Darkmans by Nicola Barker

Why, WHY did I buy this rubbish? This is a fine exemplar of everything I don't like about modern literary fiction. There are no likeable characters. The reader is allowed to see into everybody's head and the inside of each character's head looks exactly the same. When I finally reached the denuement I was mildly surprised that Nicola would ever think anyone would be interested.

I had stupidly hoped the book would be some sort of supernamtural thriller with maybe some literature round the edges but it turned out to be 850 pages of buggerall. It's not even bad enough to laugh at. A total waste of everyone's time, money and effort.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: the origins of the internet by Katie Hafner and Mathew Lyon

As a programmer, I ought to have found this interesting, but unfortunately it was more like doing unpaid overtime. On several occasions I went to bed ahead of my husband, saying I wanted to read a bit of my book, only for him to arrive upstairs minutes later to find that its turgid prose had already stunned me into unconsciousness. Reading about someone else's marathon debugging session is only slightly less horrible than being in the midst of your own.

My one real moment of entertainment came from reading about the work of JCR Licklider. As well as having a funny name, he believed that by working with machines humans could achieve enhanced cognition. As someone who works with machines every day and often seems to be having cognitive difficulties, my response to his idea is a bitter, "Ha!". Most humans don't want their cognition enhanced and are content to muddle along with the same mixture of magical thinking and believing whatever is most convenient that we've been using ever since we were monkeys. We have created this amazing, worldwide network of machines and what do we use it for? Pornography, dating, looking at cute animals, watching amusing films of things in blenders and wanky, ego-stroking popularity contests. Some of the cleverest humans get as far as using it to pretend to be an elf. Quite frankly it would serve us all right if the Internet became self-aware and started exterminating us!

What is a little sad is that although many of the programmers mentioned were undoubtedly brilliant (and obsessive) and working at the bleeding edge of their fields, none of them got rich from their work. What you need to make money appears to middling intelligence, a sharp suit, glossy hair and a disarming smile. Bugger.

Despite the fact that I've not enjoyed this book, my friends seem to be queuing up to read it. I can't persuade them to like my favourite authors but they all want to read this crap. T! Humans, eh? They're just bloody perverse!

The Dream of Scipio - Iain Pears

My God, this is one of those books that is just too bloody clever for its own good! One quote on the cover said it was “Illumined by a fizzing passion for the recondite”. What does that even mean?

My first disappointment was that the book is not about Scipio at all, nor is it even about the original “Dream of Scipio” written by Cicero. It interweaves 3 different stories of men from different periods in history. Each of them lives near Avignon at a time when it seems that civilisation itself is under threat and faces difficult moral dilemmas.

Manlius is a Roman of patrician class, living in Gaul at the time when it is falling to the Goths (insert your own joke about black nail varnish here). The empire can't protect its territories, the slaves needed to work in the fields keep running off to join the enemy and the Christian Church has started taking over a lot of the functions of the old state. Manlius's philosophy teacher Sophia persuades him to leave his estate, bribe his way to a Bishop's job and start using his expensive education in strategy and diplomacy to do what good he can, rather than sitting in his villa reading poetry as his world falls apart.

Olivier is a medieval poet whose patron is a cardinal at the court of Pope Clement. In between delivering the cardinals letters, he tracks down ancient manuscripts makes copies and tries to preserve them. He finds a piece called “The Dream of Scipio” written by Manlius. This interests him because he can scarcely understand it and those bits he can understand seem heretical, yet it was written by a bishop. He asks advice from a Jewish scholar and falls in love with his beautiful assistant – at a time when the black death comes to Avignon and the Jews are being used as scapegoats.

Julien Barneuve is a scholar who served in the trenches of the first world war. It was this experience which led him to his belief that civilisation is to be preserved at all costs. It also leads him to retreat from the world and channel his energies into academic studies. Both Manlius and Olivier are known to him. He puts years of work into attempting to unravel the meaning of Manlius's “Dream of Scipio” and he knows Olivier as a medieval poet famous for murdering his lover and having his hands and tongue removed as punishment. Julien's lover is a Jewish artist, and yet when France falls to the Germans he takes a job with the Vichy regime in order to prevent the country descending into chaos and barbarism.

One of my major complaints about the book is that it switches between stories far too frequently. I feel like I've barely found my feet in one time, when I'm whisked off to another. This makes reading hard work. The ending was very strong (though pretty depressing), but I would have edited out most of the middle of the book, were it up to me!

I enjoyed the reversals in the final act: Manlius is corrupted by power, betrays his friend and signs tracts of land over to the barbarians, allegedly to keep the peace. Olivier, whom the reader is led to despise as murderer and ignorant medieval clod, comes good. We finally see that he sacrificed his reputation as well as his life to save his girlfriend and tutor. Julien the Vichy official immolates himself, his house and his life's work and his funeral pyre serves as a beacon to warn his friend in the resistance. Julien goes a bit crazed in the end and starts to believe that while throughout his life he has striven to preserve “civilization” through academic studies and through collaborating, he was utterly wrong. He comes to think of the Holocaust as the end product of thousands of years of progress; it required administrators, industrialists, government, police and international co-operation to make it happen. It required philosophers and theologists to prepare the ground and set up justifications. Julien's last act is therefore to destroy as much knowledge and learning as he can.

The book gives us a sort of potted history of European anti-semitism, as well as telling the reader far more than he or she ever wanted to know about Neoplatonism. The central question of the book, however, is whether it is ever right to side with evil men, in order to ameliorate their actions. By the end, Iain Pears seems pretty clear that it isn't.

The argument which dupes Julien into working for the Vichy government is that someone else will do it if he doesn't, and they'd be harsher. For my money, this argument is completely fallacious and you've my permission to punch anyone who tries to use it on you. It is no more than the trick of rhetoric known as the false dichotomy. Consider: the only thing in the whole world you can really control is your own actions therefore you have a straightforward choice between agreeing to do evil and not. The consequences of not agreeing cannot be known in advance – maybe the next candidate will refuse too. My view also passes the simple ethical test passed down to me by my mum: “What if everybody behaved like that?”. If everybody behaved my way in these circumstances, evil jobs could only be done by completely amoral people, and though some exist, they are pretty rare. “The evil done by men of good will is worst of all”. If you don't believe me, go and see Watchmen when it comes out.

To my mind civilisation is not about arcane knowledge or a classical education. It's not necessarily even about the rule of law. The word literally means the habit of living in cities, and all we really need to carry on doing that is the ability to rub along with each other without violence. Politeness, consideration and cooperation are what makes us civilised not cultivated tastes for the high arts or spending our time in contemplation. The nice thing about my way of seeing this is that each and every one of us can either do our bit to keep civilisation going or hasten its demise through our own behaviour. It's up to you. Now go out there and save the world!

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

Well the Bookclubof1 blog has been pretty quiet recently. That's because I've been chipping away at the Cannon again. I have been reading Mary Barton and I think I now understand why until relatively recently Mrs Gaskell has been so incredibly unfashionable. My aim here is to supply both of my readers with everything they'll ever need to know about Mary Barton in order to seem cultured without having to read the bugger.

Mrs Gaskell was the wife of a Unitarian minister and lived in Liverpool. “Mary Barton” was her first book (and the worst one of her's I've read so far) and was apparently very controversial in its day – although it's pretty hard to see why now. It was written during the recession of the 1840s and details the hard lives of the mill workers in Manchester. The plot runs something like this:

Mary's Mum dies leaving her with her father who works as a weaver in a dark, satanic mill. She gets a job as an apprentice dressmaker and everything goes well for a time. Mary is lucky enough to have a choice of two admirers: sensible, hardworking Jem Wilson who has a good job as an engineer or Harry Carson, the dandy git who is the mill owner's son. Being an idiot who thinks a rich man would marry a shop-girl, Mary initially prefers the latter but eventually come to realise Jem's sterling qualities. Unfortunately, this is where things start to get difficult. The recession comes and workers are laid off at the factory or have their hours cut. Many of them can't feed their families anymore and the people are sick and starving. John Barton is part of a Trade Union delegation which attempts to negotiate better conditions with the mill owners. Not only do the negotiations fall through, but Harry Carson finds the workers' raggedy appearance (caused by his own greed in the first place) hilariously funny. The union come up with a plan to murder him: they draw lots and whoever draws the marked piece of paper has to kill him. John Barton gets the job. When Carson is murdered the blame falls of Jem Wilson who was seen having a fight with him in the street over Mary. Mary guesses her dad is the killer. She wants to prevent Jem being hanged for murder, but can't bring herself to turn her dad in so she goes chasing about the country to find someone who can give him an alibi. Finally she confesses her undying love for Jem from the witness box while being cross-examined. It's cheesy. Cheese on toast.

And it's all cheese from here on in. Mary's Dad reappears wracked with guilt, confesses the murder to Harry Carson's father and then drops dead on the spot. Why couldn't he have done this 10 chapters earlier and saved Mary and Jem a whole load of hassle? The whole story just felt really contrived and unnecessary at this point. Anyway, Daddy Carson now decides that the way to prevent things like this happening in future is to be a nicer kind of mill owner, but at the point where we leave him he still believes that it is “The Market” that is starving his workers, not him. Bloody Adam Smith has a lot to answer for. Mary and Jem get married and emigrate to Canada where they live happily ever after, even though Jem's “frabbit” old mother comes to live with them. The cheesiest bit of all is right at the end though... throughout the book, Mary has a friend called Margaret who is a fantastic singer, but blind. Right at the end she and Jem get a letter from England which reveals, “They've done something to Margaret to give her back her sight!”. How crap! Very early laser surgery, I expect...

What you can't really appreciate from this precis is how very religious the author is. (And you can tell what the author thinks about bloody everything from the long expositiory lectures, planted like booby-traps in the text. That's something that you just don't get in modern novels – and a good thing too!). In some ways this is a good thing as it is Gaskell's religion that gives her sympathy for the poor which was mostly lacking in middle class people from her era. A lot of the time it makes her annoyingly sanctimonious: for example, it's a sin for the workers to feel downcast while watching their children starve as they should have faith in God. Also, the bourgoisie should conduct themselves in a moral and upstanding way to set a good example to the ignorant workers!

However progressive Gaskell might have been in her attitudes to the proles, in this book at least, she is no supporter of women. Early on John Barton complains: ”That's the worst of factory work for girls. They earn so much when work is plenty that they can maintain themselves”. Well, Heaven forbid that we should be able to take care of ourselves and not have to whore ourselves out to men! There's also lots of author's commentary about how inappropriate it is for wives to work because when the husband gets home all tired and finds that his missus hasn't tidied up and made him dinner it drives him to that den of sin known as the pub. Why don't working husbands drive wives to the gin shop? Before any one thinks that I am judging someone from the past by modern standards, I'd like to point out the The Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written some 50 years before Mary Barton, so Mrs G could have chosen to suck a lot less than this!

There are lots of critiques on the Internet which begin with statements about how Mrs Gaskell's writing is far too sentimental for our sophisticated modern tastes. I disagree. Yeah, she's too sentimental for anyone with intellectual pretensions, but look at the huge number of misery memoirs sold and try to tell me the Great British public are too sophisticated for Gaskell. She'd be entirely right as a scriptwriter for Hollywood romantic comedies. She'd also have been at home working on 'Stenders. And she'd have LOVED Brookside. In fact, I think that's a great essay question right there: If Elizabeth Gaskell were alive today, Brookside would still be on TV. Discuss.

If King Arthur had worn tweed...

For ages now I have been reading “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White. This is essentially a retelling of Arthurian legend, viewed through the prism of 1950s politics and morality. It comprises of 4 books: “The Sword in the Stone”(famously adapted by Disney), “Queen of Air and Darkness”, “The Ill-Made Knight” and ”The Candle in The Wind”. The first two books are rather good, but the second two threatened to bore the living arse off me.

“The Sword in the Stone” is clever and funny (the Disney film is actually surprisingly true to the book). Arthur is still an interesting character at this point because he's just a boy and still fallible and human. Further into the saga, Arthur is just so damn good, wise and kind that he becomes terribly dull. Merlin overseas Arthur's childhood and works to instill a sense of right and wrong into him, as opposed to the standard education for a mediaeval monarch which would have been learning endless manners and protocol and absorbing the idea that you are better than everyone else and can impose your will on the peasants through violence. In some places, the writing is actually very funny with characters such as Sir Ector and King Pellinore given dialogue that makes them sound like overbred upperclass twits. In many places though, there's just too much detail on the habits of the mediaeval aristocracy. For example, I don't need an exhaustive rundown of all the different breeds of hunting dogs and the protocol for handling each. I don't need a list of heraldic animals and I don't care what the difference between lions couchant, rampant, or passant regardant is. Despite these information dumps, this book still contained my favourite moment in the whole saga:

King Pellinore has spent his whole life hunting the Questing Beast (aka The Beast Glatisant), a weird creature which has the head of a snake, the body of a lippard (lizard?, leopard?) and the hooves of a hart. It makes a noise like a pack of hounds and only a Pellinore can catch it. The years of sleeping in forests and fields begin to take their toll on King Pellinore, and he accepts an invitation from a fellow knight to stay in his castle, sleep on a feather bed and have a bit of a holiday from the Questing Beast. On a Boxing Day boar hunt, they find the Questing Beast lying half-dead in the snow – it has been pining away without King Pellinore to chase it! He takes it home and feeds it bread and milk until it is healthy, then gives it a head start and sets off after it with renewed vigour.

The second book was also a pretty good read. In this book Arthur is trying to secure his new kingdom against rebellious Scots, and old-style robber barons reluctant to sign up to his new order of niceness. As part of this process, Arthur and Merlin invent the round table to that knights gagging to fight someone can harness their testosterone and use it for good. It is also in this book that Arthur sows the seeds of his destruction by accidentally sleeping with his half sister, Morgause. And crazy, cat boiling, brother humping Queen Morgause really does steal the show in this book. A woman so deluded she offers to be the bait in a unicorn hunt, despite having four strapping sons! She may be mad and bad, but since all the other women in the whole saga are a waste of space, I can't help feeling some grudging admiration...

Now we come to “The Ill-Made Knight” which deals mostly with the story of Lancelot and Gwenevere. I have never had any sympathy for those two and nothing Mr White had to say changed my mind. Faithless, whorish people often whine the excuse: “You can't help who you fall in love with.”. Maybe, maybe not, but you definitely CAN help who you have sex with. There is no excuse for having a personal life like something from Deidre's Casebook; it is just plain sluttish. Please remember that it is only polite to break up with one lover before you move on to the next. my contempt for the protagonists made this book pretty hard going. The structure of it seems to be that somebody accuses Gwenevere of adultery and trail by combat is used to prove her innocence or guilt. Lancelot then acts as her champion and kills the accuser. This is repeated about seventeen times.

The monotony is slightly relieved by the quest for the Holy Grail. I would have liked to have more details about this but the way that the story is told is that the reader is left hanging about Camelot with Arthur and Gwenevere, getting only sketchy impressions of what happened from returning knights. One good result is that following the Grail quest, smug, virginal, boring Galahad (Lancelot's accidental son – it's a long story) becomes so chuffing perfect that he evolves into a life-form made of pure energy and buggers off... like the tedious, pixie-eared girl from Voyager.

By the time I arrived at the final book, I have to admit I had begun to skim a bit. Modred hatches a scheme to destroy the round table by waiting til Arthur is off somewhere on business, then catching Lancelot red-handed in Gwenevere's bedroom. The lovers flee to France and the Round Table broken up as some knights are loyal to Arthur while others side with Lancelot. Arthur pursues Lancelot, mostly to appease Gawaine, who's brothers got in the way of Lancelot's escape and were cut down while unarmed. There is an extended and particularly pointless battle in which people who are friends try half-heartedly to kill each other in order that honour be satisfied. Meanwhile Mordred is left in charge of England, where he raises an army of fascist supporters in black uniforms, declares himself king and tries to marry Gwenevere. By the time Arthur realises the danger it is too late – all his knights are dead and he is a worn out old man left to fight a battle he can't possibly hope to win. His final action is to dispatch a messenger boy with orders to tell everyone he meets the story of a legendary king who tried to make things better by persuading people to be nice to one another.

To my disappointment, many of my favourite bits of Arthurian legend, such as getting Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, Gawaine & the Green Knight, going to the Vale of Avalon etc. aren't in the book at all. And in all the other versions of the legend I've read, Morgause's role is played by Morgana Le Fey. That's the thing about legends, though: they're always a bit vague.

White assumes his assumes the readers will have already read Mallory's Morte d'Arthur. Maybe this was true in the 50s (after all there was no lolcats then, noPeepshow, no Heroes so people might have been desperate enough) but it certainly isn't true in my case. I have read stories of the individual knights in books of Celtic myth which I bought in the hippy crystal shops of my wild, impetuous youth. I have read “The Mists of Avalon” by Marrion Zimmer Bradley, which is told from the perspective of Morgana Le Fey, but not Mallory. Unfortunately, White seems to have left out many bits and pieces on the grounds that he'd just be going over ground already covered by Mallory. But one of my reasons for reading him was so that I wouldn't have to read Mallory!