Catherine Chidgey: The Book Of Guilt Britain in the 1970s, full of ’70s nostalgia, but in an altered universe in which Hitler was assassinated in 1943, and the Second World War ended in a treaty in which the UK shared some of Nazi Germany’s darker scientific secrets. Our scene is set in what at first looks like an orphanage for boys in a grand but fading country house. All the inmates have left except for a final set of pre-teen triplets, cared for by Mothers Morning, Afternoon and Night, who teach them out of the Book of Knowledge (an out-of-date Children’s Encyclopaedia); record their dreams in the Book of Dreams, their transgressions in the Book of Guilt, and who dose them with medicines to protect them against some mystery illness. All the other residents have, they believe, been promoted to a grander house in Margate, a paradise for children. Elsewhere, Nancy is a girl kept by her parents as a guilty secret. The dystopia slowly winds out, mostly told through the eyes of Vincent, one of the triplets. And so the shocking horror slowly unspools. Echoes of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
John Higgs: Exterminate, Regenerate As someone once said in another context, one should never underestimate the power of cheap music. And it doesn’t come much more powerful, or more cheap, than Dr Who, the long-running children’s science-fiction programme that aired on the BBC from 1963 to 1989, and again from 2005 to the present day. Higgs gives a comprehensive, readable and honest account of the genesis, exodus and revelation of the show. The book is far, far better than most effusions on popular culture, and gets into the grittier details that the show’s enormous publicity machine won’t tell you, such as the bullying, misogyny, racism and sexual harassment behind the scenes; why Christopher Eccleston left the show after just one season series; and the complex relationship between the show and the BBC that affected its content, such that stories featuring the stuffy, bureaucratic Time Lords of Gallifrey (representing BBC higher-ups) tended to happen during particularly fraught periods in this pas-de-deux. He also analyses the show’s longevity, getting into such subjects as myth. Myths tend to feature archetypes such as the Trickster, and Higgs portrays the first iterations of the Doctor in this light. Myths are also not required to be consistent. Only the TARDIS and the signature tune have been constant elements from the first episode: even the Doctor is changeable. Philip Ball missed a trick as Dr Who isn’t discussed in his book The Modern Myths (reviewed here) where he makes the case that literary quality is in inverse proportion to mythic potential. Some Whovian myths are, however, exploded. Terry Nation didn’t get the idea for the Daleks from a volume of an encyclopaedia labelled DAL-LEK. And a reluctance of most of the (white, male) BBC staff to take on a show they felt was beneath their dignity, not a desire for diversity, explains why the very first episode, broadcast on 23 November 1963, was directed by a gay Asian and produced by a Jewish woman, nor that the originator of the show, if there was any single one, was Jewish. Higgs doesn’t make the leap, entirely obvious to me if perhaps nobody else, from these facts to the situation of the Doctor as a wanderer exiled from his home planet, though he could have done: in the same way that it was Jewish writers and artists who created comic-book superheroes who, like the Doctor, would sweep in, right wrongs, and stand up for the underdog. After-images, as it were, of the Golem of Old Prague, a prototype cartoon superhero in itself. After reading this excellent book I wallowed in the entire Audible collection entitled Dr Who at the BBC, which is mostly fairly dull and repetitive, but features a few nuggets such as a radio play about Delia Derbyshire, the musician and engineer at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who turned Ron Grainer’s original score into the futuristic soundscape that’s now instantly familiar (you know the one, tiddly-pom tiddly-pom tiddly-pom tiddly-pom woo-woo); and another radio play about a Dr Who fan convention in Belfast during the Troubles.
Stuart Turton: The Devil and the Dark Water A maritime romance and whodunit with a frisson of horror from the Age of Sail, this, so something for everyone. No swash is left unbuckled as the Saardam, a Dutch East-Indiaman, sets out from Batavia to Amsterdam under a horrible curse, that only the unlikely pair of sleuth Samuel Pipps and his monolithic-yet-sensitive sidekick Arent Hayes have any hope of unraveling. It was all far too convoluted for me, but I enjoyed the ride. Belatedly I see that Turton is another author with a story in The Winter Spirits (reviewed here) but one that didn’t stay with me quite as vividly as those of Natasha Pulley or Jess Kidd.
Thomas Olde Heuvelt: Echo Taking horror from the oceans to the high mountains, this is a love story between two unlikely people. Manhattan socialite Sam Avery and Dutch beefcake Nick Gievers have been inseparable since pecs were flexed in the gym. Sam would rather mix cocktails, but Nick’s passion ia a good deal more rugged. He is a skilled mountaineer, and the more remote and dangerous the mountain, the better. One day, Nick returns from a rarely-explored peak in the Alps, his face horribly disfigured, his companion lost, and bringing with him an ancient horror that soon spreads. Only Sam seems immune, but in coming to terms with Nick’s new life, he must confront ancient horrors of his own. I loved this book (the mountaineering sequences were especially absorbing), but it was, perhaps, somewhat overlong, and the ending rather too 2001-a-Space-Odyssey for a novel that also references Spandau Ballet.
