My Autobiography by Guy Martin

This book has convinced me that not only should you never meet you heros, but you shouldn't read their autobiographies either. If you like Guy Martin and want to carry on liking him, look away now.



I'm not a fan of motorsports so I first found Guy on television. "Come and watch this," I said to my husband, "It's like Wolverine was a Northerner building a boat.". We marvelled at his sideburns, and occasionally at his engineering and once at nearly all of him when a steam-powered shower turned evil and he had to jump out of it in a hurry. Since then I've enjoyed How Britain Worked (a wonderfully comforting programme as every episode was the same; Guy would join some bunch of brown-coated old boys as they restored old bits of stuff and win them over with his no-nonsense northern tea drinking and ability to "Shave a couple of thou off that, lad". The best bit would always be Guy turning to camera demonstrating a nice interference fit and saying, "Look at that, eh? Trick as.", or some weeks, "It were proper graft though, in them days, weren't it?") and two series of Speed (a much less cosy programmme which frequently gave the impression that it might end with the words, "This programme is dedicated to the late Guy Martin").

I guess what I was expecting from this book was some exciting bits about high-speed crashes and also the inevitable dull bits about boring out cylinders and valve timing for the hardcore. In fact the book delivers both those things, but it also shows Guy in a much less lovable light than I was expecting. By the end I felt I was looking at a man who had just done whatever he felt like at every turn and was then left wondering why everyone was so pissed off at him.

And there are the various daft things he does which just you leave you shouting at him. Like the way that the man who is happy to try to drive round the Isle of Man at over 200 mph seems to end up cheating on his girlfriend cos he can't quite get together the guts to break up with her first. Or the way that when his Dad (who is every bit as uncommunicative as Guy himself) confiscates the works van after a series of driving offenses, Guy says something along the lines of, "I figured it was his way of telling me I was sacked from the family business," and I think, "Why didn't you just ring him up and ask him, you big eejit?". And then there was the incident where Guy bypassed the TT podium and went to the tea van instead, which I had wrongly attributed to his being an unassuming lad who liked his tea. Turns out he was having a big prima donna strop.

Despite all this, I still admire Guy (well, can I ride a motorbike at 200mph? Can I bugger. I'm on the breaks of my pushbike just going down the hill from my house to the main road) but I've stopped slightly fancying him.

Here's hoping he finally gets that TT win...

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford

I sort of love the Mitfords. If ever you catch yourself believing that your own family are the craziest, most dysfunctional bunch ever to escape out of an ITV sit-com and into reality, you can look at the Mitfords and reflect that your lot are nowhere near. Are any of your sisters Communists or Fascists? Have any of them actually been imprisioned for being a danger to their country? Have they had a crush on Hitler? Or eschewed the company of humans in favour of chickens? Do your parents believe that educating girls will give them fat ankles and leave them unmarriageable?

In case anyone ever reads this and they are not familiar with the British aristocracy in the inter war period, I have prepared a brief rundown of the Mitfords. (I was going to make Mitford Top Trumps but I ran out time, patience and artistic ability.)

Know Your Mitfords

Muv: a.k.a Lady Redesdale. Posh tweedy lady who won't let her daughters mingle with the garstly bourgeoisie. In her book this is pretty much everyone so Mitfords don't get out much.

Farv: Appears in Nancy's novels as "Mad Uncle Matthew" who is always shouting, "You filthy sewer!" at effete young men and threatening to have them horsewhipped. Likes hunting. Dislikes everything else.

Nancy: The novelist. Wrote Love in a Cold Climate  and The Pursuit of Love.

Diana: Fascist. Marries Oswold Mosley of the British Union of Fascits and spends WW2 interred. Completely Barking.

Pam: A boring one.

Tom: a.k.a Tudemmy. The Boy. Less loopy than the girls. Possibly because he was allowed to go to school and meet people outside his own family.

Unity: a.k.a. Baud. Fascist. Has a crush on Hitler. Spends her time in Germany hanging out with top Nazis. Tries to kill herself by shooting herself in the head when rejected by the Fuhrer. Gives herself a horrific brain injury instead and lingers on for ages.

Jessica: a.k.a. Decca. Communist. Runs away to join The International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.

Deborah: a.k.a Debo. Mocked by her older sisters for being a bit thick because all she wanted to do was marry a Duke and raise chickens but compared to being a Communist or a Fascist, that actually looks pretty sensible.

So This book is the autobiography of The Communist One. Jessica is also one of the youngest and while Nancy is being a Bright Young Thing and Diana is bringing shame on the family by divorcing*, Decca and Boud are stomping about the schoolroom being rather ineffectually home schooled by their mother and giving each other Chinese burns. For my money, the most normal thing in Decca's childhood is the weird games she plays with her siblings. In fact I think that Hure, Hare, Hure, Commencement (of unbearable pain) sounds like exactly the kind of game that my sister and I could really have got into.

The two sisters grow up without any other companions or anything to occupy themselves save reading and winding each other up. Jessica reads the pacifist literature spawned by the first world war and through that finds out about Socialism, Unity becomes a fully paid up member of the British Union of Fascists and Jessica moves further left into Communism, apparently to annoy her sister as much as anything else. Was this a time of extreme political views when all of politics was a lunatic fringe of some kind? Or is it just these girls in their insular, overheated world who have gone a bit odd in the reasoning department?

Long years seem to be spent grumpily hanging around the family home waiting for life to start. Jessica looks forward to "coming out"** as a signifier of adulthood but rightly predicts she won't meet any like minded young men in her season of balls. In this period of solitary moodiness she starts reading about the exploits of a distant relation in the press. Esmond Romilly has bought shame on his family by refusing to join the OTC, claiming to be a pacifist, escaping from Wellington public school and founding a Communist Bookshop. He sounds like just the sort of chap Jessica would like to meet, but unfortunately, he goes to fight the fascists in Spain*** and the mooning continues.

Then one day she finds out he's back in England and secures a weekend invitation to the same country house where he is convalescing. The pair seem to hit it off straight away and Esmond readily agrees to help her run away to the war in Spain.

I'm afraid I can't really take to Esmond Romilly. If he were from any other background, he'd be described as a wastrel and good-for-nothing. I think its his gambling addiction, plus the fact that he clearly fancies himself as a scammer and con artist (stealing from friends and family is apparently OK when you're a Communist). Despite this he falls for scam after scam himself, repeated losing all the money Jessica has earned on card games and bent horse races. Fortunately, being a Communist, she doesn't really mind about the money.  In fact Jessica doesn't mind about any damn fool thing that Esmond does, he is a genius in her eyes and everything they do together is just one big romantic adventure. 

Together they go to Spain, fail to report on the war, get married, come back to London and hang out with other Communists, have a baby girl who dies of measles (I got very upset for them at this point. Man, I'm glad to live in the century that I do!) and go travelling across America while they wait for the war to break out.

According to Jessica, by 1938 it was obvious that war was coming but not at all obvious whose side Britain would be on. This is a million miles from the plucky-Britain-standing-alone-against-Hitler line that we have all been spun. While I'm not at all sure of Jessica as a reliable narrator of historical facts, I still recall a number of high-profile Brits (including the King) who were favourably impressed by the Nazis. 

The book ends with the outbreak of war and Esmond joining the Canadian RAF. I looked him up and he died soon after at only 23. He never had the chance to mend his ways and stop being an idiot. I guess if I was assessed on only the first 23 years of life, I'd look a bit bloody clueless too. Jessica goes on to live to a ripe old age, but that's in other books.

Overall I enjoyed the growing up with the crazy Mitfords parts of the book but found the Romily years hard going. Jessica writes well enough that I'd look for her collected letters to her sisters, but I'm not sure I can handle any more memoir. She's at her best pointing out the ridiculous behaviour of her family and herself. When it comes to everything else she seems very sure of her opinions but totally unable to marshal anything resembling an argument in support of them. Or perhaps she assumes that her readers want celebrity gossip more than they want politics or history but I could have coped with more Communist ideology and less guff about lovely people we met in the Hamptons. That's probably just me.

*Yes, I'm afraid that for the British Aristocracy in this period divorce was WAY more embarrassing than being a fascist. 

**As a debutant, not an LGBT.

***No, I don't know how you segue from pacifism to joining in foreign wars either.

Yes Man by Danny Wallace

In the run-up to Christmas this year, I had a big work deadline causing me stress. This was all I could think about until after it had passed. Afterwards I looked around and tried to organise myself a pre-Christmas night out. Unfortunately, everybody I tried had been booked weeks ago and I was forced to continue my run of staying in.

To make matters slightly worse, I asked my husband to recommend a funny book to cheer me up and he suggested  Yes Man by Danny Wallace.

The gist of the thing is that Danny has also got into a rut of not going out which he decides to break by saying "yes" to things he would normally say no to. But he has friends who ring him up and ask him. He doesn't have to play phone tag with people for days just to remind them he exists. His friends just ring up and all he has to do is say yes. The lucky c*nt.

Anyway, before long Danny is allegedly affirming his way to the good life, saying yes at work to a TV presenting job in which he tries to wind up a Buddhist monk by poking him.

But it isn't all plain sailing. There is the time he agrees to come along with his ex and her new boyfriend on a date, donating money to any charity which asks him, spending a lot of money on travel because an advert happened to be phrased as a question and meeting up for polite conversation with a stockbroker obsessed with Sarah Brightman.

There is also the ever-so-neat plot about the girl he loves who has returned to Australia. Will Danny's resolution to say yes to everything make him brave enough to move out after her and give it a go? (Clue: of course it bloody will). Call me cynical, but things like this make me doubt that half the events described ever actually took place (think for a moment about how boring, episodic and unstructured an account of anyone's real life would be). So bearing in mind that we've agreed between us that Mr Wallace needn't be strictly truthful, that we'll allow him some license in order to better entertain us, why isn't the ****ing thing funnier?

I suppose the book worked for me in that I moved from feeling properly sorry for myself to just being a run-of-the-mill grumpy old git.

A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson

Everyone likes bumble bees, don't  they? They are so plump and furry and vibratey like tiny flying cats with too many legs... So I have been reading this amusing book about them by the founder of the bumble bee trust.

I enjoyed the section on Dave's childhood attempts to help bees which frequently ended disasterously. Such as the time he finds some soggy ones struggling along after heavy rain, decides to dry them out on the kitchen hot plate and accidently grills them.

Much of the book deals with the challenges faced by bumble bees. These basically boil down to manmade problems caused by modern agriculture (loss of hedgerows and flower meadows) and the shortcomings of the bees that make them particularly vulnerable. Only the queen bees can hibernate to survive the winter... so a whole hive of bees has to find enough flowers throughout the spring and summer to make a few queens. Then the queens are unfortunately a bit rubbish at finding holes to hibernate in. They can get damp and go mouldy, or drown in wet winters or fall prey to a variety of fascinatingly disgusting parasites.

One useful but rather disappointing piece of information to come out of this book is that bees don't seem to particularly like the little encourage-the-bees houses for them that you can buy in garden centres. This is a shame as I'd like to provide bees with some quality accommodation, but at least it has saved me some money. Apparently the best we can do is to hope that bees decide to come and live in out walls or under our sheds.

Much of the day-to-day business of scientific bumble bee research turns out to be coming up with good ideas and then watching them fail. For example at one point Dave and his phd students reason that if dogs can be trained to sniff out drugs or explosives it should be possible to train them to find bumble bee nests. And so a couple of bumble bee sniffer dogs are expensively trained and paired with handlers. Although the dogs are able to demonstrate their skill in tests, when they actualy get out into the countryside they prove to be rather less good at finding bumble bee nests than their handlers. Effectively the sniffer dogs function as affable companions to human bee finders.

It would have been nice to have had a bumble bee identification chart so I knew which bee he was on about at any given time, but I guess you can look them up on the bumblebee trust website. And besides, Dave himself admits that some species can only really be told apart by cutting their toes off and sending them for DNA analysis.

The first and last chapters of the book deal with Dave's involvement in a project to reintroduce the short-haired bumble bee which has become extinct in Britain. I got quite excited a while ago when I spotted a story on the BBC, saying that these bees had been "successfully reintroduced". Unfortunately when I looked more closely this turned out to mean "haven't all died yet" rather than that a self-sustaining population had been estblished. Hang in there short haired bumble bees! And try not to go mouldy over winter...

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Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

I think it might have been Dr Johnson* who said that if you want to understand what nobody else does, you should read what everyone else is reading one year later. If, on the other hand you aspire to total cultural irrelevance, you should wait as long as I have waited to read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

In case you have forgotten in the intervening years, the book is set in a sort of alternative version of Regency England where magic has existed at one point, but the art has subsequently been lost. It is about two rival magicians who reinvent it: the dry-as-dust Mr Norrell and his sometime pupil the charming, cavalier Jonathan Strange.

So, about a decade ago my bookish friends either thought that this was the book the printing press was made for or over-long, over-hyped and impossible to finish. I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Yes, it is very, very long. And most of the story seems to happen in the final 25% of the pages. But it's the kind of book you can loose yourself in.

And it's set in the Regency. In the time of Jane Austen and of Blackadder II. A time of fops and dandies and highwaymen! The Romantics! The Enlightenment! The era of Georgette Heyer's bodice rippers! I don't like to think of myself as a dreamy romantic but I think I have a bit of a thing for the Regency...

I like the way faeries are presented in the book; pitiless, inhuman creatures with powerful magic, driven by pride and vanity. Another aspect I enjoyed is the way that the Raven King, John Uskglass lurks in the backstory throughout the novel. A medieaval magician who ruled northern England then vanished abruptly leaving behind legends of his return. By the end we see that he has been manipulating the entire cast of the book in aid of political machinations in Faerie.

I think what I really liked about Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is the fact that underneath it all the story is actually a bromance. The two main characters have a natural antipathy but eventually learn mutual appreciation. The world comes between them in the form of the Napoleonic wars, Strange's wife, malevolent faeries and Norrell's sychophantic hangers-on. In spite of all this, by the end of the book they are "chained together like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis"** but kind of loving it.



*One of very few historical characters from the Regency period not to feature in this novel.
**Thankyou, Mr Rimmer.

Just Put the Fracking Cheese Back and Nobody Gets Hurt

This week I have mostly been reading Who Moved My Cheese a self-help guide which is apparently An Amazing Way To Deal With Change In Your Life.

The book takes the form of a little parable about the inhabitants of a maze who live on the cheese they find in it. There are two mice, Sniff and Scurry who live by their simple mouse instincts, sniffing out new cheese and scurrying into action. Then there are two miniature humans who are encumbered by human thought patterns, expecting their cheese to go on forever and scared to venture out into the maze when their cheese supply runs out. One of the little people learns to laugh at himself for hanging around waiting for the cheese to come back and plucks up courage to venture back into the maze and start searching. Eventually he finds all manner of great new cheeses of types never encountered before.

It sounds patronising, but at it's not as bad as Paulo Coelho and at least it's short. The most appallingly-written part is the wraparound story about a bunch of people listening to the cheese parable and using it to deal with the changes going on in their lives but I guess no one reads self-help books for fully-realised characters.

On his way through the maze our tiny hero chalks up useful advice for anyone following him on the walls. My favourite was, "It is safer to search in the maze than remain in a cheeseless situation.". Very true. In contrast the least useful was,"What would you do if you weren't afraid?". Every time I try to answer that honestly I come up with something violent or unethical or just plain destructive. Basically, you should all thank your lucky stars that I am afraid.

Anyway, the advice is all very well but what about other people? None of the tiny people has tiny children looking up at them begging for cheese, or whining that the quest for new cheese has meant moving away from their friends. There are no spouses who carry on consuming cheese when there isn't any on cheesy credit cards (which are probably made of crackers). No one is an island and realising what you need to do does not necessarily make you free to do it. I have a horrible feeling that what you're meant to do is wheel out the cheese story and tell it to your family, employees or whatever. And I don't think that's going to wash this side of the atlantic. Not unless they're very easily led indeed.

In many ways the most interesting aspect of the is as an example at pacing and leading. These are rhetorical devices commonly used by hypnotists, politicians and other species of charlatan whereby you start with a statement everyone can agree with and slowly, step by step lead people by the nose into deeper, darker waters. One day I will use these techniques to write a self-help book of my own which will leave my victims, sorry, readers with a warm glow of empowerment and the overwelming urge to send me all their money. 

Youth-Speak

It seems like only yesterday I was enjoying youthful slang the older generation couldn't comprehend: phoning my 'rents, drinking pints of 'ken in student bars. Omg I used a lot of TLAs and had a rising intonation? Now I am on the outside and I have no idea whether the kids are alright because I don't understand a word:

A student I trained with at kung fu asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I was a software developer he said, "Aw, man, savage!". I don't even know whether that's good or bad!

Squealed by a youngster working in our sales dept, "Oooo, cool beans!". Makes me think of cold baked beans. Ugh...

From a conversation I overheard between two girls dressed like something out of Desperately Seeking Susan, "So, he's like, 'What's her complexion like?' And I'm like, 'Mmmm 'spretty vaz.'". WTF? Did I even hear that right?

Vampires vs Werewolves vs Bookclub of One

Don’t panic! Brain death resulting in reading “Twilight” books hasn’t set in. That, I think, is one of the compensations of encroaching middle age: I have now been round the block enough times to know that the Twilight series will be cock-awful without having to read the sodding things. So what nonsense have I been reading?

“The Fallen Blade” by Jon Courtenay-Grimwood. I don’t recommend it. I really enjoyed JCG’s Ashraf Bey books (Pachazade, Effendi and Fellaheen) and I would urge both my readers to go out and buy them. Don’t part with money for Fallen Blade as it will only encourage the author to turn out more of this lazy crap – particularly upsetting since he’s capable of better. Why is this book so dire? Let’s take a look...

Firstly, it seems to be composed of a selection of rather tired memes (or “cliches” as we called them in my day): Vampires fighting werewolves and vampire assassins.  I quite like the fact that the novel is set in a sort of renaissance Venice and I quite like the way that Othello and Desdemona have been borrowed into it, but sadly I don’t like either facet enough to undo the vampire-assassins-fighting-werewolves rubbishness.

Secondly, The Fallen Blade has an amazingly rubbish heroine. Gulietta’s job, as far as I can make out is simply to be fought over by werewolves, vampires and various human political factions. JCG keeps telling us she is, “every inch a Millioni Princess” but she is just helpless flotsam washed about the place by the actions of other people. Conversely Desdaio (the Desdemona character) is described as soft and privileged, but puts her wealth and good looks to use doing whatever she thinks is right. She’s a bit of an innocent abroad (particularly in the scenes where she’s negotiating with Atilo in the belief that the worst that will result is a slap while he considers having her murdered) but ultimately a much more sympathetic character than the useless, standy-there Gulietta.

I think you can probably guess that the characters I found most interesting in this book were the ones borrowed from Shakespeare. Atilo is a Moorish pirate forced to serve Venice who has risen to become the Duke’s chief assassin. Desdaio is the wealthiest heiress in the city who, to the disgust of nearly everyone else has chosen Atilo for a husband. Already there are cracks and jealousies appearing in their relationship.  I’d have liked to have seen more of their tragedy played out – I guess that is saved for the next books (this one is, as always, the first in a trilogy) but I won’t be reading them as life’s too short!

More easy reads for the middle of the night

High Lord by Trudi Canavan

I have reached the end of the Black Magician trilogy! Finally I have closure and Trudgy Caravan and I can go our separate ways! In this final instalment it turns out (rather disappointingly) that the High Lord is not in fact evil. He has been practising black magic but only because it was necessary to protect the kingdom from a bunch of evil, foreign magicians. Sonea choses to help him, but they are caught practising black magic and drummed out of the guild leaving the country undefended with evil magicians marching towards it...

Tithe by Holly Black

Now this was good fun! 16 year old Kaye Fierch was able to see fairies as a little girl. When her mother's latest relationship breaks down they move back to the town she grew up in. The fairies are still there but now they seem to be involved in very adult machinations...

Escardy Gap - Peter Crowther and James Lovegrove

Basically this book is Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury rewritten in the style of Stephen King with added postmodern wankery of an author trying to write a horor novel as the wraparound story. The sad thing is that I read it from cover to cover, more fool me! Going to try to ebay it to buy stuff for Tiny Daughter...

The Eclipse of the Century by Jan Mark

When 20 year old student Keith Chapman is involved in a car crash he has a near death experience, but rather than seeing a vision of heaven and speaking to his dead relatives he sees a town square and hears a woman's voice telling him that they will meet again in Qantoum, under a black sun at the end of a thousand years. Keith does some research and discovers that Qantoum is a real place; a town which sprang up round an oasis on the silk road it has been conquered by Alexander the Great,the mongols and Russia but with the collapse of the Soviet Union it is now in a disputed territory on the boader of Tajikistan. He determins to visit to see whether it is anything like his vision. Years of fighting have left Qantoum a wreck without power and miles from any kind of authority. It has two distinct populations: the Sturyat, descendants of a tribe of nomads who settled there a thousand years ago and a motley collection of westerners living in and around the town museum. Feeling very pleased with his own political correctness, Keith moves in with the natives, but are they Sturyat as peaceful as they first appear? Why is everyone who crosses them "taken by the sand" and is there any truth to their bizzare assertion that their race comes from space and will be heading back there soon?

I really enjoyed this book; once again there was an upside to being hauled out of my lovely bed! My favourite character was the phlegmatic Russian Lt Kije. I can still see the image of him that built up in my head, sardonic, unshaven and with a filthy Russian cigarette on the go (the text never really describes him, this is just how I think he ought to look).

The Code Book by Simon Singh

Hurray! I think my brain is finally beginning to recover!

I've had this book on my shelf for years, but while I was going to work programming everyday it just looked like more work. Maternity leave was the right time to read it. Either my brain is starting to work properly again or Singh writes with enough clarity to penetrate the mum-fog. Probably a bit of both.

The code book is a history of cryptography from the Ceasar cypher (good enough for 1000 years then broken by Arab scholars) through to quantum cryptography. The Caesar cipher was followed by polyalphabetic ciphers (in the case of the one time pad the key is as long as msg therefore unbreakable but logistical problems distributing keys mean this method must be used sparingly). We then come to the mechanisation of encoding and the Enigma machine. The section on the breaking of the Enigma cipher was especially interesting as I had never realised the contribution made by the Polish secret service as well as the more familiar story of Bletchly Park. In many cases it was human weaknesses that made the messages decodeable ( for example, the choice of 3 letter day codes was left to the individual operators who would sometimes get lazy and use their own initials, or letters which were next to one another on the Enigma machine keyboard). Another trick was to realise that a certain message at 6am was always a weather report, so you could expect the word "wetter" near the beginning. We then move on to RSA and PGP. For the future we have the possibility of quantum cryptography. There are also interesting asides on the translation of the Rosetta Stone and linear b.

Great stuff. I feel enthused to have a go at the cyphers in the back. Then I'm going to decode the Voynich manuscript, solve the travelling salesman problem and sort out 3 body physics before the end of maternity leave...

 

Silly books to read in the middle of the night...

Cart and Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones

This is eminently suitable to read at 3am as the story is so good it's almost a pleasure to haul your sorry ass out of bed. Moril is one of a family of travelling musicians touring Dalemark. His father is killed and his mother takes up again with an old flame, leaving him with a moony older brother, a bolshy sister, a posh teenage refugee and a magic cwidder. Fortunately they have a very sensible horse...

This is the first of the 4 Dalemark books so there are still 3 more to go, hurrah!

Eagle Strike by Anthony Horowitz

One of a series of books about teenage spy Alex Rider. Amazingly, this is really too lightweight for even the most sleep-deprived of mothers. There's just so little too it. By the time you've done 2 night time feeds it's all gone!

Sabriel by Garth Nix

This is more like it! Sabriel's dad is Abhorsen; a kind of nice necromancer who makes sure the dead rest in peace. When Sabriel is 18 and just about to leave her posh girls' school an apparition brings her father's sword and bells. This is a bad sign and means her father has somehow got stuck in Death and Sabriel sets out to rescue him. Can she get the guy, kill the baddies and save the entire planet? I think she probably can ;-)

My only problem with this book is that the evil necromancer is called Kerrigor which I'm sure is a sort of Irish butter...

Viriconium by M John Harrison

This is not the best thing to try to read at 3am while feeding a baby! It is full of long words, rather overwrought descriptions and sections where nothing much seems to happen, making it hard going for the sleep deprived.

Viriconium is the patchwork city at the end of the world. A crumbling ruin left by a long vanished civilisation. Death, decay and dissolutiom are everywhere. If you like Gormenghast or The Book of the New Sun but find them a bit too cheerful, this is for you!

The book I have (from the Fantasy Masterworks series) is a collection of novels and short stories. My favourites are The Pastel City (which deals with a civil war - The War of The Two Queens - in which one side finds and reanimates hideous brain-stealing golems left behind by some previous civilisation) and The Shadow of Wings in which the world is invaded by giant locusts from outer space. Strangely, this seems a lot less stupid when you're actually reading it. Both these novels feature my favourite character, Tomb the Iron Dwarf. In a novel where every character spends a good deal of their time making epigrams on the nature of being, Tomb who says, "I'm a dwarf, not a philosopher." And hits things with his axe is a welcome relief.

If my review makes this book sound like standard, cliched fantasy of the Trudy Canavan style, that is a failing on my part. In fact I suspect that most of the problems I have with it are because it's just too bloody clever for me.

One of the things that confuses me are the inconsistencies between the different stories. For example in The Shadow of wings, the fortune teller Fat Mam Etieller is killed near the end. The she reappears in In Viriconium despite the fact that (I think!) this is set later. It is very hard to work out a timeline and pin down the order of events. Is this an intentional trick? Or were the stories never intended to be read together?

Another example is that both The Pastel City and Cromis and Lamia feature the warrior-poet teugus-Cromis. But the character seems totally different. The cromis who hunts the Lamia is a much more unpleasant person. Is this just a less developed version of the character for a short story who later changes?

The city of Viriconium itself appears inconsistent to me. At times it seems to be 19th century Paris, at others it is mediaeval, at others it is like a city state in rennaisance Italy. I can't work out how much is intentional, nor can I discount the possiblity that it all fits together, but I'm too tired and stupid to realise how at the moment. I think it would help me to know the order in which these stories were writen, and where they fit on a timeline of Viriconium.

I am going to reserve judgement on M John Harrison; there is another of his books, "Light" on my shelf and I will give that a go when baby is a bit older and my brain might have recovered!

Read and Return

Bollocks, the cocking Read and Return bookshop has closed! And I had £11 of credit with them... Arses!

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Many years ago, after reading Order of the Phoenix, I swore that I was not going to give J. K. Rowling any more of my money until she learned to read over her work and delete the duff bits. Now with my brain fried by hormones and lack of sleep I was so desperate for an easy read that I went back to the Harry Potter* series.

Maybe motherhood has eroded my critical faculties, but the Half-Blood Prince feels like a return to Rowling's earlier form. For a start it is much shorter and tighter than than the previous 2 installments. And I enjoyed a new comic character, Professor Slughorn who is a bit of a slimey networker. And the whole thing is easy enough to read at 3am while feeding a baby.

The ministry of magic has finally got the message that Lord Voldemort is back and prominent wizards who opposed him are being found murdered. Meanwhile, Harry has been given a second hand potions text book full of annotations by the mysterious "half-blood Prince" which make his potions the best in the class...

Unfortunately, I now feel the need to read Deathly Hallows and I have a bad feeling about that one. The fact that it had to be made into 2 films rather than 1 makes me think it might be another unedited abortion. Ah, well. I'll have to read it and find out... 

*At the height of Harry Potter mania my sister made a game of inventing new Harry Potter titles. She was best at the game coming up with gems like "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce" and "Harry Potter and the Centre of Gravity".

Mumming down

Well, my pregnancy ended on the 16th Feb and I am now the slightly shell-shocked co-owner of a tiny daughter.

I read the following books whilst pregnant but didn't manage to finish blog entries for them:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahunik

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Robin Ince's Bad Book Club

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Havoc in its Third Year by Ronan Bennet

Day Watch by Sergei Lukyaneko

Perhaps I will get round to finishing some of these. Maybe when daughter is 18.

Anyway, what with the horrific lack of sleep it was 4 weeks after the birth before I could concentrate enough to read anything at all and I can only manage very easy books. That's right, I'm back on the Trudi Canavan, or Trudgy Caravan as my friend Jules calls her.

I've just finished "The Novice", the sequel to Magicians' Guild. In this book Sonea (the street urchin with magical powers) starts her training in magic. Unfortunately, the other novices don't want to share lessons with a guttersnipe and Sonea becomes the victim of endless magical bullying. When it becomes clear how strong a magician Sonea is, her training is taken over by the sinister High Lord which causes as many problems as it solves.

My main criticism is that Sonea's cheif tormentor amoung the novices, Regin, is not a fully realised character and just seems to be malice on legs. Despite this I can't wait to read the final book and find out what the High Lord of the magicians' guild is up to! 

RIP DWJ

This week has seen the demise of one of my favourite children's authors, Diana Wynne Jones and the world is a slightly crappier place as a result.

The People's Manifesto by Mark Thomas

In 2009, Mark Thomas toured Britain with a stand up show where he asked the audience to suggest some policies they would like to see put into practise. At the end of the show each audience voted for their favourite policiy and all the favourites have been collected together to form this book: the demands of the people of Great Britain (or at least those of them who agree enough with Mark's left wing politics to make them feel it was worth going to see him). Anyway, it's considerably more democratic than anything offered by any major political party.

The lovely thing about these policies is how they range from the serious (renationalising the railways, requiring a referendum to go to war and introducing a "none of the above" box on ballot papers), to the trivial (everyone should be allowed the day off work on their birthday, Windsor to be renamed "Lower Slough" and overtaking lanes for pedestrians). Many of the the policies reflect a desire for fairness, or sometimes just a love of poetic justice, for example, people who support ID cards would not be allowed any curtains, those guilty of homophobic hate crime would have to serve their sentence in drag and and anyone who lets their dog shit in the street would have to wear it as a moustache.

Overall my favourite policy is that politicians should have to wear overalls like formula 1 drivers, covered with the logos of all the companies who pay them.

Magicians' Guild by Trudi Canavan

Just look at that correctly placed apostrophe! Surely we are in the hands of a master here? At least compared to reading "Shadowmancer"...

I've now graduated from children's books to blandly generic fantasy for young adults. Magicians' Guild takes place in a standard-issue Fantasyland city complete with guilds for magicians, theives and probably assassins. In this irony-free Ankh-Morpork lives Sonea, a streetwise teen from the slums who discovers she has magical powers. The titular (f'nar, f'nar! Titular!) guild of magicians must then track her down and persuade her to join them before she accidentally destroys the whole city.

The charm of Magicians' Guild is that despite being a long way from either imaginative or literature, it is never so badly-written that is gives you "the bump" and startles you awake wondering why you've been spending your time on such rubbish. Like all the best "dragon crack" it is very easy to start and very hard to stop. It also follows fantasy conventions exactly by being part of a trilogy. Bugger. Now I need two more books in order to find out whether the snooty magicians will ever really accept a commoner. And what about the Lord High Chief Magician bloke who is a thoroughly Bad Egg? I can see a trip to the Read and Return* bookshop in my future!

Let's hope I hurry up and have this baby before I end up regressing all the way back to Eddings and Gemmel.

*To my alarm, Exeter's read and return has a prodigious collection of erotica. While I am happy to purchase pre-loved books along the lines of "The House Plants of Gor" and "The Stainless Steel Rat Picks his Nose", I'm a bit chairy of second-hand porn!

Shadowmancer by G. P. Taylor

Pregnancy has bought with it a reduction in brain power* and I have been reaching for the easy books. What could be easier than a kids' book? Plus it will be great practice for reading The Little Mole Who Knew it Was None of His Business over and over again. Alas, once you are an adult, reading all but the most well-written of children's books is actually quite a chore.

Shadowmancer is a fantasy novel of the epic-battle-between-good-and-evil school. In the style of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe it even has a guest appearance from Jesus. Set in North East England in some sort of generic "olden days" (I think it is round about the 18th century as we have smugglers and long-haired men) the local vicar is a sorcerer set on taking over the world using the power of the Keruvim (a sort of golden angel statue thingy. A mcguffin, it's basically a mcguffin.). Only two local kids, Kate and Thomas, and the incredibly holy African boy Raphah stand in his way. Will they be horribly killed, or will Jesus help them out at the last minute? This is fiction, so Jesus comes through, just like he doesn't in real life. I think I read somewhere that the author of this book is a vicar, but I can't altogether trust my own brain at present, so perhaps that isn't true.

I can't say that I really enjoyed reading Shadowmancer all that much. The good characters are good through and through whilst the bad characters are utterly bad. I feel this gives the book an overly simple and unrealistic feel - but I suppose that's what you get if you insist on reading children's fiction when you're in your mid 30s. The only real character in the whole thing is the smuggler Jacob Crane who is ruthless in his pursuit of wealth but fundamentally unwilling to see a satanic priest rule the Earth. Sadly, by the end of the book, he has seen the error of his ways and become comepletely nice. Pass the sickbag!

*If you are of the female persuasion and plan to one day bear children, feel free to imagine that this will not happen to you. I know I did.

The Bull From the Sea by Mary Renault

I had a preconceived notion that all of Renault's work is replete with ancient Greek buggery. I was therefore a bit disappointed by this book. It picks up the myth of Theseus at the point where he arrives home having failed to change his sails. So pretty much after all the interesting bits of the story. Theseus seems to have been annoyingly hetrosexual. Of his ladies, my favourite by far is the amazon queen Hypolita who is much less decorative and more of an equal than his silly Minoan wife Phedra. Unfortunately, Hypolita dies bravely in battle and I really lost interest in the novel from that point.

Renault fans have let me know that the best book for buggery is "Fire From Heaven" about the early life of Alexander the Great so I pass the advice on to you.