The End Of The Pier Show

Betty M. Owen (ed): Eleven Great Horror Stories As you both probably know I am a confirmed Haunter of the Dark secondhand bookshops, in which emporia I like to paw pore over mossy grimoires anthologies of science fiction, horror and ghost stories. I tend to pick these up when I am too busy elsewhere to invest time and energy in something more substantial (more on this below), and when I do, I am enchanted, once again, by the charm of a well-turned short story. The stand-out story in this example is The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft, that master of cosmic schlock, whose fiction is, it has to be said, so bad that it’s good. As Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove wrote about Lovecraft in Trillion Year Spree, their history of SF, his work succeeds as psychological case history even if it fails as literature. Long after reading, and even when one has forgotten all the details, Lovecraft’s fiction leaves a kind of ectoplasmic stain on the mind. None of the other stories tend to stay as much in the memory as this, not even Poe’s The Oblong Box, and I’d say that most of the stories might be classified more as fantasy, even whimsy, than the kind of horror that gives one the heebie jeebies as one lies awake too afraid to see what’s making those strange snuffling sounds under the bed…

Which leads me to an apology. As the astute reader will have noted, this was the only book I read in November. That’s actually not true – to be precise, it’s the only book I completed in November. I am picking my way through an absolutely huge book, of which I am only reading a few pages at a time, and news of that will be fifthcoming forthcoming when I have finished it, whenever that may be.

One will also note that, apart from that, and if to add insult to injury, I’m posting this more than a month late. I offer as my only excuses that I have been in a state of bouleversement over what I shall euphemistically call World Events. That, and I have been busy completing my second album in G&T, my musical collaboration with guitarist Adrian Thomas.

Notwithstanding inasmuch as which I had a deadline weighing down on me — the delivery to the publishers of my thirdcoming forthcoming book. Reader, I succeeded in this task, and you can read more about it at the shiny new book website. The book should be out in 2024 and editions are already projected in Italian, Japanese, Korean and Romanian.

Hoping that you both have a Festive and Floofy winter break —

This eldritch example sent in — preternaturally, of course — by the ever-chthonic Mr C. D.  of Leeds. Ai, Shub-Niggurath, notwithstanding inasmuch as which other imprecations of a similar sort.

David Mitchell: Unruly Just so you know, this is not the same David Mitchell who wrote those modern fantasy classics Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks (this last reviewed here) and others. It is a different David Mitchell. This David Mitchell is the broadcaster and thinking-person’s comedian who happens to be married to Victoria Coren (another broadcaster and thinking-person’s comedian) and co-writer with Robert Webb of a number of amusing shows and sketches. My favourite is the one about the laboratoire, which should appeal to readers of Occam’s Typewriter. There are probably other David Mitchells. You might be one of them. If you are, please don’t write in. But I digress. Here the author – a history graduate – looks at the kings and queens of England from mythical times (Arthur) to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 — and the advent of Shakespeare, who, in the mouths of the kings in his history plays, accorded his characters a degree of self-knowledge that they probably never possessed in real life. After Elizabeth, the monarchs of England were monarchs of Scotland as well, so that would be a different book. Although Mitchell has many criticisms of monarchy, he feels that it’s nonetheless a cornerstone of the constitution, that unwritten compendium of more than a millennium of precedent, habit, tradition, kludge, fudge and bodge that explains and perhaps obscures the character of this Septic Sceptred Isle. At first, monarchs were the biggest thugs, who could marshal the most under-thugs. When Christianity came into the mix, the thuggery was papered over: monarchy was seen as something sacred, the monarch holding his (mostly his) office by God-given right. The rot set in when Henry Bolingbroke deposed Richard II and got away with it, becoming Henry IV, leading (eventually) to the Wars of the Roses. If God-given kings could be deposed, wherefore the God part? Before that, people had to put up with the monarchs they got, and sought to restrict their often dreadful government with institutions such as Magna Carta and what came, eventually, to be Parliament. The rich people did, anyway. The poor ones just had to suffer in silence. I listened to the audiobook version, narrated with brio by the author, with characteristic rantings and ravings. Notwithstanding inasmuch as which he is one of the  aforesaid thinking-person’s comedians, I learned a lot. This is perhaps not for those who cannot tolerate Anglo-Saxon Epithets (perhaps those who still think in Norman French, as English kings did for several centuries) for the good reason that two of the kings were a right couple of Cnuts.

A. M. Homes: This Book Will Save Your Life A few months ago I reviewed a collection of short stories by this author. I loved it, so was keen to try her work at novel length. It concerns the static life of Richard Novak, a wealthy freelance stock-exchange speculator who lives alone in his beautiful home in Los Angeles, seeing no-one but his housekeeper, nutritionist and personal trainer. Until the day when he is gripped with an inexplicable all-over pain, and his life slowly unravels into a series of seemingly random events. Richard runs into a variety of characters from the scriptwriter next door; the movie star who lives up the hill; the man who runs a donut shop downtown; and the horse that mysteriously materialises in the sinkhole that appears in his yard and into which his house threatens to disappear. Like her short stories, Homes’ novel has the same absurdist whimsy you’d associate with James Thurber (whose work, while dated in many ways, I like very much), but at novel length it threatens to degenerate into a case of one damned thing after another, and as such has echoes of Catch-22 (which I confess I liked very much less). This Book Will Save Your Life does seem to have a purpose, though. As much as he seems to be a ball-bearing batted around on some cruel pin table, Richard does find that life can be forced to have meaning, if only one can surmount the hazards.

Ben Elton: Time and Time Again You might recall that a while back I reviewed Making History by the national treasure that is Stephen Fry, a comic SFnal romp in which an academic historian and a quantum physicist work together to see if they can change history. It was a book very much in the ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ Alt.Hist. micro-genre. Quite by chance I came across another work in what now might be a nano- or even femto-genre, that is, a book in the ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ mode of Alt.Hist. by celebrated British comedians and writers not normal associated with SF, and that’s Ben Elton. Very far from his 1980s stand-up heyday of ‘knob jokes’ and poking fun at Margaret Thatcher, and even his glory days as writer of Blackadder, Elton has proved himself many times over as a novelist of some skill, tackling ever more serious subjects that have fewer and fewer laughs. One of his best was The First Casualty, about a pacifist police detective sent to investigate a murder on the Western Front, a place where killing is just normal. This was deeply dark, and full of memorable and ghastly imagery. The one that stuck most in my mind was of the over-laden soldier who stepped off the duckboards laid over the sodden ground and disappeared into the mud without trace. There’s more imagery of this kind in Time & Time Again. Compared with Making History, it’s darker, slicker, and much more cleverly plotted. It starts with a well-known episode in the life of Isaac Newton. After the Principia and other light classics, Newton entered a phase of deep depression. He eventually emerged, but did little serious physics again. Instead he dabbled in alchemy, Biblical numerology and became head of the Royal Mint. In Elton’s novel, Newton became depressed after discovering that gravity affected the passage of time, thus anticipating Einstein. Rather than being linear, time could twist and turn in serpentine ways, and even swallow itself. For example, Newton discovered that were you to stand in a space the size of a closet in the basement of a building in Istanbul at a certain time in 2025, you’d be transported back to 1914. He leaves his calculations to posterity, and time travel is the fate of former soldier and celebrity adventurer Hugh Stanton, who goes back to 1914 to prevent Archduke Franz Ferdinand from being assassinated in Sarajevo  — thus preventing the Great War — but then going to Berlin to bump off the militaristic Kaiser Wilhelm II. Without giving too much away, Elton has borrowed this scene from Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day Of The Jackal but made it much better — even for that acme of thrillers. However, Stanton finds that just his very existence in the time stream into which he has so rudely dropped changes the course of events unexpectedly. And he is not the only person who’s had the idea of rebooting history. But hey, I’m telling you the plot. Savage, dark and disturbing, this is one of the best thrillers I have read — and one of the best alt.hist SF novels too, right up there with Kingsley Amis’ The Alteration (and that’s saying something).

Dara Horn: People Love Dead Jews There is a day in the Jewish calendar that commemorates the dead of the Holocaust. It’s called Yom Ha’Shoah. Given that this exists, why should there be a different Holocaust Memorial Day? I have always wondered why I felt a bit uneasy about the latter, and this book articulates it perfectly. Holocaust Memorial Day is a convenient way in which people other than Jews can join in an orgy of virtue-signalling about how sorry they are about it all, piously observing that they’ll never let the slaughter of Jews happen again. As all Jews know, this is poppycock. For the same reasons I have never watched Holocaust porn such as Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas or The Pianist. (I did once watch The Piano, which is ghastly. But I digress). Time and time again, the world lets Jews be slaughtered, only later on to commemorate the deserted synagogues and say how sorry they are about it (if they can be bothered). People charged with Diversity and Inclusion always forget to mention Jews, because, in David Baddiel’s words, Jews don’t count. They are dispensible. In a disturbing, depressing (but endlessly interesting) book that takes in Jewish history from Renaissance Europe to 1920s China, Dara Horn shows that the world is only interested in Jews when they are dead. This is illustrated perfectly by the story of a real, live Jewish member of staff at Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam being told not to wear his kippah in public… for fear of giving offence. I write this in a state of barely repressed anger, when after the brutal murder and mutilation of around 1,400 Jews — the most lethal pogrom since the Holocaust — followed by apocalyptic death unleashed on Gaza — some 100,000 people march in London calling (in effect) for the destruction of even more Jews, with even the drivers of tube trains joining in, and the police just standing by and doing nothing about it. Plus ca change.

This one from our correspondent Dr R___ H___, of a sign on a boardwalk at Qingdao, China, in what looks like rather threatening weather.

Andrew Smith: Moon Dust I was no more than seven years old, but I can still remember the towering model of a Saturn V rocket in my bedroom. I can still remember, like it was yesterday, or even earlier today, going to Woolworths with five shillings and elevenpence in my pocket (those old copper pennies were heavy) to buy an Airfix kit of the Lunar Module, whence the Apollo astronauts disgorged onto the surface of the Moon. So, so much has changed. Those copper pennies, even Woolworths, are long gone, along with the Apollo space program. But the memory is still green. It all happened in a heated rush, between 1969 and 1972 (the time it took for Led Zeppelin to release their first four albums). But it’s been more than half a century since Apollo 17, the last mission to place a human foot on the Moon. Only twelve people have ever left their bootprints there. All were American, white and male, and they are dying off. When journalist Andrew Smith sought to catch up with as many of them as he could, only nine (as of 2005) were left. None of them was able to answer Smith’s question — what was it like to stand on the Moon? — and have variously suffered in the years since for what seems to be an existential inarticulacy, a failure to quite live up to an experience they can never quite express. To be sure, they have groped for answers in various ways. Some have got religion, of various sorts, from conventional Christianity through Buddhism to New Age philosophy. Others have gone into politics, or business, with varying success. One, Alan Bean (Apollo 12)  has become an artist, trying, and trying again, to capture the moment on the Moon in paint. Almost all suffered a fearful personal toll — the divorce rate among Apollo astronauts was huge. What was it all for, then? What justified the immense cost (though much less than the war in ‘nam)? The personal sacrifice? For Smith this is a personal story — as Apollo will ever be to all those little boys with models of rockets in their bedrooms — and we get a lot of personal anecdotes as well as documentary. He even falls into the trap (as I did once, pointed out by a reviewer of one of my own books) of citing the model of rental car he was driving as he sought his ageing and often reticent interviewees. His conclusion was that Apollo might have, in part, been many things. An urge to put one over the Soviets, certainly. A desire to explore new technology, possibly. A wish to keep people employed in the aerospace sector in three states with large numbers of voters (Florida, Texas and California), cynically. But what it was, most of all, was theatre, spectacle on a grand scale. Spectacle never to be repeated. More than 400 people have since gone into space, but never more than low-Earth orbit. Only the Apollo astronauts ventured further. There are those — a minority, but a sizeable one — that thinks the whole thing, the Moon landings and attendant hoopla — was an elaborate hoax. Perhaps it was all a dream. Even before my Airfix models, I came across a book in my elementary school library. It was called You Will Go To The Moon. Funny, most of one’s dreams are forgotten soon after waking. A few, though, remain vivid.

Mike Gayle: A Song of Me and You I feel I owe author Mike Gayle one. After all, he was on the judging panel for last year’s Royal Society Science Book Prize that selected my recent tome as the winner. Thanks Mr Gayle! I spotted one of his novels on my sister’s sofa so I thought I’d dive in, and selected this one more or less randomly as an audiobook. I had no idea that it was a romantic novel, probably of the genre once patronisingly called ‘chick lit’, but it was very enjoyable for all that, and I looked forward to a daily dose of it while walking the dogs each morning. Two months before the story opens, Helen, a 45-year-old, part-time primary school teacher from Manchester, is deserted by her husband Adam for a younger model, leaving her with two teenage children. The story opens just after Adam has taken the teenagers away on a camping trip. Helen, deflated, sublimates her anger and frustration in housework before the doorbell rings again. At the door is Ben, who just happens to be the lead singer of the world’s biggest rock band. He is hiding from the press and seeking a break from his roller coaster career. He asks Helen if he can lie low for a few hours. But why would Ben turn up at Helen’s door: her, of all people? Well, there’s more to this than meets the eye. Ben and Helen grew up together and were childhood sweethearts before events took each of them in their own separate directions. It’s a good summer read (indeed, I was looking for something suitably light) and it is enviably well constructed, with some twists subverting what might otherwise be a predictable plot. My only criticism is one of style. There are a lot of sentences that begin with phrases starting with a present participle, like this: ‘thinking that this book review was going on too long, Henry sought a convenient ending’. And there were similar sentences of this form: ‘as Henry was winding up his book review, his thoughts wandered to the possibility of making another cup of coffee’. But nothing that a sharp-eyed editor couldn’t have sorted out.

Andy Weir: Artemis You might remember Andy Weir as the author of The Martian, a rather fine near-future SF adventure about an astronaut stranded on Mars, and the mission sent to rescue him. It was made into a heartwarming motion picture film magic-lantern production starring Matt Damon. A characteristic that set The Martian (book and magic-lantern production) apart from much recent SF was its entirely unpretentious style. It was hard SF in the old-fashioned sense. That is, the plot turned around entirely believable and achievable science, without resorting to hyperspace or quasi-mystical woo. The same is true for Artemis, Weir’s second novel. This is set in the eponymous city (really, no more than a small western frontier town) on the Moon, a short distance from the landing site of Apollo 11 (which has its own visitor centre) and concerns the exploits of Jazz Bashara, a porter and sometime smuggler of contraband. One of Jazz’s contraband clients asks her to perform an audacious act of industrial sabotage that propels her into a nail-biting adventure. So as well as being a good old-fashioned SF romp, it’s a great thriller. Weir gets a gold star and a tick for diversity points (Jazz is female and Muslim; Artemis is a wholly owned subsidiary of a Kenyan aerospace company), and even more gold stars and ticks for the hard science (the plot turns, in places, on quirks of  industrial chemistry). But most of all, because it’s a well-knit, pacy read. Highly recommended.

Adam Kay: Undoctored I am sure that you’ll both (if you are in the UK at least) have heard of Adam Kay, a hospital gynaecologist who was so beaten down by the relentless pressure of working for the National Health Service (NHS) that he quit and became a writer instead. He turned his considerable talents to a best-selling memoir, This Is Going To Hurt, which was made into an affecting TV series starring soon-to-be national treasure Ben Whishaw (yes, him, the voice of Paddington Bear). This Is Going To Hurt (and its modest sequel, The Nightshift Before Christmas) were, in places, laugh-out-loud funny, though often in the dark-tinged humour that clinicians use to get through each endless, blood-soaked shift. Undoctored is a collection of further anecdotes from Kay’s medical life, mixed in with recollections from his subsequent often hand-to-mouth existence as a jobbing stand-up comic and writer, until he made it big with T. I. G. T. H. If you have read T. I. &c., you’ll know what to expect — or you’ll think you do — but be prepared. If you thought that some parts of T. I. &c were dark, then Undoctored is as dark as The Dark Lord Sauron teaming up with Voldemort to track down an eyeless black cat in a coal cellar during a power cut. While wearing sunglasses. At night. Snippets of Undoctored occasion a wry smile: whole scads are almost too hard to read. To say that Undoctored is confessional is accurate, but hardly gives the flavour of say, Kay’s pages-long account of suffering from an eating disorder, or of being raped. To put things down on paper is brave. To let such experiences out of doors deserves a medal. Beneath the thin (and often absent) humour is a serious message, and it’s the same as that hammered home in T. I. &c. And that is that many health-care professionals suffering from overwork, stress, fatigue and a range of problems possibly connected (or exacerbated) by the above, do so in silence, fearful of letting the side down. What should change? To say that the NHS is underfunded, as Kay does explicitly, is a given, but then, it’s in the nature of organisations such as the NHS always to be underfunded. What Kay says, more often, but not quite so directly, is that what needs to change is an attitude, found among doctors themselves. Some senior doctors, or consultants, come over as arrogant and entitled, and assume that because they had to suck it up at medical school (and before that, at their public school, and, before that, at home) then everyone else must do so, too. The selection of medical students should also change. To get into medical school one not only has to demonstrate stellar academic ability but still have time for a range of hobbies and voluntary work. This is all commendable, but do such things automatically translate into being a good doctor? Kay thinks not, but does not offer any alternative prescription. As a wise doctor once wrote, ‘h9:{(*&^SH\ £$%^(•¶∞’.

  Robert Harris: Act of Oblivion By now you’ll both know that I am a fan of Harris, writer of peerless historical thrillers (Fatherland, Pompeii); so-so SF (The Fear Index, The Second Sleep); and the best novel about old men in frocks you’ll ever read (Conclave). This one concerned a period of history about which I knew little – the English Civil War and its aftermath. The early 17th Century was a period of pronounced religious strife in Europe. Europe saw the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), in terms of population loss and displacement, one of the most destructive conflicts to hit the continent. In Britain, religious and political turmoil led to the execution of the king, Charles I,  and a decade or so in which England was a republic governed occasionally by parliament, but mostly by the fiat of a military dictator, Oliver Cromwell. After Cromwell’s death England reverted to being a monarchy under Charles II. Parliament forgave all those who’d participated in the interregnum under the so-called Act of Oblivion: all except for those men who’d signed the death warrant of the late king. Harris’ novel concerns the exploits of Richard Naylor, the manhunter charged with tracking down the regicides and bringing them to justice (which was — be warned — unbelievably gory, and described in lurid detail). Two of the regicides, the puritan Ned Whalley and his even more millennial son-in-law William Goffe, managed to elude his grasp by escaping to New England. Just about everything in the novel really happened — Whalley and Goffe were real people. The only fiction is the character of Nayler himself. And given that you can look up all the events, and get some idea of the ending, it’s a testament to Harris’ skill that he keeps the pages turning nonetheless.

Richard Osman: The Last Devil to Die Tucked away in the section of the shop labelled ‘Cosy Crime’ you’ll find the sensationally successful thrillers by man-on-the-telly Osman. The Last Devil to Die is the fourth, after — in order — The Thursday Murder Club, The Man who Died Twice, and The Bullet that Missed. If you were thinking that he sells shedloads of novels simply because he’s the man on the telly, you’d be wrong. Each one is devilishly plotted; beautifully wrought; contains characters you can believe in and root for; and are also very funny. In short, they deserve all the acclaim that has been heaped upon them. If you’ve been living on a remote asteroid for the past few years, the novels concern the crime-fighting exploits of a seemingly ill-assorted group of pensioners living in an upscale retirement village in Sussex, England. There’s Ron, a pugnacious former trade union leader and West Ham supporter; Ibrahim, a semi-retired psychiatrist who’s definitely on the spectrum; Elizabeth, a former MI6 operative who still has Contacts; and Joyce, a chatty ex-nurse who’s always there to solve all problems with bakery products, and through whose eyes we see much of the action. And that’s really all you need to know. Osman sidesteps the pitfall that could so easily befall novels like this — that one could easily get bored of the schtick of doddery senior citizens standing up to (and outwitting) robbers, drug lords, jewel thieves and assorted lowlives, not to mention the police. He does this by deepening the characterisation with each novel by discussing the pains, problems and consolations of age. Without giving anything away, The Last Devil To Die discusses Alzheimer’s Disease in some depth, from the perspective of a sufferer and those looking on helplessly, in a way that is both sensitive and deeply moving. I read the first three in the series in print: the fourth I listened to as an audiobook, read by Fiona Shaw.

R. F. Kuang: Babel Rebecca F Kuang is the new wunderkind of fantasy literature. Babel is her fourth novel out of five, and she is meant to be working on a sixth, if she has not already been crushed under the weight of plaudits, awards, award nominations, advanced degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, and her current work towards a doctorate at Yale. And she’s still only 27. The story unfolds in a fantasy Oxford in the 1830s, where the jewel in the Oxfordian crown is the Royal Institute of Translation — the Babel of the title — the tallest structure in the city and the foundation of the wealth of the British Empire. It is here that translators inscribe, on silver bars, words in various languages and close cognates in English. But no word in one language ever has a precise equivalent in another, and the magic invoked by the ineffable gap in between – the, um, je ne sais quoi, if you like – is used to make steam-powered ships sail faster, rifles shoot truer, carriages run more safely, gardens bloom more prettily, looms spin more quickly, and massive buildings stand tall on otherwise wobbly foundations. Anything, in fact. The Empire runs on silver bars from Babel. And Babel runs on gifted young people brought from all corners of the world to enrich its stock of languages and translations. People such as Robin Swift, rescued by a mysterious guardian from a cholera-infested slum in Canton and brought up to swell Babel’s ranks. But as Robin grows up, he learns that he is a pawn in at least two great games — to maintain the Empire, or to bring it crashing down. It’s a great premise, the writing is lucid and the characterisation is realistic and sensitive. However, the book has its problems. First is the inevitable Harry-Potterishness of a lonely boy finding his feet in what is effectively a special and magical school. Second, it’s that although supposedly set in the 1830s the characters all speak in a very contemporary idiom, which is occasionally jarring. Compared with, say, Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell, another magical period piece, the tone seems anachronistic. Third, the author loves to show off her considerable erudition in long expositions about etymology. I found this fascinating, but some might find that it holds up the action. Fourth are the copious footnotes, in which the author threatens to wreck the suspension of disbelief by telling us her opinions on events in the real world, as opposed to her fantasy creation. Fifth (and this is my main bugbear) is that it is utterly and quite unashamedly sanctimonious. The British Empire is rapacious, racist, ruthless, misogynistic and exploitative. So it was, but to be harangued about this on every page becomes wearisome. And nothing good can ever be said about any white person who is not working class, especially if they are male. There is virtually no humour: the author obviously missed the parallel with the Peoples’ Front of Judea (in Monty Python’s Life of Brian) when a small and seemingly ineffectual group of characters is plotting the downfall of a vast and powerful empire. And I swear that there is a conversation where one character declares to another, in almost as many words, about the Violence Inherent in the System, a line straight out of that other Python film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I could have done with a lot more of the fantasy and a good deal less of the social justice warfare. By the end I was left wondering about the source of the author’s deep well of animus. Then I read the acknowledgements, in which she thanks the people ‘who made those strange, sad months in Oxford bearable’. There’s someone on the banks of the Cherwell whose ears are burning.

 Ian Stewart: Loophole  Many will be familiar with Ian Stewart as a mathematician and one of the few of his profession who can explain maths cogently to regular mortals. Many more will know him as an honorary wizard of the Unseen University and co-author (with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen, late and lamented both) of the four volumes of The Science of Discworld. But he’s also a considerable author of SF on his own account, and Loophole is his latest. It’s a rambunctious romp involving super-powerful but dotty aliens, a terrifying plague of Von Neumann machines, and a clash of two universes that are not quite as different as they first appear. This is more than just Hard SF. Or Wide-Screen Baroque. With a fiendishly clever plot so twisty it will turn your brain into a Möbius pretzel, it verges on Wrap-Around Rococo. The science is absolutely Out There, but with Stewart as your guide you can be confident that it’s reliable, in one universe or another. At the same time the characters are human, humane (especially the aliens) and there is a generous dose of humour to lighten what might otherwise be a heavy load. If you’ve read The Science of Discworld, or any of Stewart’s books with Jack Cohen (such as Figments of Reality), you’ll know what to expect. DISCLAIMER: I provided an endorsement for the author and received a pre-publication copy.

Dimitra Fimi: The World of J. R. R. Tolkien I don’t often listen to audiobooks. However, having listened to The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion courtesy of Audible, this one came up as a suggestion. It’s a series of lectures by Dr Dimitra Fimi, Senior Lecturer in Fantasy and Children’s Literature at the University of Glasgow. The course covers Tolkien’s life and works and delves fairly deeply into such matters as his invented languages; his sources among the mythic traditions of Europe; the nature of evil; his influence on popular culture; and the sometimes vexed questions of race and gender raised by Tolkien’s work. If you have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and possibly The Silmarillion, but haven’t had the energy (or desire) to get stuck into the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth and the other intimidating edifices of Tolkien’s work edited and published posthumously by Christopher Tolkien, his son and indefatigable literary executor, this course is the easiest and most entertaining way to become ridiculously well-informed about the life and works of the Great Hobbitmonger. DISCLAIMER: the author is a personal friend who I’ve bumped into at various Tolkien-related events.

Michael Cobley: The Ascendant Stars This is the final episode in the author’s Humanity’s Fire space-opera trilogy. You’ll find parts one and two reviewed here and here, respectively. By now the redoubtable and horny-handed residents of the colony planet Darien find themselves assaulted on many fronts, not only by the forces described in the earlier episode, but also some completely new ones. It’ll be no surprise to learn that everything turns out well for the good guys in the end — with the help, I regret to say, of a few McGuffins seemingly plucked from hyperspace the air — but the roll-call of characters, civilisations, plots, counter-plots and counter-counter plots has by now grown so long and the story arcs so labyrinthine that I quite lost track of what was going on and in the end had to simply let myself get carried along for the ride. The ride, such as it was, was a lot of fun, but at times I just longed for it all to end. One can have, it seems, too much of a good thing.

William Boyd: Any Human Heart I first came across William Boyd with Brazzaville Beach, a novel about infighting among scientists studying chimpanzee behaviour, and which features entirely appropriately on the LabLit List of novels featuring scientists in their natural habitats. The behaviour in Any Human Heart is, however, entirely and poignantly human. The book consists of extracts from the diaries of Logan Gonzago Mountstuart (1906-1991), a literary figure so insignificant that he is entirely fictional, for all that he rubs up against real people such as Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor during his long and eventful life. For me it has echoes of Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess and The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham in its evocation of creative talent just trying to burst through the conventions of their times, not always successfully. It’s a testament to Boyd’s skill that you can’t help but like Mountstuart, despite the fact that he is an adulterous, philandering, voyeuristic drunk. At various times a nerdy schoolboy, celebrated author, art dealer, war correspondent, impoverished pensioner, urban guerrilla (failed), English lecturer, columnist on arts and letters, prisoner of war, paedophile (inadvertent), boulevardier and spy, he is both betrayer and betrayed. His adventurous life encompasses four continents and almost the entire twentieth century. Perhaps it’s the twentieth century that’s the real protagonist, a period that saw perhaps the greatest changes in the entire history of our species,  full of unparalleled marvels and horrors, buffeting its human cargo with haymakers of contingency and fateful swerves like no other, and so richly documented in this affecting novel.

Robert Graves: Goodbye To All That I first came across Robert Graves in my earliest youth, as the translator and re-teller of the Greek myths that I learned at my mother’s knee. I had always been captivated by his prose, elegant and yet easy and lucid. I wasn’t really aware, however, that he was a poet of some standing, nor that he had served on the trenches in the Great War. Goodbye To All That is his autobiography, written in his early thirties after he had fled to Majorca, swearing to leave England for good (hence the title). And it’s no wonder he wanted to get away from it all. Born in 1895, Graves was sent to a series of dismal preparatory schools before being thrown at Charterhouse, a well-known public school for boys where his time seems to have been uniformly miserable. He went straight from Charterhouse to the Western Front, which he seems to have preferred to his schooldays. Most of the book concerns his war service, which he re-tells in great detail and indeed the book is now regarded as an important source of information about trench life. After the war he married, but his marriage was unhappy and after a concatenation of personal and business disasters he fled Britain’s shores to write everything down. Goodbye To All That made his name and was a literary and financial success. Given the often depressing nature of Graves’ experiences you’d think that reading this book might be a chore, but far from it. The tone is breezy and bright, and full of (often very dark) humour. I gobbled it up over a weekend and enjoyed it immensely.

Alice Feeney: Daisy Darker When Daisy Darker’s grandmother invites her family to Seaglass, her crumbling home set on an island off the Cornish coast accessible only at low tide, you know that dastardly doings are in store. Especially as the occasion is for the grandmother to read her will. Apart from the grandmother and Daisy herself (who you soon realise is not necessarily a reliable narrator) the members of the family are uniformly appalling, and it’s no wonder that they haven’t been gathered together in the same place simultaneously all at once and together for decades, such is their mutual antipathy. In an entirely knowing nod to Agatha Christie (And Then There Were None) with overtones of Stephen King, you will probably be able to work out what’s going to happen well before the ending (though I didn’t — I’m lousy at whodunits). Despite this it’s a deliciously enjoyable summer read.

Michael Cobley: Orphaned Worlds This is the second part of a sci-fi trilogy that started with Seeds of Earth, which I reviewed last month. Here the braw and brawny human colonists of the planet Darien (who read like a collection of extras from Outlander) are assailed on all sides — by the brutal Hegemony (in which the home planet Earth is a junior partner); their even more brutal allies, the Brolturans — and, joining in the fray, a fleet of religious maniacs, together with opponents from a conflict that played out aeons before — all for control of an ancient matter-transference device beneath the planet’s surface. The author throws everything and the kitchen sink into this enjoyable space-operatic romp. (To be continued).

V. E. Schwab: The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue Adeline La Rue is an illiterate peasant girl born in the French countryside towards the end of the seventeenth century. Fearing a short, brutal life of drudgery and, at best, boredom, she makes a deal with the Devil to be free. But desperate souls never read the small print (the Devil being, of course, in the details) and Addie is destined to go through life instantly forgotten by everyone she meets, and unable to make her own mark on history — except, it seems, as a muse for others. Until, that is, three hundred years later, when she meets Henry, manager of a small secondhand bookstore in New York — who remembers her. Henry, you see, has made his own, rather different deal with the Devil. Towards the end, Addie and Henry work to see if they can unstitch their own respective Faustian bargains. This book was recommended to me by Gee Minima, whose tips I always take seriously (it was she who put me on to The Night Circus, my Top Read of 2014), and with a front-cover puff from Neil Gaiman, no fewer less, The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue was a must-read. And it’s terrific. The writing is astonishingly good. The characters, both prosaic and demonic, leap off the page. If I have one criticism (shared by Gee Minima) it does tend to sag a bit two thirds of the way through and could have lost about fifty pages with no harm done.

Stephen Fry: Making History The actor, director, memoirist, techno-geek, celebrity depressive, comedian, driver of decommissioned London taxis, fellow supporter of Norwich City FC and National Treasure that is Stephen Fry also writes novels. Heavens, is there anything this man cannot do? Notwithstanding inasmuch as which, this one is science fiction, noch, and it’s not half bad. It’s hard to say much of what it’s about without introducing spoilers, but suffice it to say it starts with a Cambridge history graduate just about to finish his doctorate thesis who collides with a German emigre quantum physicist, with hilarious and unpredictable results…

Michael Cobley: Seeds of Earth There’s nothing like a stonking great slab of space opera to get one back into the fun of reading after a dry spell, and as luck would have it Mrs Gee found this — and its two sequelae, because it’s a trilogy, of course it is — in a local charity shop. When a lost colony of the human race is rediscovered on a remote planet, what was once a bolt-hole in the back of beyond turns out to be in the disputed border regions between mutually hostile alien powers. Not only do the plucky colonists have to learn to play politics with hostile civilisations much more powerful than their own, they must contend with the discovery, on their planet, of an artefact of apocalyptic power left over from an age when warfare was existentially, pan-galactically, super-eschatologically ferocious. The aliens come out of Star Wars — the humans from any Peter F. Hamilton novel — the result is a blisteringly good read.

A. M. Homes: Days of Awe If  James Thurber had been born in the late twentieth century rather than the late nineteenth, and had been female (also Jewish) he might have turned out something like A. M. Homes, whose dissections of modern American life in this warm collection of short stories have the same satirical, surreal, occasionally fantastical and always affectionate tone, but which are always as sharp as a tack. I found it on Mrs Gee’s nightstand. It had been recommended by a friend. Reader, I devoured it.

Renee Knight: Disclaimer Catherine is an award-winning documentary film-maker at the top of her game. Relaxing at the end of a day, she picks up a thriller that has found its way to her bedside table. To her horror she finds that the main character is — herself. Thus starts a nail-biter full of more twists and turns than an explosion in a pretzel factory. One critic compared it with Gone Girl, and I can see the similarity, except that whereas Gone Girl swerves halfway through with a savage plot twist that feels like being hit over the head with a blunt instrument (if you’ve read it, you’ll know what I mean), Disclaimer toys with you unmercifully before going in for the kill with a shocking denouement.

You’ll both recall that lately I have been keep my demons at bay by working furiously hard, both at the day job (I’m with the Submerged Log Company) and also by writing my next book. This strategy has been fairly successful (and, oh yes, the drugs) in that I am more than 52,000 words into the first draft of a billet-doux provisionally entitled The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire, and so closer to the beginning of the end than the end of the beginning. It takes the theme of an article I wrote for Scientific American on the imminent extinction of humanity and expands it to book length [Cripes, no wonder you were depressed and anxious — Ed.]

A few weeks back St Martin’s Press bought the US/Canada rights, and I am just about to sign with Picador for the UK/Commonwealth rights, and publishers in Korea and Italy have also expressed an interest in translating it, yea, even before I’ve finished it, so really I should stop writing this now and get on with it.

This literary preoccupation may explain why I haven’t been very active recently either on the social media or on this blog (and, oh yes, the drugs) and haven’t read my usual monthly shelf’s worth of books. I have been reading, though — voraciously so — but it’s been of the technical kind, by way of research. I have been terrifying myself by learning about climate change. I have been finding out about drought, dearth, disease, demography and death. You know, all the ‘d’s. I’ve been digging into subjects as varied as palaeoanthropology and photosynthesis, and  in a moment I shall be rocketing off into space. You know, like you do.

I’ll send you a postcard.