One Virgin Too Many - Lindsey Davis

What did the Romans ever do for us? Apart from the roads, the aqueducts and decreasing the population of ancient Britain they provided historical fodder for Lindsey Davis’s popular detective novels about Marcus Didius Falco. Falco scrapes a living as a private informer in Rome under the Emperor Vespasian. Vespasian is probably my favourite emperor because he was in charge of the 2nd Legion (stationed in Exeter, you know) and marched around the west country, um... killing my ancestors. I think this gives us a connection.

Like American detectives of the 1950s, Falco gives us a first person narrative of his investigations. He’s an ex-legionary whose tour of duty to Britain (cold, rainy and full of violent, woad-spattered ancestors of the bookclubofone) lurks in his backstory in much the same way that ‘Nam or WW2 do for tough-guy American detectives. This is where Falco’s macho credentials end though. As a good Italian boy, he has an extended family including a domineering mother, spirited girlfriend and slightly bullying sisters to keep him in line. This tends to be what keeps this series in the “cozy mysteries” category. Unlike more morally dubious detectives (like Aurelio Zen, for example ) there is never any doubt that Falco will do the right thing in the end; if he didn’t his female relatives would hound him to the ends of the earth.

In this the 11th book in the series, Falco gets a visit from a six year-old child from one of Rome's foremost families who insists that one of her relatives wants to kill her. Unfortunately, he's in no mood for precocious children, having just come back from telling his favourite sister that her ne'er-do-well husband has been thrown to the lions in Tripoli during the 10th book. Alas, he sends the kiddie packing, only for her to go missing a couple of days later. In the meantime, his girlfriend's layabout brother is trying to get into a religious cult called the Arval Brothers (who sound like Animal House for grown up Romans). He gets blackballed... and then trips over a murdered body while leaving the feast in a big strop, so Falco has two mysteries to solve.

If you are already a fan of the series, well read on as this is much the same as the last couple. If you've never read any of these books, my advice would be to start with The Silver Pigs. That is the first book and I found it much edgier and more suspenseful than most of the others. And Exeter features briefly!

Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur!

Boom! Boom! Akkalakka-boom-boom!

Hands up who wants to see cave men fighting dinosaurs? Yep, that's pretty much everyone. The only problem is that millions of years separate cave men and dinosaurs making feasible combat unlikely. So how about, right, an alternative world in which the meteor that caused the K/T extinction never hit? In such a world cavemen could fight highly evolved, super-intelligent dinosaurs! And that would be even better! Harry Harrison's “West of Eden” is set in just such a world and delivers fantastic, enjoyable SF hokum together with top-notch caveman/dinosaur* action.

The book features 2 made up languages (one dinosaur, one human), which results in the kind of cheerful gibberish you really only get in SF books:

“It stood, it walked like it was human, Tanu. A murgu, father but it has hands like ours.”

“Commander, you will take 10 of your strongest crewmembers ashore at once. Armed with hesotsan. You will have the uruketo stand by here.” Great stuff.

The plot, well... the plot doesn't really matter, but it goes a bit like this: Humans and dinosaurs meet and it doesn't go well. The more advanced dinosaurs track down and eliminate a whole tribe of humans, except for one boy who the take as a research subject. This boy Kerrick, learns to speak dinosaur and eventually comes to be highly prized by their leader for his ability to say one thing and think another (the dinosaur language is based on their body language making it extremely difficult for them to lie to each other). Kerrick eventually escapes an uses his knowledge of dinosaur society to help the humans destroy the dinosaur city.

A word on dinosaur technology: dinosaurs are heavily into wet-ware having become masters of DNA manipulation to create life forms to use as tools (like Justina Robson's Forged but less cool). Trouble is, they don't use fire, or work metals, so I'm not sure how they got this technology in the first place. For example, they have created an artificial life form which is all googley eyes and lenses to use as a microscope, but before this was invented, how would they be able to see the structure of DNA and meddle with it in order to create the googley-eye-beast-microscope in the first place? There are chicken-and-egg problems there.

Another point which annoyed me repeatedly is that the author has used the word “sentience” when he means intelligence. As I understand it intelligence enables me to solve problems and perform complex tasks, while sentience is self awareness; sentience is the little voice in your head that's doing the director's commentary on your life. For example, he talks about light emitting plants which the dinosaurs use to guard the perimeter of their camps. Apparently these have been bred “sentient” to enable them to detect motion and light up attackers. They don't want sentience for that, intelligence will do! No-one wants a sentient weapon. Well, no one who's ever seen Dark Star...

West of Eden comes with the book equivalent of a DVD of extra material: dictionaries of human and dinosaur languages at the back of the book, a history of the world according to dinosaurs and notes on each of the different culture. I paid the exactly as much attention as I do DVD extras.

The review of a book which is such good fun should end on a upbeat note, so here goes: Cavemen! Dinosaurs! You have to imagine the furry thongs and bikinis yourself but any regular reader of SF will be able to do that without any trouble.

* I should point out that I do not mean “caveman slash dinosaur” in the sense of “slash fiction”. Well, except for one very wrong and mercifully brief scene...

Dawn of the Dumb - Charlie Brooker

I love Charlie Brooker. Love him for his demented rants born from having any kind of conscience in the modern world, love him for his balls-out rudeness about minor celebrities and reality TV idiots (all of whom are asking for it, in my opinion). Yes, I think I have a bit of a crush on him, despite the fact that I've a shrew notion he'd be whiny and high-maintenance in person. Anyway, you don't want to hear me say it's funny, you want a look at the funniness itself:

• “My least favourite Hazel McWitch lookalike” = Gillian McKeith
• “If a penis could chose its own wardrobe and hair stylist, chances are it'd end up looking like Duane “Dog” Chapman star of Dog the Bountyhunter.” I especially liked the bit about how Duane's hairstyle looks “like the entire cast of The Lost Boys crossed with a gay lion”.
• “Slough looks like it was never actually built, merely crapped into position by a misanthropic, mediocre God.”
• Deborah Meaden of Dragon's Den, “could chew the tin balls off a Cyberman”
• A BB contestant is described in the following terms, “With a face like a perineum with tiny dots drawn on it for eyes, he was the human equivalent of a cock- shaped novelty pen with ego problems”

So the Brooker book (which the whole English-speaking world except for me got for Christmas) is pretty funny. It's also ecologically sound, being constructed entirely from recycled Guardian columns.

One thing which strikes me as bit unfair about Brooker, though is this: He's funny, but is he actually funnier or cleverer than the people you know in real life? I'm not sure he is. CB's humour reminds me strongly of my friend TLO - I suspect that the only reason Charlie has a newspaper column and a TV show and TLO doesn't, is that TLO is actually better equipped for real-life and therefore able to hold don a 9-5 job.

What are the scores, Jorge Borge?

This month I have mostly been reading "Labyrinths" by Jorge Luis Borges.

Apparently, Mr Borges writes “metafiction”so the first thing I had to do was look up what the hell that was. I also looked up “symbolism” as that was allegedly a big influence. Having read the definition of symbolism, I felt no wiser as to what it actually was so I just had to get on with reading the book in continuing ignorance.

The book is collection of short stories and essays. The stories are short, but at the same time immensely dense, referencing any number of other pieces of fiction inside them. This is really, really confusing as Borges’ fiction also makes liberal use of describing books that don’t exist, false biographies and deliberately false attributions. I end up feeling that I must have guessed wrong at least once about which bits were fact and where the words have come from, therefore I have been proven to be as daft and ignorant as all those people who thought Ghostwatch was a genuine documentary. Not only that, but the subject matter takes in big philosophical questions about such things as identity, free will, consciousness and reality. And the words are really hard.

My mind is pretty much blown.

Much like the film Primer, I have enjoyed Borges, and I’d recommend him, but I can’t honest claim to have understood the half of these stories. I liked the “Library of Babel” which struck me as much like the internet in that it contains everything you might ever want to know hidden amongst tides of lies and crap. I also liked the story about the magician who dreams a man into existence. This was easier going for someone who spent their youth with PKD!

How many words did I have to look up? LOTS!

Cosmogony – The study of the origin of the universe

Numina - Plural of “numen” which means a presiding divinity or spirit of a place; Creative energy; genius.

Verisimilar – having the appearance of truth; probable

Apodictic - Necessarily or demonstrably true; incontrovertible

Tetrach - A provincial ruler or vassal king who owed allegiance to the Roman Empire.

Nitid – bright, lustrous.

Teleology – I wish this meant the study of television, but alas it does not. Apparently it is the belief that everything has an ultimate, original cause and the search for evidence of design in nature. Sounds like a cross between a child recursively asking “Why?” and the endlessly moronic “intelligent design” doctrine. The study of this ology looks like a waste of neurons. I am cross that such a word even exists. Why not join with me in deliberately misusing it to mean “The study of television”? Eventually, the meaning will change!

Pullulate – to send out shoots, to breed or multiply, to swarm or teem.

Panegyric – an elaborate formal compliment.

Borges is another person who is done no favours at all by the modern desire for photos of the author. He was obviously scarily intellectual, but looks like a cross between a basset hound and a Galapagos tortoise.

Pulp Fiction for January

There are some who probably believe that January is the month for tackling the weighty tomes that have been sitting unread on your shelf for the past year, making you feel guilty. I could not disagree more. With the outside cold and dark and all my money spent long before payday, January already has plenty of potential for misery without making things any worse. Therefore I have indulging in a bit of pulpish genre fiction to cheer myself up.

All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses An Eye – Christopher Brookmeyer

This book is currently the top contender for “Airport Novel of the Year”, and award (bestowed in a star-studded ceremony which takes place in my imagination) which I give for the most entertainly daft paperback thriller I've read all year. Previous winners include “Good News, Bad News” by Mark Wolstonecroft and a delightfully silly book about an ex-navy seal going cave diving, so it's pretty prestigious. In real life All Fun and Games was winner of the 2007 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic writing – although this is no guarantee of anything; the same prize was won by DBC Pierre's “Vernon God Little” which is unspeakably depressing!

Anyway, the plot is that a top scientist goes missing from his job at a secret weapons research facility. He is being hunted by all the major arms manufacturers in order that they can either make use of his research, or ensure that it is never completed. The leader of a team of mercenaries hired by the scientist's original employer comes up with a brilliant plan: he will hire the one person who will stop at absolutely nothing to find the missing scientist... his mum! His mum is a forty something Scottish housewife who has never committed so much as parking offence. All this is about to change as wee Janet goes AWOL from her suburban life and finds the skills learned in boxercise proove very useful in the cut-throat world of international espionage.

As I race towards middle age myself, I find that I particularly like books and films which are kind to ladies of this age (Check out Kung Fu Hustle – it features a chain-smoking, plump, middle-aged lady kung fu master!). I like to think that I will still be allowed to have adventures when I'm forty. One thing I didn't like was the sex scene between Janet and the international man of mystery who has recruited her. I think this is partly just me (I prefer my sexual tension unresolved) and partly because it felt like the author was writing to a formula (e.g. hollywood blockbusters must have 3 explosions and a car chase, international spy stories need at least one sex scene) rather than allowing his characters to behave consistently. Nevertheless, I was enormously pleased when Janet left her annoying, complacent husband at the end. Bugger girl power, this book has middle-aged-woman-firing-two-9mm-barettas-at-once-power.

I Am Legend – Richard Matheson

This book is number 2 in the “SF masterworks” series. Does this mean that it is officially the 2^nd best SF ever? Don't know about that but really good for its time and well worth a read if you haven't already. In fact, go and read it right now as I'm about to give away the ending.

Robert Neville might well be the last human left alive. A mystery virus seems to have turned everyone else into vampires. By night he cowers in his fortified house and by day he repairs his defences, then seeks out and stakes as many sleeping vampires has he can find.

Eventually his house is infitrated by Ruth, part of a group of people infected with the virus, who have managed to stave off full undeadness (with magical mcguffin tablets of some kind). This allows them to retain their personalties and intelligence and now they are rebuiling society – for vampires. When members of this group finally capture Neville and sentence him to death, he realises that from their point of view he his the night salking thing of terror who comes and kills them when they are helpless in their beds. He notes with grim satisfaction that he has become a creature of legend.

My husband I both read this recently while off work with the flu and it becoes particularly resonnant if read when you've been at home all day on your own, bored, lonely and feeling like you might well be the last person alive. Much of the point of the book seems to be about the dehumanising nature of hardship. After the death of his wife and daughter Neville seems to have lost the capacity for any feeling oter than anger. His constnat conflit with the vampires has made him nable to think of them as anything other than blood-seeking animals, desite observing intelligent behaviour in some of them – he even captures some of them alive to experiment on when he is trying to investigate their condition.

Not sure if I can go & see Will Smith film as I fear some Hollywood arse-wit will have gone and stuck a happy ending on to it.

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!

The Killing Joke - Anthony Horowitz

When I was about 10, Anthony Horowitz was my literary hero. He was the author of the excellent Diamond Brothers books “The Falcon’s Malteeser”, “Public Enemy Number Two” and “South by Southeast”. Not only that, but he wrote many of the scripts for my favourite TV program at the time, “Robin of Sherwood”, in which the gorgeous Michael Praed romped about the forest with his flowing, glossy mullet to a Clannad soundtrack. When my sister lent me a book Anthony had written for adults I was childishly excited...

Well, no real life book was ever going to live up to those impossibly high expectations!

The premise of the book is that a man overhears a sick joke in a pub and wonders who makes these things up. So he tries to trace the joke back to its origin. It turns out that all our nation's jokes are created by a shady government organisation which is willing to kill to protect itself.

(Let me take this opportunity to reassure any readers that not all jokes are produced by the government. Some of my friends and I make up our own. This is a lot like making your own jam/cakes/clothes in that the finished product is a bit shaky, but you get a tremendous sense of achievement. Here's an example: What's Dr Who's favourite readymeal? Gallifraybentos pies! As you can probably tell, I've yet to reach the stage when anyone else repeats one of my jokes.)

Anyway, the book putters along with the hapless hero being hunted by an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman, framed for a series of dwarf murders, falling in love and finally escaping from the villains clutches at the last minute. The book also seems to have the message that although many aspects of jokes are unpleasant or politically incorrect, a life without humour would be truly unbearable.

I am not quite sure how best to express my disappointment with this book; it's not really bad, but it occasionally feels hastily lashed together, as if the author were using one of those “Solutions for Fiction Writers” books. For example: Why would someone be that offended by a sick joke? OK, let's say it was about his Mum. But why would he be a struggling out-of-work actor if his Mum's famous enough to have jokes told about her death? Let's say she gave him up for adoption – that's good enough for Gilbert and Sulivan and it's good enough for us! Except that it isn't quite. Horowitz's adult fiction,like my jokes, needs a bit more work.