It’s certainly quicker and easier to go for Ackroyd’s retelling, and he brings across the gusto and the sheer vigour of the original well, but he does lose the poetry. Curiously, he also misses out on a lot of Chaucer’s wordplay, putting through one meaning and ignoring the other meanings that Chaucer hints at in his original text.
So if you want a quick, down and dirty (lots of four-letter words) retelling of the original, read this version.
But if you want the poetry, and the vulgarity too with all the double and triple meanings that Chaucer manages to inject into them, then invest in the original and bookmark one of the online Middle English dictionaries to help with the most difficult words.
On 1 August 1708, Captain Woodes Rogers sailed out of Bristol on what would become a three-year voyage around the world. The expedition was composed of two frigates, the Duke and the Duchess, and its primary purpose was not to explore but to make money as privateers: essentially, they were government-sanctioned pirate ships that could attack countries England was at war with but not the ships of neutral or friendly countries.
The Duke and Duchess were after Spanish ships and the place to find them was the Pacific. Privateer is basically composed of extracts from the book Captain Woodes Rogers wrote of his voyage, with brief explanatory notes by the editor and, as such, it does an excellent job of bringing the world of early-18th century seamanship to life. Captain Rogers has to deal with mutinies, outbreaks of scurvy when the ships run out of limes (Rogers was unusual at the time for realising that scurvy was caused by a lack of fresh food and took limes with him on the voyage but a long period at sea led to their supplies running out), sailing further south than anyone had done before, capturing a rich Spanish prize, being shot in the mouth in the capture, enduring surgery to remove the trapped musket ball, and eventually returning home with both ships and most of his original crew. It was a personal triumph for Rogers but he probably lost money on the venture.
Perhaps the most noteworthy episode in his voyage was landing on the isolated Juan Fernandez Island to find a shipwrecked sailor, Alexander Selkirk, there. Selkirk had been marooned on the island for four years. Among the many people to read Rogers’ account of Selkirk’s rescue was Daniel Defoe, who used Selkirk as the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.
It’s a short book but it packs a lot of incident into brief length.
For those who have not listened to the excellent Uncanny podcast that produced the material that went into this book, Danny Robins always has in the studio with him two experts, a sceptic and a believer, to try to understand the various uncanny events recounted by the witness whose story forms the bulk of the episode.
But what becomes clear from reading this book, as well as listening to the podcast, is that neither side is anywhere near to an explanation or an understanding of the phenomena being recounted. The sceptic side is easier to dismiss: in most cases the sceptic case requires so much special pleading, as well as simply ignoring the more difficult pieces of evidence, that the wielding of Occam’s razor is sufficient to dispense with it.
What is stranger – and more interesting – is that the believer case is just as inadequate as an explanation. Take poltergeist activity as an example. Sounds, knockings, objects being moved and thrown, and other such phenomena which are usually associated with a child or teenager. Yes, this is true, but it’s nothing more an observation: there’s no explanation there.
It’s clear that, in terms of understanding these phenomena, we have only reached the classification stage. There’s not even a hint of an explanation: yes, ghosts might be associated with the dead, but there’s no indication how they are associated with the dead, or why.
In the history of thought, this is like the 15th century, when thinkers were devising a method of investigation that could have easily turned into magic as it turned into science. It’s biology before Linnaeus, geology before Charles Lyell, economics before Adam Smith. As such, it would be an exciting field for a true, original thinker to enter. There’s a universe of strange phenomena happening out there that has been ignored.
There aren’t many academic books that are still worth reading a century after they were first written. Usually, they become outdated, the arguments they address become irrelevant and their conclusions are superseded.
Frederick Lewis Taylor’s The Art of War in Italy 1494-1529 is one of the very few exceptions to this rule. While more recent scholarship has refined and in some cases changed our views of the events during the wars that ended the medieval era and began the modern age, they have not overturned the facts upon which Taylor based his book. Taylor’s arguments are still fundamental to our appraisal of what happened during these wars and his conclusions are still very much worth considering.
It’s also helped by Taylor being an excellent, lively writer, far better than the usual run of academic authors. In fact, as a one-volume introduction to this fiendishly complicated period, there’s few better alternatives.
In the introduction, Stephen King tells us, his constant readers, how he came to write his Fairy Tale in the middle of the stultifying restrictions of the covid crisis. He says how, when he was trapped in his house, he imagined what would make him happy and the answer was a tunnel from a shed in his garden to another world.
To be honest, that would make me pretty happy too, covid or no covid.
Unfortunately, the story followed and that didn’t make this reader happy. For a start, the other world that we reach through that tunnel isn’t all that wondrous: a few fairy tale tropes – giants, mermaids, etc – but it’s done in the trademark Stephen King style where the fairy tale signatures include elements of 50s Americana such as tram cars and the Wizard of Oz.
The story itself is sadly predictable: our hero, a high-school lad called Charlie Reade who spends most of the story telling the reader that he’s really not as perfect as his actions suggest he is, follows the quest and succeeds in the quest, without too much trouble.
But really, where on earth did Stephen get the idea that a suitable name for the villain of the story, the man who is literally greying out a fairy tale world, should be ‘Flight Killer’? I mean, come on. If the villain was a striking air-traffic controller, maybe. Presumably that’s an allusion to how Flight Killer is busy killing butterflies but, frankly, even ‘Butterfly Killer’ would have been better than ‘Flight Killer’. It suggests someone who delays your holiday, not someone of unlimited depravity and evil, intent on destroying a world and everyone in it.
However, Charlie manages to dispose of ‘Flight Killer’ without too much difficulty – turns out his evil minions, who killed all the opposition previously, can be killed by chucking a bucket of water over them. Just as well they didn’t try to take over the world when it was raining.
I’m glad writing the book got King through the misery of lockdown. Unfortunately, it rather brought that misery back to this reader.
This is, by some margin, the most atmospheric book I have ever read.
It’s quite extraordinary. On one level, not very much happens. A young girl, Penelope, at the start of the 20th century goes to stay with relatives in the country to help her health (you can tell it’s set a long time ago as Penelope’s relatively poor family are living on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea!). The relatives live in an old farm house that was once part of a larger manor house.
While staying at Thackers, Penelope slips into the past, meeting the people who lived in Thackers in Elizabethan times. She slips backwards and forwards, between past and present, a traveller but never a settler. She is witness to an abortive attempt to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots, who was being held in a nearby house. And that is about it, as far as story is concerned.
But that really is the least of it. In the introduction, Alison Uttley tells how she herself, as a young girl, lived in the Derbyshire valley where the story is set and how, as that young girl, she travelled into the past.
“Many of the incidents in this story are based on my dreams, for in sleep I went through secret hidden doorways in the house wall and found myself in another century. Four times I stepped through the door and wandered in rooms which had no existence, a dream within a dream, and I talked with people who lived alongside but out of time, moving through a life parallel to my own existence. In my dreams past and present were co-existent, and I lived in the past with a knowledge of the future. I travelled into that secondary dream world, seeing all things as if brightly illuminated, walking in fields and woods dazzling in their clarity. I sat on the stone walls in the sunshine of other times, conscious of the difference, knowing intermediate events. The painted room, the vision through the windows of the house, and many another incident came to me in dreams, and I have woven them into this story.”
That is how Uttley describes it in her introduction and, reading the book, we are taken into a past dazzling in its clarity yet suffused with the logic of dream, where none of the characters that Penelope meets are surprised at her reappearances after long absence.
It is a book that cannot be adequately described, only read, but if you too would walk in those times and see everything as brightly illuminated, then read this book: no other conveys better the reality, and the strangeness, of this type of experience.
Whoops! Chalk this one up as a top contender for brilliant marketing idea gone disastrously wrong. Suppose you’re a writer, you’ve set your first novel of paranormal detective fiction in a version of London really quite similar to the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. The book has done well but obviously you want the next in the series to do better. Then an amazing possibility presents itself: you meet Neil himself and tell him about your book. You get friendly with him. You think about asking him to read your book and write a cover comment and he’s happy to do that but he’s done that for a fair few other writers and you want your book to stand out.
Then you get that brilliant idea. Your vision of London owes so much to Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Would he…? Might he…? After all, the idea plays into Gaiman’s own use of metafiction. So you ask him and he says, “Yes.”
“Yes!” You are beyond delighted. This will really make your book stand out.
Neil Gaiman has agreed to appear in your novel as one of its characters, a writer navigating on the borders between this world and Neverwhere, dipping his writerly toes into the supernatural world of your own creation.
A more perfect, more arch, tribute to Gaiman’s vision of London that has inspired your own book is hard to imagine.
What’s more, Gaiman doesn’t even ask to be the book’s hero, or even heroic: he’s happy to be a morally dubious figure, skating the boundaries of self-interest and altruism, right in line with your overall vision.
Yes, this is brilliant, this is really going to work…
Then, ten years later, Gaiman goes and gets accused of all sorts of horrible behaviour by various women. He denies it, obviously, but then sues one of the women for breaching a non-disclosure agreement. What was your book’s biggest selling point suddenly becomes an albatross of Me-Too proportions.
The most brilliant selling idea of modern metafiction gets undone by the fiction ceasing to be meta.
If, like me, you started off really enjoying Ben Aaronovich’s Peter Grant supernatural police detective fiction but then found the series tailing off, then this new series, featuring police detectives investigating supernatural murders, might seem like an obvious new avenue.
And it is. But perhaps a better reference point would be the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere but with more murders and the police involved. The story takes a while to get going, and a bit longer to successfully differentiate the main characters, but after about 50 pages Cornell hits his writing stride, the characters start breathing and moving, and the pace picks up.
Definitely one worth thinking about in the growing genre of London based paranormal fiction.
Historians, when writing for the general public, don’t normally draw back the curtains on what they do. They tell the story of what happened, when it happened and who did what, but they don’t spend ages going through the painstaking work that allowed them to tell this story.
In Oathbreakers, Gabriele and Perry do something different: they pull back the historical curtains. While the book sets out to tell the history of the bitter civil conflict between the children and grandchildren of Charlemagne that tore apart the Carolingian Empire, it’s a book that also reveals how historians interrogate their sources to try to get at the real story of what happened.
While the history of the falling out between the heirs of Charlemagne is dramatic in itself, just as much of the tension in the book comes from the authors’ treatment of their sources. As Gabriele and Perry examine the sources of their history, the writers’ description of their methods also allows the reader to evaluate what they are doing. For, of course, just as the original annalists were telling a story with a view to its effect, historians work with their own set of assumptions and presuppositions. It’s just rare for these to be presented to the reader, explicitly and implicitly.
As such, Oathbreakers is both an excellent history of the division and conflict that, eventually, produced France and Germany but also a chance for readers to understand how historians come to these conclusions and agree, or disagree, with their conclusions.
Dear Readers, here they are: the contenders, the two rivals to be the cover of my next novel (you can guess the title!). Please let me know which one you prefer.
