What I Read In July
Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry of Time The British government has acquired a device to transport people from past centuries to the present day. The people concerned are recorded as missing or dead, so the course of history should not be changed. At this end, Ministry employees have to give house room for the ‘immigrants’. Our protagonist, a young twenty-first century woman of mixed British-Cambodian parentage, is put in charge of an officer from the doomed Franklin Expedition to the North-West Passage. Cue many misunderstandings concerning the role of women, people of various ethnic heritages, and so on. This is not a comedy, however, and there’s more – it appears that the device to bring people to the present day is a gift from the future, and there are all sorts of other shenanigans going on. I enjoyed this mainly for the interesting use of metaphor. The protagonist describes the taste of Guinness, for example, as ‘angry Marmite’. Which was fun.
Laura Spinney: Proto Your Starter for Ten – what connects Slovakian and Sinhala? Phrygian and French? Hittite and Norwegian? The answer is that all are Indo-European languages, connected by historical and linguistic roots so deep that the similarities can be hard to trace. Yet it was the deep similarities of grammar and vocabulary between the languages now spoken more widely than any other on the planet that led to our modern understanding of language change in general, and new work on archaeology and ancient DNA has enriched and sometimes complicated the picture. Laura Spinney traces the tortuous history and geography back to the steppes of southern Russia, the plains of Anatolia and the high deserts of the Silk Road. I listened rather than read this – as an audiobook – and I am glad I have a decent knowledge of geography, as having a map in front of me would have been helpful. Perhaps the dead-tree version has suitable visual aids. I was fascinated to learn about Tocharian, a lost branch of Indo-European, and the deep connections between, say, English and Sanskrit. Spinney takes an interesting and controversial view on the preservation of languages that otherwise might have died out. Languages change all the time (and that’s rather the whole point), borrowing words from other languages. The Celtic languages spoken today, for example, are much corrupted by loans from English, so the Irish, Welsh and Gaelic that people work so strenuously to preserve are hardly authentic. Languages also change much faster than one would imagine, as people move from place to place. Not many young, working-class people in London today speak the cockney that they might have done a couple of generations ago. Instead they speak a dialect called Multicultural London English, what the politically incorrect might call Jafaican. I could find only two irritants in this absorbing book. Shakespeare wrote in early Modern English, not Middle English. And why is the country Turkey rendered Türkiye? We don’t refer to Greece as Hellas, or Germany as Deutschland.
Paul Hayes: Dr Who: Pull To Open Regular reader of these annals will note that I recently delved into the literature concerning the BBC’s long-running SF series Dr Who, notwithstanding inasmuch as which Exterminate, Regenerate by John Higgs (review here). Whereas that was a complete history of the show, Pull To Open is a account of its genesis, up to and including its very first airing in November 1963, so goes into much more granular detail about the circumstances, and looks at contemporary world events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Profumo affair. Hayes makes the case that BBC Head of Serials Donald Wilson deserves as much credit as Sidney Newman for the invention of the show. Absorbing, but probably for diehard fans only.
Taylor Jenkins Reid: Atmosphere I first came across Reid as the author of Daisy Jones and the Six, a rockumentary about a seventies soft-rock band with uncanny similarities to Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac, and found the televisual emission much better than the book. I believe there is a movie adaptation in the works for this, too, though the book is good in itself. It follows the career of Joan Goodwin: astronomer and wannabe astronaut. Goodwin is all work, work, work and is sexually repressed, living her personal life somewhat vicariously through her appalling and selfish sister Barbara. Her sexual awakening comes through meeting Vanessa Ford, another astronaut candidate, and the trials they face keeping their passionate relationship hidden from any overt sign of ‘sexual deviancy’ that would get them kicked off the program. The sex scenes are poignant and passionate without being explicit, and the space scenes are (as far as I can tell) authentic. The story is bookended as Goodwin, the Cap Com at Mission Control, helps Ford land a damaged space shuttle. Gripping until the end.
