Adrian Selby's Blog, page 7

Books – The Girl With All The Gifts

Minor spoilers regarding early part of novel ahead…

I’ve not personally overdosed on zombie movies/games/books/TV shows/tee shirts etc. but because the rest of the world has, I’ve got a second-hand kind of weariness of it, so much so I have tried to avoid it. I’ve done the odd George Romero, loved Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later, but then I’d had enough.

I was thus in the glorious state of not actually knowing that The Girl With All The Gifts, by M.R.Carey, is a book set in a world overrun with zombies. I didn’t know what Melanie, the young protagonist, was, as the blurb was thankfully vague, but don’t worry, it’s not a big spoiler.

So anyway, imagine my delight when I couldn’t put the damn book down.

This is a zombie novel with a great big heart and a conundrum.  Why are so many people zombies in the classic moronic sense, and why are some, like Melanie, full of empathy and good at quadratic equations?

Soon enough the story becomes about Melanie, her beloved teacher Miss Justineau, a scientist and a couple of soldiers forced on the run.  The big heart comes from Carey’s great characters, who, despite being somewhat stereotypical (the kind teacher, the cold scientist, the hardened sergeant, the nervous rookie) nevertheless have their flaws and ‘soft sides’ exposed through their travails.  It’s effortlessly done, and you’re rooting for the whole not-so-merry band all the way along.  Melanie’s presence, exemplifying this unique take on the zombie mythos, adds a delicious tension between them, as well as her own unique struggle as she learns and then has to deal with what she is.  Indeed, they are all challenged by her, and it should be obvious to most readers that there’s a clear message here about prejudice, ignorance and humanity more generally.

Though I do have limited reading in the genre, I thought Carey’s ’cause’ of the zombie plague was engaging and fairly plausible and it is critical to their challenges and the highly satisfying and surprising conclusion.

The other interesting thing about the novel was the narration itself.  I didn’t sense a consistent voice but the character of that voice came across as though it was a mate telling you it all down the pub; the narrator doesn’t come across as typically dispassionate.  It reminded me of Wolf Hall, the sense of the narrator being one of the characters telling their story in the third person.  It certainly lent a warmth to the storytelling here, and as with Mantel’s book, you feel a bit closer to the characters where this technique is adopted and it led to some lovely phrases:

“(strings) wrapped loosely around and around the little corpse as though the rat had decided to try to be an octopus then hadn’t known how to stop”

and:

“Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved.  You’ve already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.”

There are plenty of beautiful phrases like these throughout the novel that elevate it without clogging it up.  I felt there was one off note later on in the book, a scene with one of the soldiers, of which I’ll say no more but it did so stick out like a sore thumb I’m still wondering what Carey was thinking, but that aside, I don’t hesitate to recommend it to you for a gripping summer read.

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Books – The Deluge

I’d been putting off trying to articulate my thoughts on Adam Tooze’s masterful analysis of global history from 1916-1931, The Deluge, because, being so ignorant about that era, I wasn’t sure what I could say other than ‘read it, it’ll educate ya’, for fear of drawing incorrect or misleading conclusions from this densely detailed and nuanced appraisal of the post-WW1 political order.  I’ll confess it was a struggle, but a fascinating one.  Mr. Tooze, if you ever read this, apologies :)

Anyway, I read an article this morning about academics giving that lunatic George Osborne a shoeing about his desire to enshrine budget surpluses in law.  It brought home one of my big take-aways from Tooze’s thesis, in particular this comment from the article:

“77 of the best-known academic economists, including French economist Thomas Piketty and Cambridge professor Ha-Joon Chang, said the chancellor was turning a blind eye to the complexities of a 21st-century economy that demanded governments remain flexible and responsive to changing global events.”

The thing is, it isn’t a 21st-century problem.  It was a problem back in 1916, and it’s been a problem ever since and it arguably caused World War II.  What was so eye-opening about Adam Tooze’s book was the extent to which the world’s economies were and thus are interconnected, how decisions made by banks and governments in the US and the UK, then, tragically, Germany in 1929, rippled across the world and back again, fuelling nationalism, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary fervour, the Depression etc.  Decisions politicians make about their own economies in isolation never truly affect those economies in isolation.

Because no economy, a hundred years ago or now, is in isolation, George.

Tooze, in his introduction, outlines a key plank of what he believes went wrong after the war that was meant to end all wars, and it begins during it:

(President Woodrow Wilson’s)”mission was to ensure not that the ‘right side’ won in World War I, but that no side did.  He refused any overt association with the Entente.  Only a peace without victory, the goal that he announced…to the Senate in 1917, could ensure that the United States emerged as the truly undisputed arbiter of world affairs.  This book will argue that despite the fiasco of that policy already in the spring of 1917…this would remain the basic objective of Wilson and his successors right down to the 1930s.”

They did not see supporting Britain and France as supporting ‘good’ but supporting rampant imperialists, in that respect no better than Germany, and actually more of a threat.

“The ghost at all our feasts” was a term used by H.Nicolson to describe US policy towards Europe – present but affecting not to be.

What was interesting to read, later on, was Tooze’s belief that Wilson and the US in general was so scarred by its own civil war that it had a kind of genetic antipathy to the ‘imperialists’ of Great Britain, France and other powers on the ‘dark continent’.  Arguably, the failures of the victorious powers to secure, with the US at their head, a lasting peace, lay in this antipathy residing in the world’s first superpower.  For the first time in history, as Hitler, Churchill and Trotsky all realised fully, the US was bigger and stronger than any nation had ever been.  They could no longer consider their place in the world without also considering their relationship to it.  What rankled for at least Trotsky and anyone else that did not share its liberalism was that the US chose to exert its power through its economy and ideology, that it was using its power to establish a blueprint for the world’s social order and couldn’t be stopped from doing so.  Yet insofar as it proposed to the world a desire to see it at peace such that free trade and liberalism could spread, and it had ample resources to achieve this, why did it fail?

In the early part of the book it was interesting to see how this played out as World War I reached 1916 and 1917, when formally the US government was preaching non-intervention while Wall Street was independently lending massive amounts to the Entente to fund their war effort.  In 1916 JP Morgan, principle lender in all this, apparently lent almost all the money the Entente spent on its war effort that year.  This lending, and its impact on the US economy via its exports began to have such a powerful effect that the US was being drawn into the conflict regardless, and it was becoming clear which side, but it had nothing to do with US foreign policy.  However, the US was, at the time, equally concerned about the strength of the British Navy and its empire as it was the Germans.  The counterfactuals over these two years come thick and fast, particularly how close the US might have been to supporting Germany if not for a disastrous decision on their part to increase U-Boat attacks on US shipping.  Even with a number of its ships being sunk, it took time before they fell into line with the Entente and started sending troops and supplies over the Atlantic.

There are some fascinating minor facts that came out of this, such as some of the people involved in organising the allied supply infrastructures would later go on to inform what became the EU, for this was the first truly international logistics effort between European nations, alongside the US.

One of the early counterfactuals relates to how closely the call for ‘peace without victory’ might have gained the credence it needed to overcome an Entente opposition so determined to win at all costs, to get a decisive victory despite the impact of this crippling the home economies.  If Wilson had kept the US out of joining sides for just a few months, it would have been bolstered in its position by the Russians, whose revolution in 1917, almost at the same time, led to their own desire for a ‘peace without victory’, all the more stunning in its force because they had already lost hundreds of thousands in the war.  For a country to effectively ‘write off’ its war dead for the sake of peace without victory, for a new world order, was a bold and progressive step, one unlikely to have been ignored in concert with the US position.  The Russians were advocating abolition of the death penalty and removing restrictions on assembly and free speech.  “It was making itself the most democratic country on earth.”  It’s unbearably sad when, as someone so ignorant of history, I came across this, how pregnant with so much better possibility was the world’s future at certain critical points.  The ennui with knowing how it would ultimately transpire was unexpectedly heartbreaking as I went along.

Soldiers watch the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

The Russians could not surrender to Germany, despite such heavy defeats on that front, given successes in Turkey and the new nationalist fervour stoked by the revolution.  Yet to engage in a truce with Germany would cut off the flow of credit and support from Britain, while allowing Germany to move its men fighting its eastern front to the west and likely deliver a victory as part of their massive counter-offensive, with the risk they would then turn back east anyway.   The Entente would have struggled to endorse it because it might at least force the Russians into the German army, along with the considerable ‘food basket’ and coal that the Ukraine and Russia could supply.  Yet the Russians had no desire to win the war for imperialist objectives.  A peace without victory was needed.

So, because the Russians offered a peace formula, a large part of the German SPD party that supported the war to defend Germany against Tsarist aggression was now suing for peace itself, in April 1917.  Indeed, at this point, an Entente victory was looking unlikely, after a joint British/French offensive failed to break through German lines.  Some French divisions then mutinied, while at home some Liberal and Labour MPs clamoured for the acceptance of the ‘Petrograd’ peace formula.  The U-boat blockade was bleeding the allied forces dry on the continent, and food supplies to Italy had almost run out, the country beginning to starve, leading to rioting.  Yet it was the German government’s belief that despite all this, the Entente, presumably in part due to Britain’s widespread empire, were still able to get enough boats through that the blockade would ultimately be futile.  This boosted their own calls for peace even more strongly internally.  The German Chancellor was dismissed and the Reichstag voted for peace.  It was all just a few months too late.

When the Petrograd peace formula came through, echoing Wilson’s own, it was too late for him to throw himself and the US behind it, though where his own peace without victory had failed, it would not just have become embarrassing to follow Russia’s lead and do a u-turn, but also because it would go counter to his own view that the US should lead the new world order.  He saw Germany as dangerously imperialist and aggressive enough that a peace by force would be required, and had thus acted first.

As Tooze says, had the Americans not joined the war when they did, had the Germans not stepped up their U-boat campaign (against internal opposition), had the Entente been more ready to sue for peace though it would mean declaring the world’s worst war futile, there may have been peace with Germany and democracy in Russia from 1917 onwards.  The Bolsheviks, and later, Stalin, might never have got started.  The steps to their power, and Lenin’s subsequent naked aggression and usurpation of the fragile democracy that Russia was birthing, are followed in much the same fascinating and tragic vein through the ramifications of the ‘Brest Litovsk’ treaty.  I’d be typing the book out if I carried on, but now I revisit it to refresh these points, I’m once again carried away by it.  The Entente, concerned about a pact that forced Germany and Russia together, as well as the US, who foresaw a pan Eurasian counter to their own global power, supported the Czech army that was fighting both Russians and Germans.  This forced Russia into Germany’s arms, yet led to deep civil unrest in Russia due to the former Tsarist connections, and Lenin, to maintain control, effectively declaring himself a dictator, after being shot by leftists disappointed at the treaty.  What comes across in this book is his and Trotsky’s ideological arrogance and the damage it ultimately did.  In my notes I bolded ‘Lenin is a total dick’, which I’m sure sufficiently excoriates him in the eyes of the world…

Here, in a microcosm, is an illustration of how the decision making and economic ramifications of them played in and out of how these nations engaged with each other.  They are bound no less by such relations in peace time, as the rest of the book goes on to amply demonstrate.  It explores the failures of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, the rise of fascism and of Chinese nationalism and how the Russians saw a great opportunity to shape it into a communist regime.

Wilson was arguably right about the imperialist bent of Britain and France, from the Anglo-Iraq treaty of 1926 to the French bombing Syria and their Rhineland invasion in the late twenties, or the British occupying Istanbul and letting the Greeks assault Turkey’s interior.  It was a view that even Hoover shared in his own way, with the US government time and again refusing to consider economic plans and security guarantees that could have altered the impact of the serious deflation of the early 20s and later the global economic collapse borne of the Great Depression.

Off the back of this depression, Heinrich Brüning, the German Chancellor in 1930, began a train of events that, with another miserably missed alternate universe, led to Hitler’s Nationalist Socialists gaining power.  Aristide Briand and Gustave Stresemann, a Frenchman and a German (both of whom would win the Nobel Peace Prize) advocated, in response to America’s intransigence on inter-allied war debts and reparations that were seen as damaging to European sovereignty, the idea of a European Union, but it collapsed.  Brüning was looking to overturn the Versailles Treaty and, perhaps fuelled by the challenges of the negotiations around the Young Plan, which was an attempt to review and decide reparations for the war, his foreign minister, replacing the recently deceased peacemaker Stresemann, with a strengthening economy exporting to Russia and developing ties with Italy, decided to embark on negotiations with Austria for a customs union.  So what, eh?

It broke at least three post-war peace treaties while simultaneously being rather suicidal in the face of Briand’s proposals for a stronger Europe overall which would have given Germany a bigger export market.  Instead the move, on the back of deflationary economic adjustments, led to an increase in domestic and international pressure, and Tooze views it as a sop to the far right.  In Tooze’s view the French had opened their money markets to Berlin as a reward for its compliance/adherence to the Gold Standard for its currency.  The US and Britain appeared not to care a great deal about the union, with the US view being this would surely only help consolidation of European states and reduce their fragility.  But this antagonisation of the money markets and Brüning’s scathing view of the reparations payments was made because he was aware that with the US as a key debtor, and Wall Street wanting to see its creditors ensure they got theirs before the allied nations, Germany could reduce its reparations obligations.  When Germany’s economy went into freefall, it soon became clear to Hoover and the allies that something had to be done to shore it up, and the US put forward a plan to suspend Germany’s war debt commitments, a plan ratified by everyone but France.  I infer from the text, because of their 25% holding of the entire world’s gold reserve at that time, that they just didn’t want to, having been particularly sore about German reparations enough to invade Rhineland, at great cost to their own international credibility.  This decision to ignore Hoover’s rescue plan incensed the international community, yet France could argue that it had made round after round of reparations concessions that weren’t matched by the US.  In addition to the financial reparations:

“Again and again France had called for an international security system to replace the provisions agreed at Versailles.  But this had been vetoed by Washington…With the stabilisation of the franc in 1926, the agreement to the Young Plan and the Mellon-Berenger war-debt deal in 1929 it had paid the price.  Now, as a result of a crisis the Germans had brought upon themselves, America was unilaterally asserting its right to declare an emergency and overturn the rules of its own game.”

By the time France agreed to the Hoover moratorium Germany’s financial system had collapsed and its banks were closed.  Brüning’s reduction in reparations was achieved, but everything else was a catastrophe.  With the disaster in Germany this apparently put pressure on the British financial system that ultimately led to its dropping out of the gold standard as it deflated its own currency to protect the British economy from huge cuts in government spending and support for a nation still recovering from the war.  Once this happened, sterling and London in general being a key global currency and financial hub, the impact was felt all over the world, bad enough it caused banks to fail in the US (as a measure of its former influence this is quite shocking).  The plunge in sterling and subsequent adoption of protectionist trade measures to protect the domestic economy was disastrous for its trading partners.  With the pressure now gone internationally to conform to the gold standard and the strictures it imposed on its economy, Japan’s government came under increasing pressure to start spending on its military to counter the growing spending of China and Russia.  Back in Germany, without currency reserves to stop runs on the mark, it could not sensibly, with the British deflating, expect to keep competitive in its export market and came under increasing pressure to leave the gold standard as well, but it could not do so because of the foreign debts, in particular the dollar debts to Wall Street creditors.  As unemployment rose and its industry was hit hard, the German government lost an election on the back of Hitler’s pro-jobs rhetoric, sweeping him into power.

As you can no doubt see, Germany’s financial decisions, ties to Italy and Japan’s massively increased military spending are all jigsaw pieces required for 1939.

*

Why have I regurgitated all this from Tooze’s book?  I could have been playing Bioshock instead.  I want to impart, to anyone bothering to get this far, through the examples at the beginning and the end of the period examined in The Deluge, what a profound effect it’s had on my view of Europe and the US and that it is worth reading if you want to understand the importance of staying in the EU, and of extending the United Nations, of trying to make these institutions work rather than denigrating and ignoring them.

I hadn’t expected it to be this gripping, to watch with horror as time and again peace was snatched away at the brink of treaties, how those who won the war ended up no better off than those who lost it, how they were all, anyway, bound up together.  Tooze sees the peacemakers, these internationalists like Briand and Stresemann, J.M. Keynes and even Lloyd George at one point, not as idealists, but, given how interconnected the world is, the ‘higher realists’.    It’s a lovely phrase, reclaiming away from cynics the ongoing and very real value of speaking nation unto nation.

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Stannis Baratheon is not the Mayor of Casterbridge

This post contains Game of Thrones spoilers, for, well, almost all of it, along with the movie adaptation of The Mist and the opening of the Mayor of Casterbridge, oh and possibly King Lear.  Yep, I think that’s it.

Shireen, Stannis Baratheon’s daughter, was the latest in a rather long line of ‘good’ characters being killed cruelly and unexpectedly in HBO’s adaptation of George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the visceral thrill of seeing Ned Stark die and the Red Wedding.  I enjoyed too the unexpected deaths of Tywin and Joffrey.

Here is an epic where there is no safety catch, everyone and anyone could get killed, deserving or completely undeserving.  Yet the predominant narrative in fantasy, as with myth, is the hero journey, and this always ends with a triumph over adversity.  This triumph is widespread in almost all drama, it arguably applies even to great tragedies like King Lear.  It also applies richly to Game of Thrones.

So why did Shireen’s death seem so wrong? Why also would my wife say “If they kill Jon Snow I think I just won’t bother watching it anymore” when she’s absolutely loved everything that’s happened to some of our beloved good guys up till now?

Let me talk of books for a moment.

There exists an instinctive contract between writer and reader.  You aren’t going to care about my characters unless you can believe what they do and say, unless they’re consistent.  They, like all of us, have a certain elasticity to their web of beliefs and their morals.  Once the boundaries are established, you snap them only with very good reason.  When these characters are immersed in a setting, when the world breaks upon them, how they respond to it has that elasticity.  And as readers we can all sense it, lord knows how, it’s like a spidey sense without the spiders.  It’s probably the same intuitive muscle we use to ‘read’ the people in our lives, their foibles and dispositions, fears and loves.

But if the world breaks on people hard enough, they snap, they become capable of things we would otherwise have found hard to believe, but, crucially, they snap believably.  As readers we’re ok with unpredictability in our characters or plots so long as we understand them enough to know that they will snap if that thing happens.

So, with the Red Wedding, we know that Rob shouldn’t have broken a promise, but we understand why he did.  We know that Frey is an evil, hard bastard, it is foreshadowed that he is untrustworthy.  Rob confronting him was fraught with danger.  The shock is how invested we are in Rob, up to that point, believing that he’ll find a way through the situation.  Yet we understand that he might get betrayed, his life might be in danger.  That he and his mother get killed is weird and very powerful, it robs us of complacency but does so only having helped us understand his peril.

Martin plays a masterstroke here, because, as with Ned’s execution, you are turning every page from now on not with a warm sense of entertainment, a theme park ride with a few thrills and a foregone conclusion, but following characters you love getting into real jeopardy and maybe not getting out of it.

So you love to hate Joffrey, but you’ve seen evil go unpunished, so you aren’t sure if he’ll get his due, and that makes you feel all the more desperately desirous that he does, so when he does, the satisfaction is amplified, moreso when it’s televised, a medium with very little in the way of this kind of subversion of the good vs evil tropes.

Result – breakout phenomenon.

While controversial therefore, Jamie’s rape of Cersei and Ramsay’s of Sansa, or Craster giving up his newborn sons to the White Walkers in exchange for his life and that of his awful harem, these are believable.  These people are operating in more or less complex interpersonal webs that as viewers we can clearly conceive.

Yet Stannis, in his monologue to Shireen only a couple of episodes before her awful death, talks of how he protected her as a baby, because she was his daughter.  Dramatically, this scene takes a rather cold relationship between them and powerfully displays the ties of a father to his daughter regardless of those around him saying she should be shunned or killed for her (once) lethal and infectious affliction.  He told her he would do, and did do, everything and anything for her.

Then, Melisandre hints that sacrificing his daughter’s life will help him win the north, and an episode or so later, he’s wrestling once more with those saying she should die, but this time he draws a completely different conclusion.

Arguably, what’s at stake here is the Iron Throne, whereas previously there was no such dilemma.  Perhaps Benioff and Wise, the screenwriters, after an otherwise utterly flawless adaptation of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’*, believe that they’ve put enough world on his head to make Stannis snap.  My spidey sense tingled as she burned, it didn’t feel wrong in the way they wanted it to feel.  In part it was because in setting Stannis up as a protector of his daughter, he joined the ranks of fathers like me who would rather watch their own dreams turn to ash than have a hair on their daughter’s head even singed.

Coupled with the fact that they could have ridden to the wall, diminished of course, but alive, we were looking for a third way, we were trying to anticipate as viewers what was possible to overcome his dilemma, because we had removed the impossible, that he could burn Shireen.

As he watched her burn I couldn’t feel the sort of pain that I cannot truly imagine I would feel if I were in his shoes.  Yet Cersei’s is quite believable, as Joffrey dies, all the more remarkable for the conflicting feeling you have of delight in his death and sympathy for his mother, who is entirely loathsome anyway.  Their love breaks through.

The only similar event (that didn’t appear to have any justification before it happened) in literature I’ve read to this point is Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, where the protagonist sells his wife at the outset.  But Hardy then paints a tragic and compelling portrait of a man full of self-loathing and regret, a whole novel that justifies the bizarre and memorable opening.

Which brings me to Jon Snow.  In this episode review for ‘Dance of Dragons’ on Tor.com, Theresa DeLucci is starting to feel weary of it all:

“As sad as I am about Shireen and the horrific-even-for-Thrones’ standards death she got, I’m also strangely bored. Yet another beloved character given lots of screen-time this season murdered for a flimsy reason, much like Barristan Selmy. It just gets disheartening. They’ve gone to this well so many times before, it doesn’t have as much emotional impact for me.”

I have to agree.  There is now *so* much investment in Jon Snow, Tyrion and Daenerys to carry the grand narrative to its conclusion, that unless George and the screenwriters land the end of the world on them, their deaths will leave us with nobody to care about.

You won’t end it like the movie adaptation of The Mist, will you George?

*I need to stress just how incredible a job they’ve done adapting the books.  This series has been a joy to watch.  I think it’s why this galls me so much.

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The Banner Saga

I was captivated by the gorgeous artwork when it first popped up in my Steam shop window.  A quick scan of some reviews was enough for me to buy it.  Then, as I’ve been rather busy, I shelved it until now.

After ten minutes I was utterly immersed.  The Banner Saga, by the Texas based studio Stoic, has that ineffable atmosphere you only get from a labour of love.  I can’t recommend it enough.

Its core gameplay reminded me of XCOM: Enemy Unknown; utilising/synergising the skills of a squad made up of different character classes in a series of turn based tactical arenas where your characters level up over time.

As I write that sentence however, I can’t help feeling that I’m completely missing the point.  The gameplay is only an equal part of the draw of this game, alongside its art and music.

This is a handpainted game, suitably minimal animation, in a world inspired by viking legend.  The moment you load it the haunting ensemble of horns accompanies a snowy setting illustrating the main characters; tired, grim and thoughtful.  It is a melancholy that never really lifts from the moment you follow Ubin’s cart and his weary travellers under a sun that has simply stopped in the sky for reasons unknown.  It follows you as you wind your way through the multiple choice narrative, the leader of a caravan of refugees and warriors fleeing from ‘the bad guys’, the Dredge.

Our caravan visits a Godstone. Click to expand.

In between the battles you have many decisions to make as you progress through the wartorn lands, infighting in the caravan, thieves, betrayals, challenges to your authority, and all are dextrously handled.  In my single run through of the game (and it varies according to the decisions you make) I found myself having a subtly sexist assumption in a conversation plainly exposed, snubbed by my daughter for threatening to kill desperate farmers for their oxen to feed my caravan that, through lack of supplies, was starving to death, and frequently I was presented with a decision tree to manage my interaction with my caravan of refugees where there was simply no obvious right decision.

Hard choices.

There were at least two eye-openingly disturbing moments in my playthrough, relating to the backstory, and by the end of the journey, by luck or judgement I don’t know, every choice I made felt hopeless, the brink of defeat so important to the classic Hero Journey.  As with XCOM, I cared about what was happening.

Winter is coming!

Needless to say the worldbuilding, evident in the annotated map, and the storyline, are beautifully done.  With the score by Austin Wintory (click the link to listen to a track) adding immeasurably to the atmosphere, this game was more akin to reading a novel than any I’ve played, an absorption more in the milieu than the gameplay.  It’s a world on the edge of darkness, perhaps its end; great beasts (and a much bigger plot) are hinted at, a huge unseen threat, like a rupture in nature, colouring the foreboding backdrop.  I’m delighted that there will be another game here.

Reviewers of the game have suggested it gets repetitive, but it isn’t more than ten or twelve hours, perhaps less if you’re not poring over the map and just soaking up the beautifully drawn world like I was.  For me the game never outstayed its welcome, right up to the beautiful ending.

Any tips you say?  Don’t spread your Renown too thinly, and always always bring a tin opener.

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