I wonder if the book might have been better if Gaiman had dropped the first ‘r’ in the title: Tigger Warning – if nothing else, I’d say it suggests the contents a little better. There’s the usual Gaiman excellence and the usual Gaiman frustrations: his talent runs over and doesn’t really, in the end, seem to know where to go. There’s a comparison to be made with the work of Alan Garner: the seem commitment to the imagination, the same deep, gnawing fear that, underneath everything, these are all just imaginings, phantasms of words and thoughts, sounds and furies signifying nothing. Gaiman is at his best when he adds a lightness of touch, a sense of humour to his stories – Garner doesn’t do jokes. There’s not many funny stories in here – most are dark and creepy – but they’re effective; I’d be hard put to say they are anything else.
It was PG Wodehouse who likened his first reading of Flashman to Keats’ experience of reading Homer in Chapman’s translation, although I can safely say that Flashy is unlikely to ever hold his silence, even on a peak in Darien – he’d be looking for a likely woman or an escape route. The whole point of Flashman is that, despite his being a cad, a bounder, a coward and a cheat, yet, in the madness of the Crimean War, his cowardice takes on a certain honesty. Indeed, given the fact that Flashman contrives to take part in the charges of both the Heavy and the Light brigades – the latter with his bowels erupting in a fanfare of farts – there is a case for calling him the bravest man there: one who knows fear and yet still carries on. Thankfully, just when it seems like Flashy might be turning into a proper hero, he does something truly appalling and the reader breaths a huge sigh of relief.
This is a review written by two people, or rather, the same one, separated by so many years that he is, to all intents and purposes, two different people. The first is me, now, age 52, married, with three sons; a home owner, a writer, a man set in the tramlines of a life that has barely moved six miles north on the Piccadilly Line through those years.
The second is me, age 6: a child, a boy who loved reading above all other pleasures, a mixed-race child in a ’60s London that was not, at least where we were living, in the least swinging or happening; a boy whose physical boundaries were circumscribed by being a shy child but whose mental scope had widened immeasurably when he discovered, first, reading and then, the local library.
This young me read Babar, all the Babar stories, and loved them. This young me could not see why there should be this barrier of wordlessness between us and animals – why shouldn’t they speak? And, for that matter, why shouldn’t Babar wear a bowler hat and take tea outside a cafe in an unnamed city that bore a striking resemblance to Paris. Nor did it seem odd to me that Babar should be able to get to Paris on foot, when running away from the horrible hunters who had killed his mother. If, God forbid, hunters killed my mother, I’d want to run away too, and preferably to somewhere where a nice, rich old lady would take me in, give me cake, dress me up nicely and teach me to speak properly.
The old me, getting the book from the library to rediscover his childhood, discovered rather how far away that childhood was. The faith in story – even though I am a writer – is not strong enough now to carry me over what seem to adult eyes the glaring gaps in the story. I think my adult eyes are wrong. Why shouldn’t animals talk? They were obviously meant to. Would I really be surprised if, one day, my cat looked up at me, sniffed, and said, ‘You really are an insufferable bore?’ before sitting on a newspaper to absorb the latest news.
No, I wouldn’t be surprised. In some deep sense, I’d think this the return of a natural order, somehow unaccountably lost along the way. But, for my young self, that lost natural order seemed so much closer and the leap, in book form, hardly any leap at all.
There are many reviews from old people decrying Babar for all sorts of reasons. Don’t believe them. They read with old eyes and older minds. Those for whom Babar was written see him, see story, with different eyes and clean minds. We old people bring the accretion of decades to him, when Babar needs to be read fresh, by a child still barely touched by the world. They will read him, and they will love him, and they will be right to do so.
A while back I read The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers and loved it: its mix of no-nonsense theology and creative analysis provided me with the best, and most personal, account of the Trinity I have ever read. In the dim past, Sayers’ translation of Dante’s Commedia was the first version of the work I read, and her determination to include Dante’s terza rima scheme gave me some first pale idea of the power of the original. But, of course, nowadays (and indeed during her life), Sayers is best known for her detective novels starring Lord Peter Wimsey, so I thought I would give one of these a go.
Case solved. It’s not for me. Not for any lack of ingenuity or paucity of literary skill – quite the opposite. The book gives a terrifically acerbic account of upper-class country house life just after the Great War. The mystery is ingenious and the plotting as thorough as any of the other great ladies of detective fiction.
No, it’s the language. Where Sayers’ brusque, almost staccato use of language worked to bracing effect in The Mind Of the Maker, here I found it like listening to pebbles being fired at a corrugated iron wall – one after another after another. This is purely a personal taste and I’m sure other people will find the style as invigorating as I found it exhausting. I do wonder if the style is specific to this particular book, or continues through the series. I will probably dip into another Lord Peter Wimsey to see how it reads in comparison to Clouds of Witness. But, for now, that’s enough – I feel like I’ve been sandblasted!
Has anyone remarked on the double entendre in our hero’s name? No. Then I won’t either.
Right. The book. Yes. I know I had all sorts of interesting things to say about it, but I finished reading it a month ago and the interesting things have slipped away into the place all those bon mots and lightning quick quips go when you actually want to use them, to be replaced by leaden, frankly rather dull, words. Words like episodic, entertaining and edifying: they all apply but really, if you’ve read any Hornblower, you’ll know that already.
What did I have to say that was interesting? Ah, was it this: this is story as single-person drama. While it’s not written in the first person, it’s absolutely Hornblower’s story – something evinced by the relatively small amount of dialogue. It’s all action and Hornblower planning on, or reflecting on, action. As such, it’s a peculiarly solipsistic book. Not bad for that, but I think having read four Hornblowers I need to take a break for a while. It might have helped if Hornblower had a sense of humour, but he’s as devoid of that as he is of musicality. Music is a bit hard to do in a book; humour is almost as hard.
It’s fascinating, sometimes, to step behind a story and into the intentions of the writer. Now, James Aitcheson is a skilled writer and this is an excellent book – it fully deserves the glowing reviews it has received on Amazon and Good Reads and elsewhere. So let’s just take those reviews as read, and move into the swampy mire that is the mind of the writer at work.
Now, I thought I had this book worked out. Laconic hero – from the Norman side although a Breton so, I suppose, a double enemy of the Anglo-Saxons – faces English folk hero in Hereward, who proves to be as ruthless and determined a killer as, well, William. Nice set up of Hereward as the adversary, the assault on the Isle of Ely, Hereward’s escape around the half way point of the book, and I’m expecting it all to continue through further encounters and skirmishes until a final denouement 150 pages later.
Only, it doesn’t. James does a story swerve on the reader, and completely dumps his expectations in the fen fastness into which Hereward’s legend disappears.
That’s when I started thinking about what James is doing here and in the previous books about Tancred, and I kept on thinking, following trails and suggestions, through to the end of the book. There’s a clue, I think, in the title of the first: Sworn Sword. Many of the warrior societies of the early and high Middle Ages were held together by oaths, by the pledging of service and loyalty and arms through the giving of word upon the sacred. With limited recourse to law or recompense from human society, a surer, although post-mortem sanction was required to hold men in check, and the giving of oaths before and to God provided that, for failure to uphold an oath meant sure and eternal punishment in the afterlife. Or did it?
That is what James Aitcheson is doing in these novels, I think. He is working through the implications and understandings of an oath-bound society, using his hero to investigate the consequences of this within an imaginative recreation of a historical society. And it’s quite, quite fascinating.
Knights of the Hawk ends with Tancred largely cut free from his previous oaths and obligations, to kings and lords and even the woman he had loved. Now, it will be fascinating to see where James takes the story, for both literally and metaphorically, Tancred ends the story at sea – and the sea can take you anywhere.
Oswald has been on tour – and this is where he’s been!
Hanna Marie Lei “This one has so much drama it’s a bit of a roller coaster, but not in the whole crazy significant other sort of way, more like an enjoy the show sort of way, although getting connected to the characters is very easy.”
Leah’s Good Reads “The author has the unique ability to clearly communicate the events and settings of the time in a way that is truly interesting.”
Tell Me a Story, Raggedy Man “Fans of world-building fantasy will enjoy this book, as will fans of medieval history novels.”
Books, Beautiful Books “Rarely have I seen historical accounts so well fancied and wrought out! The author is superb; his works worth the read!”
Live to Read to Live “This book beautifully captures the very real struggle between the forces of good and evil.”
Fellow Darkling (an author who writes about the Dark Ages in general and the seventh century in particular) Matthew Harffy interviewed me on his blog. We both, independently, wrote about seventh century Northumbria, and then were both horrified to learn that another writer was trespassing on ‘our’ patch. Read here how we reconciled without recourse to the duelling cloak and then read Matthew’s novel, The Serpent Sword, for his take on King Edwin.
Once upon a time, tales tell of a man, slim of hip and youthful of face, who appeared in the homes of many, many people, speaking to them, face to face, although he was far away. Some said he had already passed into the West, yet his voice was still heard, and the tale of his searchings passed down the generations: the Dark Ages; the Trojan War; Alexander the Great; a pair of jeans that wouldn’t cut off circulation to his nether regions. Were these tales based on truth, was there a real man behind them, distinct from the later accretion of legends? Join me now, as I go In Search of Michael Wood…
The man who would come to be known as Michael Wood first appears in the historical record in a far distant age: the 1970s. To give you some idea of how different the world was then, if you wanted to communicate with someone, the best way to do it was by sitting at a table, getting a piece of paper, covering it with illegible squiggles that was known as ‘handwriting’, wrapping it up and licking a little square of paper to stick on it, and then putting it into one of the magic red boxes that were all over the country in the 1970s. Mind, you had to select the correct red box. The one for this form of communication was round and chest high, with a slot in it; there were other, square, red boxes, taller than a human being, which people disappeared into for varying lengths of time, standing within them immobile while holding a wire attached object to their head. Some archaeologists suggest they were recharging their neural implants, but there are no records of neural implants that early, so it remains mysterious what they were doing in these red boxes.
Now, legend has it that Michael Wood was a historian. Let’s look at the evidence. Here are some pictures of historians through the ages:
Edward GibbonEric HobsbawmMarc Bloch
And now, here’s a purported photo of Michael Wood:
Michael Wood – or is it?
Clearly, this is not the portrait of a historian.
Then what is he?
Reading some of the other books to which his name was attached, I thought he might be a writer. This hypothesis still might hold true, if we argue that In Search of Myths & Heroes is mainly the work of later redactors, drawing together some common tropes in the Woodian corpus to make a reasonable but not, to the expert eye, totally convincing facsimile: viz, the recurring travel motif, the anecdotes of discomfort, the well-turned phrase. But, being the work of a redactor (or redactors – there may have been many involved in producing this text from within the Woodian community), it lacks the touches that confirm authenticity, in particular the overall sense that this narrative is going somewhere.
But if Michael Wood is a writer, then what to make of these supposed appearances on film and TV? I would like here to propose a hypothesis. What we see on screen is, in fact, a projection of the dreams and desires and hopes of the Woodian community that produced these texts: the shifting image (so like the chthonic world of the subconscious) coalesces to produce, for a fleeting hour, the ideal ‘Michael Wood’, that the Woodian community be reaffirmed in its commitment to its Woodian ideals. And thus the Woodian cult continues.
