New idiot announces, "Shakespeare was a Jew!"

... And a girl one, at that.

It may have been 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare - but rumours circulating about the Bard's mysterious identity are as frequent as ever. 

Now one leading Shakespeare expert is claiming that the English playwright was actually a dark-haired Jewish woman, who lived in London. 

John Hudson's book, entitled Shakespeare's Dark Lady, explores the theory that Shakespeare's true identity is that of a woman named Amelia Bassano.

.oO Snip Oo.

She was therefore well-placed and had all the right knowledge skills, and contacts to have produced the canon we attribute to Shakespeare. 

Mr Hudson, who directs the innovative Shakespeare company the Dark Lady Players, based in New York, also believes that Amelia had an affair with the playwright Christopher Marlowe, writer of Doctor Faustus, and became pregnant before dying in poverty in 1645. 

One of the main reasons why he suspects Amelia wrote the plays is that many are based abroad - whereas Shakespeare was believed to have stayed in England for his entire life, The Sun reports.

Surely, the fact that many of "Shakespeare's" plays feature devils, witchies, denizens of Faerie land and suchlike supernatural entities must point to the conclusion "he" was actually a faerie warlock?

 Or (given he wrote several set in ancient Rome) they must have been written by Cicero, and just left lying about until some jobbing glover's son found them and decided to chance his luck?

And if this Bassano bird - with her alleged knowledge of foreign parts - had actually written the plays, she'd know that Bohemia has no coast line? Will manages to wreck a ship there in The Winter's Tale.

So, I'm not convinced.

It's silly to suggest someone who could make up stuff about Ancient Rome and the sexual shenanigans of the Danish royal family, and the goings on of the Faerie Court couldn't make stuff up about Italy, so he had to be a female Jew and NO-ONE realised until now.

But ... but ... the ghost of Hamlet's father says ... (wait for it) 'adieu' ... A Jew, geddit?

And Hamlet says he wishes his sullied flesh - his body - could resolve itself into ... a dew.  Or is a Jew?

The Terror, by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons has written a book about a horrible true story.  The Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, has been in the news, lately.  Climate change means the passage is now often navigable; and the wreck of Franklin's ship, Erebus, has been found, sitting on the bottom of the sea off King William Island, where she sank, over a hundred and fifty years ago.

The Franklin expedition was a tragedy.  Two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, blundered into the Arctic ice, became trapped; the crews succumbed to scurvy and (possibly) lead poisoning.  Despairing of breaking free of the pack, or of rescue, the surviving crew members set off on a Hellish trek across the sea ice and the frozen  North Canadian archipelago in a doomed effort to reach trading posts hundreds of barren miles away.  They didn't make it, and in their desperation they ate each other.  All 129 men died.

This we know, and it should be enough.  There isn't any need to add to what really happened.  A terrific novel could be written describing the disaster.  Simmons, to his credit, tells some of that story, and that portion of the novel is most successful.  He captures what must have been a horrific combination of drudgery and despair, and the horror of the attempt to cross the wilderness of frozen ice, dragging unwieldy sledges improvised from the ships' boats.  That is the best part of the book, awakening sympathy and horror in the reader.  But it is a horror of the pitilessness environment, and the hopelessness of the struggle.  Not of the hostile supernatural presence Simmons decides to add to the mix.  Simmons decides to garnish the already dreadful true events with a supernatural horror.  And it simply does not work.  The concept of a hulking, powerful, swift and remorseless THING hunting down the men of Erebus and Terror sounds chilling - but it isn't.  The scenes where the mysterious beast attacks the men are not frightening, and the beast is never convincing.

The plotting and story-telling is also unconvincing.  Early on, we learn the beast has breached Terror's hull - but nothing more is made of this calamity.  Having gained entry, the beast never bothers to take advantage of it.  There are possible explanations for this - but it is hard to escape the suspicion Simmon's just forgot about it.  After all, late in the book, Terror is able to sail happily enough, in spite of this breach.  Similarly, a crucial set piece relies on the officers ignoring what the crew are up to over the course of several days, in a situation where the least wavering of control and surveillance could lead to death.  Not convincing.

Captain Francis Crozier, the main character, is awkwardly portrayed.  Simmons wants him to to be the one who, if-only-they-had-listened, would have brought them home safely.  His crucial advice is ignored.  But Simmons can not reconcile this with the reality that Crozier loaded up the already-too-heavy boat-sleds with unnecessary junk - books, slippers, soap and silver spoons were all recovered from King William Island, pointing to an expedition planned not by level headed men but by a rabble, driven insane by scurvy and lead poisoning.  Equally, Franklin is presented as bumbling twit.  There is a lot the real Franklin can be criticised for - the failure to leave message cylinders detailing his plans in particular - but he was not a sap or a fool.  He had trekked across Canada twice.  The first time, disastrously, with members of his party succumbing to starvation and cannibalism; but he planned the second expedition, meticulously, drawing on his experiences and refusing to be browbeaten into compromise.  It was successful, covering thousands of miles of the bleakest terrain on the planet.  This man was not a buffoon, and Simmons's portrayal of him as a bit of an idiot is unjust.

Finally, there is a real problem towards the end of the novel.  For reasons entirely incomprehensible, Simmons decides to lard the final pages of his novel with Inuit theology, at a point where the story can least endure it.  Having slogged and shivered with Crozier and his shipmates over several hundred pages, it is hard to resist skipping the protracted mythic sections.  It just doesn't work, and one feels that someone must have mentioned this to Simmons.

There are some good parts to the novel.  It is a swift, page-turning read, for most of its considerable length.  As mentioned before, the simple day-to-day effort of staying alive in the icebound ships is gruelling enough with out supernatural additions.  There are a few shivery moments where suspense generates unease in the reader; and Simmons has certainly done his homework.  He includes a bibliography of sources that serves as a good guide to further reading for those interested in finding out more about this valiant, utterly misguided, attempt to do what was pretty much impossible - make a North West Passage, to the sea.

*

On Citizen Kane (SPOILERS)

Peter Bradshaw has an excellent essay on the oft debated meaning of Rosebud in Citizen Kane.

Yes, we all know it is the sled he was playing with the day he was plucked from the bosom of his family and set on the path to material riches and spiritual poverty; and the more salaciously minded know where Kane got the idea of putting Rosebud on the lips of his thinly disguised WR Heart clone ... and we can all work out that the deeper meaning of Rosebud is something about losing innocence, the way that dreams destroy the dreamer, how success and wealth are empty without love and so on.

Bradshaw posits a new idea that is very interesting; that, on his deathbed, is that Kane is thinking not of himself, but of his son, who we are told dies very young in an car crash:

It is in fact the moment that isn’t there, a shocking, ghostly absence that Welles allows you to grasp only after the movie is over: the death of his first wife and his son in an automobile accident. We only hear of it in the newsreel about Kane that begins the film – the brief roundup that we are invited to believe does not get to the heart of the man. But that is the last we hear of it. It happens two years into his second marriage. When does Kane hear this terrible news himself? How does he react to the death of his first wife and his adored little boy? We never know.

Kane's reflecting, on his death bed, of how he seems to have visited his own fate upon his child - denied his family; trapped in a pampered but bleak, loveless life; and in the case of his son, his childhood literally destroyed.

Kane realises he's become Thatcher, ripping a child away from his parents and setting him on the road to perdition. All because of his vanity and self-deceiving, selfish self-indulgence. His pain at the end is that he has done this to everyone - his first wife, his second wife, his friends and colleagues at the Inquirer ... But most of all his son.

This (possible) interpretation is highlighted in the 'News on the March' clip that immediately follows the 'Rosebud' opening. It's Poe's idea of concealing in plain sight.  We miss it because we assume the answer to the riddle will be revealed at the end; but, brilliantly, the answer is right there, before the question is even asked. It is one of the few avenues not investigated by Thompson. And we all miss it, too.

We can live with our own failings and disappointments, but the way we fail and disappoint others is what truly haunts.

The Forest of Doom!!

For those of you who don't know, The Forest of Doom was the third installment of the brilliant Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks.

This post is a response specifically to comments made by the brilliant Auckland based blogger, Murray, who has been playing his way through the series and posting accounts of his misadventures and opinions on the books.

So be warned; if you have haven't encountered the Fighting Fantasy books, or read Murray's blog (which I hugely recommend) this will probably make no sense to you. And not in an intentional, post modern literature sort of way.

Forest of Doom was always one of my favourites (and one of the few that I finished, though it took me years and I probably stopped playing by the rules to do it) but the opinion of those commenting on it is generally negative. So what I offer here is a defence of Forest of Doom. The criticism of the book by Murray - and on other blogs - shows fatal misunderstanding of what Livingstone was trying to do.

I think FoD was the second game book I bought, after Death Trap Dungeon. Keep in mind that, if flicking through those pages and being perverted gently by all those barely concealed genitalia, was a novelty for me, it was also kinda new for Steve and Iain.

Warlock of Firetop Mountain came out in 1982, and Citadel of Chaos and Forest in 1983. Like musicians, who get to plunder their whole miserable angsty adolescence for their their first album, and six months of cocaine, constant touring and meaningless sex for the second, Steve and Iain were in a hurry.

Also bear in mind books 3, 5, 6 and 7 were solo efforts by Livingstone. After Citadel, and the co-authored Starship Traveller, Steve Jackson took a holiday from writing the 'core' Fighting Fantasy. So it was pretty much a one man show, with cameo appearances by various people all called Steve Jackson. And Iain managed to knock out five solo books in two years. So maybe we should cut these him some slack, huh?

So, exculpatory pleading aside, what of FoD? Well, as Murray notes, it is set OUTDOORS. Ponder that novelty for a while. The default settling for most adventures is still a fancifully network of tunnels and rooms, populated by random monsters, with no real ecology (What does the DRAGON in Warlock eat?) or purpose.

A good friend of mine, a role-player of considerable vintage, says that it was Forest of Doom that made him realise You Could Take This Shit Outside. Okay, FoD is just a dungeon with trees for walls, but that is still a transition many have to make. What Freud would have made about our reluctance to move from the warm comforting 10x10 tunnels and wombs, sorry, rooms?

Taking the action out of tunnels makes the setting more convincing. Tunnels have to be dug by someone, whereas trees just grow, yeah? And the forest setting immediately creates a viable eco-system. Even if we can't go off the paths, the nasties we encounter can. So the WEREWOLVES, CAT WOMEN, CENTAURS and such like seem more plausible.

Another thing Livingstone did that was really cool was create a detailed story setting. FoD has a decent introduction, outlining how you get involved in the quest. It also gave you a pay off if you managed to complete the quest - a remarkably long 'paragraph' 400, meaning you get some sort of a reward for all the page flicking and dice rolling. I think it was Masks of Mayhem that ended the story with a single sentence 'paragraph' - a pretty crappy ending.  FoD really felt like a story in which you got to be the hero.

The structure of the game book is also innovative and some seem to have misunderestimated Livingstone's purpose. Yeah, sure, you can play it as a psychopath and attack everyone ... Livingstone is giving you that choice. You get to choose how you interact with the population of Darkwood.

Obviously, if you attack them all, they'll all try to kill you right back. If you don't, some of them probably won't; but (clever bit) some will, because the outcome has to be unpredictable. Some times being nice will get you out of a fight, but not always.

If Steve Jackson was a GM, you get the impression he'd be the sort of GM you'd hate - the type that are always out to kill the PCs and who revel in the cunning ways they manage to Seal Their Doom. Whereas Iain would be the sort of GM who would provide a good night's entertainment for all with plenty of beer and chips.  Steve would probably put slow acting poison in the chips, and then giggle evilly as he watched you expire.

The other big innovation was structural. Remember the frustration of bursting into tears on the Warlock's treasure chest because you didn't have the right damn keys? Instead of, you know, doing what a self-respecting Dragon slaying, Warlock disembowelling sword waggler would do, going back into the maze to find the damn things? FoD doesn't do that.

If you get to Stonebridge without the two parts of the hammer, you don't get called a dumbass loser, you get to carry on. You may have found a significant location but not had the magical item needed, like the GHOUL's crypt. So you get to re-visit Yastromo and buy the magic items you now realise you need. Or you can explore new paths - in fact you have to do this, as the two parts of the hammer are located on different routes through the forest, justifying the classic/infamous "You come to a T junction, L/R" opening to EVERY game book in the series.

Obviously, this means you might go through some encounters twice, and it would have been nice if Livingstone had included an "If you have been here before and killed the werewolf, turn straight to ..." option, players with a modicum of intelligence can just skip repeat encounters, unless you really like killing CAT WOMEN. This highlights a profound difference in attitude between Steve Jackson and Iain Livingstone. Iain isn't out to kill you for any wrong choice.

Steve Jackson, on the other hand, certainly is, as Murray discovered in House of Hell. Pretty much any wrong choice in a Steve Jackson book leads to certain death ... and, frustratingly, it may not occur immediately; you may still seem to have options, as in the Kitchen of Death in the House of Hell; but there is no going back once you blunder into one of his 'Kill Zones.' FoD, on the other hand, forgives mistakes, some of the time at least, and doesn't kill you too vindictively too often.

So in terms of innovation, it is something of a high water mark in the series. I don't know if any of the later books had such a complex structure or allowed as much freedom of interaction. Which isn't to say it is perfect, because it isn't. But it is different and, I think, undervalued.

The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph Conrad

I finished The Arrow of Gold the other night, which probably makes me one of the elite in Conrad appreciation.  because if you manage to read that book ... Look, it isn't bad.  In places.

Unfortunately, the places where it isn't bad are the places where the tiresome love interest is not to be seen.  And there are not many of them, and the whole purpose of the novel was to record the romantic tensions between the narrator and the allegedly captivating Dona Rita.  I desperately wanted her to be captivating.  For moments - when the narrator was not directly involved in the story - she was tolerable.  But that is not easy to do.  So swathes of the novel are tedious and pointless and frequently bordering on the incomprehensible.

These sections are thrown into relief by the scenes which don't feature Rita, or where Rita is narrating her own personal history, with the narrator dumbly standing about twiddling his thumbs.

There are moment when the ladies withdraw and the men get on with manly stuff, and that is always where Conrad is at his best.  It is no wonder that his greatest novels are often the ones which are set on ships or other places where women are generally not a concern.  Conrad seemed to find them profoundly puzzling and - as one of my correspondents in the recent guardian discussion pointed out - this rather damages his standing as a great novelist.

After all, if you find fully half the species profoundly incomprehensible, and intercourse (careful now!) with them deeply confusing, then you are rather limiting yourself.

I'm not so harsh, as there are many things that chaps can get up to without having to dally with girls.  But it does count against Conrad that he wasn't smart enough to realise what a dreadful dead end the romantic aspects of his later novels would be. To try and fail once might have been commendable.

To try and fail repeatedly suggests either he was so arrogantly convinced of his brilliant, or he had stopped really caring and was trying to milk the formaula that had - inexplicably - made the equally muddled Chance a best seller.

No Stars

A list of some films I particularly admire

I can't call it a bloody Top Ten because there are more than ten of them, and I couldn't ever settle on a definitive Top Ten if I tried.  So here's a random list of films I really admire.  Tonight.

I used to be able to reel lists like this off off so easily. See, I used to be pretentious. I used to be able to do Top 10s of nouvelle vague directors ... and now I'm not sure if I even managed to spell nouvelle vague correctly.

How times have changed. I used to be somebody ... I coulda been a contenduh ... now all I got is vintage wine and memories. And the sad thing is, I'm so out of touch with cinema my top 10 would probably looks pretty much the same as it did two decades ago. I stopped caring, you see, about new Scorcese films sometime between Brining Out The Dead and The Aviator.

Back then, it all seemed so important. I understood Jean Luc godard. Not his impossible movies, no-one, not even Jean Luc, understands them. But I understood the man. The urge to go and see half a dozen films in a day and argue endlessly about them with your equally intelligent and fixated friends in some cafe. Cinema seemed vital when I was in my 20s

But now ... I can barely find the time to watch a DVD and when I do, suddenly the desire to be challenged and puzzled by it seems so indulgent.

In no particular order ...

1. Touch of Evil. D: Orson Welles. Gargantuan film from the gargantuan Welles. Charleton Heston - cheekily blacked up as a Mexican drugs cop - investigates a murder while Janet Leigh lounges about in a bra that would make Madonna blush. Berserk, but brilliant. Or is it the other way round?
2. Sånger från andra våningen / Songs From The Second Floor. D: Roy Andersson. Brilliantly puzzling non-;inear story (sort of) about The End Of The World. Moments of unsurpassed beauty.
3. Simple Men. D: Hal Hartley. Wonderfully dry comedy about two brothers searching for their father and the meaning of life on Long Island. It's a terminal moraine, you know.
4. Raging Bull. D: Martin Scorcese. A grim tale of an athlete's attempt to escape the lower class drudgery and enjoy a brief stab at success. Peerless example of what cinema can be. Absolutely perfect in every regard.
5. Week-End. D: Jean Luc Godard. Simply because this changed my conceptions of what cinema meant. A middle class couple set off with murder in mind get caught up in the collapse of western soiety, and cannibal pig killing Maoists.
6. Mulholland Drive. D: David Lynch. Convuluted tale of desire, murder, corruption, revenge and some guy in a big cowboy hat. Horribly, perhaps the last truly remarkable film I saw in a cinema.
7. The Sporting Life. D: Lidsay Anderson. A grim tale of an athlete's attempt to escape the lower class drudgery and enjoy a brief stab at success. Another one.
8. Lone Star. D: John Sayles. A clever, low key film about a intergenerational murder mystery in small town Texas, from a director who liked to keep things simple so you could appreciate how complicated they really were.
9. Withnail & I. D: Bruce Robinson. Oh, come on. It's fantastic. I'm a trained actor, reduced to the status of a bum! An essential part of my student days, and still a fine meditation on growing up too late, unrequited love and oh, everything. My boys, my boys!
10. The Third Man. D: Carol Reed. I used to call this my favourite film, though it is currently out of favour. An inimitable setting, fine set pieces and performances. But would the police really not looked at Harry Lime's body before he was buried?
11. Fat City. D: John Huston. A grim tale of an athlete's attempt to ... Late, low key boxing drama from the great director. A washed up might-have-been gets a sniff of a second chance.
12. La Chinoise / The Chinese. D: Jean luc Godard. Godard renounces radical leftism in charactertistically off beat tale of student terrorists. Characteristically baffling and defiantly unhelpful, but contains many moments of Godardian genius.
13. Nackt Unter Wolfen / Naked Among Wolves. D: Frank Beyer. Concentration camp cat and mouse as prisoners conceal a Jewish child. A distant ancestor of the slushier Life is Beautiful, this film is stark, brilliant drama.
14. Oldboy. D: Park Chan-wook. Sick, brutal, nasty film about long delayed revenge. Redeemed only by the fact that it is brilliant in almost every way.
15. Darwin's Nightmare. D: Hubert Sauper. Jarring documentary about poverty, exploitation and pending ecological collapse around Lake Tanzania, where locals fish for invasive Nile Perch which are freighted to European restaurants while the fishermen subsist on rotting fish remains.
16. The Sweet Smell of Success. D: Alexander MacKendrick. Uber-louse Tony Curtis oils and weasels his way about the screen in a stupendous film about how vile people can be to each other.
17. A Night To Remember. D: Roy Ward Baker. The sinking of Titanic, the way it should have been told.

So, yeah. A top Seventeen. How stupid is that?

Something Happened! But do I really care?

I don't usually give up on books, but I hereby publicly announce that I am giving up on Something Happened, by Joseph Heller.

This is odd as a) Joseph Heller is a proper author who wrote at least one undeniable classic novel, Catch-22, and b) people sometimes say Something Happened is better.

It isn't.  It's very dull, with slab like pages of unparagraphed text dully reporting nothing happening.  It's about an advertising executive, right, and his troubled marriage and ... and I can tell you just had to stifle a yawn there.  Reading that sentence.  Now imagine the whole sense of "Who really cares about this?" stretched out over a 400+ page novel.

Though I am in no position to judge the novel fairly.  I didn't even make it to the halfway point.  Maybe the second half is astonishing.  Maybe the protagonist stops ruminating and gets a really big gun, a really hot and sexually voracious girlfriend, a fast car and zooms off to blow up Las Vegas.  Or maybe it builds to some astonishingly acute psychological or philosophical insight that would have forced me to re-evaluate every aspect of my own sad, petty life.

Or perhaps the dullness was the point, in which case, Joe, we didn't really need it spelled out for us at quite such length or in such banal detail.  Perhaps a short story would have done just as well.

Or maybe the whole thing was a joke and the point was that, in the whole novel, nothing happened.  In which case I hope Joe Heller was cremated as I may dig up his corpse just to punch it in the face.

Re-read Catch-22.  Don't bother with Something Happened.  Or, if you have read it, tell me when it gets good so I know what page to start from.

Because the first couple of hundred pages made me really, really wonder why I was living (not in a good way) and - more pertinently - why I ever bothered to learn to read.

Player of Games

A surprisingly good article - though with a rubbish headline - about the way video games have developed over the decades, to the point where they challenge more traditional literary forms in terms of plot, characterisation and philosophical content.

You might sniff, but while video games might not yet be Tolstoy, they are certainly beating Wilbur Smith ...

Cart Life is an equally effective study of contemporary life in America on the poverty line. As you scrape a living, selling coffee or newspapers, you begin to feel the grim pain of systemic unfairness and economic failure. The sense of injustice when one character is evicted from his motel room for keeping a cat is devastating.

Cart Life is a game, of course.  Though from the synopsis above, you might think it was a novel or a TV series - or an article from an unusually socially aware newspaper or magazine.

That's how debased our culture has become - where games can seem closer to capturing the grim reality of the times than the supposed established arts and media.

Interview with Hilary Mantel

A surprisingly good, detailed and in depth interview with Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.  Though it is A Place of Greater Safety which I remember most fondly - it is one of my all time favourite novels, though I did not know was her first effort (though not first published) until reading this interview.

Originally published in The New Statesman.

“Also, it taught me what I’ve long suspected: that public opinion is not something that features very highly in my life. Nobody should go into a trade like writing expecting applause, or universal approval, or even popularity. What appals me is that people mistake this constant storm of trivial abuse for some kind of freedom. ‘Me, speaking my mind!’ ” Her tone is boldly dismissive. “It’s not. It’s actually a huge distraction of the bread and circuses variety. To a large extent proper civic engagement, community engagement, proper political debate and activism, has been replaced by this. By illogic. By platitudes. And actually a lot of it is just abuse and bullying. There’s a nasty, narrow little conformism. And people are afraid, quite understandably, to differ from the norm. I think it’s a very sad state of affairs.”

The Crimson Petal and the ... who really cares

In a rare move, I have given up on Michael Faber's massive The Crimson Petal And The White.  After about 750 pages, I suddenly realised I utterly did not care what happened to any of the characters and did not have the slightest interest in what might transpire in the final hundred pages.

Sorry, Michael.  You obviously put a lot of effort into this book and thought you were onto something.  But size isn't everything.  The Fire Gospel was shorter, and much more interesting and entertaining than the bloated tome I have just put down.

Too much sugar is bad for you, you know.

RIP GGM

Aged 87, so hardly shocking, and I remember a foretelling of his imminent death about a decade ago, allegedly from the pen of the man himself. Though it was either fake, or he got better, as he carried on living and writing for years afterwards.

 As for the books themselves, I was flabbergasted the first time I read A Hundred Years of Solitude, but on re-reading it seemed flat, contrived and really just an endless recitation of random stuff happening.

Great ending though. I read lots of his books, and they all seemed pretty much the same, South American melancholia-by-numbers and lots of random stuff happening that was presumably meant to be portentous.

 I think the thing that annoyed me about 100 Years was the slab like pages of text, without dialogue or even paragraphs. Just endless recitation of what was going on, none of which really amounted to much. There were only a handful of key incidents in the book and the rest of it was just filling pages to give it an epic feel so it really did seem like a century had passed.

That said, the last time I re-read it, the fate of the luckless Mauricio Babilonia (yeah, I had to look up his name), a minor character I'd pretty much over looked before, struck me as incredibly sad. Fantastic apocalyptic ending. I've never been able to look at ants quite the same way since.

And still one of the iconic writers, for all my carping.

 And it is a shame he didn't get to live to a hundred, for obvious reasons.

Random Book Buying

Courtesy of Arty Bees in Wellington:

• A Midsummer Night's Dream by Bill Shakespeare.  In the old Oxford Shakespeare / World Classics edition.  The one I quixotically started collecting just after they started doing them in different, less appealing colours.
• Tears of The Salamander and A.K., by Peter Dickinson.  Dickinson is one of the great British children's writers.  And he's still alive and still, intermittently, publishing.

And from Trade Me:

• Elidor, by Alan Garner.  Another great British children's writer.  I read his books devotedly as a child, and am now buying them for my own.
• The Devil's Cup, by Stewart Lee Allen.  How coffee invented the Renaissance.
• Collapse, by Jared Diamond.  Because the End Of Times is always interesting.
• Monte Cassino, by Matthew Parker.  In my teens I read Sven Hassel's gory account of the battle of Monte Cassino and have been slightly fascinated by it ever since.
• How To Read Marx, by Peter Osborne.  Not one of the silly 'X for Beginners' type books, but a genuine attempt to place Marx's economic and philosophical ideas into context and critique them from a modern standpoint.  Or something like that.

 Any bets on when any of these tomes may be read?

Peter Capaldi as Dr Who

Good (Time) Lord!   I remember him from Soft Top, Hard Shoulder, one of those hopeful attempts at a British Road Movie.  Nay, that even more benighted sub-genre, the Scottish Road Movie.

And he can manipulate time, you say?  That explains why Soft Top seemed to go on forever ...

On Iain Banks

I haven;t always been kind to Iain Banks, but now he's gone and died, grumbles about the quality of individual books tend to fade in comparison to his achievement over all. 

True, a lot of the books were either pretentious student twaddle (Espedaire Street, The Bridge, Walking on Glass) or tired and bloated (Crow Road, Dead Air, Whit). Maybe three or four of them were truly brilliant (Player of Games, Against A Dark Background, Complicity).  Which is more than you can say for most writers.

So what if he never managed to repeat the brilliance of Use of Weapons?  What matters, of course, is that he did it once.  And (at least sometimes) tried to emulate its scale.

Here is Iain Banks' final interview, shortly before his death.  Definitely worth a read, for those who have not already found there way to it.

Really drives home that while he probably wrote too much, too quickly, now that he's gone you wouldn't really have had it any other way; and what a rounded, passionate, honest human being he was, beyond the (rather variable, but all now treasurable) books.

A book with a title that I will not reveal for now

Some books really are asking for it.  Take the one I'm talking about now.  No, I'm not going to tell you the title, not yet.  Not until you're ready.  But to explain.  I picked up a novel, by 'Best selling' auther JA Jance, at my local library the other day.  Two things struck me as soon as I looked at the cover.  Yes, I know.  Never judge a ... but just bear with me, okay.  Cliches are sometimes true.  This book's cover was asking for it.

The first thing wrong with it was the title.  Yes, I know, I still haven't told you what it is yet.  I'm a tease.  The second thing wrong with it was the strapline below the title, which proclaimed this book to be 'A Novel of Suspense', a high falutin' wording that vaguely echoed Conrad's line in titles (Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard).  Old Joe could do it of course; but here, proclaiming the book to be 'A Novel of Suspense' only managed to sound both pompous and wistful at the same time.  This wasn't a quote from some gushing hack, mind you.  It was a claim advanced by the novel itself.  Any book promoting itself in such a way is setting expectations that it damn well better live up to.  Paradise Lost, however, does not.

Paradise Lost?  Yes, indeed.  I kid you not.  She called her book that.  Barging fearlessly where angels fear to treat, or something like that, and appropriating a title that might - just might - have a bit of history.

And the funny thing is, it is totally irrelevant.  There's no reason for anything to be called Paradise Lost.  I guess Jance just thought it sounded kinda cool.

The story stumbles along the predictable road of far too many 'series' novels - the tiresome set ups and rehashings of previous entries in the series, the irritating supporting entourage of characters you know you are supposed to love and don't, but which the writer is too enamoured with (or arrogantly thinks her readers are) and the annoying intrusions of the character's personal life into the narrative.  Because, ya know, this ain't a detective story, it's a story about a detective and that means we have to know all about Tough-But-Sensitive Joanna Brady's romantic tribulations and her uneasy relationship with her daughter and ... and, ye gods, if I wanted a family saga I'd read one. 

Plot wise, the novel is very predictable.  The killer becomes immediately obvious applying the standard 'least important character rule'.  This may have been intentional - I'd identified the killer as a prime suspect just because of his prominent placement, then decided he was too obviously a red herring, and devised a somewhat - to my mind - alternative.  Which might be a testament to Jance's powers of misdirection, if it weren't for the crashing sense of disappointment when the killer is revealed.  Scooby Doo did this sort of thing better.

So, no.  Something was lost.  The plot?  My interest?  But not paradise.  It was a long, long way a way from where I was at.

How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World, by Francis Wheen

I've just read this book for the second time, which might sound like a good thing but 'm not really sure it is. You see, I was at a second hand book sale and saw How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World and thought, "That Wheen chap is supposed to be quite clever; and I enjoyed (while not necessarily agreeing with vital bits of) his biography of Karl Marx a few years ago. So let's add this one to the stack." So I did, and I read it, and it was only after thirty or so pages that I realised with an uneasy sensation of unease that I had read the damn thing before. But completely blanked the experience from my memory. Which is not good, and something I never do. Usually.

What's even odder is that HMJCTW is quite a memorable book - even if you might struggle to remember the detail, the fact that you've spent several days in Wheen's bracing presence should be something that stick.  The tone or texture of the book is good - affecting the scornful rage at crap of Robert Hughes's Culture of Complaint and the hard headed progressive stance of Tom Franks's One Market Under God (which Wheen acknowledges a couple of times, in close enough juxtaposition and in similar enough terms to suggest proof reading wasn't really a priority or inappropriate starry eyed fanboyishness on Wheen's part). It's good, though not brilliant, and better when Wheen is flaying dragons closer to home, such as faux-lefties like Blair or Mandelson, or assailing the reliable hydra of Margaret Thatcher, than when delving into the Hellish netherworld of Post-Structuralist lunacies. That, of course, may be more to do with my personal prejudices and preferences.

Al Gore - another pseudo-leftie who is always given an easy ride because he made a film once about something or other and was robbed of his rightful inheritance, rather like Esau duped by Jacob - receives a roasting, his mealy mouthed defence of the tobacco industry cruelly but appropriately juxtaposed with his elegy for his dead sister, killed by lung cancer after smoking since she was a teen.

It seems to flag a little bit in the final chapter, where you can almost sense Wheen deliberately aiming a few blows at leftwing commentators, with a slightly self conscious air to ward off claims of bias - but it feels a bit half hearted. If you are going to do a take down of Noam Chomsky - and there is a man in need of a thorough taking down - then do it properly, not over a couple of pages. Chomsky's attempts to dismiss eyewitness testimony about the massacres in Cambodia is mentioned, for example - but the obvious link back to the Post-Structuralist attempts to deny reality, and the similarities between Chomsky's tactics and those of Holocaust Deniers is not made. Perhaps Wheen felt anyone who had ploughed through 300 pages of his book would have been sufficiently improved to make the connection without his prompting; and perhaps my chiding is the proof he was right. But I still feel that the final chapter needed to more ferocious than it was.

As with most books of this type, it is easy to read and easy to forget - most of the rage is forgotten after you put it down, and you slide back into a catatonic state of vague satisfaction. Most of the arguments, examples and anger have already faded from my mind - but hopeful, this time I'll at least remember that I have read it.

Reading list 2012

Slightly more cutting edge and here-and-now than the 2011 list:

1. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkein. Archetypal adventure story that isn't quite as big or exciting as it was when you were young. ***
2. Monsieur by Lawrence Durrell. Deeply strange mess of narrators and characters, who may have all written each other into existance. *
3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Long, mostly good account of the rise of Thomas Cromwell. Complex, and lacks some dramatic vitality. ***
4. Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone by JK Rowling. Likeable enough child's fantasy about an orphan wizard. **
5. The Mercy Seat by Martin Waites. Rubbish modern noirish thriller set in the North of England. Obvious plot and crap characters. Less than No Star
6. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Satire of celeb culture and reality TV as teens battle to the death for sport. What's not to like? **
7. The Devil's Footprints by John Burnside. Long-even-though-it-is-short novella about a middle aged plonker. No star
8. The Agenda by Bob Woodward. Intruiging account of the dealing and politics of Clinton's first few months. *
9. About A Boy by Nick Hornby. Smug and twee account a thirty something bloke and a miserable teenager. No star
10. The Hillicker Curse by James Ellroy. Brutally frank account of the author's sexual and social dysfunction, though perhaps too much. *
11. Falk by Joseph Conrad. Odd novella about romantic-sexual frustration, and cannibalism. Or was it the other way round? *
12. The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad by John Stape. Adequate introduction to the writer, but with little consideration of the writing. *
13. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. Second Hunger Games installment repeats the tropes of the first book while advancing the plot arc slightly. *
14. Other People's Wars by Nicky Hager. Interminable analysis of New Zealand's support of The War On Terror. Should have been interesting. Isn't. No star
15. Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli. Pointless yarn about a kid who runs about a lot, has no family and brings people together. Spinelli has done better. No star
16. Bridge to Terabithia by Katharine Paterson. In progress.
17. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling. In progress.
18. Clockers by Richard Price. In progress.
19. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. In progress.
20. The Third Reich by Michael Burleigh. In progress.
21. Capital, Vol. 1 by Karl Marx. In (very slow) progress.

What I read in 2011

For the historical record ...

1. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence. Remarkable account of the desert war in WW1. Long, doesn't suffer fools, but unique. ****
2. The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Samson. Lightweight cutesy mystery, irritatingly whimsical and obviously aimed at starting a franchise. No star
3. The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman. Elizabethan scientist Dr Dee investigates a murder with mythic and political resonances. Adequate. No star
4. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sprawling, unfocused tale about the gorgeous, flawed, Divers, whose beauty conceals murky secrets. **
5. Rommel by Desmond Young. Superb short biography of the field marshal, based on interviews with colleagues and family. ***
6. The Hollow Men by Nicky Hager. Interesting study of how the right tried to win power in New Zealand. Of moderate interest to denizens of other lands. **
7. Silas Marner by George Eliot. Slight and sentimental yarn about rural types. Not really very distinguished at all. No star
8. Out of Sight by Catherine Sampson. Dreary murder mystery that lurches from unlikely to absurd, with an "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo" feel to end. No star
9. The Dead Pool by Sue Walker. Very poor murder mystery marred obvious killer, predictable plot twists and some really clunky dialogue. Less Than No Star
10. Blood is Dirt by Robert Wilson. African tale of murder and corruption starts brilliantly, but loses its way. Great setting and first chapter. *
11. Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper. Part one of famous children's fantasy series. Readable enough, but not great to revisit. No star
12. Angel Isle by Peter Dickinson. Massive late work by one of Britain's greats. Magic, adventure and ideas, but it is the characters that sustain it. **
13. Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes. Crime novel that could have been interesting. Well written and observed, marred by whimsy. *
14. Out by Natsuo Kirino. Thriller about four women who conceal a murder, and the consequences. Dark and nasty but interesting and involving. **
15. 1974 by David Peace. Re-read. Ferocious murder shocker. Doesn't relent on the blood and depravity, but author's purpose isn't clear. *
16. The Twentieth Century by Howard Zinn. Class based history. Possibly a bit repetitive in the end. Zinn would argue this is because nothing's changed. *
17. Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin. A black actor grows up, confronting racism and his romantic travails. Great pages, dull chapters. No star
18. Aneurin Bevan by Michael Foot. Sympathetic, very detailed biography of the perennial Labour outsider. Part one of two. ***
19. The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke. Typically well written and interesting account of efforts to build an earth-to-orbit pulley system. *
20. City of Screams by John Brindley. Ambitious YA novel that has too much going on. Something about religion, evolution, violence and angels. No star
21. Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker. Overblown wannabe epic makes remarkable times - the New York draft riots - tiresome. *
22. Final Cut by Paul Thomas. Pacey mystery that loses its way halfway. Killer obvious, plot incoherent. No star
23. The Thin Man by Dashiell hammett. Entertaining whodunnit that perhaps has to work a bit too hard to gloss over its doubtful plot. **
24. The Man Who Went Up In Smoke by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Adequate policer marred by languid telling and clumsy denounement. We arrive there pages before the admirable Martin beck. *

Maniac Magee, by Jerry Spinelli

A few years ago, I read Loser, by Jerry Spinelli. This was on the recommendation of an interweb friend, who was rapturous in her praise of the book. I concurred. Loser is a beautifully done book. Deft in all the right places, heart felt in the others.

Odd to report that Maniac Magee, which I have just read, also by Mr Spinelli and covering some similar terrain, is much less interesting. Maniac Magee is a young lad who lost his parents in a slightly absurd locomotive accident, rejected his grandparents, and became a homeless waif who drifted (or rather ran) through the streets of his home town, touching many lives and changing things in many ways. Which sounds like a brilliant book. Only my summary is loads better than Spinelli's extended version, even if I do say so myself. because the version that Spinelli gives us is an incoherent stream of stuff happening, and - WHEEEE!! - more stuff happening, and - HEY!! - look out, here's some more stuff happening. There's something about a frog; a knot; lots of luridly sketched characters, one of whom is called Mars Bar; there are some bison - or were they yaks? - or something, anyway; and an old geezer with a lifetime of disappointments weighing him down; a sort of Boo Radley character who terrorises the local children; pizza; and all sorts of stuff.

None of which adds up to very much in the end, and leaves one with a disquieting sensation of not actually having not actually read the book at all, moments after the final page is finished.

No star

Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes

You are probably familiar with the phenomenon. You start to read a book, and it is really good. Really, really good. You read perhaps half of it, before exhaustion forces you to stop and rest. The, when you return to the book the next day, it somehow seems to be diminished.

I don't know what might cause this phenomenon, or if it has a fancy, official name. Perhaps it is the result of tiredness, returning to the book when you're still feeling worn out from the exertions of the previous night; perhaps it's because you can have too much of a good thing, and even sugar starts to sicken after a few tablespoonfuls; or perhaps there are writers who specialise in creating riveting first halves of novels, but less skilled at finishing them off. Whatever the cause, Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes is afflicted. It started well, kept me engrossed until I eventually had to stop and rest; and, when I returned the next day, seemed so much less than it had before.

It's a tale that might have been pirated from Chandler or Hammett. Charlie Watson's brother, Leo, dies in mysterious circumstances. Charlie has a hunch more to it than the police think. Charlie decides to poke about a bit, and discovers his brother had a second life, masquerading as a private detective, and there is, indeed, more to it than the police think. Only, rather than being set in San Fransico in the 20s, it's set in modern, middleclass suburban London, and instead of a shambling PI with a bad liver and a broken heart, our hero is a DJ with a wife and a new baby.

(The Tom Waits reference is deliberate, and relevant, by the way. Read on!)

First the good. Holmes can certainly write. He's got a wry, humour style that is easy to read with out being facile. he's got an eye for observation of people's foibles, the wear and tear of relationships and the intricacies of everyday life, particularly in its intimate, sotto voce miseries and joys. Holmes is probably sick of being compared to Nick Hornby, but - bluntly - he asks for it. Charlie exudes the same geekish, near autistic degree of self-absorption as Rob Fleming in High Fidelity. Charlie doesn't run a record store, but he does work as a DJ and Holmes even uses song lyrics to title the chapters. That's just asking to be tarred with the Hornby-lite brush. Still, Holmes amply demonstrates he can capture the desperation and frustration in every crappy life. And he can draw on the powers of darkness when it suits him, crafting dark and ominous scenes and loading innocuous ink on paper with menace. I don't think any parent could read the opening lines without a shiver of anticipatory horror:

She shouldn't have put the little one in the paddling pool. Not when she was so tired from night after night of 3 a.m. feeds and splintered sleep. Worse than that, she had been drinking.

Not long after, he sketches a scene where some scarily feasible young thugs run amok, egging each other on to trash a graveyard. It's the stuff of modern middle class nightmares, and well done. It seems, for a little while, that we're going headfirst down a very dark, nasty tunnel.

Then, suddenly, Holmes pulls back. Instead of the dark neo-noir nightmare we're promised, we get whimsy. We get, I dread to say, something closer to the cloying cuteness of the Mobile Library mysteries, rather than James Ellroy or David Peace. Holmes seems to recoil from the dark, silky textures he's found and prefers the lighthearted comfort of a pigs ear - in this case, the pig in question being Empress Of Blandings, the redoubtable sow described by PG Wodehouse. Instead of cynicism, bitterness and despair, we get ... silliness. Unnecessary, pointless silliness.

Take the dog. Look, the whole book hinges around Leo's efforts to find a dog. Now, that isn't a codeword for a stash of drugs or a dead body or a missing heiress. It's a dog. And the dog is called Charles Laughton. And - even worse - that isn't even a throwaway gag, it turns out to be fairly important in yoking together the two plot strands that constitute the mystery elements of the story, one of which is quite interesting, and the other, well, is about a dog.

Or there's the pointless absurdity in making the dead brother a *cough* professional Tom Waits impersonator. Now, the reason I picked this book off the shelf was because of the title. I figured any book referencing Rain Dogs in the title, and which features a brother who impersonates the great man, must have been written by a Tom Waits fanatic and would be imbued with the essence of Waits: darkness, hopeless (probably whisky fuelled) romance, bitter regret and the despair of chucking out time. Alas, no. It's entirely frivolous. Leo might as well have been a George Michael impersonator. Or an accountant. The Waits references are simply a schtick, a gizmo, a lure to people like me who are drawn to anything Waitsian.

The book is loaded with such stuff, and it wears thin pretty quick, especially because there are times - when Holmes plays it straight - that you can forgive the silliness, or convince yourself that he knows what he's doing and he'll make it all make sense in the end. So when it doesn't, and you realise that all the frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story was just frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story, you feel extra betrayed.

It's almost like Holmes had set out to write a dark urban thriller, albeit one set in the middleclass suburbs. He must have thought it would be interesting to add all these rococo elements, so he could show off his mastery as he wove magic with his unlikely ingredients. Then he chickened out, and was left with a poor farce around a double, or even triple, tragedy. Because people die in this book. Several of them. A young girl is coerced into performing in porn. Years of madness and despair are laid bare for us. There's nastiness in here, but none of it seems to mean anything at all, beyond an opportunity for Holmes to crack a few grating, smug jokes.

Rain Dogs and Love Cats could have been very good. Instead, it was just very disappointing. And its flaws were not flaws of over-arching ambition, pushing too far in the manner of David Peace; they were the flaws of cowardice, of safety seeking and the cheap laugh.

No star