Henry Gee's Blog, page 7

What I Read In February

Dale E. Greenwalt: Remnants of Ancient Life There is more to fossils than bones and stones. Very rarely. soft tissue is preserved too, and Dale Greenwalt reviews what we can and cannot know about ancient life from the occasional scrap of chitin, cellulose, protein or DNA that niggardly posterity chances to leave behind. DISCLAIMER: I read a proof copy sent to me by a publication for whom I am writing a longer review.

 

 

 

 

 

Tim Marshall: The Future of Geography The High Frontier is a lawless place. But as Tim Marshall explains in this very readable guide to the latest in space exploration, the absence of rules makes space a dangerous place — for everyone on Planet Earth. The space programs of all the major and minor players are set out, as are the various dangers as they scramble for territory above our heads. It then goes all fizzy and futuristic at the end, and inexplicably misses out the most likely habitat for humans in space – hollowed-out asteroids, planetary surfaces being too difficult and expensive. DISCLAIMER: I was sent an advance copy by the publisher.

 

 

 

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, simultaneously driving all other hominids to extinction. In this engaging book, archaeologist Robin Dennell explains how and why our species became so uniquely invasive. It’s an academic text, but don’t let that put you off, as it’s never less than completely readable. It is, though, printed on that shiny paper academic publishers seem to love, you know, the grade that makes even slim volumes like this weigh a ton. DISCLAIMER: I was sent a copy by the author.

 

Arthur C. Clarke: The Deep Range I seem to have lost my reading mojo, so, frustrated by a deeply cerebral novel I could barely start, let alone finish ( I might succeed one day) I turned to this good old-fashioned SF from the good old-fashioned Arthur C. Clarke, an undemanding adventure in which a washed-up astronaut conquers his fears of space by mastering the secrets of the deep. It was written in 1957, and it shows, but I’ll make no apology for having enjoyed every minute.

The Very Hungry Pupperino

On Monday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate a sofa.

On Tuesday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate a set of six mahogany dining chairs.

On Wednesday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate a small semi-detached ex-Local-Authority house in Cromer, Norfolk.

On Thursday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate the award-winning Georgian market town of Holt, Norfolk.

On Friday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate 4,000 Holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.

On Saturday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate the Chernobyl nuclear power station and acquired remarkable superpowers.

On Sunday, the Very Hungry Pupperino ate Vladimir Putin, and there was Much Rejoicing.

On Monday, the Very Hungry Pupperino visited the vet who made her sick it all up again. After that she felt much better.

(Picture by Denise Reynolds at Glaven Veterinary Practice, Holt. With apologies to Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar).

What I Read In January

Penelope Fitzgerald: The Bookshop It is 1959, and widowed Florence Green opens a bookshop in the sleepy Suffolk town of Hardborough. Discovering a strain of quiet obstinacy she doesn’t know she has, she ignores or attempts to sidestep the  polite yet determinedly ruthless opposition of a town with minefields of unwritten social rules and hierarchies that will not be gainsaid. I left this in a state of righteous indignation on Mrs Green’s part, for all that she appears to have brought much of her woes upon herself.

 

 

 

 

Neil Gaiman (ed). Unnatural Creatures Having run out of original Neil Gaiman books to read (though one or two might have escaped my notice) imagine my pleasure at running across this anthology of tales curated by the man himself. It’s hard to pick favourites from a diversity of authors that includes Anthony Boucher and Saki, Nalo Hopkinson and Gahan Wilson, but I feel bound to reserve that honour for Gaiman’s own story The Sunbird, which he says was inspired by E. Nesbit but written in the style of R. A. Lafferty. If the tales have anything in common it is that if the tales themselves do not always have the air of fairy-tale whimsy, it lurks not too far beneath. Delightful.

 

 

 

 

Peter Frankopan: The New Silk Roads It must be awfully frustrating, being a modern historian like Peter Frankopan. No sooner than you publish a revised version of your 2015 best-seller The Silk Roads, than the world changes again. For this snapshot of the world in 2019 seems already out of date. His analysis of geopolitics centres on the ‘spine’ of Eurasia (between the eastern Mediteranean and China) and contrasts the ‘Belt and Road’ initiatives of China with the chaos of the Trump administration. But that was then. Trump has now been replaced with Biden, and the world has been reshaped once more by COVID. The New Silk Roads reads like a three-year-old feature in The Economist. Nothing wrong with that, but I expected more from a book that promises a glimpse into the future to say more than it was unpredictable and volatile. Because I knew that already.

 

 

 

Carl Chinn: Peaky Blinders The Real Story You will  both probably be familiar with Peaky Blinders, a stylish and violent televisual emission dealing with the fictional Birmingham bookmaker and gangster Tommy Shelby and his family in the years after the First World War. Shelby leads a gang called the Peaky Blinders, called after their habit of seeing razors into the brims of their peaked caps for use as weapons. Social historian Carl Chinn, descendant of Brummie backstreet bookies himself, shows that almost everything in the TV series is a myth. The peaky blinders were assorted Birmingham toughs who terrorised the poorer districts of Brum in the 1890s (by 1918 they were all but extinct); nobody sewed razors into peaked caps; and the real story is one of social deprivation, squalor and general thuggery, told here as one long litany of barely digested gobbets of court reports from contemporary newspapers.

 

 

Gary Gibson: Stealing Light I was in the mood for a good old-fashioned space opera, and, having read everything that Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds have had to offer, was casting around for something new but in that similar post-gothic vein. Glasgow-based Gary Gibson is a new author for me and on the strength of Stealing Light I’ll be in the market for more. The author has clearly thrown everything into the sensawunda electric kitchen sink — apocalyptic weapons, incomprehensibly ancient alien civilisations, amazing technology, a majestic plot, exotic sex, lashings of violence, and a feisty but flawed heroine who never gives up. Wonderful stuff. If you like that sort of thing. Which I do.

The Last Question

In his 1956 story The Last Question, Isaac Asimov has human beings ask computers of increasing power the Ultimate Question. You know, the one about Life, The Universe, and Everything. And the question goes something like this —

HOW CAN THE ENTROPY OF THE UNIVERSE BE MASSIVELY DECREASED?

In six scenes, in which humans evolve and their computers get more and more sophisticated, the answer always comes back something like this. No, not ’42’, but

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER

Eventually, in the Universe’s dying gasp, the very last human asks the gigantic mega cosmic hyper computer this same question, and … but I’d be spoiling it.

Well, what with the current fuss and brouhaha over quasi-intelligent wordybot ChatGPT, I thought I’d try it out. This is what happened.

… from which I learned that ChatGPT doesn’t quite have the succinct elegance of a professional SF writer.

It doesn’t have much of a sense of humour either. When I asked it

HOW MANY BEANS MAKE FIVE?

the answer came back

Which suggests that the way to tell the difference between true intelligence and a simulacrum is to tell it a joke.

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice

This one contributed by my correspondent Professor Trellis of North Wales and received with thanks. Presumably the injunction does not apply to Residents.

Hard of Hearing

While researching a recent tome I discovered much about the wonder that is mammalian hearing. As the so-called mammal-like reptiles of the Triassic shrank, from the size of large dogs to small dogs to cats to mice to shrews, they also changed in shape. The tooth-bearing bone of the lower jaw (the dentary) expanded, kettling the other bones at the back until they left the jaw completely and were swept into the middle-ear. There, the bones of the jaw joint, specifically the articular (in the back of the jaw) and the quadrate (the bone in the skull with which it articulated) became respectively the malleus and the incus, joining the time-hallowed stapes to give a chain of three tiny bones (the ossicles) connecting the eardrum to the inner ear. Mammals have a new jaw joint, in which the dentary articulates with another bone in the skull, the squamosal.

The result was transformative. The ossicles allowed hearing of refined sensitivity and at much higher pitches than reptiles could manage. Even birds — which still hear with the reptilian system, and its single stapes bone — cannot hear pitches higher than about 10 kilohertz (kHz), for all their trills and tweets and coos. Yet small children can hear up to 20 kHz, and this is positively cloth-eared compared with dogs (45 kHz), cats (85 kHz) and dolphins (160 kHz).

It was as if the first true mammals discovered a door in the high hedge surrounding the dark and dense woods in which they lived and found a wide-open vista the existence of which they had not suspected.

I use the word ‘small children’ above advisedly. As we humans age, we tend to lose our ability to detect the higher pitches (I am now 60). Over the past few years my own sensitivity to higher pitches has declined, such that I am now affectionately known chez Gee as ‘You Deaf Old Bugger’. After months of resistance I was finally persuaded to get my hearing tested, which I did at an audiology branch of a well-known chain of optician. My audiogram showed significant loss of sensitivity to higher-pitched sounds, especially above 2000 Hz (2 kHz). It is these frequencies that define consonants in everyday speech. This hearing loss explains why when Mrs Gee asks me to send reinforcements as the Russians are going to advance, I think she is asking me send three and fourpence, the Russians are going to a dance. The family has had to endure regular subtitling on TV – either that, or volumes too high for the rest of the family to tolerate.

Although I have abused my hearing throughout my life with exposure to loud music, mild to moderate age-related hearing loss is very common. There might also be a genetic element. Close relatives younger than I have hearing aids. So, in the past week I have joined the ranks of the hearing-aided.

What a revelation it has been.

I cannot pretend it is anything like the experience of the first mammals. However, we can turn down the volume on the TV and radio here at chez Gee and subtitles aren’t always a must. My hearing aids are also equipped with bluetooth which is brilliant. I can listen to music or audiobooks as I engage on my daily round — something I was used to doing with earbuds. And there is an app for that (of course) so I can control my hearing aids from my phone.

It was rather disconcerting initially. For the first two days or so the world did seem rather ‘fizzy’ as I could hear ‘noisy’ and high-pitched sounds well for the first time in years. I didn’t realise how much birdsong there is, even in midwinter. But I learn that it takes time for one to learn to live with the experience and after a few days it settles down.

There are downsides – if I want too play music through studio headphones I need to take my hearing aids out. And, as I am one of the few people with sufficient sense left in the world to wear an FFP2 mask in crowded public spaces (one wonders if the NHS would be quite so burdened with flu and COVID cases were mask wearing compulsory in public spaces),  putting on and removing a mask is quite tricky when there are hearing aids in the way. But that’s an argument, perhaps, for another time.

My Reads of 2022

In 2022 I consumed devoured read 62 books of various sizes, from slim novels to the multi-volume epic that is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which I counted as one book). I haven’t read as many books in a year since records began (2014, in my case), and, perhaps, ever. Perhaps there hasn’t been much to watch on the telly. I doubt if I’ll ever match it – since I had COVID I find it harder to concentrate, lose patience more easily and so take longer to finish things.

Here they are, in no particular order, as they say on the game shows.

Richard Fortey: A Curious Boy It was the author himself who recommended this book to me, as he said — and I hope, if he reads this, he won’t mind my saying so — that aspects of his book reminded him of me. And it did. It was uncanny. The geeky boy who loved nothing better than to roam the countryside; to spend time alone with collections of fossils, or insects, but who loved art, and literature, and music, ideas; was allergic to virtually every sport (Fortey played Tiddlywinks for Cambridge University: I represented the University at Scrabble); and who was drawn, ineluctably, into science. And writing about science. And even the same areas of science. Fortey’s Life: An Unauthorised Biography (perhaps his best known book) plows a furrow adjacent to my own writings. However, I suspect that Fortey and I are less long-lost brothers than exemplars of a type: variants of the same species. There are, to be sure, many people out there who will see themselves in this book, whether or not they became scientists — or, as Fortey nearly did, a historian of science. Or a poet. A joyous read.

Annie Proulx: Barkskins Like many people, I suppose, I first came across Annie Proulx with her redemptive novel The Shipping News. Later on I read Accordion Crimes. The two novels are totally different in scale and scope, yet both united by their unequalled grasp of the effects of history on the residents of North America, and their spare, unsentimental style. Barkskins follows this tradition. At the very end of the 17th century, two down-and-out youths from the slums of Paris are transported to New France — today’s Nova Scotia and New Brunswick — as indentured labourers. One, René Sel, becomes a woodsman, set with his axe to fell what seems to be the inexhaustible forests of the new continent. His descendants largely belong to the indigenous Micmac people — woodsmen, fishers, trappers, hunters, ever trying to hold on to the threads of their ancient traditions. The other, Charles Duquet, absconds, and eventually founds a mighty dynasty of lumber barons. So begins a walloping great family saga, which could have degenerated into a potboiler, but works because of Proulx’s signature style – pure, terse prose occasionally ornamented by sentences of breathtaking beauty and startling originality. Many of the characters are explored in depth — the Micmac paterfamilias Kuntaw Sel, the timber baroness Lavinia Duke — but most make only fleeting appearances. The real stars are the panoramic landscapes, the trees, the great forests of America, and, later, the world, felled by the human need to conquer and subjugate. If I could find one fault, it is the tendency to dump a lot of historical information into the mouths of her characters as a way of helping you, the reader, catch up with world events. The thing is, you see, Proulx’s best characters struggle when the need to express themselves hits their fundamental inability to carry it through, usually because, in their world — a tough world of physical hard labour to which Proulx’s style is ideally suited — doing counts for a lot more than saying. Think Brokeback Mountain. (Yes, Proulx wrote that, too). Most of her characters work best when they say little. By giving voice to the unlettered and inarticulate she elevates them to a kind of dignity and greatness.

Alastair Bonnett: Off The Map That a sense of place has meaning to human beings is the theme of this charming book, which, in its collection of 47 cartographic oddities, is an appeal to the importance of topophilia – a love of place. Failure to recognise this leads to consequences that vary from the amusing to the tragic. Among the motley collection of locales is Leningrad, a kind of alter ego to St Petersburg; the two fractally intertwined villages of Baarle-Nassau and Baale-Hertog, one in Belgium and the other in the Netherlands, each no more than a doorpost away; and the multiple enclaves-within-enclaves of the Chitmahals between India and Bangladesh whose inhabitants suffered discrimination from both states (a situation resolved in 2015, after this book was first published). One is reminded of China Miéville’s urban fantasy The City and the City, in which two entirely different cities share the same space (indeed, the author mentions this book). There is the urban landscape of Bonnett’s native Newcastle known only to foxes; the lay-bys known only to doggers; and Sandy Island, a sandbar in the South Pacific known only to cartographers, but which doesn’t actually exist at all. Through it all is a sense of regret that our sense of place has been replaced by a preoccupation with the journey. Old Mecca, for example, has largely been demolished, consisting mainly of the Grand Mosque where pilgrims gather, and the hectares of parking lots and hotels required to accommodate them.  And there’s a parking lot at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) that is a shanty village of campers that house the often transient airline staff, but with no power or running water. At the opposite extreme are the luxury cruise ships that have become a home from home for the super rich. Everywhere — but nowhere. A poignant read.

James Joyce: Ulysses The premise of Ulysses is simple. It follows a small group of characters through their lives in Dublin, Ireland, during the course of a single day, specifically, 16 June 1904. On the way it challenges, reflects, refracts, subverts, transmogrifies, distorts, compresses, explodes, eviscerates, reassembles, thesaurizes and recycles everything we think we know and understand about how human thought gets processed into language, or words on a page. Like many specimens of Anglo-Irish literature through the ages (by that I mean literature in English by writers who self-identify as Irish), all the way from Jonathan Swift and, as it happens, Thomas Beckett, to Spike Milligan and Roddy Doyle, Ulysses is marked by a strong sense of the absurd. Now, this doesn’t mean that there don’t exist writers from places other than Ireland who are absurdist, nor that there might be writers from Ireland who write in a more conventional style. But — and this isn’t just because the action takes place in Dublin — one does tend to find reading this easier if one’s internal voice takes on an Irish accent, and rather than trying to think too much about what’s going on, simply go with the flow. And it is, in general, a modernist work, which seems odd for a book that was published almost exactly 100 years ago, but if you’ve read the poems of T. S. Eliot, such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, you’ll know what to expect. The erudition (especially long quotations in Italian); the rich allusion; sometimes disconcerting contrasts between the internal worlds of the characters and their everyday circumstances; and above all the long, seemingly meaningless and certainly incomprehensible diversions. In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. What the Actual? Which room? Which women? And what’s with this Michelangelo business? And I thought this bus went to the station? Don’t sweat it, just enjoy the sounds of the words as they roll past: Ulysses is not so much a novel as a prose poem. What Joyce tries to do in Ulysses, apart from simply do things for — oh, heck, I’ll say it — the craic, is chart the interior monologues of characters as they happen. That is, quite literally, a stream of consciousness. So when the main protagonist, one Leopold Bloom, decides to go to a friend’s funeral, we don’t see him — as an omniscient narrator would, directing Bloom as a puppet — putting on his black suit and hat and going to the funeral, making small talk with his fellow mourners as they share the cab ride to the cemetery. Yes, we get that, but at the same time we witness every thought that passes across Bloom’s mind, whether everyday anxieties (he has a business appointment, and he needs to find time to do some shopping) or bubbling up from his subconscious, such as his sexual fantasies, and the state of his bowels, and all in the order in which they would happen — uncurated, unedited, unexpurgated and in real time — with no sense of propriety or logical order. This is no more than honest reportage of how people think, but our mind’s editor is as self-deluding as it is fierce, so what reaches the outside world is usually the cleaned up version — even more so for characters in fiction.  But if this is really how people think, it’s a wonder we can make any sense of our lives at all. As far as I know, no writer has worked harder to craft a work in such detail (Ulysses has a particularly knotty textual history and arguments persist to this day about the most authentic version) and yet at the same time remove himself from the process of his own creation. It is a remarkable book. Perhaps the most remarkable I have ever read. Will I read it again? Not on your Molly Bloom. But did I enjoy it? O yes, very yes I did yes yes YES!!

Lesley Glaister: Little Egypt This little book was a tonic. I was attracted because it is based around one of my favourite settings — a large country pile in an advanced state of decay, with secrets piled on secrets. Indeed, the house is the title character. Little Egypt is a grand house in the north of England. Like many grand houses, the First World War pretty much did for it, and the spendthrift owners progressively sold off more of the land until it is a  small island completely cut off from the rest of the world by a railway line, a dual carriageway and a superstore. Although dilapidated, it is still inhabited by nonagenarian twins Isis and Osiris, whose childhoods had been scarred by their abandonment in the house, during the 1920s, by their Egyptologist parents who were forever in Egypt squandering their wealth on a search for the fabled Tomb of Herihor. As the story opens, Osiris has long ago descended from eccentricity into madness, but Isis is still as sharp as a tack. For years she has been courted by a developer who wants to buy Little Egypt so it can be levelled to make way for yet another superstore. Isis is sorely tempted … until she remembers the awful secrets that the house conceals. The only flaw for me was a section in the middle in which the young twins actually travel to Egypt to see their awful parents. This seemed to go on longer than necessary. Mainly, I think, because those scenes didn’t feature the slowly decaying mansion, against which the tombs and temples of ancient Egypt seemed fresh and new.

Robert Harris: Conclave  To make a thriller out of the election of a new Pope would seem a tall order, given that almost all the characters are elderly men in frocks. Despite an almost total lack of sex or violence, and no car chases  Harris weaves a truly unputdownable tale about the election of a (fictional) Pope. The incumbent Pope has died after a long illness during which he has left several loose ends and made several seemingly unusual decisions. It falls to Cardinal Jacopo Lomeli, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, to organise the conclave of 118 of his fractious fellows in which a successor will be elected. Cue a great deal of intrigue, politicking, quotations from the Bible and some jaw-dropping plot twists. It might seem odd to write a novel about the Catholic Church these days that is in any way sympathetic. This one is — sympathetic, that is — because despite nods to the ongoing scandals involving sex abuse by the clergy, and the financial chicanery with which the Pontifical bank accounts have been associated, the protagonist is a fundamentally good man. Lomeli has spent a life in the Church, and despite his own repeated bouts of Imposter Syndrome he is clearly devout, well-liked, tactful and skilled in untangling the various problems that the task of running the conclave throws up. And if after reading this book you don’t know everything there is to know about running a Papal conclave, you’ve been reading a completely different book.

Martin Cruz Smith: Wolves East Dogs Arkady Renko, dogged Moscow detective (introduced in Smith’s 1981 novel Gorky Park), tries in vain to wrest any kind of order from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the ‘New Russia’, which is every bit as corrupt as the old. Here he investigates the case of millionaire Pasha Ivanov, who has — apparently — thrown himself to his death from his penthouse apartment. This seems out of character for the cheerful, outgoing Ivanov, whose apartment walls are decorated with pictures of himself with notable figures of the day. ‘He embraced Yeltsin and Clinton and the senior Bush. He beamed at Putin, who, as usual, seemed to suck on a sour tooth’. But Ivanov has been acting out of character of late. And the floor of his walk-in closet is covered in — of all things — salt. Renko’s trail leads nowhere. And more than nowhere, for he finds himself chasing leads in the radioactive exclusion zone around the wreck of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, a region inhabited by a bored militia, desperate scientists, shady scavengers and the peasants who refused to leave after one of the reactors blew up in 1986. Renko finds a kind of respite here, perhaps because he has no formal jurisdiction in Ukraine, even enjoying the rustic hospitality of the peasant farmers. ‘Arkady found the pickles crisp and sour, with perhaps a hint of strontium’. The plot is, eventually resolved, although perhaps rather too quickly and neatly after a series of unlikely coincidences. But a satisfying read nonetheless. Especially at the moment.

Kyle Harper: Plagues Upon The Earth. Kyle Harper is an historian, specialising in the history of disease. He is specifically interested in the pandemics that swept through the Roman Empire – events that might have changed the course of history. While thinking about that he reasoned that the entirety of human history, not just the Roman Empire, might have been shaped by contagion. Considered as apes, humans, as it turns out, are uncommonly prone to pestilence. Chimpanzees, for example, are strangers to bodily hygiene (they even like to snack on their own poo) and yet have fewer kinds of germs than humans. Harper’s history is divided into several eras. First came our prehistoric past, when we were mostly plagued by worms. After that came agriculture — an disaster for human health – in which humans began to live in close proximity to their domestic animals, one another, and the excrement of all. Diseases sprang up that exploited the fecal-oral route, and the possibilities of vector-borne transmission. The Iron Age saw a greater concentration of people in cities, adding respiratory diseases to the mix. Oh yes, and cholera. The Iron Age ended with the Columbian Interchange between Africa, Eurasia and the Americas, with dreadful consequences for all concerned. After that, modernity lurched into view with a greater realisation of the importance of hygiene, followed by the germ theory. For the first time, cities were places where people could safely be born, rather than sinks of mortality that required constant immigration to keep their populations from collapse. Today, people are more likely to die from accidents or genetic disorders than the infectious diseases that exerted such a grievous toll. Depending on who’s counting, there are around 200 viral, bacterial, protist, fungal or parasitic diseases that affect infect humans. Harper hadn’t meant to write this book during the COVID pandemic. That he has done underlines the importance of this book, which one can only feel guilty about for finding racily readable, given the subject. Humans, for all our control of the natural world (and perhaps because of it) are ever at the mercy of diseases.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou – God: An Anatomy. The God of the Bible is a musclebound, physical, jealous street-fighting brawler. He has feet, and hands, and legs, and arms, and a head, and viscera, and dangly bits. This physicality is hard to see, as it has been progressively airbrushed out in successive reworkings of the canonical texts that eventually became the Bible, largely as a result of Christianity which, with its constant worrying about the nature of the Holy Trinity has to pour the corporeal essence of God into Christ, leaving God as no more than some indefinable essence or pneuma, the smile of an ever disappearing Cheshire Cat. The author digs into the original Hebrew of the Bible texts and interprets them as products of the politically turbulent times in which they were written – the closing centuries of the last millennium BCE, when the tiny Yahweh-worshipping kingdoms of Israel and Judah were progressively despoiled, reorganised, destroyed, reorganised again and finally destroyed by waves of Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Hellenic Greeks and Romans. She also traces Yahweh back to his roots among a wider Levantine pantheon, as a storm god and son of the High God El, and who eventually took over El’s consort for his own — and shows how Yahweh fits in to the patterns of religion and worship characteristic of the region back to the earliest times. It should be a deeply scholarly work — and it is — but it’s also racy and engaging, and will give pause for thought to anyone who takes the King James Bible literally. Yes, the Bible should be interpreted literally. But in its original Hebrew, which I know from experience, is a very slippery fish, the translation of which will depend a great deal on the moral stance of the translator.

And the winner is…

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Folio Society Edition). What can one say about this 2,900-page epic? I found it as stately, well-proportioned and elegant as a Georgian mansion. As someone said of Wagner, it has marvellous moments, and rather tedious quarters of an hour — but the overall effect is spectacular. To be sure, it wouldn’t do for every day. Rather like turning up at the supermarket to do the weekly shop in a chauffeur-driven Rolls. But as a prose stylist, Gibbon is (in my opinion) unmatched.

What I Read In December

Richard Fortey: A Curious Boy It was the author himself who recommended this book to me, as he said — and I hope, if he reads this, he won’t mind my saying so — that aspects of his book reminded him of me. And it did. It was uncanny. The geeky boy who loved nothing better than to roam the countryside; to spend time alone with collections of fossils, or insects, but who loved art, and literature, and music, ideas; was allergic to virtually every sport (Fortey played Tiddlywinks for Cambridge University: I represented the University at Scrabble); and who was drawn, ineluctably, into science. And writing about science. And even the same areas of science. Fortey’s Life: An Unauthorised Biography (perhaps his best known book) plows a furrow adjacent to my own writings. However, I suspect that Fortey and I are less long-lost brothers than exemplars of a type: variants of the same species. There are, to be sure, many people out there who will see themselves in this book, whether or not they became scientists — or, as Fortey nearly did, a historian of science. Or a poet. A joyous read.
Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, (vol. 8, Folio Society Edition). In this, the final volume, we see the Byzantine Empire down on its uppers. Reduced to Constantinople and its environs, with a small scattering of Aegean Islands and enclaves, the final conquest was only a matter of time. Quite a lot of time, as it turned out, as the Turks were perpetually distracted by their own internal wrangling; pressures from outside, notably the incursions of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane; and more prosaic matters. For example, the conquests of the Sultan Bajazet were brought up short

not by the miraculous interposition of the apostle [St Peter], not by a crusade of the Christian powers, but by a long and painful fit of the gout.

The Byzantines did themselves no favours by ceaseless internal scheming and schism. Slowly, their ability to command resources dwindled. When one Byzantine prince presented to his inamorata a crown of diamonds and pearls, ‘he informed her, with a smile,

that this precious ornament arose from the sale of the eggs of his innumerable poultry.

At times, the relic of the Roman Empire maintained a precarious existence thanks to the munificence of the Turks themselves (to whom they paid tribute); the energies of the Italian maritime republics, particularly Genoa, which maintained a sizeable presence in Constantinople until its fall in 1453; or simply by playing one antagonist off against another. Finally, the Byzantines attempted to save themselves by overtures to the West: that a reunification of their two divergent churches might be backed up by western arms to stay the Turks. Various synods were convened. All ended in failure.

Perhaps the key to the final fall of Constantinople was the invention of gunpowder, for the use of which the Turks created the most immense cannon (reminiscent to news watchers of a certain age of the supposed ‘Supergun’ of the Late Saddam Hussein, despot of Iraq.) Gibbon is not impressed:

If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.

Gibbon’s description of the fall of Constantinople is gripping.

From the lines, the galleys, and the bridge, the Ottoman artillery thundered on all sides; and the camp and city, the Greeks and the Turks, were involved in a cloud of smoke, which could only be dispelled by the final deliverance or destruction of the Roman Empire.

The final chapters form a kind of coda, in which Gibbon examines the state and governance of Rome itself, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. In doing so he comes full circle, considering Rome as a city state, with all its petty wrangles, and with even less of a reach than the infant Roman Republic.

What can one say, finally, about this 2,900-page epic? I found it as stately, well-proportioned and elegant as a Georgian mansion. As someone said of Wagner, it has marvellous moments, and rather tedious quarters of an hour — but the overall effect is spectacular. To be sure, it wouldn’t do for every day. Rather like turning up at the supermarket to do the weekly shop in a chauffeur-driven Rolls. But as a prose stylist, Gibbon is (in my opinion) unmatched.

Chris Beckett: Beneath the World, a Sea ChrisBeckett is one of the most original SF authors writing today. His novel Dark Eden, about a group of people descended from astronauts stranded on an alien planet, was one of the best SF novels I’ve read in years. Beneath the World, a Sea, conjures similar atmospheres, though in a very different setting. Ben Ronson is a detective sent to the Submundo Delta, a strange region of Brazil, cut off from the rest of the world, with an unearthly flora and fauna. He is there to investigate the killings of the duendes, the Submundo’s weird indigenes, which have a disturbing psychic effect on anyone who gets close to them. It’s a bit Heart of Darkness, and asks penetrating questions about our identities as people. Who are we, really, once we have stripped away the learned reactions to the rest of the world, the personae we are forced to adopt in order to get along in society?

 

Yuval Noah Harari: Homo Deus I found this book quite infuriating – possibly because the subtitle (‘A Brief History of Tomorrow’) is misleading, and also because I found it thoroughly overwritten. It does say some things about the future, but you have to wade through 400 pages of tendentious moral philosophy to get to it, after which it proposes a kind of new religion called ‘Dataism’ in which information flow is everything and individual humans are redundant. In doing so it proposes a number of axioms, some of which are problematic. The idea, first, that organisms can be reduced to ‘algorithms’ is twenty years out of date. The second, that there really is no individual ‘self’ is plainly wrong. Although the story the brain tells us about the world is incontestably biased and demonstrably inconsistent, it is a story, and no worse for all that. But the most frustrating thing about this book is that it has been written without an editor. Overstuffed and repetitive, it would have been entertaining at a third the length.

Apotheosis

You’ll both be aware by now that my recent tome was shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize for 2022. You’ll recall that my book kept some mighty company, so imagine my surprise and delight when, at a ceremony on 29 November, that it was voted the winner. Please head over to the book’s official website for all the hoopla.

What I Read In November

Frans de Waal: Different A salutary and timely corrective to all those engaged in debates about sex and gender that nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution. Humans are animals, and so are our various itches and scratches. The problem, says distinguished primatologist de Waal, is that humans cannot help but put things into binary categories. ‘Sex’ is biological and for reproduction, and ‘gender’ is a cultural overlay. But chimpanzees (the common or perhaps less frequent variety) and bonobos (what used to be called pygmy chimpanzees) are two species, equally closely related to us, neither of which have language, and in whose universe the ideas of sex and reproduction cannot possibly be connected. Chimpanzees are male-dominated (mostly) and violent (sometimes); bonobos are female-dominated and have sex, in various positions, as a way of saying ‘hello’. Because animals have no language, and at the same time no sense that sex and reproduction are connected, there are likewise no simple lines to be drawn between sex for procreation and sex simply as something pleasurable to do, which logically leads to a rather relaxed idea of gender. This should be absolutely required reading for any person in a gender-studies program. The problem is that when they finish it they might realise that they don’t really have a program to go back to, because de Waal has explained everything. And I mean everything. De Waal takes conservatives and progressive attitudes to sex and gender to task with brio, and does so in such a pleasant, well-meaning, enlightened way that no-one could possibly be offended. Could they? Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2022 (DISCLAIMER: as is one of mine).

Richard Osman: The Bullet that Missed by way of temporary respite from the Roman Empire I dived into this, the third in the series of whodunits by That Man On The Telly. It follows directly on from The Man Who Died Twice which in turn follows The Thursday Murder Club, and if you haven’t read any of these you are missing out. The Thursday Murder Club is an unlikely quartet of pensioners living in a retirement village that solves murders. They are not afraid to get their hands dirty themselves. Affectionate, warm, and killingly funny, The Bullet That Missed is the best of the three so far in its gloriously slick, twisty and turny way.

 

 

 

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 7 (Folio Society Edition) The greatness of Rome has long sunk into obscurity, and the successor, in Constantinople, is going the same way. In this, the penultimate volume, we read how the tide of Islamic expansion reached its highest and began to recede; how new invaders — Normans, Hungarians, Bulgarians — interrupted the course of life in Europe; and, most of all, of the Crusades, a series of events that epitomises heroic failure. Gibbon first wonders at how the seemingly inexorable rise of Islam was finally checked, and concludes that it was the result of its own internal factionalism. Had it stayed together, Islam might have gone much further, a reflection that is the source of one of the most famous quotes from this most quotable of authors:

Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.

Despite numerous assaults, Constantinople hung on by the skin of its teeth: but, asks Gibbon, to what end? ‘In the revolution of ten centuries’, he writes,

not a single discovery was made to exalt the dignity or promote the happiness of mankind. Not a single idea has been added to the speculative systems of antiquity, and a succession of patient disciples became in their turn the dogmatic teachers of the next servile generation.

Where the first legions of the Prophet failed, the Seljuk Turks nearly succeeded, and indeed wrested from the Roman orbit, after a millennium, the Levant, including the holy places. At first, lucrative tourism allowed for pilgrimages to be made, but it entered the mind of one Peter the Hermit, a native of Amiens, that the Holy Land should be reclaimed for Christ. He returned from Jerusalem ‘an accomplished fanatic’, and found many willing ears, as ‘he excelled in the popular madness of the times’ — and so the First Crusade was born. Not that the motives of the crusaders were wholly or even partly honourable. Crusaders were granted relief from all their sins, unleashing a tide of licensed yobbery on the peaceful nations of Europe.

At the voice of their pastor, the robber, the incendiary, the homicide, arose by thousands to redeem their souls by repeating on the infidels the same deeds which they had exercised against their Christian brethren; and the terms of atonement were eagerly embraced by offenders of every rank and denomination.

Although some of the crusaders held on to statelets in Syria and Palestine for a few decades, they were ultimately defeated and the result of a great deal of religious fervour, spilled blood, sack, pillage and rapine was – well, bupkes. The ultimate betrayal was the Fourth Crusade in which the impoverished Byzantine Emperor called on the West to push back the Turks from his beleaguered city, resulting in the conquest of Constantinople itself, and its rule for sixty years by a consortium of petty French barons and Venetian merchant princes.

One might have thought, opines Gibbon, wistfully, that a result of this peculiar episode might have had the benefit of the direct infusion of ancient Greek literature and philosophy into Latin, rather than its circuitous route via Arabic. But the crusades ‘appear to me to have checked rather than forwarded the maturity of Europe’, and

if the ninth and tenth centuries were the times of darkness, the thirteenth and fourteenth were the age of absurdity and fable.

It all amounted to a waste of human capital on so monumental a scale that it makes the shame of it quite meaningless. But perhaps one benefit might have been the beginnings of the loosening of the feudal system. If the flower of European chivalry mortgaged their estates only to kill and pillage and bleed and die for Christ in a far-off country, then

The conflagration which destroyed the tall and barren trees of the forest gave air and scope to the vegetation of the smaller and nutritive plants of the soil.

 

Rose Anne Kenny; Age Proof  The world is greying, and rapidly, and in medicine there is perhaps no greater growth area than gerontology – the medical issues facing older people. But as gerontologist Kenny shows in this book, you are as old as you feel, and there are myriad ways to keep youthful, cheerful and in the peak of fun and brio. In truth, this is not really what I was expecting from a science book. Although it does contain a lot of science, it reads much more as a self-help manual. There is no real narrative arc, and one could probably benefit by treating it as one of those old-fashioned health encyclopaedias you’d dip into to discover this and that. It could have been fleshed out with a lot more anecdotes, such as the one about the woman whose heart stopped whenever her son-in-law told her a dirty joke (which reminded me, if not the author, of the famous Monty Python sketch about the joke that’s so funny that people hearing it died laughing). It would also have benefited from a more scrupulous edit, and — call me grumpy — a lot fewer exclamation marks! (Here are a few more!!!) Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2022 (a contest in which I also have a canine).

Peter Stott: Hot Air If ever there was a book too make you think, this is it. But beware – it will also make you angry. Angry at the wicked, selfish, and, it has to be said, evil people and institutions that seek to undermine, traduce, vilify and even criminalise the pursuit of science, for political ends, and in the service of powerful vested interests. Peter Stott comes across as the typical mild-mannered scientist who, in the early 1990s, found himself on the ground floor of the emerging science of climate change. As a scientist at the UK Meteorological Office, he has been at the sharp end of the research that shows, increasingly, and now unquestionably, that the world’s climate is changing, very rapidly, as a direct consequence of human activities. But he has also been at the sharp end of well-funded efforts to undermine the credibility of the science and the scientists themselves, aided at times by cackhanded and ill-informed news editors who wheel out long-discredited climate-change ‘sceptics’ for the sake of what they call ‘balance’. Thankfully the balance has shifted, for now, to embrace the reality of anthropogenic climate change – but for how long? Jair Bolsonaro was bested in Brazil by only a whisker, and if Trump succeeds in becoming US President again, the world might once again switch to the dark side. Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize of 2022 (and, as you know by now, I also have a dog in that fight).