Henry Gee's Blog, page 5

What I Read In February

Barbra Streisand: I first came across Barbra Streisand with a fluffy comic song in my parents’ record collection. It was ‘Second-Hand Rose’, which I now know was written in 1921 and originally performed by the music-hall comedienne and singer Fanny Brice. It was in a Broadway musical about Brice that Streisand made her name and shot to stardom. That was Funny Girl. Streisand was just 21. As a child she was practically feral. Her father died when she was an infant. Plainly an inconvenience to her cold stepfather and uncaring mother, she left home in her mid teens and hustled for acting and singing jobs, eventually scoring a residency at a well-known Manhattan night spot as well as stealing the show, aged just nineteen, with a supporting role in a Broadway production, I Can Get It For You Wholesale.  Her talents as singer and actor were spotted and she was cast as the lead in Funny Girl. That was made into a movie in which Streisand starred opposite Omar Sharif, and she never looked back. Dozens and dozens of albums followed, along with films, in which she played an ever more active part behind as well as in front of the camera. This culminated in Yentl, the story of an Orthodox Jewish girl who impersonates a man so she can acquire learning, in which Streisand not only starred, but wrote the screenplay, produced and directed — a first for a woman.  There are parallels with Streisand’s life and that of rock star Geddy Lee, whose memoir My Effin’ Life I reviewed last month. At first glance, it’s hard to imagine musicians as different as Lee and Streisand. But look closer: they are both Jewish; their fathers died when they were very young; neither went to college (which perhaps explains the ferocious curiosity of the autodidact); both are entirely self-taught as musicians, and have enjoyed lifelong and lauded careers. This mammoth memoir goes into immense detail about every project Streisand was involved in, her loves, and her hates. She settles old scores, talks about food (a lot), and recalls every outfit she’s every worn, anywhere. At almost 1,000 pages, it was (unusually for a celeb autobiography) written without literary assistance. Perhaps Streisand’s greatest coup was that she had written into her contracts, from a very early age, that she would have total creative control of any recording project she would be involved in. I suspect that this applied to this book, too. My Name Is Barbra is an enjoyable if over-long read, but somewhere there’s a place for us in Manhattan is a book editor sobbing into her skinny latte in frustration.

UPDATE: Since reading this I’ve started to listen to the audiobook. This makes more sense than the dead-tree version. It’s narrated by Barbra herself, naturally, and also has clips of the music she mentions along the way. It’s amazingly long — about 48 hours — so is likely to keep me out off mischief on dog walks for some time.

 

Iain Banks: Espedair Street Danny Weir is a gangly bug-eyed kid from a sink estate in Paisley, Scotland, who goes by the name of ‘Weird’ (a school joke: he was ‘Weir, D.’ in the school roll). He has just one talent – writing songs. In the early 70’s he linked up with a promising rock band, became their bass player and main songwriter, and enjoyed (if that’s the word) the life of 1970s rock excess. Years later, he lives in a converted folly in Glasgow, fabulously rich but somehow aimless. A concatenation of events leads him to contemplate suicide. That’s when his rockstar past collides with an uncertain future. But which will he choose? Espedair Street comes from the literary-novel side of Banks’ personality. With his middle initial ‘M’ he wrote brilliantly realised and influential space operas. I’ve read all of those, some of them many times, but haven’t read so many of his M-free works. Those I have read are varied in character and tone, from the ghoulishly gruesome Complicity to the affectionately dotty Whit to the readable but strangely heartless The Business to the fantastical Transitions to his gleefully revolting debut The Wasp Factory. Okay, perhaps I have read more of them than I first thought. Espedair Street tends to the darkly comic, with some amazing sitcom-style set pieces (always involving a great deal of alcohol and drugs), but is on the more affectionate side of his writing. I once met Banks in the coffee queue at a SF conference, and considering that many of his works are very dark, sometimes violent, he was the nicest, kindest, sweetest person imaginable. Perhaps he exorcised his demons in his writing. He died of cancer aged just 59: even with his prodigious literary output, he left us far too early.

Martin Popoff: Queen: Album By Album I rarely read, still less buy, books about rock musicians written by fans or journalists, even books about Queen, a band I’ve been fond of since I was eleven. I confess that I bought it by mistake, on eBay. I thought I was bidding on a book of Queen sheet music, as I have just joined a Queen tribute band as piano player and need to sort my Galileos from my Bismillahs (I bought that too, in the end). Still, it didn’t cost much, and when it arrived, I read it. It’s a series of transcribed interviews with various Queen fans, musicians and journalists conducted by rock journalist Popoff, each chapter analysing one of their many albums in chronological order from the self-titled debut in 1973 to their final record, Made In Heaven in 1995, released four years after Freddie Mercury’s death. I was pleased to see that not everyone agreed with one another, nor did they have universal praise for everything Queen did. Hot Space came in for a critical panning, which one would expect, but to my surprise A Kind Of Magic came off worse. Reading this did make me realise that no Queen album can be seen as a coherent whole. This is perhaps a function of the band having four strong-minded songwriters with very different tastes. That they worked so long together and produced (in my opinion) some fantastic and enduring music is all the more mysterious.

Harry Sidebottom: The Mad Emperor Until recently perhaps the only time anyone heard the name of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, better known as Elagabalus or Heliogabalus (reigned 218-222CE) was in the Gilbert and Sullivan song sung by the Modern Major General:

I know our mythic history, King Arthur’s and Sir Caradoc’s/ I answer hard acrostics, I’ve a pretty taste for Paradox/ I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus/ In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous.

But who was Heliogabalus, and what exactly were the crimes, so proverbially well-known in Victorian times that Gilbert and Sullivan’s audience would immediately have understood? History has painted Heliogabalus as the most depraved and dissolute of all the Roman Emperors (something that takes some doing). He was perhaps most notorious for his many extravagant banquets, which were not only decadent but dangerous. This idea was cemented in the 1888 painting The Roses of Heliogabalus by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a fine example of High Victoriana, showing guests at one of his soirees suffocating in a blizzard of rose petals. Lately, Heliogabalus has become a minor icon in parts of the LGBTQ+ movement, as a man who wanted to be regarded as a woman, and even (legend has it) that he inquired about having surgery to create a vagina. Wherefore the modern gender-fluid ideation?  Historian Harry Sidebottom tries to separate the man from the myth in this excellent book which — be warned — is much drier than you’d expect from the subject matter. The problem is that almost all we know of Heliogabalus comes from three sauces tzores sources, all variously unreliable, only two of which were written by contemporaries, and only one by someone who ever stood in the same room as Heliogabalus. What is certain is that Heliogabalus was a spectacularly incompetent Emperor. His lavish spending depleted the Imperial coffers; his habits alienated the Senate, the Army, the Plebs and the Imperial Household — the four constituencies that any competent Emperor would have to mollify; and, worst of all, he tried to introduce a new religion to Rome. Heliogabalus, although born in Rome, was raised in his family’s ancestral home of Emesa (modern-day Homs) in Syria, where the local god was Elagabal, a solar deity manifested as a large conical black stone. Heliogabalus was a High Priest of Elagabal and brought the god to Rome, where he insisted that it assume primacy over Jupiter, father of the Roman pantheon. Romans didn’t mind adding another God to their pantheon (they did it all the time) but objected to the demotion of Jupiter. That, along with the fact that Heliogabalus often wore priestly robes rather than a toga (a habit that the Romans found effeminate); was circumcised and didn’t eat pork (A similarity to Judaism — antisemitism, then as now, lurked close to the surface); and tended to promote people to high office on the basis of penis size — all contributed to his downfall. What Sidebottom doesn’t explain is how, a century or so later, Jupiter and the entire Roman pantheon were not only demoted but completely swept away by another obscure Oriental cult, an offshoot of the despised Judaism, that venerated a man nailed to a cross. But perhaps Constantine had better PR.

Richard Shepherd: Unnatural Causes When I was an undergraduate I went to a talk given by a forensic pathologist who recounted some grimly hilarious episodes from his casebook, many of which have stuck in the memory but which are probably unrepeatable nowadays. Imagine my anticipation when I was recommended this book by a colleague who, like me, enjoys a televisual emission called Silent Witness, which follows the lives of forensic pathologists as they solve mysterious deaths from the many clues that silent corpses can reveal — if you know where to look. Unlike Silent Witness, Unnatural Causes is the memoir of the real-life work of a forensic pathologist, one Richard Shepherd, who was switched on to cutting up dead bodies in his earliest youth, and ended up involved, directly or indirectly, in many celebrated cases, including the Marchioness river boat disaster, the Clapham rail crash, the 9/11 outrage, and the inquiry into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed.  The personal cost of such work proved to be enormous. His first marriage was sacrificed to his devotion to slicing and dicing, along with his mental health (in later life he suffered from PTSD) and — very nearly — his reputation, when he was referred to the General Medical Council over a trivial error (the case was dismissed). Shepherd clearly prefers the company of the dead, who, unlike the living, are unlikely to overload one with emotional demands (his young baby, his frustrated wife, the grieving relatives of the dead) or indulge in personal character assassinations (attack-dog barristers in court-room cross examinations). His only solace seems to have come from flying, an occupation that took him far away from the cares of the everyday. I have to say I found this a grim read, though I stuck it out doggedly to the end.

No News Is Good News

During a group discussion at work (as you both know, by day I’m with the Submerged Log Company) a colleague noted that among the various things one wouldn’t be allowed do with human subjects would be to deprive them of access to the news for five years.

Five years without the news, I thought. Bliss! Sign me up!

That was when I decided to  make myself nayesrein (I’ve just made that word up), so since 15 February I have stayed away from all sauces tzores sources of news, whether broadcast, print or online. I can choose not to watch TV news, or look at news websites, and when the aggressively inoffensive burble of BBC Radio 2 that’s usually on at home is interrupted by a news bulletin, Mrs Gee either switches it off, or I fire up Queen’s Greatest Hits from my iPhone into my bluetooth-equipped hearing aids. If in the supermarket, I avert my eyes from the come-on headlines on the news stand.

Earlier experiments with abstention from news (for a day or two, such as over a weekend) show that lack of exposure to news does improve my mood.

Consider: most of what news editors choose to report of world events is dreadful, and what makes it worse is that there is very little you can do about it. That doesn’t stop one being personally affected by the news. Ever since Recent Events in the Middle East, there has been a sharp rise in anti-semitism, evidenced with such strength of feeling and in such a large swath of the population that Jews like me feel, to say the least, intimidated. In short, it’s a downer.

How long will I abstain from news?

I don’t know yet. Some news has already leaked through (the death of a Russian opposition politician) but perhaps some crosstalk is inevitable. It reminds me of Anathem, a fine novel by Neal Stephenson, of a secluded order of monks whose members can choose to shield themselves from the outside world for a day, a year, ten years, a hundred years … even ten thousand years. I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep it up for that long.

I have a feeling that the world would be a far better place if we went back to a kind of world in which news came to us once a day, via a radiogram, at 9pm, and read by Alvar Liddell. Failing that one could get it from The Times, two days later.

Perhaps, you might argue, constant exposure to news should make for a more informed electorate. On the other hand, I am not at all sure that access to the news on demand, at any hour – any minute – of the day or night, is really healthy. And that’s aside from the invariable spin that news editors choose to put on the news, at times simply by choosing to include one item rather than another. It’s no wonder that fake news and conspiracy theorists have thrived in such a news-soaked atmosphere.

Hey, I have an idea. Wouldn’t it be great if the whole country, or even the whole world, simply refused to access any news site, or buy any newspaper, or listen to or watch news broadcasts, for a short while, such as a week, and do something more useful instead such as go for a walk? It would do wonders for our mental health.

What I Read In January

Geddy Lee: My Effin’ Life Frank Zappa once quipped (and I am working from memory here) that rock journalists are people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for the benefit of people who can’t read. I am mostly inclined to agree — the memoirs of rock musicians, often ghost-written, are not generally works of great literature, and neither is this one. It is however a great deal better than most, for two reasons. First, the author (who had a little editorial help) is the bass player and lead singer of the rock band Rush, which, as they came from Canada, have what can be described as a cult following (that’s me, and possibly Ricardipus) but only if one regards Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings as the biggest home movie ever made. Rush was very much on the intellectual end of the rock spectrum, combining dense, complex arrangements with lyrics based on science-fictional themes or social or historical commentary. Although much of this came from the drummer and lyricist, the late Neil Peart, it would hardly have succeeded were his bandmates, Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson, not also intellectually in tune, and this depth is echoed in this book. The second reason is Lee’s background. He was born Gershon Eliezer Weinrib to two Polish Jewish emigres who’d come to Canada following the Holocaust. Indeed, Lee’s parents met in a Nazi concentration camp, and that both survived can be put down to a series of hair-breadth ‘scapes. Lee has researched the Holocaust and his parents’ experiences and these and the wider context are described in two moving chapters. (‘Gershon’ became ‘Gary’ became ‘Geddy’ following his mother’s inability to pronounce ‘Gary’ in her thick Polish/Yiddish accent. ‘Eliezer’ was shortened to ‘Lee’). Lee’s father died when Lee was just twelve, leaving this nerdy boy with the responsibility of saying kaddish thrice a day for eleven months just before his own bar-mitzvah, a period he describes as his ‘year of woe’. Although Lee gave up formal religion after that, his Jewish background informs his writing and world view, and as a fellow Red-Sea Pedestrian whose mother was a Holocaust survivor, this part of the book resonated strongly with me. I suspect that many Rush fans will skip those chapters. The rest of the book will probably be of little interest to anyone else. But for Rush fans who happen to be Jewish, this will hit the spot.

Hilary Mantel: A Memoir of my Former Self: A Life In Writing The late Hilary Mantel was the author of Wolf Hall and its sequelae, together a fictionalised account of the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the canny and ruthless advisor to King Henry VIII. Wolf Hall and its immediate sequel, Bring Up The Bodies, both won the Booker Prize, but even more prestigious accolades awaited: Wolf Hall was my read of 2016, and the third volume, The Mirror and the Light, was in my top ten in 2021. A Memoir of my Former Self is an anthology of her journalism. It’s an eclectic collection, including assorted film reviews for the Spectator (she liked RoboCop, but not Mickey Rourke); delvings into her ancestry; reflections on the craft of writing historical fiction (and for her, writing was very much a craft); occasional pieces on travel; musings on a fetish for stationery; and — most of all — her reprinted Reith Lectures. What shines through this scatter of pieces, sometimes funny and demotic, occasionally dense and philosophical, is a barely suppressed rage at her own treatment by the medical profession. In her twenties she experienced agonising abdominal pains, which were brushed off by (male) doctors as symptoms of depression. It’s turned out that they were gynaecological and very real. Severe endometriosis required a complete hysterectomy and the excision of parts of her bladder and bowel at the age of 27, the consequences of which she was to endure for the rest of her life. Even in this supposedly enlightened age, the medical profession treats female patients as so many hysterical women, to be patronised with valium and told to go away and pull themselves together. Mantel’s death in 2022, aged only 70, from a stroke, was a grievous loss to literature.

Filming

I met this small grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) on the beach at Cromer last week. Although grey seals are fairly active at this time of year — you see their heads bobbing up just offshore now and again — in all my years of beachcombing this is the first time I have seen a live and apparently healthy seal on the beach. Please be reassured that I didn’t get quite as close as this picture suggests. I used quite a high zoom and cropped the image.  It’s always wise to keep some distance from wildlife, especially seals on the beach, to avoid distressing them: seals on the beach, especially young ones, can end up stranded, and die. This one didn’t seem ill or in any way discommoded, and a short time after I took this picture the seal flopped off towards the sea.

This sighting was all the more remarkable because I happened to be on the beach with a film crew. It was from European TV channel Arte, which came all that way to Cromer to interview me (me!) on the history of life on Earth as part of a fifthcoming forthcoming show, my recent volume on this subject having now appeared in five of the six languages in which it is broadcast (the six is French, and that edition is available for pre-order).

So I was accompanied by the producer and two cameramen. One had a small movie camera (it looked just like a top-spec SLR to me) on a ‘steadycam’ apparatus, which meant that the camera kept pointing in the desired direction no matter how the support armature was moved, rather like a bird of prey keeping its eye on the prize while hovering in mid-air. These things will be familiar to anyone who makes movies, but I had never seen one before, and it was eerie to watch. The other cameraman had a remote-controlled quadcopter drone, which was tiny. We were on the beach to get some atmospheric, establishing shots (luckily the rain and wind held off until after we had finished). You know the sort of thing, pictures of me walking up and down the beach looking thoughtful, all of which will be edited down to 0.003 seconds in the Final Cut, but which were fun to do. What was disconcerting to me (doing the walking up and down) was the drone hovering a few feet away from me at head height. It took quite a bit of concentration not to turn my head to look at it. But it was there, just out of the corner of my eye.

All of this was enjoyable recreation for a short spell, before I take up the cudgels of publicity again. I have been guesting on the occasional podcast (my latest is here) and am gearing up for an appearance at the Norwich Science Festival next month. By ‘gearing up’, I expect I shall turn up and open my mouth, hoping that something intelligible will come out of it. Winging it — it has always worked for me in the past. And the manuscript of my next book is now submitted, so in a few weeks I’ll probably have edits to take up, galleys to check, indexes to compile and so on and so forth. But I already have a website up so you can check on progress. It won’t be out in English for another year, but I’ve already sold translation rights for several foreign-language editions.

Apart from that I am enjoying recreations such as reading and learning to play songs by Queen on the piano. The former is fun and engaging, and I’ll post a review when I’m done (it’s a very big book). The latter are fun and engaging in a different way. Queen, especially the late Freddie Mercury, wrote proper songs, you know, with proper chords and melodies and everything, and it’s fun to engage with sheet music again. Most pop songs can be comped from a chord chart, but the only way to learn Love of my Life, for example, is from the dots, and the experience is comparable to playing a very simple Mozart piano sonata: simple enough that I can almost read it at sight. I’ve often thought that Mercury didn’t write pop songs so much as show tunes. The rusty gears of a long unused part of my brain grind into life once more, as they did when I read Bohemian Rhapsody from the sheet music aged 15.

To all of this tuneful activity must be added Shaken and Stirred, the second album from my recording project G&T. This took far longer to complete than it was meant to, but it’s here now, and it’s even getting some airplay. OK, it’s community internet radio, but it’s definitely something: my co-conspirator, guitarist Adrian Thomas, was interviewed on Poppyland Radio by DJ Simon Pink (you can listen to it here). Simon has interviewed me too for a broadcast soon.

In other news I am starting to dig a large pond in the garden. It’s fun planning such an exercise, and it’ll take some months to complete. There is a lot of earthmoving and levelling to be done, and at the age of 61 and three quarters I can only manage a small bit at a time (I am digging it by hand). Each spring the pond we currently have heaves with hot frog-on-frog action, but the space is my newt minute, and I’d like to give them a bit more elbow room for next year.

All of which means that I am climbing out of the slough of despond in which I had been mired last year, which basically wiped out spring and summer last year for me. I’m not out of it yet, and I may never be, but if I look after myself and get plenty of sleep and don’t take on too many commitments simultaneously all at once at the same time and all together, things will start to look up, I hope.

My Best Reads of 2023

This year I have read a number of books equivalent to the Answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, which is fewer than last year (62) or the year before (54). I was going to offer excuses for this (writing another book; an episode of depression that blew a hole out of much of the Spring and Summer) but my records show that this was more than 2020 (41) and a lot more than 2019 (18), so perhaps it’s, you know, about normal. By way of compensation, some of these books have been excellent and there are so many contenders for this year’s Top Ten that I’ve had to leave out some really good ones, and deciding the winner has been difficult. So here they are, in no particular order, as they say on the game shows:

Robin Dennell: From Arabia To The Pacific: How Our Species Colonised Asia Our species began as a hunter of open savannah in Africa. When it left Africa into Asia, it had to contend with environments as harsh and as different as arctic tundra and tropical rainforest – which it conquered as no other species has done. In this engaging book, archaeologist Robin Dennell explains how and why our species became so uniquely invasive. DISCLAIMER: I was sent a copy by the author.

 

 

David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks The only other novel of Mitchell’s I’ve read is Cloud Atlas, and, like that, The Bone Clocks consists of six novellas loosely tied together, though in conventional sequence rather than nested like layers of an onion. Each novella eavesdrops on a decade in the life of Holly Sykes, a seemingly very ordinary English woman, from teenage runaway to dying septuagenarian. The Bone Clocks is never less than ambitious but it is held up from collapse by the sheer quality of writing.

 

 

A. M. Homes: Days of Awe If  James Thurber had been born in the late twentieth century rather than the late nineteenth, and had been female (also Jewish) he might have turned out something like A. M. Homes, whose dissections of modern American life in this warm collection of short stories have the same satirical, surreal, occasionally fantastical and always affectionate tone, but which are always as sharp as a tack.

 

 

Robert Graves: Goodbye To All That  is an autobiography, written in the eminent classicist’s early thirties after he had fled to Majorca, swearing to leave England for good (hence the title). And it’s no wonder he wanted to get away from it all. Born in 1895, Graves was sent to a series of dismal preparatory schools before being thrown at Charterhouse and thence the Western Front, which he seems to have preferred to his schooldays. Given the often depressing nature of Graves’ experiences you’d think that reading this book might be a chore, but far from it. The tone is breezy and bright, and full of (often very dark) humour.

 

 

V. E. Schwab: The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue Adeline La Rue is an illiterate peasant girl born in the French countryside towards the end of the seventeenth century. Fearing a short, brutal life of drudgery and, at best, boredom, she makes a deal with the Devil to be free. But desperate souls never read the small print (the Devil being, of course, in the details) and Addie is destined to go through life instantly forgotten by everyone she meets. Until, that is, three hundred years later, when she meets Henry, manager of a bookstore in New York — who remembers her. The writing is astonishingly good. The characters, both prosaic and demonic, leap off the page.

 

 

William Boyd: Any Human Heart consists of extracts from the diaries of Logan Gonzago Mountstuart (1906-1991), a literary figure so insignificant that he is entirely fictional. For me it has echoes of Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess and The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham in its evocation of creative talent just trying to burst through the conventions of their times, not always successfully. It’s a testament to Boyd’s skill that you can’t help but like Mountstuart, despite the fact that he is an adulterous, philandering, voyeuristic drunk.

 

 

Ben Elton: Time and Time Again Very far from his 1980s stand-up heyday Elton has proved himself as a novelist of some skill, tackling ever more serious subjects. The one starts with a hypothetical discovery by Newton that were you to stand in a space the size of a closet in the basement of a building in Istanbul at a certain time in 2025, you’d be transported back to 1914. He leaves his calculations to posterity, and time travel is the fate of adventurer Hugh Stanton, who goes back to 1914 to prevent Archduke Franz Ferdinand from being assassinated — thus preventing the Great War.  But Stanton finds that just his very existence in the time stream into which he has so rudely dropped changes the course of events: and he is not the only person who’s had the idea of rebooting history.

 

 

Dara Horn: People Love Dead Jews Time and time again, the world slaughters Jews, only later on to say how sorry it is about it. In a disturbing, depressing (but endlessly interesting) book that takes in Jewish history from Renaissance Europe to 1920s China, Dara Horn shows that the world is only interested in Jews when they are dead. This is illustrated perfectly by the story of a real, live Jewish member of staff at Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam being told not to wear his kippah in public… for fear of giving offence.  Plus ca change.

 

 

Simon Sebag-Montefiore: The World: A Family History is a rather gruesome 4,000-year litany of murder, incest, deceit, massacres, religious mania, war, genocide, and some rather lavish banquets (which often end up in massacre, rape, war &c. &c.)  after which one feels that the sooner that Hom. sap. becomes extinct, the better. At more than 1,200 pages, it’s a terrific achievement. Having read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire last year (which is more than twice as long) I was surprised at my initial reluctance to read this, but once you pluck up the courage to dive in, the water’s blood-soaked lovely.

 

 

And this year’s winner is …

Gaia Vince: Nomad Century Because of climate change, the biggest migrations in human history are happening now, and will continue through the present century, as billions flee the global south. Vince sets out the scale of climate-change-caused disruption the world currently faces in stark, even terrifying terms before setting out a detailed manifesto on how the world might be saved or even made better by welcoming migrants into countries suffering depopulation, rather than putting obstacles before them. An important and indeed visionary book.

What I Read In December

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith: A City On Mars Just when I was finishing the draft of my next book, in which I was wondering idly about possible futures for people in space, I came across this entertaining and very refreshing corrective. Cheekily subtitled Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? the Weinersmiths puncture the starry-eyed optimism of space cadets such myself that the High Frontier will soon be ripe for human settlement. Yes, there may be some exciting technology, driven by the ambition of tech billionaires such as Messrs Musk and Bezos, but there is really far too much we don’t know about the capabilities of humans to survive in space that we need, realistically, to research, before we make that leap. To take just one thing (notwithstanding inasmuch as which that it’s an absolutely crucial … er … thing): although some 400 astronauts have ventured into orbit, and even then for only very short periods, the only humans who have ever been above the Earth’s magnetosphere were the Apollo astronauts, all of whom were men. To date, no woman has ever flown above the natural geodynamic shield that protects fragile flesh from the harsh environment of radiation in space. This means that there are no data on the effects that radiation has on the female reproductive system, still less on whether it is possible to bring foetuses to term in space, and that they should grow up healthy.

Oh, and another if rather different thing that the Weinersmith’s cover in depth: the questions raised by legal title and ownership of any part of space (this section of the book is much more interesting than it sounds). Can you just fly off to Mars and set up your own private empire there? Apparently not — the United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty (OST) forbids it. But the OST was created before anyone had landed on the Moon, and might need updating. Efforts to sequester pieces of space before such issues are hammered out to the general satisfaction might lead to conflict here on Earth.

Third, for perfectly good reasons of biology, as well as societal functioning, psychology and economics, successful colonies in space will need to be large, and house many thousands of people, if not millions, with the necessary spread of occupations that would allow a society to function. A few people cooped up in a tin can bazillions of miles from Earth won’t cut it. What if one of the colonists needs root-canal work and none of the other colonists is a dentist? Finally, space is dreadful. I mean, really dreadful. Yes, the views are nice, but the immediate environment is simultaneously extremely dull and absolutely lethal. There seems to be no rational reason why anyone would want to go into space. That doesn’t rule out any irrational ones. And when have human beings ever behaved rationally? All of which brings us to …

Simon Sebag-Montefiore: The World: A Family History This absolute unit of a tome was given to me last Christmas — yes, Christmas 2022 — but I had been put off by its forbidding hugeness (it weighs in at more than 1200 pages) and until the holidays I was only reading a few pages at a time, when to get the best out of it you really need to put in the hours. (This was the book I mentioned last time). Conceived as a modest little lockdown project by the eminent historian, it covers 4,000 years of human history, from the perspective of families — dynasts such as the Habsburgs, the Julio-Claudians, the Sauds, the Hohenzollerns, the Assads, the Gandhis, the Bonapartes, the Trumps, the Paleologoi and so on, and many more you’ll never have heard of. Taken together it’s a rather gruesome litany of murder, incest, deceit, massacres, religious mania, war, sexual perversion, more war, genocide, mutilation, slavery, antisemitism, misogyny, rape, more war and some rather lavish banquets (which often end up in massacre, rape, war &c. &c.)  after which one feels that the sooner that Hom. sap. becomes extinct, the better.

In a book this enormous there are bound to be mistakes. Isaac Newton went to Cambridge, not Oxford. Las Vegas is in Nevada, not Utah. And where he talks about ‘palm olive’ he really means ‘palm oil’. There are omissions, too (wherefore Idi Amin?) though not many (the comprehensive treatment is nothing short of staggering.) But no matter. Selecting the material, editing and proofreading a book this large will always be a challenge. There were quite a few clever words I had to look up: funambulist, bazzoon, contumacious, camarilla, chappal, malversation, rebarbative, to name but three six seven, but it’s hardly the author’s fault that such words are rarely encountered here in Cromer. He does trip up, though: former President Jimmy Carter can hardly be described as ‘toothsome’, though I know what he means. It’s not the author’s fault, however, that apart from writing such a doorstep in the first place, the print is small, and that the text of the footnotes (of which there are many) is microscopic. So much so that it prompted me to go out and buy a decent reading lamp.

On the positive side, the things that this book offers are, first, a sense of comparison. By looking at all of history — everything, all at once — you get a good idea of the simultaneity of events in widely different places. The book goes into far more detail about places such as South America, pre-conquest North America, China, India, central and south-east Asia and especially Africa than any book I’ve seen so far. I had no idea, for example, that the English Civil War took place at the same time that Shah Jahan was putting up the Taj Mahal.

This allows the history of individual places to be viewed in their proper — that is, global — perspective. For example, little is said about England until it started to become a European and then a global player. In the context of everything that was going on in the world during what we like to call the ‘Dark Ages’, all that stuff I enjoy reading so much about, such as the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle of Hastings and so on, was of marginal interest to the world at large, given the titanic events happening elsewhere at the same time, such as the Justinian plague, the spread of Islam, and so on.

And by driving the narrative forward on a truly global scale, one gets a good appreciation of the progress of such things as the Black Death, and the First World War. There are some surprising insights. For example, in this book, the Second World War started not with the German invasion of Poland, but the Japanese invasion of China some years earlier, for that’s when the dominoes started to fall.

But what this book offers most of all is a richer context of current events, usually studied in a very detailed, granular way. Here the author shines, as he has interviewed many of the key players, from Margaret Thatcher onwards. Here is Sebag-Montefiore on political correctness and the Culture Wars concerning which there is much current debate:

The open world had never been richer or more secure, yet America — emulated by the other comfort democracies — started to consume itself in vicious, self-mutilating schisms about history and nation, virtue and identity, every bit as demented as the christological controversies of Medieval Constantinople.

It’s a terrific achievement. Having read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire last year (which is more than twice as long) I was surprised at my initial reluctance to read this, but once you pluck up the courage to dive in, the water’s blood-soaked lovely.

What I Read In November, And Other Stuff

Betty M. Owen (ed): Eleven Great Horror Stories As you both probably know I am a confirmed Haunter of the Dark secondhand bookshops, in which emporia I like to paw pore over mossy grimoires anthologies of science fiction, horror and ghost stories. I tend to pick these up when I am too busy elsewhere to invest time and energy in something more substantial (more on this below), and when I do, I am enchanted, once again, by the charm of a well-turned short story. The stand-out story in this example is The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft, that master of cosmic schlock, whose fiction is, it has to be said, so bad that it’s good. As Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove wrote about Lovecraft in Trillion Year Spree, their history of SF, his work succeeds as psychological case history even if it fails as literature. Long after reading, and even when one has forgotten all the details, Lovecraft’s fiction leaves a kind of ectoplasmic stain on the mind. None of the other stories tend to stay as much in the memory as this, not even Poe’s The Oblong Box, and I’d say that most of the stories might be classified more as fantasy, even whimsy, than the kind of horror that gives one the heebie jeebies as one lies awake too afraid to see what’s making those strange snuffling sounds under the bed…

Which leads me to an apology. As the astute reader will have noted, this was the only book I read in November. That’s actually not true – to be precise, it’s the only book I completed in November. I am picking my way through an absolutely huge book, of which I am only reading a few pages at a time, and news of that will be fifthcoming forthcoming when I have finished it, whenever that may be.

One will also note that, apart from that, and if to add insult to injury, I’m posting this more than a month late. I offer as my only excuses that I have been in a state of bouleversement over what I shall euphemistically call World Events. That, and I have been busy completing my second album in G&T, my musical collaboration with guitarist Adrian Thomas.

Notwithstanding inasmuch as which I had a deadline weighing down on me — the delivery to the publishers of my thirdcoming forthcoming book. Reader, I succeeded in this task, and you can read more about it at the shiny new book website. The book should be out in 2024 and editions are already projected in Italian, Japanese, Korean and Romanian.

Hoping that you both have a Festive and Floofy winter break —

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice

This eldritch example sent in — preternaturally, of course — by the ever-chthonic Mr C. D.  of Leeds. Ai, Shub-Niggurath, notwithstanding inasmuch as which other imprecations of a similar sort.

What I Read In October

David Mitchell: Unruly Just so you know, this is not the same David Mitchell who wrote those modern fantasy classics Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks (this last reviewed here) and others. It is a different David Mitchell. This David Mitchell is the broadcaster and thinking-person’s comedian who happens to be married to Victoria Coren (another broadcaster and thinking-person’s comedian) and co-writer with Robert Webb of a number of amusing shows and sketches. My favourite is the one about the laboratoire, which should appeal to readers of Occam’s Typewriter. There are probably other David Mitchells. You might be one of them. If you are, please don’t write in. But I digress. Here the author – a history graduate – looks at the kings and queens of England from mythical times (Arthur) to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 — and the advent of Shakespeare, who, in the mouths of the kings in his history plays, accorded his characters a degree of self-knowledge that they probably never possessed in real life. After Elizabeth, the monarchs of England were monarchs of Scotland as well, so that would be a different book. Although Mitchell has many criticisms of monarchy, he feels that it’s nonetheless a cornerstone of the constitution, that unwritten compendium of more than a millennium of precedent, habit, tradition, kludge, fudge and bodge that explains and perhaps obscures the character of this Septic Sceptred Isle. At first, monarchs were the biggest thugs, who could marshal the most under-thugs. When Christianity came into the mix, the thuggery was papered over: monarchy was seen as something sacred, the monarch holding his (mostly his) office by God-given right. The rot set in when Henry Bolingbroke deposed Richard II and got away with it, becoming Henry IV, leading (eventually) to the Wars of the Roses. If God-given kings could be deposed, wherefore the God part? Before that, people had to put up with the monarchs they got, and sought to restrict their often dreadful government with institutions such as Magna Carta and what came, eventually, to be Parliament. The rich people did, anyway. The poor ones just had to suffer in silence. I listened to the audiobook version, narrated with brio by the author, with characteristic rantings and ravings. Notwithstanding inasmuch as which he is one of the  aforesaid thinking-person’s comedians, I learned a lot. This is perhaps not for those who cannot tolerate Anglo-Saxon Epithets (perhaps those who still think in Norman French, as English kings did for several centuries) for the good reason that two of the kings were a right couple of Cnuts.

A. M. Homes: This Book Will Save Your Life A few months ago I reviewed a collection of short stories by this author. I loved it, so was keen to try her work at novel length. It concerns the static life of Richard Novak, a wealthy freelance stock-exchange speculator who lives alone in his beautiful home in Los Angeles, seeing no-one but his housekeeper, nutritionist and personal trainer. Until the day when he is gripped with an inexplicable all-over pain, and his life slowly unravels into a series of seemingly random events. Richard runs into a variety of characters from the scriptwriter next door; the movie star who lives up the hill; the man who runs a donut shop downtown; and the horse that mysteriously materialises in the sinkhole that appears in his yard and into which his house threatens to disappear. Like her short stories, Homes’ novel has the same absurdist whimsy you’d associate with James Thurber (whose work, while dated in many ways, I like very much), but at novel length it threatens to degenerate into a case of one damned thing after another, and as such has echoes of Catch-22 (which I confess I liked very much less). This Book Will Save Your Life does seem to have a purpose, though. As much as he seems to be a ball-bearing batted around on some cruel pin table, Richard does find that life can be forced to have meaning, if only one can surmount the hazards.

Ben Elton: Time and Time Again You might recall that a while back I reviewed Making History by the national treasure that is Stephen Fry, a comic SFnal romp in which an academic historian and a quantum physicist work together to see if they can change history. It was a book very much in the ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ Alt.Hist. micro-genre. Quite by chance I came across another work in what now might be a nano- or even femto-genre, that is, a book in the ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ mode of Alt.Hist. by celebrated British comedians and writers not normal associated with SF, and that’s Ben Elton. Very far from his 1980s stand-up heyday of ‘knob jokes’ and poking fun at Margaret Thatcher, and even his glory days as writer of Blackadder, Elton has proved himself many times over as a novelist of some skill, tackling ever more serious subjects that have fewer and fewer laughs. One of his best was The First Casualty, about a pacifist police detective sent to investigate a murder on the Western Front, a place where killing is just normal. This was deeply dark, and full of memorable and ghastly imagery. The one that stuck most in my mind was of the over-laden soldier who stepped off the duckboards laid over the sodden ground and disappeared into the mud without trace. There’s more imagery of this kind in Time & Time Again. Compared with Making History, it’s darker, slicker, and much more cleverly plotted. It starts with a well-known episode in the life of Isaac Newton. After the Principia and other light classics, Newton entered a phase of deep depression. He eventually emerged, but did little serious physics again. Instead he dabbled in alchemy, Biblical numerology and became head of the Royal Mint. In Elton’s novel, Newton became depressed after discovering that gravity affected the passage of time, thus anticipating Einstein. Rather than being linear, time could twist and turn in serpentine ways, and even swallow itself. For example, Newton discovered that were you to stand in a space the size of a closet in the basement of a building in Istanbul at a certain time in 2025, you’d be transported back to 1914. He leaves his calculations to posterity, and time travel is the fate of former soldier and celebrity adventurer Hugh Stanton, who goes back to 1914 to prevent Archduke Franz Ferdinand from being assassinated in Sarajevo  — thus preventing the Great War — but then going to Berlin to bump off the militaristic Kaiser Wilhelm II. Without giving too much away, Elton has borrowed this scene from Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day Of The Jackal but made it much better — even for that acme of thrillers. However, Stanton finds that just his very existence in the time stream into which he has so rudely dropped changes the course of events unexpectedly. And he is not the only person who’s had the idea of rebooting history. But hey, I’m telling you the plot. Savage, dark and disturbing, this is one of the best thrillers I have read — and one of the best alt.hist SF novels too, right up there with Kingsley Amis’ The Alteration (and that’s saying something).

Dara Horn: People Love Dead Jews There is a day in the Jewish calendar that commemorates the dead of the Holocaust. It’s called Yom Ha’Shoah. Given that this exists, why should there be a different Holocaust Memorial Day? I have always wondered why I felt a bit uneasy about the latter, and this book articulates it perfectly. Holocaust Memorial Day is a convenient way in which people other than Jews can join in an orgy of virtue-signalling about how sorry they are about it all, piously observing that they’ll never let the slaughter of Jews happen again. As all Jews know, this is poppycock. For the same reasons I have never watched Holocaust porn such as Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas or The Pianist. (I did once watch The Piano, which is ghastly. But I digress). Time and time again, the world lets Jews be slaughtered, only later on to commemorate the deserted synagogues and say how sorry they are about it (if they can be bothered). People charged with Diversity and Inclusion always forget to mention Jews, because, in David Baddiel’s words, Jews don’t count. They are dispensible. In a disturbing, depressing (but endlessly interesting) book that takes in Jewish history from Renaissance Europe to 1920s China, Dara Horn shows that the world is only interested in Jews when they are dead. This is illustrated perfectly by the story of a real, live Jewish member of staff at Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam being told not to wear his kippah in public… for fear of giving offence. I write this in a state of barely repressed anger, when after the brutal murder and mutilation of around 1,400 Jews — the most lethal pogrom since the Holocaust — followed by apocalyptic death unleashed on Gaza — some 100,000 people march in London calling (in effect) for the destruction of even more Jews, with even the drivers of tube trains joining in, and the police just standing by and doing nothing about it. Plus ca change.

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice

This one from our correspondent Dr R___ H___, of a sign on a boardwalk at Qingdao, China, in what looks like rather threatening weather.