Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

I caught sight of this book on my shelf the other day and I thought, “It's about time I read that, it must be nearly a year since AB lent it to me”. Then I thought about it some more and realised it must be closer to 3 years. Sorry!

For anyone not familiar with Neil Gaiman, he is probably best know for the Sandman Graphic novels, but has also written novels, short stories, the TV series “Neverwhere” and the film “Mirrormask”. His work is strange, funny and can be even scarier than Richard Madely. I love his prose, but I apply The Tolkein Rules which mean I don't have to read the poetry.

On the whole, I thought this was a stronger collection than “Smoke and Mirrors”. My favourite story was “October in the Chair” because it is written in the style of Ray Bradbury whose work I also love. The story that gave me nightmares was “Feeders and Eaters”, so I suppose that makes it something of a favourite too. For anyone who enjoyed “American Gods”, there's a short story about Shadow at the end.

New rule: You are allowed to fancy Neil Gaiman even if you're married because... well... he's Neil Gaiman

Singling Out the Couples by Stella Duffy

I acquired this book in an online trade set up at Bookcrossing. Despite the ominous sign that its previous owner had precious little to say about it, I was interested as I had read and enjoyed “Beneath the Blonde”, a lesbian detective novel by the same author.

The blurb says that a princess, perfect in every way except one, sets up home in Notting Hill and begins targeting smug, ever-so-in-love couples, deliberately splitting them apart. It’s a peculiar book: half of it is extremely well observed psychological stuff about the fragility of the couples’ relationships, the lies they tell themselves and each other. The other half of it is everything that is crap and embarrassing about magical realism, for example Princess Cushla literally has no heart.

For me, this book fell between two stools and would have been far, far better with the fairytale elements removed. I think Stella is trying to be Angela Carter and that’s not a good thing. I don’t like Angela Carter either.

The Carter-esque characteristics seem to draw attention to the wrong elements of the writing, if you know what I mean... It’s as if Stella is stood on a chair shouting, “Everyone be quiet and look at me because I’m going to do some symbolism now!”.

Get back to your crime fiction, Duffy!

Dissolution by C. J. Sansom

Dissolution is the first of a series of detective novels by Sansom set during the reign of Henry VIII. The title refers to the famous "Dissolution of the Monasteries", which we all had to cover in school, but is also a bit of a pun, refering to decay and moral turpitude.

The lawyer Mathew Shardlake is dispatched by Thomas Cromwell to Scarnsea Abbey where the King's representive, sent to pressure the Abbey into agreeing to disolve itself, has been murdered. Mathew and his assistent Mark (a comely lad with fancy doublets and a fashionable codpiece) must investigate the crime in a cold, sinister set of buildings inhabited by spooky monks, one of whom is a murder. If this sounds a little familiar, I spotted a nod to The Name of the Rose: the monks' library holds a copy of Aristotle's "On Comedy" but they believe it to be a 13th century fake.

As Shardlake investigates further, not only does he uncover 3 more murders and cess-pit of hidden sin amongst the monks, but he comes to see that the fine motives he has ascribed to the leaders of the English reformation (a readable bible and an end to corruption in the church) are largely absent. While he believed that the wealth of the church could be redistributed to the poor, the Dissolution is revealed to be nothing but a land-grab by the King's friends. By the end of the book his disillusionment is complete as he has found out that his patron, Cromwell has tortured confessions out of innocent men and perjured himself to get rid of Anne Boleyn. Mathew Shardlake needs a new job, but it is not clear how he will be able to resign and keep is skin... I need the next book to find out!

Of interest to me in this book was an alternative piece of weather symbolism. In many, many, many books, the weather is hot at the start and as the tension builds it gets hotter and more sultry, then there will be a huge storm at the climax of the story. I have become so bored with this pattern that one night, after wine, I ranted to a friend that I would eat the next book I found it in! In dissolution, the weather is still telling us what's happening in the story, but in a refreshing way. When Mathew and Mark arrive at the Abbey they are immediately trapped there by snow. As the mystery unfolds, it does so with a cold, clean, pure white backdrop. Once Mathew finds out about Cromwell, the thaw sets in. As his comfortable world of righteous Reformers and corrupt Catholics is torn down, England becomes one huge quagmire... and I don't have to eat the book.

What is Good? - A. C. Grayling

I had heard A.C. Grayling on Radio 4 and he conformed to my ideas of what a philosopher ought to be. You can keep your sexy pseuds like Alain de Bottom and Julian Panini; philosophers should be querulous old men like Grayling. I like to imagine that he lives in an Oxford College where he enjoys drinking sherry and looking wistfully at pretty undergraduate boys. For all I know he is a heterosexual at a red-brick university, but I have to admit I’d find that disappointing...

I do not know very much about philosophy (for years I thought that Jeremy Bentham was that bloke who played Sherlock Holmes in the ITV series) but I do like a good think. 32 years of thinking have yielded the following results: I really don’t see why there should be a god. For a while I was worried that I had now had no basis for ethics, but was just making up stuff as I went along. Then it occurred to me that unless you are a moron fundamentalist, if you follow a religion, you still have to decide which bits of it you are going to practice and how you will resolve its contradictions, so there isn’t really much difference for atheists. Everyone who isn’t actually a complete mental is having to make it up as they go along.

Professor Grayling has been thinking much longer than me and come to a rather more extreme conclusion that religion is not just unnecessary to moral and ethical thinking, but actually inimical. The whole book is presented in terms of two steps forward in the form of advances in thought made by secular scholars, followed by one step back of religious backlash. Grayling sees religion as a force for evil in the world, which has been temporarily compelled to pretend to be nice by its unpopularity and shrinking power base in the developed world. And it’s hard to argue with him once he gets going in on this theme, with religious wars and inquisitions to back him up. However, there is still the occasional inflammatory statement left in the text with no surrounding evidence. E.g. “Islam is by nature fundamentalist”. WTF? Maybe this correct (how would I know, I know buggerall about Islam but what I see on telly), but I don’t think you can damn a whole religion without supplying a line of argument and some facts to back it up. Especially if the thrust of your whole book is that reason is better than dogma.

For reasons beyond my feeble intellect, the book deals only with Western philosophies. Why? The title is “What is Good?” not “What Have Various Europeans Believed Through History?”. For example, all I know about Confucianism is that it was a Chinese ethical system with no god. I would have liked to know more, and I'd have thought a book by an atheist philosopher might have told me.

Obviously, the book doesn’t actually tell you how to live (distrust anyone who does!) but if, like me, you think Kierkegaard is probably an Ikea shelving unit, it will give you a starting point. Now that I have read Philosophy 101, I've decided to become a Stoic, like Marcus Aurelius. (Anyone who has seen me coding will know I have a long way to go.) My favourite aspect of Stoicism, is the bit where you get to be Emperor and swan about in a long cloack while having Russel Crowe unleash hell on your behalf.