The End Of The Pier Show

The Rings of Power: Impressions of the First Series

Posted on 17 October 2022 by Henry Gee

You’ll both be aware that I offered a few impressions of the first two episodes of The Rings of Power, the multi-squillion-dollar televisual emission from Amazon Prime. Now that all eight episodes of the first series (or ‘season’, as we are now obliged to call such things) have been aired, I thought I’d note down a few thoughts, more for my own edification than anything else, as it seems that everyone has their own deeply entrenched opinions. The Guardian, for example, thinks that the series was ‘a stinker’. Mind you, I don’t much care for the Guardian. In any case, nobody cares what I think. In general, though, I think that The Rings of Power is far more than a fantasy extravaganza, for beneath the CGI it asks penetrating questions about the nature of good and evil, and whether the goodness or evil of an act might just as easily rest on one’s perspective as any innate quality of the act or its intention.

As before THERE ARE ~~SPIDERS~~ SPOILERS, so if you haven’t yet seen all the episodes, you may look away now.

Overall — I found it most satisfying. I have watched almost all episodes twice. I know in my earlier post I said I didn’t care if the story did violence to Tolkien’s original, but that was perhaps disingenuous of me. I do care. Of course I do. The story was consistent with Tolkien’s (admittedly sketchy) narratives of the Second Age of Middle-earth (after the ‘Elder Days’ of the Silmarillion, but thousands of years before the events in The Lord of the Rings), and such liberties as it took actually, in the end, generally enhanced the story rather than detracted from it.

Here’s a brief run-down of the Second Age in Tolkien’s imagined world, inasmuch as it concerns the first TV series. The First Age, or ‘Elder Days’, ended with the defeat of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. Sauron, Morgoth’s chief Hench Entity (he is the Dark Lord in The Lord of the Rings), escapes, and there is peace for a long while. The Men (that is, humans) who aided the Elves were given a large island, Elenna, to live on, in the middle of the ocean, where they founded the kingdom of Numenor. Although there was much commerce between Men and Elves, as the Age wore on, Men became suspicious of Elves and jealous of their immortality. The Men left behind in Middle earth – those who did not qualify for entry into Numenor — were a wretched bunch, haunted by their erstwhile service to Morgoth, and generally abandoned. As the age progressed they were aided by visits from Numenor, visits that became increasingly colonial and dominating. Meanwhile, those Elves who did not return to the Blessed Realm of Valinor in the far west founded a kingdom called Lindon on the far northwestern corner of Middle-earth, presided over by Gil-galad, the High King. The Dwarves, meanwhile, opened up their kingdom of Khazad-Dûm in the Misty Mountains. Some of the Elves who took delight in manufacture and smithwork founded a country called Eregion nearby, and there was much commerce between Elves and Dwarves. One result of this interaction was the forging of the Three Rings of Power, artefacts that helped preserve the culture of the Elves against the ageing of the world. Unbeknown to the Elves, they are aided in their effort by a mystery smith called Annatar, who turns out to be none other than Sauron. After that events take a nosedive, but that’s enough to be getting on with for now.

The TV series follows one main story, with another only tangentially related, and a third hardly at all.

The main story (which I discussed more in my earlier post) follows the young Elf Princess Galadriel, very much a warrior, in her obsessive search for Sauron. Gil-galad tries to dissuade her, saying that evil has been vanquished, but privately confesses to Elrond (his herald and speech writer) that evil might still lurk and that an effect of Galadriel’s quest will be to stir up what might have been best left slumbering. His remarks are, indeed, prescient. (Linguistic Note: The Elves speak standard, Received-Pronunciation English). After several adventures Galadriel finds herself castaway on a shipwreck with Halbrand, a Man of the ‘Southlands’ of Middle-earth who is escaping who-knows-what depredations by those Orcs still around after the First Age — for not all were destroyed. They are both rescued by Elendil, a Sea-Captain of Numenor. (Linguistic Note: Halbrand has a Yorkshire accent).

The story thus shifts to Numenor, where we meet the Queen Regent, Miriel; her chancellor, the charismatic Pharazon; and Numenorean society in general. (Linguistic Note: Numenoreans, like Elves, speak standard Received-Pronunciation English). Halbrand would like to remain in Numenor and become a smith, but Galadriel discovers that Halbrand is a scion of a lost kingdom in the Southlands and persuades the Numenoreans to launch an expeditionary force to aid the Southlands and restore him to his kingdom.

In the Southlands, we find a small village of people (with Yorkshire accents). A healer, Bronwyn, a single mother with a teenage son, Theo, is close to Arondir, an Elf who is part of a detachment charged with guarding the Southlands. When Gil-galad determines that peace has returned, the detachment is withdrawn… but not before falling foul of a band of Orcs. The Orcs, which hate sunlight, are tunnelling and undermining the entire area, slowly turning it into a kind of Western-Front hellscape. Which is a shame, as the Southlands look rather pleasant, except for the volcano that broods on the horizon. The Numenoreans land and help the Southlanders defeat the Orcs, or so it seems. Galadriel has a confrontation with the leader of the Orcs, who turns out to be a corrupted Elf, called Adar. However, the Orcs use a sneaky contraption that floods the magma chamber of the volcano with water, prompting a violent eruption. The Numenoreans and Southlanders have to retreat from a land that is turning, very quickly, into Mordor. The volcano is of course Orodruin, or Mount Doom of The Lord of the Rings. Galadriel and Halbrand make their way to Eregion.

Meanwhile, Gil-galad sends Elrond to Eregion, where he is required to help Celebrimbor in a new project. There is some hurry, apparently, but Celebrimbor doesn’t have the manpower. Elrond goes to nearby Khazad-Dûm to enlist the help of a friend, Prince Durin, heir to the throne. This story — a personal one, of Elrond’s relationship with Durin, is the meat of the second story. (Linguistic Note: The Dwarves speak with Glaswegian accents). Together they discover a new ore called mithril which Elrond says will stop the Elves from fading, but Durin’s father, also Durin, forbids further work mining mithril, and with good reason — the mine workings disturb an ancient menace, slumbering far below the Dwarf mines (this is the balrog from The Lord of the Rings). Elrond is thrown out of Khazad-Dûm with a single nugget of mithril. Back in Eregion, Celebrimbor uses the mithril to forge the Three Rings, with helpful suggestions from Halbrand, which Galadriel finds suspicious. The dwarf storyline is only there to provide the mithril, and warn us of the oncoming Balrog. It also forces us to ask about the costs and benefits of friendship. King Durin puts the friendship between his son and Elrond at hazard for a greater good – the disobedience of Durin (fils) in digging for mithril at Elrond’s urging, will, eventually, cost far more.

The third story concerns the Harfoots, a wandering tribe of proto-hobbits, living somewhere near Greenwood the Great (the later Mirkwood). One of them, a young woman called Elanor Brandyfoot, befriends a stranger (known as the Stranger, with a capital ‘S’) who falls from the sky in a meteorite. The Stranger is very confused but seems to have magical powers. (Linguistic Note: the Harfoots have Irish accents). Their story interacts with the others not at all, except that they notice that parts of their landscape have been burned by lava bombs from distant Orodruin.

The question the Tolkien Twitterverse asked throughout the series was — who is Sauron? I thought it might be the Stranger, and indeed, in Episode 8, the Stranger is approached by three magi who are convinced he is Sauron, only to find that he is, in fact, an Istar, or wizard. (I was reminded of the scene at the beginning of Monty Python’s Life of Brian when the magi come to worship the baby Brian, but realise they have come to the wrong house). It seems clear from some of the things he says to Elanor that he is in fact Gandalf. In Tolkien’s legendarium, Gandalf arrives in Middle-earth respectably by boat, thousands of years later, his task being to inspire the residents of Middle-earth to rise up against Sauron. However, thinking about it, his fiery televisual arrival is satisfying for a number of reasons. First, he is disadvantaged from the beginning — shocked, disoriented and naked, he has to make a start from nothing. Second, the fact that he is befriended by Harfoots explains Gandalf’s later fondness for hobbits (which Tolkien does not explain). Third, that the magi mistake him for Sauron. In Tolkien’s mythology, Gandalf and Sauron belong to the same order of angelic being. In The TV adaptation, it is the benign influence of the Harfoots that turns the Stranger towards ‘good’ — perhaps, had the Magi got to him first, he could have been turned to evil. In effect, he could have become Sauron. As Tolkien notes, even Sauron was not evil in the beginning. Perhaps our choices — whether good or evil — are not innate, but determined by early experiences?

Is Adar, the corrupted Elf, then, Sauron? No — but his depiction lends a new poignancy to the stories of the origins of Orcs. This is a vexed question I discussed at length (even more length than here) in a book, but Tolkien was very clear that, in one respect, Orcs originated from Elves that were ensnared by Morgoth, twisted and ruined. Adar, then, although he looks like a battered Elf, is one of the first generation of Orcs. His fellow Orcs (his ‘children’, produced by some unknown means) are much more human-looking than many of the Orcs in the (much later) Lord of the Rings, as if Orcs become more degenerate with time. We see that Adar is far less morally compromised than, say, Galadriel — he cares neither for good nor evil, only for the welfare of his band of Orcs.

Sauron turns out to be … Halbrand. In a key scene in the season finale, he wars in thought with Galadriel. He admits that ‘I have been awake since before the breaking of the first silence’: that is, he is a divine being. But he also, it seems, would like to make amends.

When Morgoth was defeated, it was as if a great clenched fist had released its grasp from my neck, and in the stillness of that first sunrise, I felt — at last — the light of the One again. And I knew, that if ever I was to be forgiven, that I had to heal everything that I had helped ruin.

[Theological Note: The One is the High God, above the angelic Valar, in which category Morgoth originally belonged; and the lesser but still angelic Maiar, which include Gandalf and Sauron]. Halbrand/Sauron tempts Galadriel with the thought that she might be his Queen, using lines (‘stronger than the foundations of the Earth’) that we saw Galadriel utter in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (she rejects this). At the end of this confrontation, Halbrand’s eyes turn slit-like, like that of the cat Sauron always was, and the single lidless cat’s eye he would eventually become (blink and you’d miss it). But before that, Sauron, at all points, seems to be the reasonable one in the argument, compared with the fanaticism of Galadriel. Were Galadriel to ally herself with Sauron, he seems to say, she could save herself and millions of others much misery, and restore order to Middle-earth. He knows that the best lies are 90% truth, and Galadriel well knows that to search for evil, one first has to confront darkness in oneself. At the end of the episode we see him journey to the Mordor that Adar and his Orcs have prepared for him.

In the end, The Rings Of Power asks important and subtle questions about the nature of Good and Evil – questions with which Tolkien himself wrestled. There is ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ in us all. We have the potential to do either, and our choices ever rest on the edge of a razor.

[Further Linguistic Note: distinguished Tolkienist John Garth noted on Twitter that Sauron’s Yorkshire accent, might, after being in Mordor, become more like that of the Black Country].

Posted in Science Fiction, Uncategorized | Tagged amazon prime, durin, elrond, galadriel, gandalf, gil-galad, halbrand, john garth, Monty Python's Life of Brian, sauroin, the lord of the rings, the nature of good and evil, the rings of power, the science of middle earth, tolkien | Leave a comment

What I Read In September

Posted on 1 October 2022 by Henry Gee

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 4 (Folio Society Edition). We arrive at last at the Fifth Century and the agonising collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Assailed by barbarians on all sides (The century kicked off with the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410), the Romans tried to mitigate the damage by allowing some barbarians to settle within the borders of the Empire. Although this worked for a while — with many barbarians adopting the trappings of the Romans — pressures both external (the Huns in central Asia) and internal (the worsening of the economy combined with rampant corruption and general mismanagement) led to many barbarians declaring de facto independence within the Empire. One Constantine, supposedly maintaining Britain against piracy from Angles and Saxons, took his legions to Gaul in a bid to capitalise on the worsening chaos, leaving Britain to its fate: the island was instantly plunged into a darkness that lasted almost two centuries, and of a depth that even modern scholars find hard to penetrate (see my review of Max Adams’ The First Kingdom, and Thomas Williams’ Lost Realms, below). The Vandals settled in North Africa, the breadbasket of Rome, and from their base at Carthage inflicted piracy on a Mediterranean that had once been mare nostrum. All of a sudden, the Romans were catapulted back to the Punic Wars — but without the spirit or the energy to fight them. As time went on, many of the Empire’s best generals and ministers were in fact barbarians. The Roman general Stilicho had to repel barbarian invasions by cobbling together coalitions of other barbarians, and was himself a Vandal in origin. The Huns were only stopped at the Battle of Chalons in 451 by a coalition of Romans and Visigoths. That army was led by Aetius, whose father had been a Scythian. Many of the Goths were already ruling Gaul and Spain in any case; and the battle didn’t stop Attila the Hun ravaging northern Italy afterwards. The last few Emperors of the West — by then consisting only of parts of Italy and Dalmatia — were puppets of barbarian ministers, only there for ceremonial reasons. The very last, Romulus Augustulus, was gently deposed in 476 by Odoacer, the de facto ruler of Italy. It says something about the weakness of the Empire that Odoacer didn’t even think him worth assassinating. The Empire of the West, therefore, ended not with a bang but a whimper, a circumstance that made its disappearance all the more poignant. The event, nonetheless, is generally regarded as the End of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. In Gibbon’s view, the establishment of Christianity was one of the factors that weakened the Empire, with the diversion of thought and energy into religion rather than defence or government. Although he admits that monks preserved culture that might otherwise have been lost

.. posterity must gratefully acknowledge that the monuments of Greek and Roman literature have been preserved and multiplied by their indefatigable pens.

he is scathing about the institution of monasticism itself, noting that ascetics

… obeyed and abused the rigid precepts of the Gospel, [and] were inspired by the savage enthusiasm that represents man as a criminal, and God as a tyrant. They seriously renounced the business and pleasures of the age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage; chastised their body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of eternal happiness.

Nowadays we’d call this kind of behaviour ‘virtue signalling’. It worked, too — monks attracted legions of devotees who, if they could not join the throng themselves, showered religious institutions with gifts, the effect being a general corruption in which the monastic life became, in some cases, every bit as luxurious as that of a Roman patrician, but with none of the responsibilities. Gibbon reserves some of his sharpest barbs for the hagiographies of early Christians which, in his opinion, make very poor substitutes for history:

The lives of Paul, Hilarion, and Malchus, by [St Jerome], are admirably told; and the only defect of these pleasing compositions is the want of truth and common sense.

The knowledge and reason of antiquity were swept aside by faith and credulity. The Age of Faith was fecund with the miraculous. Gibbon dismisses most miracles with the contempt they undoubtedly deserve. There was one, though, that he found affecting. This is the tale of the Seven Youths of Ephesus. As Christians during the persecutions of the emperor Decius, they were walled up in a cave and left to starve. Two hundred years later, workmen removing stones for building found the men merely sleeping. They awoke to a world that had changed utterly. The Empire was Christian, and the capital had moved from Rome to Constantinople. Gibbon notes the persistence of legends like this, noting that the fable has ‘general merit’.

We imperceptibly advance from youth to age without observing the gradual, but incessant, change in human affairs; and even in our larger experience of history, the imagination is accustomed, by a perpetual series of causes and effects, to unite the most distant revolutions. But if the interval between two memorable eras could be instantly annihilated; if it were possible, after a momentary slumber of two hundred years, to display the new world to the eyes of a spectator who still retained a lively and recent impression of the old, his surprise and his reflections would furnish the pleasing subject of a philosophical romance.

Cue Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in the court of King Arthur and Woody Allen’s The Sleeper to The Time Machine and every other story of time travel right down to recent films such as Interstellar. The fable about the sleepers of Ephesus resonates down to our own times.

Annie Proulx: Barkskins Like many people, I suppose, I first came across Annie Proulx with her redemptive novel The Shipping News. Later on I read Accordion Crimes. The two novels are totally different in scale and scope, yet both united by their unequalled grasp of the effects of history on the residents of North America, and their spare, unsentimental style. Barkskins follows this tradition. At the very end of the 17th century, two down-and-out youths from the slums of Paris are transported to New France — today’s Nova Scotia and New Brunswick — as indentured labourers. One, René Sel, becomes a woodsman, set with his axe to fell what seems to be the inexhaustible forests of the new continent. His descendants largely belong to the indigenous Micmac people — woodsmen, fishers, trappers, hunters, ever trying to hold on to the threads of their ancient traditions. The other, Charles Duquet, absconds, and eventually founds a mighty dynasty of lumber barons. So begins a walloping great family saga, which could have degenerated into a potboiler, but works because of Proulx’s signature style – pure, terse prose occasionally ornamented by sentences of breathtaking beauty and startling originality. Many of the characters are explored in depth — the Micmac paterfamilias Kuntaw Sel, the timber baroness Lavinia Duke — but most make only fleeting appearances. The real stars are the panoramic landscapes, the trees, the great forests of America, and, later, the world, felled by the human need to conquer and subjugate. If I could find one fault, it is the tendency to dump a lot of historical information into the mouths of her characters as a way of helping you, the reader, catch up with world events. The thing is, you see, Proulx’s best characters struggle when the need to express themselves hits their fundamental inability to carry it through, usually because, in their world — a tough world of physical hard labour to which Proulx’s style is ideally suited — doing counts for a lot more than saying. Think Brokeback Mountain. (Yes, Proulx wrote that, too). Most of her characters work best when they say little. By giving voice to the unlettered and inarticulate she elevates them to a kind of dignity and greatness.

Thomas Williams: Lost Realms This book is something of a heroic failure. I suspect that the author would concur, for that, in essence, is what it is meant to be. If it weren’t hard enough trying to unearth something about the lost history of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries — perhaps the darkest and least documented period in the history of these islands (see my review of Max Adams’ The First Kingdom) — the author homes in on those parts of that history that are more obscure still. It is likely that many petty polities rose and fell between the departure of the Roman legions in about 410 and the arrival of Augustine in 597, but evidence for most of them has been irrecoverably lost. Given that the earliest history of what Williams calls ‘the Big Beasts’ of Northumbria, Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia is hidden in the mists of myth and legend, recovering the stories of the lesser realms of Elmet, Hwicce, Dumnonia, Essex, Rheged, Powys, Sussex and Fortriu would seem like a fool’s errand. The existence as independent entities of some, (Sussex and Essex, for example, along with Lindsey, in north Lincolnshire; and Hwicce, in what is now Gloucestershire and Worcestershire) is attested only after they became subject to the domination of larger neighbours. Powys has achieved a spurious legitimacy through the creation of a ceremonial county whose borders may bear little relationship to the ancient kingdom that existed (possibly) in the valley of the River Dee. Evidence for Elmet (in modern West Yorkshire) is a gossamer-wisp away from oblivion, while Rheged (Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway) might not have actually existed at all. And so on. There are, however, some very revealing details. Such as, for example, the existence of people living in Roman luxury at Tintagel (in Dumnonia), long after the fall of the western Empire, possibly benefiting from the resurgence of the Empire and the re-opening of the Mediterranean and Atlantic trade under Justinian. Yet, hardly a stone’s throw away, in Hwicce, perhaps one of the most Romanised parts of Britain, towns were deserted in short order after the legions left, in favour of hilltop forts — perhaps the last holdouts of a population, desperate and fragmented, trying to hold on to what they had lost, an aim as futile as it was poignant. The author’s style veers from passages of a shade of purple that tends to the ultraviolet, to humour that draws on references that might baffle some people today, let alone in the fifth century. Modern Cirencester, for example

… remains genteel, well-to-do and liberal, in a Waitrose, National Trust, Radio 4 sort of way.

…to the names of native British warlords, which sound less like personal names than crude boasts:

It has also been suggested that ‘Vortigern’ was a title and not a name at all … when set aside other Brittonic names like Brigomaglos (‘mighty prince’) and Maglocunus (‘top dog’), Vortigern seems hardly out of place. (Even Biggus Dickus might feel at home in this sort of company).

No, you look it up. And on the bullying nature of some early English kings:

The so-called Mercian Supremacy was really an exercise in early medieval gangsterism, and the Mercian king was an Offa you couldn’t refuse.

Ba-boom, and, moreover, tish. So what is the point of it all? The book, I think, invites us to look critically — very critically — at the history we are taught about the foundation of our nation, to show that almost all of it is myth created retrospectively to justify present circumstances, and even the bits everyone thinks are true hardly stand up to much scrutiny. Williams closes with a discourse on how some historians are disowning the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as it has, in some places, acquired connotations of racism, even white supremacy. Such notions rest on outmoded ideas of race, nation and identity, in which it was assumed that (for example) an early medieval body buried in lowland Britain with jewellery similar to that found in northern Germany or Scandinavia must have been that of a Germanic invader, rather than — say — a person of British ancestry who just happened to like that kind of bling. After all, the fact that the streets of Britain now thrum to the engines of Japanese cars doesn’t mean that Britain has been invaded by Japan. When presented with such evidence, it is hard, therefore, not to project on to such mute remains the prejudices we hold today, when what we should be asking is how the people who lived in those remote ages saw themselves. This is hard enough to do now, even of ourselves. As David Berreby shows in his masterpiece Us and Them: Understanding our Tribal Mind, we can change our identities as often as we change our socks, and yet convince ourselves that the persona we wear today has been true for all time. So who can tell what a person who lived in fifth century Britain — a time of dramatic but ill-documented change — thought of themselves? That is something that we can never know. Oh, and one last thing. Whoever Thomas Williams imagines himself to be, he loves Tolkien. So that gets an extra star from me.

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 5 (Folio Society Edition). The period between the end of the fifth and the beginning of the seventh centuries is dominated by one name – that of Justinian, who ruled for thirty-eight years (527-565), which in Roman terms was practically forever. His domination is reflected in his documentation, for his times were described in minute detail by Procopius the Copious. So minute, in fact, that he documented the salacious private lives of the Emperor and his Empress, Theodora, who had started out in what we’d nowadays call the adult entertainment industry (her party piece involved a live goose and some birdseed). The Romans were as keen on spectator sports as anyone today. Supporters of popular chariot-racing were divided into the mutually hostile ‘green’ and ‘blue’ factions, whose supporters adhered to their teams with the fanaticism of religious mania that often became destructive. Sports hooliganism is nothing new. Gibbon repeatedly pokes fun at the Romans’ love of luxury over learning. The Romans devoted a great deal of ingenuity to wheedling the secrets of silk production out of the Chinese. Gibbon writes:

I am not insensible to the benefits of elegant luxury; yet I reflect with some pain that if the importers of silk had introduced the art of printing, already practised by the Chinese, the comedies of Menander and the entire decads of Livy would have been perpetuated in the editions of the sixth century.

And after a long discussion on the splendour of the Cathedral of St Sophia in Constantinople:

Yet how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labour, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple!

At the same time, the centuries-old philosophical schools of Athens withered and died — less by the incursions of barbarians than from the proscriptions of Christianity, which Gibbon takes every opportunity to chastise:

The Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or sceptic to eternal flames.

And here:

The king of the Lombards had been educated in the Arian heresy, but the catholics in their public worship were allowed to pray for his conversion; while the more stubborn barbarians sacrificed a she-goat, or perhaps a captive, to the gods of their fathers.

to which Gibbon adds a characteristically waspish footnote:

Gregory the Roman supposes that they likewise adored this she-goat. I know but of one religion in which the god and the victim are the same.

Elsewhere Gibbon laments the survival of devotional literature that adds nothing very much either to our general knowledge or improvement. He writes of the works of a monk called Antiochus whose ‘one hundred and twenty-nine homilies are still extant, if what no one reads may be said to be extant’.

Procopius also wrote about (and Gibbon faithfully follows) the stellar career of the heroic general Belisarius, who, although henpecked at home, reconquered Italy, southern Spain and the African littoral for the Empire.

It wasn’t all good news, though. The reign of Justinian was punctuated by natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and most notably an epidemic of plague (c.541-544). Gibbon devotes no more than a few paragraphs to this, but then, neither did Procopius, though nowadays this is the one event, perhaps understandably, that people associate with the reign of Justinian. The plague, and incessant warfare, depopulated many areas, so that, eventually, northern Italy and the Apennine spine of the country were occupied without opposition by the Lombards, whose kingdom fragmented into a series of mutually hostile polities such as the Duchies of Spoleto and Beneventum. The Imperial possessions remained, though, in pockets that eventually became the Republic of Venice, the Papal States, the Kingdom of Naples, and so on, and this led to the patchwork pattern of Italian politics that lasted until the time of Garibaldi.

The centrepiece of this volume, however, is Gibbon’s essay on Justinian’s revision of Roman law.

The laws of a nation form the most instructive portion of its history; and although I have devoted myself to write the annals of a declining monarchy, I shall embrace the occasion to breathe the pure and invigorating air of the republic.

By Justinian’s time the edifice of Roman law had become so confused and cluttered that wholesale revision was necessary:

In the space of ten centuries the infinite variety of laws and legal opinions had filled many thousand volumes, which no fortune could purchase and no capacity could digest.

The commission set up by Justinian pulled as much of extant Roman law together as it could gather and eventually disgorged three great works: the Code, the Pandects and the Institutes. Gibbon is critical of those who said that Justinian’s revision consigned much extant Roman law to the ashes, noting that only a limited amount of a thousand years of precedent would have been available. Laws existed in only a few copies, made by hand; codes that were superseded had very likely been destroyed deliberately; and, after all, this was not the kind of literature people read for entertainment. The result, therefore, of all this effort, could never have been the image of perfection:

Instead of a statue cast in a simple mould by the hand of an artist, the works of Justinian represent a tessellated pavement of antique and costly, but too often of incoherent, fragments.

The final part of this volume discusses the relationship between Rome and Persia. In the First Century, Augustus had recommended that the bounds of the Roman Empire (the Rhine, the Danube, the eastern Mediterranean shore as far inland as the Euphrates, and the Sahara Desert) were natural limits and should not be exceeded. His successors largely held to these limits. Yet for half a millennium or more the Romans existed in a state of armed truce with the Persian Empire, and the various episodes of back-and-forth usually ended up in more or less the same places. Yet the reign of Heraclius (610-641) saw warfare between Rome and Persia erupt on an unprecedented scale. At one point the Persians swept through the entire eastern part of the Empire as far as the Bosphorus, with their allies, the barbarian Avars, advancing to the walls of Constantinople on the other shore. But for the heroism of Heraclius (one of the few Roman Emperors who took to the field in person), and the fact that the Persians lacked a navy to press their advantage, the Roman Empire came within a day of extinction. But Heraclius counterattacked, advancing into Persia as far as modern Azerbaijan. In the end, though, and after much destruction, the ancient borders were re-established. Such imperial friction could have gone on forever, but for some unlikely news from a far country. Gibbon writes that the King of Persia

received an epistle from an obscure citizen of Mecca, inviting him to acknowledge Mohammed as the apostle of God. He rejected the invitation, and tore the epistle.

Hindsight might view such casual dismissal as a mistake.

Posted in Writing & Reading | Tagged accordion crimes, Annie Proulx, Barkskins, Belisarius, Brokeback Mountain, David hereby, edward gibbon, interstellar, J R R Tolkien, Justinian, Lost Realms, mark twain, Max Adams, Procopius, sleepers of Ephesus, the decline and fall of the roman empire, The First Kingdom, the Shipping News, the time machine, Theodora, Thomas Williams, Us and Them, woody Allen | Leave a comment

Shortlisted

Posted on 27 September 2022 by Henry Gee

I am ecstatic to announce that my latest tome, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, has been shortlisted for the 2022 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. A popular-science equivalent of the Booker Prize, the Royal Society has been awarding this in one form or another since 1988.

According to this article in The Bookseller the shortlist of just six titles was drawn from a field of 219 submitted for consideration, so just to be shortlisted is an honour (the overall winner will be announced 29 November), and I can safely say that this is the apotheosis of my zenith this week.

Writing a PhD thesis* got me into the swing of writing books and ever since then I have been writing something or another. My first book was published before I was thirty. This year I turned sixty. My writings have had a small but ~~enthusiastic~~ tolerant audience, but I have ever been just under the radar: they say one must toil in obscurity for decades before one becomes an overnight sensation. I can be consoled that Tolkien was 62 when The Lord of the Rings was published, and even then that was just the first volume.

Just so you know, the other shortlisted titles are —

Age Proof: The New Science of Living a Longer and Healthier Life, by Professor Rose Anne Kenny;

Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender, by Frans de Waal;

Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle against Climate Change Denial, by Peter Stott;

Spike: The Virus vs the People, by Jeremy Farrar, with Anjana Ahuja;

and

The Greywacke: How a Priest, a Soldier and a School Teacher Uncovered 300 Million Years of History, by Nick Davidson.

*My first attempt was ~~failed~~ referred as they thought it too readable to be a PhD thesis: I was told I had to go away and make it more boring. I was in good company. The late SF author Isaac Asimov had been selling short stories to pay his way through graduate school. When the time came to write up his thesis he was afraid that after all those years of learning to write well, he wouldn’t be able to write badly enough to satisfy his thesis committee (as recalled in The Early Asimov).

Posted in Apparitions, Science Is Vital, Writing & Reading | Tagged age proof, anjana ahuja, different, frans de waal, hot air, Isaac Asimov, Jeremy farrar, nick davidson, Peter Stott, rose Anne Kenny, Royal Society, royal society insight investment science book prize, spike, the early Asimov, the greywacke | Leave a comment

Queuowulf

Posted on 18 September 2022 by Henry Gee

As I expect you both have, I’ve been wondering why I have felt so moved at the passing of the Queen, someone I never knew or even met. It is a feeling that many people seem to share, so much so that they are prepared to queue for hours, even days, just for the chance to walk past her coffin.

This might reflect no more than the love-affair that the British have with queues. However, there could be a deeper meaning to it all. Through tumultuous changes — Brexit, Covid, and everything else — the Queen was a constant we took for granted, like the sunrise in the mornings. So much so that her passing represents a shift in our national stability. Not long after I heard the news I thought, as I expect you did too, of the closing passages in Beowulf.

After the eponymous hero’s adventures with Grendel and his mother, he lives a long life as much-loved ruler and protector of his people, the Geats, until, in old age, he dies in combat with a dragon. The Geats lament his passing, partly because his loss has removed their security — a bulwark against invasion by opportunist outsiders. I am sure you’ll immediately recall the passage that starts on line 3150:

swylce giormor-gyd Geatisc meowle
… bunden-heorde
song sorg-cearig. Sæde geneahhe,
Þæt hio hyre here-geongas hearde ondrede
wæl-fylla worn, werudes egesan,
hynðo ond hæft-nyd. Heofon rece swealg.

Which in Seamus Heaney‘s translation reads

A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

Then there is the more recent, very lively translation by Maria Dahvana Headley, which reads

Then another dirge rose, woven uninvited
by a Geatish woman, louder than the rest.
She tore her hair and screamed her horror
at the hell that was to come: more of the same.
Reaping, raping, feasts of blood, iron fortunes
marching across her country, claiming her body.
The sky sipped the smoke and smiled.

Both translations are rather free, partly because the text in the one surviving smoke-singed copy we have is rather ropey, and parts of the passage quoted are either illegible or missing. (This didn’t stop the noted medievalist Tom Shippey referring in my hearing to Seamus Heaney as ‘Shameless’ Heaney). At times of national crisis and brouhaha I turn to the comforting solidity of Tolkien who rendered the same passage in prose:

There too a lamentable lay many a Geatish maiden with braided tresses for Beowulf made, singing in sorrow, oft repeating that days of evil she sorely feared, many a slaying cruel and terror armed, ruin and thraldom’s bond. The smoke faded in the sky.

The translations vary (on the whole I prefer Headley’s for its brutal immediacy), but the sense of all is clear. Now, I do not think that the immediate consequence of the death of our Queen will be invasion by barbarous hordes bent on destruction. But I sense that, deep down, beneath the ordered calm of our world, the passing of a much-loved monarch after a very long reign has stirred up something atavistic, a memory of past horrors. Which might explain the urge to come together in a festival of communal mourning.

Which, in Britain, takes the form of a queue as long as Jörmungandr.

Posted in Apparitions, Politicrox, Writing & Reading | Tagged Beowulf, J R R Tolkien, Jorgmungandr, Maria Dahvana Headley, Queen Elizabeth II, queues, Seamus Heaney | Leave a comment

What It Must Have Been Like To Be The Queen

Posted on 9 September 2022 by Henry Gee

Many years ago when the world was young I was one of the four Vice Presidents of the Linnean Society of London. Each year the society would have a ‘conversazione’ — basically a drinks party — in some nice location, preferably of scientific or historic significance. One year it was to be held at Down House, the home of Charles Darwin. A duty of the President was to welcome guests to the event, shaking hands, smiling and finding some suitably anodyne words of welcome. As the conversazione was the society’s ‘Ladies’ Night’ the President was expected to be accompanied by their spouse. (This was quite a few unreconstructed years ago – I am pleased to say that the Society now has a female President). That year, the President couldn’t attend (field work abroad); one VP was ineligible (going through a divorce); the other two couldn’t make it (for reasons I can no longer remember) so the baton was passed to me.

After work me and Mrs Gee hoofed it as fast as possible to Down House; were ushered into an upstairs room to change into our posh frocks; and were then stood in the front hall of Down House to welcome the guests. We stood there for some hours. The floor was very, very hard. The guests just kept on coming. After they had all arrived we had a very quick chance to enjoy the party and take a look at the inside of Down House. Then we went home.

We were dog tired. Our feet ached from standing on that hard floor. Our hands ached from all the handshakes. Even our faces ached from all the forced smiling. The last thing I remember before falling gratefully asleep was Mrs Gee saying ‘now I know what it feels like to be the Queen’.

And that was for just a couple of hours.

Imagine having to endure day after day of it, week after week, for more than seventy years.

In the immortal words of Paddington Bear: thank you Ma’am. For everything.

Posted in Domesticrox | Tagged Linnean Society of London, Queen Elizabeth, The Queen | Leave a comment

Of the Rings of Power

Posted on 3 September 2022 by Henry Gee

By now you’ll both have gathered that I have a passing interest in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, so I hope you won’t mind that I attempt a review of the first two episodes of The Rings of Power, a televisual emission by Amazon Prime. The take-home message is that I enjoyed them very much and I am looking forward keenly to how the story develops. In what follows THERE ARE ~~SPIDERS~~ SPOILERS so if you don’t want to know the plot, please find something else to read ~~forthwith~~ fifthwith.

The story takes place thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, but in the same fictional universe, and one or two of the characters will be familiar. It starts with Galadriel (yes, that one), but as a child, playing with her friends in the eternal bliss of Valinor, the Blessed Realm. Even then we see that she’s a member of the awkward squad, and has to be consoled by her beloved elder brother, Finrod. When Galadriel grows up, the Great Enemy, Morgoth, ravages the Blessed Realm; kills the two shining trees that illuminate it; and escapes to Middle Earth. He is chased by Galadriel and many of the elves, and after a long war in which many elves, including Finrod, are killed, Morgoth is finally defeated. All this is delivered in a long spoken preamble by Galadriel herself.

Many elves go back over the sea to Valinor, but some remain in Middle Earth in the kingdom of Lindon, ruled by the High King, Gil-Galad. Everyone is convinced that evil has finally been expunged from the Earth, but, oh no, not our Gal. She is especially concerned that Sauron, Morgoth’s greatest servant, was never found, and that he might still be around somewhere, fomenting general disorder and brouhaha. (Aside: why is Galadriel so keen to find Sauron? It could all be to do with avenging the death of Finrod, who, in the Silmarillion, is killed by werewolves in Sauron’s dungeons).

The action starts — eventually — with ‘Commander’ Galadriel leading a posse of increasingly reluctant elves to the Far North in search of signs of Sauron. She finds a distinctive trident-shaped sigil which she believes is a sign of his passing, but it appears to be very ancient. After a battle with a snow troll, the elves retreat. Back home in Lindon, Gil-Galad honours the Elvish commandos with a one-way trip to Valinor (this really doesn’t ring true: going back to Valinor is a much bigger deal than a prize in some kind of competition). Galadriel, persisting in her belief that evil still walks, jumps ship just before Valinor is reached, and, in a scene perhaps inescapably reminiscent of The Raft of the Medusa by Gericault, falls in with shipwrecked sailors. After encounters with sea monsters and storms, only one man is left. He confesses to Galadriel that he has escaped the ravages of Sauron’s orcs — not in the Frozen North, but in the ‘Southlands’, the area that will one day become Gondor (there are helpful maps). Galadriel and her new friend are rescued by a passing ship, which I guess belongs to the seafaring Numenoreans, but that’s for the next episode. Back in Lindon, Gil-Galad confesses to his herald, Elrond (yes, that one) that Galadriel might well be correct that evil still walks, but that her agitation might stir up things that would be better left undisturbed.

At the same time, we see humans living in the Southlands. Just as the elves are relaxing their guard, various disturbing events show that orcs are still about, and there is a sequence of truly spellbinding horror as a human woman, Bronwyn, confronts and kills one in her own home.

But back to Gil-Galad, who sends young Elrond to the elven city of Eregion, in the shadow of the Misty Mountains, where the noted elven smith Celebrimbor requires help with a new project (no prizes for guessing what that will be). In Celebrimbor’s workshop Elrond admires the hammer with which Fëanor, greatest of all elven craftsmen, forged the Silmarils, the three great jewels wherein the only remaining light of the Two Trees is captured — and which were stolen by Morgoth. (Elrond and Celebrimbor discuss this, but we aren’t told that Fëanor was Celebrimbor’s grandfather). Celebrimbor, however, doesn’t have the manpower. Elrond decides to recruit dwarves from the nearby Kingdom of Khazad-Dûm — the ruins of which we see as the Mines of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring — but which is then at its height. He has a hard time of it, though, and has to work hard to convince an old friend, Prince Durin, heir to the throne, of his plans.

Then, there are the harfoots. These proto-hobbits live a wandering life east of the Misty Mountains, by the Great River, and we focus on one group in which a small girl called Elanor Brandyfoot cannot help poking her nose into things she shouldn’t, and so is irresistibly drawn to the site of a fallen meteor that appears to not to be a meteorite, but a man, understandably dishevelled and incoherent, but capable of powerful magic. His identity is a mystery. (I think he’s Sauron).

And that’s as far as we’ve got.

It’s a slow start, perhaps inevitably, as we have to get up to speed with the underlying back story. However, after A Game of Thrones we are used to having to deal with several different stories happening at once, some of them rather complicated, so that’s not as much of a problem as it might be.

The acting is okay. Morfydd Clark has to carry a great deal as all-action heroine Galadriel, and does a fine job of it, too. Perfectly cast, one can just imagine her maturing and blossoming into the magisterial version of Galadriel played by Cate Blanchett in Peter Jackson’s films. Most of the cast is unknown (at least to me) but the sharp-eyed will have fun spotting well-known names beneath all those prostheses, notably Lenny Henry as a harfoot village elder. But hey, this is genre fiction, not Shakespeare, and I am reminded of an anecdote told by the late Leonard Cohen who, just before he was due to go on stage, admits to his lawyer (his ‘plus one’ – but, you know, maybe everyone else was busy) that he was worried about his inability to sing. ‘If I wanted singing’, his lawyer says, ‘I’d have gone to the Met’.

But don’t mind the quality, feel the width — The Rings of Power looks beautiful.

It sounds beautiful, too, with a title score by Howard Shore (Peter Jackson’s musical consigliere for all the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films) and incidental music by Bear McCreary (Outlander).

But is it true to Tolkien? My short answer — who cares? I do not subscribe to the more purist tendency among Tolkien fans that views any deviation from the canon as sacrilege. In one of his letters (I haven’t yet discovered which, someone will surely remind me) Tolkien said that he once had this grandiose scheme (‘my crest has long since fallen’) to create a vast mythology in which some parts are described in detail, but others merely sketched, and that others would come along to add their own contributions in various media. In which case, any adaptation has to be criticised on its own terms, and not with reference to the material on which it is more-or-less loosely based.

If pressed though, I’d say that yes, it is consistent with Tolkien’s legendarium. At least, so far. After all, the action in The Rings of Power takes place in the Second Age, perhaps the most sketchy part of Tolkien’s own mythology, so there is plenty of scope for invention that is not part of the canon, but which does not violate it.

Some might baulk at Galadriel as a kind of Xena Warrior Princess, but if they do, they shouldn’t. This is entirely canonical. Even in the Hobbit she is seen as fairly ferocious (Tolkien describes Galadriel’s take-down of Sauron in a few lines, offstage), and the young Galadriel, in the Silmarillion, is described as vigorous and strong-willed. Her initial search for Sauron in the far North makes sense, too — for that was where Morgoth’s stronghold was originally located.

My only niggle is why the harfoots speak what sounds like an Irish brogue. Even Lenny Henry, who I know for a fact comes from the West Midlands. To be sure, one somehow expects the rough-and-tough dwarves to speak Glaswegian, but to have the twee leprechaun-like harfoots speaking the way they do might seem just a little bit patronising, perhaps even racist. Perhaps I am over-thinking it. But then, as a Jew, I was concerned that J. K. Rowling had depicted the goblins in the Harry Potter universe as caricatures straight out of Nazi antisemitic propaganda — clever, but selfish, wizened and ugly; adhering to the letter of the law but not the spirit; with not an ounce of compassion; are entirely concerned with money, and (of course) run all the banks. And that was even before she blundered, entirely unnecessarily, into a debate about transgender rights. The cast of The Rings of Power is refreshingly diverse, but as diversity is increasingly embraced, sensitivities are only magnified.

Posted in Cinema, Science Fiction, Writing & Reading | Tagged bear mccreary, celebrimbor, feanor, finrod, galadriel, gericault, gil-galad, goblins, harry potter, howard shore, j k rowling, lenny henry, leonard cohen, middle earth, morgoth, numenoreans, orcs, outlander, peter jackson, Sauron, the hobbit, the lord of the rings, the raft of the medusa, the rings of power, the silimarillion, tolkien, valinor, xena warrior princess | 10 Comments

The Cromer Chainsaw Massacre

Posted on 2 September 2022 by Henry Gee

Cast your mind back more than a decade, to 2011, when the Gees were thinking of doing some serious remodelling to the Maison des Girrafes. Around that time, a local DIY store was having a closing-down sale, so we went along en famille to see if we could pick up any budget tins of paint, brushes &c &c and so on and so forth in like fashion. Wandering around the store, Offspring#2, aged 11, piped up, in a very small voice:

Please may I have a paint roller?

to which Offspring#1, aged 13 and already showing signs of ~~demonic possession~~ teenage rebellion said

Please may I have a chainsaw?

a request followed by the rider

I’d use it responsibly.

since when I have adopted a healthy respect for all power tools and prefer to use hand tools wherever possible. Recent events, however, have exposed cracks in this resolution, which have now become yawning fissures as I have now bought – you guessed it — a chainsaw.

In mitigation m’lud I was driven to it. Down the bottom of the garden is a Buddleia ~~bush~~ ~~thicket~~ ~~triffid~~ tree which despite my efforts at pruning it, over years, just comes back even bigger and more brutally invasive than before, growing twenty feet or more into the air and with the trunk as tall as I am and as thick as a wrestler’s thigh. For the past two or three years it has got quite beyond my long-handled loppers or even a handsaw and the thing started laughing at me each time I passed. Rustling menacingly, at any rate. The time had come for a clash of the titans – it was either me, or that bush. This garden ain’t big enough for the both of us.

So, after the bush had finished flowering (people unaccountably like these ~~horrible invasive weeds~~ bushes presumably because they are supposed to attract butterflies) I hied ~~forthwith~~ fifthwith to my local Boutique de Bricolage and bought — drum roll — a chainsaw.

Just in case you were imagining some giant, gas-guzzling, ear-splittingly loud, smoke-belching devourer of rainforests, unliftable except by musclebound stogie-chewing lumberjacks, the chainsaw I bought is electric, and cordless. I mean, even cars these days are electric and cordless, so it was bound to pack some whoomph, even if it looked (relatively) unthreatening.

I read the instructions, which were less about how to operate it, than How To Use It Responsibly. The chainsaw, the batteries, even the plastic bag in which it was packed, were festooned with warnings about misuse, so much so that I was almost afraid to turn it on.

Almost.

After a couple of false starts during which I learned how to tension the chain properly, I got to work. Mere minutes later, I could announce that VICTORY WAS MINE. The Buddleia lay in huge piles of brushwood all over the garden that I shall enjoy clearing up tomorrow. The thick sections of trunk I shall haul into the chicken run for the hens to play on.

I can’t express how good this feels.

A decade-long grudge match is now resolved. Only a remnant of the original plant remains. Yes, it will sprout again, because I have learned that nothing — nothing — will stop this plant short of a direct nuclear strike from orbit, but at least I shall be able to keep it in manageable limits. From now on, this Buddleia will know who’s boss.

I see the flowering currant bush that’s seeded itself next to the splintered ruins of the Buddleia could do with some attention. I swear that it quakes in terror when I glance in its direction…

Posted in Domesticrox, gardening | Tagged Buddleia, chainsaw, triffid | 4 Comments

What I Read In August

Posted on 26 August 2022 by Henry Gee

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (vol 2) (Folio Society Edition) I bought a handsome 8-volume set of Gibbon’s classic history cheaply on eBay. Attentive readers will note that I reviewed volume 1 last month, so I invite you to consult that quarter for the generalities. This volume gets stuck in to the fourth century and covers the reigns from Diocletian (ruled 284-305) to Julian (361-363). The focus, inevitably, is on Constantine (306-337), the first Emperor to espouse Christianity. The text breaks from narrative history (basically, just one damned thing after another) to analyse the early Church, and its tenacity given three centuries of persecution. However, persecution was leavened by long periods of tolerance, partly because the Romans really didn’t know what to make of this new-fangled creed. Roman religion was cheerfully polytheistic, and religious adherence was more a civic duty rather than a profound revelatory experience. Christianity, on the other hand, took the strict monotheism and hatred of idolatry of its Mosaic antecedent, and added to that a promise of transcendent afterlife, the attainment of which demanded abstention from just about everything that made life worth living. The Roman view of Christianity was mostly one of bemused bafflement. It was the refusal to make customary sacrifices to the Roman Gods — and the habit of Christians to meet together in secret to discuss who-knew-what — that led to the persecution. I admit that historiography has moved on since Gibbon’s time, but his more nuanced arguments about Christianity seemed fresh and new to someone who was taught that Diocletian persecuted Christians (BAD); Constantine espoused Christianity (GOOD), and Julian turned away from Christianity (BAD). Diocletian persecuted Christians — eventually, and after much provocation. Constantine embraced Christianity — eventually, and after much prevarication. But Diocletian’s long rule (for a Roman Emperor) instituted sweeping changes in government necessary for the management of a huge and sprawling Empire already in advanced decay, and which almost collapsed completely in the third century. To do this he divided the Empire in two — he ruled in the East, his capital at Nicomedia, not far from ancient Troy, while a co-Emperor was based at Milan, closer to the troublesome provinces of Illyria and the Danubian frontier. Rome itself was increasingly marginalised as a den of antiquity. But each emperor had an under-Emperor, making four, the so-called Tetrarchy. And, with frequent usurpations, as many as six. Constantine belied his nascent Christianity by murdering almost all his relatives. He made his new capital in the sleepy town of Byzantium, once a Greek colony, and built on Diocletian’s reforms by creating a vast bureaucracy that was too often prey to corruption and intrigue. The young Julian, exiled to the Academy of Athens, picked up his learning from ancient Greek tradition, so it was no surprise that when he emerged from seclusion to assume the Purple he had no interest in Christianity. He was also a capable general, countering massive invasions of Gaul by sundry barbarians, and tried to thin out the top-heavy bureaucracy instituted by Diocletian. His military efforts, as Diocletian’s in the sphere of government, delayed the eventual collapse of the Western Empire. As Gibbon writes, what is remarkable is not that the Roman Empire collapsed, but that it stayed together for as long as it did, and is in part thanks to the work of Diocletian and Julian that it persisted. The standard view of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity was that he had a vision of the Cross just before his victory against co-emperor Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. Gibbon assumes that everyone will know this story, which is why Betty Radice’s introductory notes were essential reading. Gibbon caused much consternation in his time for his sympathy towards polytheism and his often scathing denunciations of the foibles of the early church. To this modern reader innocent of the tides of historical thought, his relatively even-handed view made a refreshing change.
Alastair Reynolds: Century Rain By now you’ll both have gathered that I am rather fond of the SF of Alastair Reynolds, having reviewed a book set in his ‘Revelation Space’ Universe in June, and the final instalment of his Revenger trilogy last month. Century Rain is a stand-alone novel and perhaps all the better for it. When I started to read it, though, imagining I had never read it before, I had that peculiar sensation of deja lu – yes, I had read it before, but had forgotten all about it. I attribute this to my failing brain, however, because it’s a cracker. Verity Auger is 22nd-Century archaeologist gingerly picking over the remains of Paris in an Earth made uninhabitable by a nanotechnological holocaust. After an accident in which she is responsible for the death of a student, she is steamrollered into a mission to journey down a wormhole to the Paris of 1959 to recover papers by a secret agent, Susan White. But this is not the Paris of our 1959. In this version of Earth, the Second World War never happened, and the Paris of the 1950s has the technology of the 1930s. In this alt.hist. Paris, Susan White has been murdered, and her worried landlord and patron commissions washed-up jazz musician and private dick Wendell Floyd to investigate. So, apart from the whizzy futuristic space adventure one expects from Reynolds, there is a significant noir element, almost to a degree of self-parody. An American in Paris, who is a jazz musician turned PD. With a name like Wendell Floyd. Who has a burly associate called Custine, and a vampish black-clad German chanteuse ex-girlfriend called Greta, who at any moment you expect to ask What The Boys In The Back Room Will Have. Naturally, romantic sparks fly between hot-headed Auger and world-weary Floyd, but you know it’ll never work. Near the end, you can just about hear Casablanca:

‘I want you to remember me. Whenever you walk these streets … know that I’ll also be walking them. It may not be the same Paris, but –‘

‘It’s still Paris.’

‘And we’ll always have it,’ Auger said.

The thing is, the noir styling suits what elsewhere in Reynolds’ fiction can grate — that is, the habit of the characters to talk to one another in pithy, sarcastic asides. Here is suits the text down to the ground. And all this in a package so sharp it might cut itself and with a plot twistier than a nest of vipers learning how to crochet. I loved it.

Paul Morland Tomorrow’s People While writing a recent book and musing on the possible extinction of humanity, I became interested in demography, and in so doing came across this book, which promises a look over the edge at the near future of humanity. Although packed with facts, it fails, ultimately, to deliver. It would be fair to say that Morland stands on the centre-right of politics, and has very little sympathy for doom-mongers that preach imminent catastrophe, whether from climate change or overpopulation. And with good reason — Marxist policies on feeding populations have always led to disaster (‘Marxism Today: Famine Tomorrow’); and, in any case, doomsayers make political capital from preaching bad news. As Morland shows, the world’s human population is ageing, and is set to top out and begin a decline perhaps towards the end of the present century. In many countries it is below the natural replacement rate. In recent centuries the world has undergone at least one, and in many cases two, so-called demographic transitions. In the first, life expectancy at birth is increased but fertility remains high, so the population balloons. This is essentially what happened in Britain in the Industrial Revolution and led Thomas Malthus to predict widespread starvation. Paul Ehrlich was still doing this in 1968 in his book The Population Bomb when world population growth was at its peak (more on that later). But then came the second demographic transition, when people moved to cities and had fewer children. This is what is happening now in most countries. In some the population is contracting at a remarkable rate, and whole swathes of countryside have been abandoned in countries as varied and widespread as Bulgaria, Russia and Japan. City dwellers have less environmental impact than people in the country. And there’s another side benefit – older populations tend to be less warlike. On the whole, there are fewer conflicts in the world than there used to be. The big exception is sub-Saharan Africa. Africa — and especially West Africa — is in the throes of the first but not the second demographic transition. As Morland shows, the population of Africa is booming even as it is shrinking elsewhere. Tomorrow’s people are likely to be more African than Chinese or Indian. After noting that the population of Africa will be four billion in 2100, I was waiting in vain for the other shoe to drop. A burgeoning population is a young population, and bellicose. The increasing drought in the Sahel adds to the endemic corruption and poor governance that are ever exploited by revolution and war. The ravages of Islamist militancy in countries such as Mali make few headlines. The multi-nation war that rages, on and off, in the Congo Basin, even fewer. Europe is already feeling the pressure of northward migration as conflict and climate make life in parts of Africa increasingly intolerable. Eventually, Africa will settle down, and the population will start to decline. Most migration in Africa stays within that continent, and the movement is generally towards mega-cities such as Lagos, after which the second demographic transition will take place. But the road before that might be rocky. Morland really should have said so.

Paul Ehrlich: The Population Bomb This is a small book that took a long time to read. The reason is that it was so noisome. Not the actual content (though that had its moments) but the book itself. I bought my copy secondhand for more than twice the cost of my eight-volume, slipcased edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and by the greasy feel — and the smell — it seems to have spent most of the time since it was printed (in 1970, but the book was first published in 1968) in the home of a chain smoker who lived in a damp cellar warmed sporadically by a paraffin lamp. So I could only stand reading a few pages at a time after which I had to wash my hands to get rid of the residue. Now, to the content. The Population Bomb is one of those polemics that I expect are more admired than read. It was written at a time when the rate of population growth was at its peak (more than 2 per cent annually). The spur seems to have been the author’s visit to India:

The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming … People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.

The rest of the book is a plea to control human population by any humane means necessary. Some of the book’s messages — especially about pollution and the environment — were no doubt visionary for the time. Some of the things he says, though, seem calculated to make enemies. At one point he seems to castigate American biomedical science for focusing on treatments to prolong lives rather than prevent new ones, what Ehrlich calls ‘death control’ as opposed to ‘birth control’:

The establishment of American biology consists primarily of death-controllers: those interested in intervening in population processes only by lowering death rates.

Although he does nod to the possibility of improved crops supporting larger populations (the ‘Green Revolution’ was in its infancy), he completely fails to understand anything other than the problem of a bulk increase in population. That, for example, populations can change; they can age; that people can decide to have fewer children; that people can be socially mobile. Even in India. Despite a brave advocacy of abortion — the book was published five years before Roe v. Wade — he completely fails to discuss the revolution in female emancipation which over the past few decades has improved the lot of humanity without any of the occasionally draconian top-down suggestions proposed to control population. The world today has almost three times as many people as it did when Ehrlich wrote this book. And they are, on the whole, better fed, better educated and healthier than they were then. I am glad I read this book, if only as a historical document. Now I must go and wash my hands again.

Dan Simmons: Lovedeath Astute readers will note that the work of Dan Simmons appears frequently in these annals. Simmons exists at the literary end of the horror/SF spectrum, so much so that some of his work (such as Phases of Gravity) features neither SF nor horror. At his best, he fictionalises some real event and adds a very slight SF/horror twist. Perhaps the best known is The Terror, based on what might have happened to the Franklin expedition to search for the Northwest Passage after its disappearance (a novel recently adapted for televisual emission). My favourite is Drood, an account of the last days of Charles Dickens as recounted in a fictionalised account by Dickens’ very real but unreliable and laudanum-addled friend Wilkie Collins. Lovedeath, although literary in places, features a mite of SF and lashings of horror. It is a collection of five novellas, each in its own style, on the general theme of Love and Death (hence the overall title). The first is the memoir of a risk-averse insurance loss-adjuster; the second a squirm-inducing horror story set in Bangkok. Another, Flashback, is the mite of SF in the collection (Simmons expanded the theme at greater length in a novel of the same name). A fourth is a kind of myth quest set among the Lakota Sioux. Simmons saves the best until last with The Great Lover, a message-in-a-bottle type tale featuring the edited transcript of a ‘lost’ diary written by fictional war poet James Edward Rooke during his time on the Somme in 1916. Scenes of gut-churning carnage are interspersed with Rooke’s highly charged vision of ‘The Lady’, who Rooke takes to be a metaphor for death. Or is she? I should add that this collection is not for the squeamish. The sex scenes are frequent and explicit, the violence even more so, but all saved, just about, by the quality of the writing. It is indeed rather strong meat, and perhaps should have been called Sex, Violence and Violent Sex.

Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson: Empty Planet This is the third book on the future of the human population I have read this month, and I have to say it was every bit as disappointing as the other two: Paul Morland’s Tomorrow’s People and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. Morland failed to deliver on the promise of his title, and Ehrlich was just plain wrong (perhaps not his fault). Bricker and Ibbitson are closer to Morland in that they predict wholesale population decline in the coming decades, as the Total Fertility Rate, or TFR – the average number of children any woman will have in her lifetime — dips below replacement rate (about 2.1) just about everywhere. The cause (which the authors tell us to a wearisome degree) is urbanisation, which goes hand in hand with increased education and female emancipation, which lead to conscious decisions to have fewer children. The authors suggest that the UN might have ulterior motives in suggesting that the global population will top out at just over 11.2 billion, claiming they know better, and that the total might be less, even as low as nine billion. They get their knowledge from talking to the occasional academic and their own focus groups of young people from all over the world, from Brussels to Nairobi, Delhi to Sao Paulo. Someone should have told them that the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’. The book degenerates by slow degrees into a soggy mire of politically correct self-congratulation in which the authors praise Canada as a beacon of multiculturalism (the authors are Canadian), but they don’t put their heads above the parapet and tell us very much about what the world will look like in the next century or two. Ehrlich went overboard on environmental degradation and the threat it poses to humanity. Morland barely touches on it, and neither do Bricker and Ibbitson. When will the planet be as empty as the title promises? In the end we are left in the dark. I have yet to read a decent book on the future of the human population. Perhaps I shall have to write it myself. Meanwhile, it’s back to the Roman Empire…

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (vol. 3) (Folio Society edition). Now well into the Fourth Century, this volume deals with the pushback of paganism against Christianity under Julian ‘The Apostate’, to its final defeat under Theodosius the Great (379-395). The interval covered is quite short — less than forty years — but Gibbon treats with it at length, partly because he finds much to admire in the character of Julian. Although Julian reigned for just sixteen months (between 361 and 363), his life was full of incident and unusually well documented. Despite his fondness for the traditional rites of Rome, Julian was an excellent general, who kept the invading Franks and Alemanni at bay on the Rhine frontier. He overreached himself, however, in a disastrous campaign against the Persians during which he lost his life. Gibbon treats the travails of the early church with his usual amused detachment, especially the lingering controversy on the relationship between Christ and God. The Athanasians, who followed the ruling of the Council of Nicaea in 325 at which Constantine was present, held that Christ and God were of the same substance, but different (homoousion). The heretical Arians, on the other hand, held just as forcefully that Christ and God were of different substances, but the same (homoiousion). Like us, Gibbon marvels at how people were prepared to sacrifice their own lives for the sake of a single diphthong: as Gibbon says himself, ‘I cannot forbear reminding the reader that the difference is almost invisible to the nicest theological eye’. And that’s before we even start discussing the Holy Ghost. No wonder Julian found comfort in the arms of Jupiter and Apollo. Julian’s death led to a revival of Christianity, and Theodosius finally outlawed many of the practices of paganism, such as the sacrifice of live animals. Gibbon, being a Protestant of his times, says that the Church became corrupted by the worship of saints and relics — idolatry by the backdoor:

The religion of Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman Empire: but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals.

The main political event was the Battle of Hadrianople in 378, in which the Romans were utterly crushed by a force of Goths — it didn’t even need to go to penalties. The Emperor Valens died in the encounter. Although the Roman Empire wasn’t instantly dissolved as a result, the psychological effect was greater than the body count. Gibbon, however, cautions us against the outpourings of those who said that the ravages of the Goths left the country bare not only of people and crops but of birds, beasts and even fish:

Could it even be supposed that a large tract of country had been left without cultivation and without inhabitants, the consequences might not have been so fatal to the inferior productions of animated nature. The useful and feeble animals, which are nourished by the hand of man, might suffer and perish if they were deprived of his protection; but the beasts of the forest, his enemies or his victims, would multiply in the free and undisturbed possession of their solitary domain. The various tribes that people the air or the waters are still less connected with the fate of the human species; and it is highly probable that the fish of the Danube would have felt more terror and distress from the approach of a voracious pike than from the hostile inroad of a Gothic army.

Everything, then, in proportion — Gibbon’s salutary warning resonates with modern arguments which say (for example) that the interest we must assuredly have in extinction of species, or climate change, is not best served by emotively worded warnings of calamity, emergency or imminent disaster. Once again, Gibbon’s attitude seems so contemporary, that I was brought up short by how little this enlightened eighteenth-century writer knew of the natural world outside Europe. His discussion of the Huns suggests that his knowledge of eastern Asia was sketchy; his ignorance of anything to do with sub-Saharan Africa, profound. This is shown in his illustration of a supposedly African ape, taken from Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, of an orang-utan (the spread pictured above), which is a native not of Africa, but of south-east Asia. Gibbon’s confusion is perhaps not surprising. Although orangs were known in the 17th century, chimpanzees only became known to European science in the 1770s – when Gibbon was writing his treatise. Gorillas were first formally described in the 19th century. As for the lineaments of Roman history, the bare bones of it, if not necessarily the interpretation, have presumably remained much the same since Gibbon’s time, and I’d contend that few have ever written about it with such style.

Miriam Margolyes: This Much Is True Miriam Margolyes is one of our best-known and most versatile character actors who might be said to have (as one character in Jurassic Park describes another) ‘a deplorable excess of personality’. Her overwhelming presence, which reminds me of some of my more formidable and ferocious mishpocha, crushes anything in its path. So much so that reading this memoir is rather like watching a road accident as it happens: transfixed in horrified fascination at the unfolding carnage, you can do nothing to stop it. I do hope for her sake that she had the text suitably picked over by her lawyers, as she says some very salty things about people who are still alive, and, possibly, litigious. It’s also scatological and even pornographic to a degree that I cannot help feel is somewhat affected. So if you allow younger readers, bewitched by the author’s association with the ‘Harry Potter’ universe (she played one of the teachers at Hogwarts in two of the films), to read this (and why shouldn’t you?) be prepared to answer some very awkward questions.

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society There is a tradition of novels being cast as a collection of letters or journal entries, from 64 Charing Cross Road, via Les Liaisons Dangereuses to, well, Dracula. Mix in a story in which the main character dominates while not actually being present (Rebecca) and you’d have something altogether meatier than this entertaining if fairly predictable romance. It’s about an author seeking inspiration who finds herself on Guernsey just after World War II, following in the footsteps of the absent character who created the titular society on a whim to get out of being questioned by the Nazi occupiers of the island. In my humble opinion, descriptions of Nazi atrocities in such flowery fare do no honour to the victims of such horrors. I have to say that this is not my usual reading — I was persuaded to read it by Offspring2, and after seeing a recent Magic Lantern adaptation. I am sorry to say that I’ve been rather spoiled by Gibbon. After The Decline and Fall Etcetera Etcetera everything else feels bland.

Posted in Writing & Reading | Tagged 64 charing cross road, alastair reynolds, annie barrows, arian heresy, athanasian creed, battle of hadrianople, century rain, council of nicaea, dan simmons, darrell bricker, dracula, drood, edward gibbon, empty planet, flashback, john ibbitson, les liaisons dangereuses, lovedeath, mary ann shaffer, miriam margolyes, paul ehrlich, paul morland, rebecca, the decline and fall of the roman empire, the guernsey literary and potato peel pie society, the population bomb, the terror, this much is true, tomorrows people | 3 Comments

What I Did In My Summer Holidays

Posted on 17 August 2022 by Henry Gee

You’ll have read in these annals that the Gees have acquired a camper van, specifically a 1995 Mazda Bongo. After tootling around in it locally, the time came for its first Sea Trial, as it were. So one Friday during ferocious heat we drove it across country, from Cromer, 319 miles westward to Carmarthenshire, for a long weekend. As well as giving the van a shakedown this allowed us to visit relatives we’d meant to visit in 2019 until you-know-what happened.

Although we arrived in a somewhat wilted state after eight hours on the road, as attested by the architecturally wayward state of the awning when I erected it (see picture) the Bongo scarcely broke a sweat during the journey.

On the first night Mrs Gee slept in the fold-out ‘rock’n’roll’ bed in the van, but I was keen to try the pop-up tent in the roof. This was OK, except whenever I turned over, the whole van shook. On the plus side it showed that the van has excellent suspension. For the remaining two nights I slept much more happily on the ground inside the awning.

We never worked out how to use the inbuilt gas burner, which was OK as we much preferred to brew outside on a camping gaz stove. I also couldn’t work out how to get the water pump to work — the one that pumps water from the jerry can stowed in a rear compartment into the tap in the sink next to the (unused) gas burner. I discovered why — a plug had come loose. I fixed it… neglecting to check that the tap inside was off, and pointing into the sink. Neither was true, and we had a minor flood in which one of the internal lights got fritzed. Oh well.

We also learned that despite its somewhat wilted appearance, the awning did actually stay up when we disconnected it and drove the Bongo to the pub… and was still erect, if not exactly tumid, on our return. Result!

We had a lovely break, during which we caught up with our relations and met some very friendly indigenes (see picture) but the time came to depart. By Monday the weather had broken somewhat, and keen to avoid the horrendous roadworks on the M5 motorway, we decided to try the scenic route, driving through mid-Wales until we popped out in the West Midlands in the general direction of Herefordshire. The charming and domesticated hills and valleys of Carmarthenshire slowly gave way to the altogether more wild and rugged terrain of Powys. The road between Llandovery and Builth Wells climbed up and up into the kind of landscape one usually only sees in TV commercials for performance cars. It was only here that the 2.5-litre diesel engine of the Bongo met a challenge, but mainly because I was unused to the gear-changing characteristics of the automatic gearbox.

We arrived safely home to find that the Offspring had minded the shop with quiet efficiency. Only later did we realise that this was the first break Mrs Gee and I had enjoyed together since the last millennium. The only thing amiss with the Bongo is a certain intermittency of the electrics that winds the windows up and down, so it’s now back in the garage for a tweak. More adventures await.

Posted in Domesticrox, Travel | Tagged carmarthenshire, mazda bongo, powys | Leave a comment

Van Extraordinaire

Posted on 1 August 2022 by Henry Gee

My new toy. Recently.

Here is my new toy. It is a Camper van. Specifically, it is a 1995 Japanese-import Mazda Bongo Friendee, bought from my friendly local motorhome and caravan dealer.

It happened like this.

Me and Mrs Gee were driving along in our car and I suddenly piped up with the idea that we should buy a camper van. Notwithstanding inasmuch as which we tried a pull-along caravan some years ago, and we had thought of buying a camper van in some vague subconscious way, Mrs Gee said that this was the most romantic thing I’d said for at least twenty years. A few days later, after getting throughly confused by online searches of makes and models and specifications, we just happened to be passing aforementioned local caravan and motorhome dealer and there it was, parked on the forecourt. So we went in and inquired. It came down to a choice between this and a similar Toyota, but we liked the inside conversion of this one more. The dealer was very friendly and helpful, and spent quite a bit of time (with no extra money from me) getting what is after all a rather old vehicle up to spec, installing a modern gas-canister cupboard, getting it M.O.T.’d and taxed and so on.

However, as someone who has never owned a camper van – or any kind of van – there is a steep learning curve to climb. For example, when I flipped the roof tent up (as in the picture) but couldn’t get it down again, the dealer explained over the phone about a lock switch I’d never noticed that had to be engaged, and all was well. Next week I am taking the van in to have a minor electrical loose connection fixed, and to have a lesson on how to use the gas burner.

Now, I hadn’t meant to write anything about this at all, but was prompted to do so by Stephen’s post on his confusion occasioned by the possible purchase of a ~~unicycling giraffe~~ electric bicycle. Acquiring some new piece of kit in a sphere of activity with which one has hitherto been unacquainted can cause some anxiety. It’s rather like being a new parent, when you are never sure if a child’s sniffle is just a sniffle or a symptom of something more serious. With my van, I have found that no amount of online searching and helpful YouTube videos (and some have been helpful) substitutes for in-person advice either from my dealer, or from friends who have camper vans and motor homes who are eager to offer friendly advice, and who are of course thrilled to have another member of their fraternity.

And so, adventures await. Adventures that we can now indulge in now the COVID pandemic is something that we are beginning to get used to. For example, in 2019 I was due to drive to Hay-on-Wye to participate in the How The Light Gets In festival. I had planned to take book-lover Offspring#2 so we could enjoy both the festival and the wealth of secondhand book-browsing offered by that remarkable Welsh border town. COVID put a stop to that, and the festival moved online. I participated by ZOOM (you can see an example of a talk I gave here, and a panel discussion here). But my short break with Offspring#2 had to be postponed. Until now! I have already booked a pitch on a campsite near Hay later in the year so my promise to Offspring#2 may be fulfilled. For although we are still very careful about COVID — we wear FFP2 masks in all crowded or indoor spaces — this van is our very own COVID-compliant glamping podule on wheels. Other trips, with Mrs Gee, and Offspring#1 are projected.

And there is something else, too — this part prompted by Athene’s musings on a return to meatspace. A part of my job (by day I am with the Submerged Log Company) involves traveling to universities and research institutes and hobnobbing with scientists. Over the past two years I have been ZOOMing in virtually, but having my own mobile glamping podule might allow me to make more in-person visits without the risks of staying in hotels and so on. The future looks bright.

Posted in Domesticrox, How The Light Gets In, Science Is Vital, Travel | Tagged COVID, glamping, Hay-on-Wye, How The Light Gets In, leraning curve, mazda bongo, meatspace | Leave a comment

The Rings of Power: Impressions of the First Series

What I Read In September

Shortlisted

Queuowulf

What It Must Have Been Like To Be The Queen

Of the Rings of Power

The Cromer Chainsaw Massacre

What I Read In August

What I Did In My Summer Holidays

Van Extraordinaire

Henry Gee

Disclaimer

Amazon Author Page

Inquire Within…

Recent Posts

Croxosphere

Recent Comments

Categories

Archives