Few writers have been as well served by their editors as JRR Tolkien. If it wasn’t for the almost lifelong labours of his son, Christopher Tolkien, we would never have had the posthumous publication of The Silmarillion, let alone the extraordinary unveiling of Tolkien’s sub-creation that we read in Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth, which presents his father’s writing as it developed, revealing far more of the depth underlying it than we would have seen with just the work the Good Professor published during his lifetime.
With Christopher Tolkien’s death in 2020, we might have feared that Tolkien’s subsequent editors would not have the same dedication, nor the expertise, that allowed Christopher Tolkien to uncover the depths of his father’s work. It looks like that fear is unjustified. Brian Sibley has proved just as deft a hand here, in his presentation of the history of Númenor, as his predecessor in the editorial chair. Perhaps not so surprising, as Brian Sibley was responsible for what remains by far the best adaptation of Tolkien’s work, the BBC radion production of The Lord of the Rings. So if you have ever wondered how the kings of Númenor rose to power, and how they fell from that estate, this is the place to find out.
The DCI Ryan detective novels set in my beloved Northumberland have been huge bestsellers so I thought I ought to read the first – besides, Lindisfarne is wonderful and I wanted to spend some time there, albeit in story rather than in person.
Well, I can see why the books have been such a success: I missed my stop on the tube because I was so engrossed! There’s no higher praise from a Londoner.
I’ve also discovered a new genre: crime romance. While ostensibly a crime novel, it’s mainly a female fantasy romance, where the brooding, handsome, rather damaged Detective Ryan is not only opened up, put back in contact with his emotions, and taught to love again by the female protagonist, Dr Anna Taylor, but to show it’s the ultimate wish fulfilment, Anna also turns her future mother-in-law into a new mother for herself, in place of her own dead mum.
So basically it’s a female wish fulfilment fantasy dressed up as a crime novel. Sadly, the Lindisfarne location didn’t come across too strongly either.
I’d not heard of this book before but apparently it’s very well known in America. Having read it, I can see why. It was published in 1969. The author dedicated it to Martin Luther King. It’s basically the Civil Rights’ Movement as a children’s book, arguing for integration of the races through the story of a white boy and an old black man cast away on an island in the Caribbean. In that respect, it seems slightly old fashioned in its insistence on Martin Luther King’s old dictum, that people be judged by their character rather than their colour, when set against today’s fractionated landscape where people are judged precisely by their position in the current victims’ hierarchy.
The castaway boy, Phillip, isn’t particularly prejudiced but he judges the old black man he is cast away with through the eyes of the 1940s, when the story is set. Then, in a nice twist, Phillip loses his sight and has to rely on old Timothy for his survival. It turns out that Timothy is prepared to go further than Phillip would have had any right to expect to ensure the boy’s survival. It’s a moving turn to the story, and gives it a seriousness that it would otherwise lack.
I’m not sure that it’s particularly relevant today, at least not in Britain, but it serves as an interesting testament to where people were coming from when it came out.
Well, what can I say? Dan Abnett is the reason I ended up writing 40k and his Ravenor novels was the second series I read after Eisenhorn. It’s no wonder I was hooked. The man is an absolute master, both at plotting (how does he keep all those separate strands in his head until he ties them all together?) and building worlds with single, perfectly chosen, words.
As to the perennial Eisenhorn vs. Ravenor question… er, can I sit on the fence? Say they’re both equally brilliant but in different ways? I know that’s a cowardly ducking of the question and… alright, yes, I am avoiding an answer. Oh, I don’t want to. It’s like being asked to choose between children. All right, all right, if I must…
Ravenor. Right, I said it. By a tiny tad, and largely because more of his crew survive, but I give it to Gideon Ravenor. But I’d prefer to have dinner with Eisenhorn. At least I could see his face.
Thanet isn’t even an island now, just a spur of Kent sticking out into the Channel.
But for a thousand years it was the hinge upon which England’s history turned. Then it really was an island, separated from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel, a tidal channel that separated the high chalk of Thanet from the rest of the country.
The Isle of Thanet was also one of the closer points to the continent. The Wantsum Channel, by cutting it off from the rest of Britain, acted in effect as a moat, providing defences for anyone holed up on the island. This was something eyes watching from across the Channel noted so that, when Julius Caesar arrived in 55 and 54 BC, he set up a fort on the island. Indeed, he might have landed on it too when first arriving. When the Romans returned, they set up their initial fort at one end of the Wantsum Channel and, once Britain was secure, turned that fort into the most important fort/port in the country, Richborough.
They also established another fort, Reculver, at the other end of the Wantsum, showing clearly how strategically important this channel was.
Then, after the Romans left Britain, the Anglo-Saxons arrived and, according to legend, Hengist and Horsa were given the Isle of Thanet by a foolish King Vortigern in return for their mercenary help. He should have remembered his history: no good could come of giving men with swords such an impregnable base. Sure enough, Hengist and Horsa overthrew Vortigern and set themselves up as kings of Kent. Once again, Thanet had been the hinge upon which England’s history had turned.
And this was not the end. During the Viking era, Viking armies realised that the Wantsum Channel was the ideal place to moor their longships while the isle provided them with a secure base to overwinter before better weather allowed them to resume their customary raiding and pillaging.
In 865, the Great Heathen Army, that came within a single battle of conquering all England, overwintered on Thanet. The isle’s inhabitants must have been becoming a little tired of being the providers for so many passing raiders. Nevertheless, the soil was so rich that the Isle had the highest population density in Kent a while later.
It was only the silting up and closure of the Wantsum Channel, turning the Isle into the tip of Kent, that ended its hinge role in history.
Gerald Moody’s excellent book gives all the archaeological detail of these few extraordinarily important square miles and sets them into their historical context.
Frankly, I had not the slightest idea of who John Brown (the Angel of the Lord) was when I began reading the book, although I had some vague idea that his body lay mouldering in the grave, so Harry Flashman’s latest adventure served to plug a huge gap in my historical knowledge while also, as usual, being a marvellous romp through the trouble spots and boudoirs of the 19th century.
It turns out that John Brown was an abolitionist who decided to launch a raid on a US army armoury at Harper’s Ferry, steal the weapons there and give them to slaves, sparking off a slave rebellion. It was a mad idea and, sure enough, it failed; few slaves joined the rebellion and Harper was captured, tried and executed. But in his death, Harper became a martyr for the abolitionist cause, pushing both sides towards the fateful Civil War that started a year and a half later.
Flashman is the bemused witness to this all: a man less inclined to lay down his life for a principle than Harry Flashman is difficult to imagine but Fraser’s great skill is to show Flashman’s reluctant admiration for Brown’s mad courage, while maintaining Flashman’s own personal cowardice.
There’s also a welcome (although not for Flashman) reappearance by Harry’s old adversary, John Charity Spring, erstwhile professor at Oxford, now slave dealer and ship’s captain.
By this novel, the tenth in the series, we know what to expect. While Flashman and the Angel of the Lord doesn’t do anything new, what it does do, it does with Fraser’s usual skill.
Confession of a laggardly book reviewer: I finished this book several months ago but I’ve only now got around to writing a review. Unfortunately, sitting down to write my review, I realised I couldn’t remember anything about the book. So, cheating, I looked up some other reviews. And I still can’t remember the story.
So I think we have to chalk this novel down as one Koontz’s misses. However, since I do know that I whipped through the book in pretty quick time when I read it, it can’t be all bad, just forgettable. So maybe a three-star read.
When I was growing up, I would sometimes hear my mother talking to my Nonna and be completely baffled by what they were saying. They were speaking dialect. My mother’s family comes from a little village in Piedmont, Italy called Pavone and my mother’s first language was not Italian but dialect. The dialect of her village lay midway between Italian and French. So, for instance, hot and cold in dialect were cald and fredd but in Italian they are caldo and freddo and in French chaud and froid.
But to give an idea of just how specific these dialects were, there would sometimes be words I overheard that completely stumped me. I asked my mother once what they had been talking about and it turned out that my Nonna had been using a dialect word from her native village, which was about 20 kilometres away from where she lived once she got married, and that word was completely different from the Pavone dialect. That’s how regional Italian dialects were.
Which brings me on to Pinocchio. When Carlo Collodi wrote the story in 1881, Italy had only been unified into a single country for ten years. The problem was, while it was now politically one country, most of the country could not speak, nor understand, most of the rest of the country. Everyone spoke their own dialects of Italian, with many of these so different from each other as to be mutually unintelligible.
It’s hard to maintain a country where people don’t speak the same language. Italian nationalists had decided that the Florentine dialect, in which Dante, Boccaccio and Manzoni had written, was the purest and best form of Italian, the one to be elevated to the status of national language. But Dante and Manzoni are not exactly classroom texts – and still less Boccaccio, whose tales in the Decameron can still make the readers’ eyes widen in shock at their sheer rudeness; certainly not acceptable in 19th-century classrooms.
Which was where Carlo Collodi stepped in. His tale of the wooden boy, crafted by Giappetto the carpenter, who comes to life but has an unfortunate tendency towards nose-lengthening lying, became hugely popular when published and immediately found its way into Italian classrooms up and down the land.
So it was Pinocchio, the wooden boy with the big heart but spectacularly poor judgement in friends, who taught generations of Italians to be able to speak to each other in the same language. Very few stories have been so crucial in a nation’s history. Indeed, without Pinocchio, there’s a good case for saying that the always fissiparous elements of Italy would have split apart into their constituent republics, duchies and kingdoms, all of which had longer histories and more deeply ingrained loyalties than the Italian state.
A little wooden boy became the father of modern Italy. Che sorpresa!
As none of us have much of it, let’s cut to the marrow: this is a book about time as understood through the equations of special and general relativity. So it’s to do with frames of reference, the speed of light, and lines of causation. It’s not a philosophical history of time, still less a mythical or religious view. But if you want a clear and concise formulation of what Einstein’s equations tell us about time within the constraints of relativity, then this is your book.
There is a memorial plaque screwed to a bench in my local park. “John Townson, greatly missed, never forgotten.”
I remember John Townson. I do miss him. But the plaque would be more honest if it read: “John Townson, greatly missed, will be utterly forgotten in 80 years.”
The vast majority of us make our way through this world and then leave it, to some regret, some tears, and protestations of eternal remembrance. But the truth is that most of us will be completely forgotten within two generations of our deaths.
Writers hope to escape this forgetting, that by their books they might achieve an immortality that their bodies cannot. Unfortunately, a visit to any second-hand bookshop will show this not to be the case: shelves of unread books by forgotten authors.
Which is where Christopher Fowler came in. For a decade he wrote a newspaper column in which he revitalised the work of a forgotten writer, and these columns are collected in this book. The majority of the writers, like Fowler himself, write in the detective/thriller genre and most I had indeed never heard of (although one glaring exception is Georgette Heyer: I would be delighted for my work to be as ‘forgotten’ as hers).
The book is a collection of lives and Fowler’s sometimes waspish, sometimes warm, assessments of their work. At the end of it, any bibliophile will be left with a list of writers to investigate.
And I was left with the hope that when I am dead, some other writer of Fowler’s talent might come along, take my dusty books from a forgotten shelf, and introduce them again to new readers.
