I read it I downloaded the musical soundtrack. Spamalot uses the already very thin plot of Holy Grail to send up the whole business of musical theatre itself. ‘The Song That Goes Like This‘ is a brilliant satire on the paint-by-numbers tedium of an Andrew Lloyd Webber score (I appreciate that some readers may disagree, but I’ve sat through Cats and Starlight Express and these are hours I shall never have again). ‘You Won’t Succeed On Broadway (If You Don’t Have Any Jews)‘ warmed the cockles of this Red-Sea Pedestrian.

Screenshot 2024-11-03 at 12.31.21Karen G. Lloyd: Intraterrestrials Before we start to search for life elsewhere in the Universe, there is much still to learn about the life beneath our feet. Deep beneath out feet.  Scientist Karen G. Lloyd tells us about organisms that live in boiling hot springs, inside volcanoes, in the driest deserts, on the highest mountains, in permafrost, and in mud in the deepest depths of the sea, and how they have metabolisms that allow them to survive — just about. To breathe, they don’t necessarily use oxygen, but iron, sulphur, even uranium. Though sometimes they grow so slowly that it might take them millions of years to reproduce. And this, of course, allows us to set some parameters about the necessities for life, not just on Earth, but anywhere in the Universe. So we come full circle. In a text that combines a rigorous work-out of the principles of thermodynamics (TRIGGER WARNING: there are equations) with breathtaking all-action adventure, our intrepid heroine ventures from the high Arctic to deep-sea hydrothermal vents in search of the limits of life. This is one of the most exciting pop-science books I’ve read in ages [DISCLAIMER: The proofs were sent to me so that I could consider writing a blurb].

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