It’s there. Under the dark water. Beneath the cold surface. A lost Mesolithic world that once connected Britain to Europe and jutted far up into the North Sea. A low-lying land of rivers and marshes and shallow hills, with a great inland lake. Doggerland, it is rather unromantically called, after the Dogger Bank, which once would have been hills but are now fishing grounds. But unlike other lost lands, it seems to have left nothing at all behind in the way of folk memories, myths or legends. There are no tales of the North Sea flood, nor of the great wave that was unleashed by the Storegga Slide, no cuneiform tablets awaiting excavation that tell a northern version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The land vanished beneath the sea and took its history with it, into the silence there. This book is the, slightly technical, account of the archaeologists who are trying to bring it back from the dark and the surprising amount of detail they can find of the geography of Doggerland. A fascinating book, but probably best suited for those with a working knowledge of archaeology.
Book review
Adventures in Bookland: The Return of Christendom by Steve Turley
Growing up in the 1970s, I remember well the proposed doomsday scenarios that haunted the world then. Apart from the obvious fear of all-out thermonuclear war between Nato and the Warsaw Pact, there were confident predictions of a coming ice age and even more confident predictions of world wide famine as population outstripped food supply in a doomsday Malthusian scenario. None of them happened. So I remain somewhat sceptical of confident predictions about the future, even when the prediction is for something I would hope for, as in Steve Turley’s book. The point he is making is straightforward and one that has been taken up by quite a few demographers. To put it simply, religioius couples have significantly more children than non-religious couples, and children tend to follow the religioius persuasion of their parents. So, in a truly ironic example of Darwinian selection, according to this model the religious shall inherit the earth since the irreligious aren’t sufficiently invested in the non-personal future to produce the children that will affect it. The argument is sound, and is also reflected in what appears to be a normal shelf life of an officially atheistic culture of between 70 and 100 years. But as with all such arguments, it depends on current trends continuing on into the future, and… well, events, dear boy, events. Things don’t normally turn out the way we had predicted. So while I hope that Christnedom will return, I treat these predictions as nothing more than signs to a possible future.
Adventures in Bookland: Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne Du Maurier
Let’s be honest now: this is romantic nonsense. Beautifully written and well plotted with all Daphne Du Maurier’s gifts for bringing the Cornish countryside and coasts to vivid life on the page, but the story… Beautiful, headstrong woman caught in loveless marriage with upper-class boor (a marriage entered into on a passing whim), develops major-league crush on rakish (and for almost all the book unnamed) French pirate and then, probably, elopes with him at the end. It’s the female version of James Bond – a wish-fulfilment fantasy to fill a few empty hours.
Adventures in Bookland: In Search of the Trojan War by Michael Wood
Life deals out its cards skew whiff. Some people struggle, burdened with debts personal and afflictions public. Others get given the full house. Witness: Michael Wood. Not only was he blessed with the sorts of looks that historians, historically, were denied – compare him to Eric Hobsbawn for example – but Wood was also gifted the ability to write with a clarity and enthusiasm that matched his on-screen persona. In Search of the Trojan War is a good example: a scholarly account of the archaeological history of the search for Troy good enough, in its grasp of the sources, to stand comparison with the best specialist work, but Wood also writes it in a way that makes the technicalities accessible to the layman. But then of course, good Hector, prince of Troy and all round decent bloke, also realised, as he coughed out his life’s blood on the plains of Ilium with that peacock psychopath Achilles strutting victory above him, that life doesn’t play fair. Take advanatage of that: read this book.
Adventures in Bookland: Fools and Mortals by Bernard Cornwell
While it looks like a novel and reads like a novel, I can let prospective readers in on a secret: Fools and Mortals is not really a novel. It’s actually a paean, an encomium, a love lyric written by an old man who has fallen in love. Old men who fall in love are always fools, but sometimes that foolishness washes away the accreted knowledge of a lifetime to reveal a silver seam lying under all that conventional knowledge.
That is what has happened here. Bernard Cornwell, who is 75 now, ten years ago fell in love. He fell in love with the theatre, with that strange, uncertain magic that happens, sometimes, when people get up on a stage and tell a story to a group of strangers, uniting them all into a shared world. According to Cornwell’s afterword, he’s been acting with the Monomoy Theatre in Massachusetts for the last ten years and this book is the fruit of that extended love affair. While ostensibly about the travails of Richard Shakespeare, jobbing actor and younger brother of the slightly more famous William, it is really an encomium to the theatre and, in particular, to that group of actors, entrepeneurs, playwrights, theatre goers and nobility who, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries created modern theatre in London. While wrapped up in a story of theft and treachery, Fools and Mortals is really about the extraordinary set of circumstances and people that made this all possible, and it’s a celebration of a sort of miracle in plain sight: the creation of a play that works. Having a wife who works in theatre, as actress and voice teacher, I’ve got some second-hand insight into how remarkable the whole process is and how contingent. If not for a London audience large enough to support the theatre and thirsty for new plays, if not for Shakespeare, Burbage, Marlowe and Johnson and their ilk, there would not have been plays to sate that thirst, and if not for a nobility willing to sponsor and protect the theatres and theatre companies from the censors and puritans of the age, it would never have come together.
Fools and Mortals is a celebration of theatre, of this every day artistic and financial miracle, with a side order of story. The story is fun, but the play’s the thing.
Adventures in Bookland: Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson
Reading the dark tales in Dark Tales, I thought: Shirley Jackson is the Union version of Flannery O’Connor: haunted by an absence of God so complete that he has been forgotten. With O’Connor, in extremis there is always the glimpse, the offer of grace, though often ignored. Here, the carapace around the world has grown so hard that horrors come into the light and dwell among us without any concomitant hint of the truly supernatural. This is the world of time twisting into endless traps with no escape. These are, indeed, dark tales.
Adventures in Bookland: Blood and Thunder by Dan Abnett
Surprisingly disappointing Warhammer 40k graphic novel, written by Dan Abnett. The basic premise, that an Imperial Guards officer is taken captive by the Orks when so covered in slime that his captor thinks him to be a little goblin creature and adopts him as a lucky mascot, is brilliantly gonzo and should have given licence for completely over the top gonzoid humour. But given the grimdark of the 40k universe, Abnett seems to hold back from going full lunatic – when this story really required the writer to shoot so far over the top as to disappear into orbit – and while there are elements of humour in it, the story remains too firmly rooted in the familiar 40k grimdark. Speaking of grimdark, my greatest disappointment with the graphic novel was the artwork: much of it was so dark and obscure that I couldn’t tell what was going on. I’m not sure if that was just a problem with the colour reproduction on my copy or if that was intentional: if the latter, take this on board, Black Library: grimdark can still be brightly coloured. Then the reader would be able to see all the horror!
Adventures in Bookland: The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch
From all the 5-star reviews, it seems that everyone else knows what’s going on. Personally, I read a Peter Grant book, thoroughly enjoy the ride, and emerge at the end of it with as little sense of what is actually going on as I had at the start of it. Not sure why. Maybe there are just too many names: possibly a handy character-card list would be in order, supplied free with every book as a book mark. Then I would know who all the various police officers and rivers are. As it is, Peter himself, the charming Nightingale, and Lesley, the turnfaced colleague, are all sufficiently strong characters to keep me reading. I don’t know where the series is heading, I’m not sure I particularly care, but the ride sure is loads of fun.
Adventures in Bookland: Early Riser by Jasper Fforde
Writing on a day in February when the temperature looks set to reach 18 degrees Centigrade and the sky is a bowl of blue unflicked with a single blob of white, winter seems a long way away. In Jasper Fforde’s new book, Early Riser, winter is a brute: a season of such ferocity that humans have evolved the capacity to hibernate to escape its rigours. It’s a fascinating idea, but one that is also the key weakness of the book. Early Riser has all Fforde’s usual comic genius, spinning word play and world play out of this central conceit, but ultimately the book fails because it’s impossible to construct a world sufficiently similar to our own that Fforde can poke fun at contemporary foibles while still having almost everybody asleep for three months during the arctic winter in Wales. It just doesn’t work. The world, trembling on the brink of toppling into Snowball Earth, with humans that hibernate, would be something completely different, not the hybrid that Fforde creates here. That aside, the story is funny, tense and quite affecting. But where Fforde’s Thursday Next novels and Nursery Crime novels convincingly create worlds that are different yet closely related to our own, this one doesn’t.
Adventures in Bookland: Early Irish Myths and Sagas
Who would have thought that those typical Irish turns of phrase and the rhythms of Irish story telling had such deep roots? But it is clear, from reading these earliest Irish myths and stories, that these phrases and rhythms, now transplanted into English, have their origins in the Gaelic of the earliest stories of the Irish. Indeed, the very nature of Irish storytelling, with its recursiveness, rapid switches between laconic understatement and exuberant and detailed description, and a general disdain for logic when it gets in the way of telling a good story, all have their origins here. These are stories of frenzied heroes who can be turned back by the well-judged insult, of hospitality overwhelming any measure of ordinary good sense, and worlds bleeding into each other. Many of the stories make only minimal sense to a modern reader, but they carry him into a phantasmagorical world. Fascinating.