Book review

Adventures in Bookland: Ancient Sorceries by Algernon Blackwood

22 January 2016
Edoardo
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Some people are christened to their art: parents beware, when you start flicking through that baby name book, you might be doing more than just choosing a name, you might be fixing the pole to which your child’s life is forever aligned. Put Chanelle around her neck and, I’m afraid, the best she will ever aspire to is coming third on Big Brother. Usain Bolt – well, what else. And the parents of Algernon Blackwood had clearly decided they wanted their son to write weird fiction – particularly when they added in to the cocktail of potential the combination of genes that meant little Algie grew up to look like this:

Algernon_Blackwood

Luckily – although that may not be quite the right word – Blackwood turned out to have the literary and imaginative gifts necessary to write ghost stories – and other fictions, that skate around the edge of the supernatural and indefinable, hinting at things that, if seen, would either shrivel in the light of sight, or shrivel sight in the light of seeing.

In The Willows, one of the stories in this collection, and the best known, one of the characters says:

‘All my life I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region – not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind – where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul…

[He continues] ‘You think it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought it was perhaps the old gods. But I tell you now it is – neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own.’

 Now, this is pretty well what I think. Our seemingly so, so solid world is cut through by other realities, most of which are completely beyond our reck. But, sometimes, things slip, in the thin places, the rubbed through areas, and worlds that were not meant to meet, mix, for a while, before the wheels of creation drive them apart again.

So, I loved this collection of short stories. While Blackwood might not have the wit (or sheer talent) of our best known contemporary writer of weird fiction, Neil Gaiman, he has one great advantage: he knows he’s dealing with something more than mind stuff, and that imbues his work with the edge, the bottom, to use an old-fashioned word, that Gaiman lacks.

But at least Gaiman isn’t subjected to the dubious talents of whatever artist drew the cover illustration for this book: isn’t it dreadful. Blackwood must be blue.

Adventures in Bookland: The Wind Eye by Robert Westall

7 January 2016
Edoardo
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This book changed my life.

There. Five-word review. There aren’t many books that do that, and this one did. Perhaps slightly unusual for a life-changing book, in that it’s a children’s book (and I read it as an adult), it’s set in Northumberland (which I’d barely even heard of when I read it, let alone visited), and it’s about an obscure 7th-century monk and a dysfunctional 1970s family. But there you go. Life-changing books come in all sorts of strange packages.

As to why it was so life-changing, think on this. My parents are immigrants. They settled in London. Our friends were in London or the south east. So, when we travelled in England, we went to them. Yes, we made the occasional trip further afield, but without a familial sense of where to go and what to visit, we were limited to the most obvious places. Our family trip to Scotland took in Edinburgh, Loch Ness and (for two young boys) an exciting night spent sleeping the back of our estate car when all the B&B places that had ‘vacancy’ signs in the morning had changed them to ‘no vacancy’ signs by the afternoon (for the adults, it was no doubt a hugely uncomfortable and deeply mortifying night, but we thought it was great). Most of England was beyond our knowledge and budget. So, by the time I’d grown up, I really hadn’t visited very much of it.

Going to university meant that I actually met and became friends with some actual English people – and then, quite a few years later, I went and married one. Now, my wife’s family knew quite a lot about England – they’d been here for centuries. And, although undemonstrative, my father-in-law’s patriotism is deeply rooted in the understated nature mysticism of the English: the same sort of feeling that permeates the Piper in the Gates of Dawn chapter of The Wind in the Willows, or the poem Adlestrop.

The other strand to this feeling for place is history: a rootedness in the land and landscape that comes from centuries within it. I can see this but, at root, I can’t feel it: my roots stop with me. But there is a further, deeper connection, and in this book I began to see the hints of that.

St Cuthbert lived in 7th-century Northumbria. He was a miracle-worker, a bishop, a hermit, a man kind to animals and plants and plagued by demons and devils; he was fierce in love and harsh on evil. With eyes turned to God, all other eyes turned to him, pulling, plucking, trying to pinch a little of his holiness from him. In defence, Cuthbert went exile in view, on one of the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland, and remained there until called back to act as bishop, although he did manage to return to the island for his final few months of life.

The saint lives. In the book, he stirs, opening up the wounds of pride and angry disbelief in an Oxford professor, lashing him to his duty; this is no plaster saint but a man of danger. This is holiness as whirlwind and fire, burning and breaking, making.

Men are broken, bent things. Sometimes they have to be broken further before they can be remade. This book broke some of me in its fire. I hope it remade that part of me in its image.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3: Guardians Disassembled

31 December 2015
Edoardo
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Rocket Raccoon may be the best character in comics right now – Groot is certainly the best talking tree and, since there’s not that much competition for the title of best anthropomorphic raccoon, Rocket definitely takes that crown, but I think he’s the best character out there, with or without fur.

But this volume is a disappointment, and one that bears all the marks of a Marvel corportate cash in. The first half at least is connected, with the Guardians disassembled and trying to get back together again, but that story isn’t even completed here. Instead, the second half is a collection of random stories, with no relation to each other, that neither highlight nor complement the original. But even if they did, there would still be no excuse for putting out an incomplete book such as this. Best avoided (or borrowed through a library, which is how we thankfully avoided having to pay to learn how disappointing this was).

Adventures in Bookland: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

30 December 2015
Edoardo
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A minor disadvantage of growing up as the child of immigrant parents for whom English was not a first language (well, it ranked equal with Sinhala and Tamil for my father), is that there is no familial list of children’s reading classics to go through. I learned to read young, got a library ticket, and was set loose. My reading reflected the magpie tendencies and path following of a child: Enid Blyton (all the Famous Five and Secret Seven, plus the Adventure series); The Wind in the Willows; Dr Doolittle and his many adventures. But it missed out many books that a familial familiarity with English would have presented to me: Winnie-the-Pooh, Narnia, Treasure Island, Middle-earth. Some of these I caught up with as a teenager (there’s no better age to enter Middle-earth for the first time than when you’re fourteen years old), but the others I’ve been working through as an adult. Narnia saw me through my university finals. Nephews and a niece provided the chance to read Winnie-the-Pooh for the first time (the first chapter left me limp upon the sofa, as my nephew tried to figure out why Pooh Bear, hanging from a balloon and attempting to impersonate a small black cloud so that he could raid a hive for honey, should leave his uncle wheezing and unable to move for laughing). Treasure Island was marked out on the map of a fortysomething. And, finally, fifty two year-old me followed Alice down the rabbit hole.

It’s pretty weird down there.

I’d say the book has the logic of dreams, apart from the fact that I have the most boring subconscious known to man. Do you want to know how boring it is? My recurring childhood nightmare was falling from our bathroom window. Do you want to know how boring it is? I’ve dreamed of VAT rates. Do you really want to know how boring it is? When I have sexual dreams, I dream of having sex with my own wife.  So, whatever logic the book has, it certainly isn’t the logic of my dreams. But it does make sense: non-sense. And, as such, I was really getting to like it, until I came to the end.

No, no, no, no!

And again, no, no, No, NO!

Lewis Carroll, how could you?

If there is one ending I hate above all others in stories, it’s the and-then-he-woke-up-it-and-it-was-all-a-dream ending. In this case, the he is a she – Alice – and it was all a dream. I mean, why should a homicidal Queen of Hearts be a dream? Let alone a white rabbit, or an alternately elongating and shrinking Alice? All sounds quite sensible to me, particularly a century and a half since first publication (1865). Better for Alice to have been kidnapped by the Cheshire Cat than for it all to have been a dream.

So, Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson, I ask again, how could you?

 

 

 

Adventures in Bookland: Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

24 December 2015
Edoardo
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Take a look at the shelves of a second-hand bookshop or, even more mournful, the library of a country hotel with pretensions. It’s where books go to die, standing unread and unremarked upon bookshelves, their authors’ names slowly fading. It’s an achievement in itself to get a book published but… then what? A career, if you’re lucky, writing, but those melancholy shelves tell the likely truth: most writers are forgotten as completely as most books.

So, in that respect, Stella Gibbons is luckier than most of us. Cold Comfort Farm, possibly the funniest book I’ve ever read, means that she stays in print and thus, in literary terms, alive. And, being alive, publishers have cast through her back catalogue and hung a collection of short stories on Gibbons’ brief return visit to the Starkadders’ farm.

It’s the other stories that impress here, though. They’re an insight into a vanished Britain, an England and English banished by the cultural revolution of the last few decades: repression and restraint, propriety and prudishness, and the smart, usually literary, set that pioneered the revolution: as complacent and self-obsessed group of people as one could imagine.

Without Cold Comfort Farm, this book would never have been republished. But Gibbons lives on, and worthily so.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Of All the Gin Joints by Mark Bailey and Edward Hemingway

16 December 2015
Edoardo
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I was about to begin this review by saying this is the perfect coffee-table book but then… coffee has very little to do with it. Better to say it’s the ideal toilet book: two- or three-page chapters on Hollywood legends and their drinking in particular and debauchery in general. Speaking as someone whom nature has, perforce, made abstemious, I read the exploits of the people here with something like wonder: how can the human system cope with such vast amounts of alcohol? I, certainly, cannot. One or two pints and it’s the sick pit for me.

On a more general point, just what is the connection between excess and creativity? For some, they seem entwined – although how much this is learned reinforcement and how much necessary spark I wonder. Writing, acting: it’s like diving, head first into the deep blue. Scary stuff, and not so surprising that some might resort to a snifter or two. But, done once, it easily becomes a habit, and a dangerous one. To make, to create, is to enter into God’s province and his plan: it entails, it demands sacrifice, whether one knows it or not. And the sacrifice will be made, whether one knows it or not.

Otherwise, just enjoy the gossip about the famously beautiful (and a few writers too).

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

16 December 2015
Edoardo
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Well, I knew it was rude, but I didn’t know it was this rude. And, yes, I know there’s all sorts of other literary and historical significances to The Decameron: the foundation of Italian vernacular literature, the introduction of a new, earthy style of writing, a witness to the social dislocation produced by the Plague, the emergence of an urban, mercantile class. But, really, I challenge anyone reading this to come away with any other first impression than that it is astoundingly, jaw-droppingly rude.

You want to know how rude? I don’t think I can tell you without blushing. Oh, all right then. How about this then. A priest, Dom Gianni, convinces his rather dim friend, Pietro, that he can turn Pietro’s wife, Gemmata, into a mare and back again. Very useful for getting to market. Pietro and Gemmata agree, but Dom Gianni warns them that, when making the spell, they must not speak or the magic will not work. Suffice to say, the spell involves Gemmata naked and on all fours and a most unusual tail.

Throughout the book, priests, monks, friars and nuns are rampant, women demand their conjugal rights, and seek satisfaction elsewhere if left unsatisfied; craft and cunning is rewarded, stupidity gulled.

I don’t think I will ever see the Middle Ages in quite the same light again.

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Brain’s Way of Healing by Norman Doidge

25 November 2015
Edoardo
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To review this book, I have to tell you about my grandmother.

When I bought my house, I was thirty years old and single – with little apparent prospect of that changing (not that I hadn’t tried to get married, but all the women I’d asked to marry me – some of whom I even knew – had refused). However, my grandmother, my little Italian Nonna, was living with my parents, ten minutes walk away. It was, as the marketing men say, a no brainer: I asked her to move in with me.

May I say that there is no more cushy or comfortable life, for a thirtysomething single male, than having your Italian grandmother living with you. Washing, cooking, cleaning, dusting, ironing, sewing – it was all done. Just so you don’t get too jealous of the tempting, mouth watering delights that must have been served up to me each night, I must say that the one area in which Nonna was not all Italian was cooking: she was terrible. Well, maybe that’s slightly too strong a word: her risotto and lasagne were good, but out of her two dish comfort zone, things tended to get, well, slabby: I still remember with a slight shudder the thick slices of deep fried polenta, quivering like vulcanised yellow rubber, that she served up at least once a week. But in all other respects, it was a wonderfully cushy life – and it meant I really got to know my Nonna (particularly as she had only recently moved to England).

It was a glorious interlude, and one that lasted four years. But then, I got married (I sprang the proposal on my wife so completely out of the blue that she didn’t have time to dodge). Nonna moved out. Wife moved in.

Nonna went back to my parents, taking over many of the housekeeping duties there, while always, whatever the weather, taking a daily constitutional through the park.

Then she had a stroke. A little one. Some weakness in her left arm, a limp, soon recovered from, and half an aspirin daily.

It didn’t work. The second stroke was a major one. Hospital, beeping machines, then relief. She would live. It was the left side again, but this time, worse. No movement in her left leg or arm, face pulled down on that side – at least, being the left side, there was no language loss. But she couldn’t walk.

Out of danger, they moved Nonna from the general hospital to Finchley Memorial Hospital, which was then devoted to recuperation and physiotherapy. And the physios set about her: exercise, effort, every day for five, six weeks.

By the end of that time, there was a little improvement, but not that much, and we assembled to meet the doctor to hear what the plan was for her continuing treatment.

There wasn’t one. They’d done all they could. The first six weeks after stroke were crucial – after that window, there wouldn’t be any further improvement. Nonna didn’t speak English. The doctor told us to tell Nonna she would never walk again. As he got up to leave, he told us to set about arranging moving her into a nursing home. And that was it.

For a year, Nonna sat in the lounge in the nursing home, watching television she didn’t understand, and I’d visit her each day and talk to her – the despairing small talk of family and friends and weather that substituted for hope. According to the doctors, there wasn’t any.

I think it was anger, the slowly nurtured anger at helplessness and fate and God, that did it. The doctors might not want to do anything, but anything was better than this waiting room of death (the staff were lovely and caring, but that is what the place was).

So what if the doctors said they wouldn’t do anything. We would. We found a physiotherapist who spoke Italian, and paid for her to visit Nonna and work with her. And, you know, there was something – some small improvement. Nonna began to be able to move her left hand, and then her arm.

And then the cavalry arrived, in the small, squashy shape of our first child, Theo – Nonna’s great grandson.

Nonna loved Theo. She brightened, she cooed, she came alive when we brought him to see her. And, when I held him, dangling, just out of reach as the physio worked on her standing and posture, Nonna pushed herself up, unthinking, focused on him and not on what she could not do, and she began, she began to stand.

Nonna was going to be the first resident of the nursing home to walk out of there on her own two feet, rather than being carried out in a box.

I still remember her chuckling laugh as she reached out to chaff Theo’s cheek, standing and not even realising it, and wishing we had started this so much earlier.

Then Nonna had a third stroke. She was reduced to a pair of wandering eyes, rolling without control, in a shell of flesh without any movement at all. She didn’t walk out of the nursing home. Six months later, she went out in the box.

I wish I’d read this book then, before all this happened. But it hadn’t been written. Back then, the six weeks window was all there was. The brain was a hard-wired thinking machine: break it, and it stayed broke.

This is the mistake of metaphor. We’ve learned to understand the body and the mind through our inventions: clocks and hydraulics, circuits and computers. Mechanical, fixed things. But the brain is alive; it’s not caught by these metaphors. And what we see in this remarkable book is the dawning realisation among researchers and doctors that brain and body, mind and effort are all intimately, and directly, connected. Unlike an electronic circuit, the brain can find new connections, fresh ways of doing things, particularly when reinforcing the new connections with physical learning.

It’s an insight that some people seem uncomfortable with. A quite remarkable (in all the wrong ways) review, by Jonathan Ree,  of The Brain’s Way of Healing in The Guardian concludes thus:

The publicity tells us that The Brain’s Way of Healing will provide new hope for millions of unlucky sufferers. Hope is a tricky commodity however, and while some of us may find it heartening, for others it could be another turn of the fatal screw. The neuroplastic revolution is part of a contemporary stampede towards the moralisation of medicine: patients are encouraged to blame themselves for their sufferings, and to think that their chances of recovery depend not on random tricks of fate, or the luck or good judgment of their doctors, but on their own willpower and moral fibre. Sick people need to be cared for, but they also have a right to be left in peace.

This is the judgement that condemned Nonna after six weeks; this is the end of hope and the acceptance of the TV lounge; this is morally stupid and intellectually offensive. Why should hope and effort be placed in opposition to care and medicine? Only in the judgement of the reviewer. For myself, I wish this book had been written then. Maybe Nonna would still have left the nursing home in a box, but the stay would have been a battle, and not a defeat.

Hope emerged last from Pandora’s box. After all else is gone, hope remains.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Rules of Summer by Shaun Tan

19 November 2015
Edoardo
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First, a tip. If you’re doing the Goodreads reading challenge, or any other reading challenge, and you’ve fallen behind schedule, this is a really, really good book to read. It has, let me see, yes… 104 words. That’s right, 104 words. So, it won’t take long to read and you can tick it right off your ‘to read’ list: another one down.

Unfortunately, you’re not so likely to leave it behind in thought.

What is it all about?

Search me.

So, let’s search the book instead.

First, the title. Hm, ‘Rules of Summer’. Very interesting. So, it suggests, it’s about rules and about summer. So, holidays, and things you shouldn’t do (and some you should).

Big brother and (protagonist) little brother. In a strange, sub-urban, half-futuristic, semi-mythological world: maybe similar to the world an imaginative and perceptive six year old lives in. (I suspect, when they see monsters under the bed, or in the closet, or behind a fence [as in rule 1: Never leave a red sock on the clothesline] that they are seeing and we are blind.)

Don’t think it’s a very nice world: rule 2: never eat the last olive at a party. Come on, someone has to – best it’s a six year old.

Rule 3: Never drop your jar. Agreed, particularly when it’s got a star in it.

Rule 4: Never leave the back door open overnight. Because you’ll get plants, molluscs and lizards in your living room. Not sure I get this one.

Rule 5: Never step on a snail. He’s right.

Rule 6: Never be late for a parade. Ditto.

Rule 7: Never ruin a perfect plan. Can’t be perfect if you can ruin it.

Rule 8: Never argue with an umpire. Particularly if he’s your elder brother. Not going to listen to you.

Rule 9: Never give your keys to a stranger. Unless he’s a human-sized cat.

Rule 10: Never forget the password. Errr.

Rule 11: Never ask for a reason. Why not?

Rule 12: Never lose a fight. And if you do, definitely, definitely don’t get on the large, scary black train to oblivion.

Oh, no! You did.

No!

This is really, really scary. Down, down, down into the dark, followed by a murder of crows.

Phew.

Double, treble phew! Big brother’s come to save me – I mean him. Him, yes, the character in the book. I’m not getting carried away, definitely not, not me.

He brought his bike! Yay. (A bit scary here, what with the skulls and the crashed planes, but I’m on my brother’s bike so I feel safe.)

Back in time for the last day of summer.

Hooray!

What’s it all about?

The Rules of Summer.

 

Adventures in Bookland: A Space Traveller’s Guide to the Solar System by Mark Thompson

18 November 2015
Edoardo
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I don’t know about you, but I always open a book with the intention to like it (there might have been a slight exception with The Da Vinci Code, but that’s the exception that proves only literary incompetence tied to astonishing success will break my general bibliphilic disposition). And I really wanted to like this one: I’ve read a couple of other, similarly themed but historical books, such as Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, and really enjoyed them, so I was hoping for something similar from Mark Thompson. What’s more, while I read widely about astronomy, planetary and stellar, when I was younger, I’ve not looked at it much recently, so I expected there to be a huge range of exciting new findings from all the space probes that have visited the solar system’s planets and satellites over the last 10-15 years. And there probably is – but I’m afraid, my eyes glazed over and my attention wondered.

This book is dull. Dull, dull, dull. At best, I’d call the prose workmanlike and clear. As a positive, I now understand the mechanics of using the gravity slingshot to accelerate a spaceship to the outer reaches of the solar system much better. But the rest of it is all so dreary.

Look, here’s a telling example. Venus, we’ve found out, rather than being the planet of love is as near hell as you can get this side of death: crushing surface pressure, hot enough to melt lead, sulphuric acid clouds: anyone on the surface would be crushed, cooked and corroded in seconds.

But if that wasn’t enough, there is now evidence that the entire planetary surface, every half billion years or so, dissolves into a molten magma lake. This is because Venus has no volcanoes, so there is no mechanism for the heat at the planetary core to escape, so it builds up and builds up and builds up until, in a truly apocalyptic scene, the whole surface of the planet melts, allowing the pent up heat of 500 million years to escape. Then, slowly, it cools and solidifies, and the whole cycle repeats.

So, something pretty juicy for a science writer to get his words into, you’d think? Think again. Here’s Mark Thompson’s description of Venerean apocalypse:

Like all the rocky objects in the Solar System, Venus displays thousands of craters, and the majority of them are still in excellent condition. This suggests that there has been minimal erosion of surface detail. More interestingly, it implies that the surface underwent some kind of global restructuring event around 600 million years ago…In a global event that lasted perhaps up to 100 million years, the entire crust weakened and yielded to the mantle, in effect recycling itself.

There, you see? Thompson takes the most cataclysmic event imaginable and turns it into a bloody Bob the Builder episode (for those who don’t have toddlers and thus are unaware, Bob is clean and green, and committed to the three ‘Rs’: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle).

But if dullness was the only objection, I’d give the book three stars: it’s at least reasonably clear; good, stolid sciencey stuff. But why, oh why, oh why do science writers, who would be appalled (justifiably) if someone accused them of mixing their neutrons with their neutrinos, not feel the same obligation to check their historical facts as they do about checking their scientific facts? Thompson, in the laziest way imaginable, rehashes the old, old Galileo Affair story as a conflict between obscurantist Churchmen, wedded to outdated and unobservable models of the universe, and brave, bold Galileo, speaking truth to power come hell or house imprisonment. I mean, this version of events went out fifty years ago: even Wikipedia has caught up with what actual historians think about what happened. For a proper review of the myths and realities of the Galileo Affair, see this article by historian Tim O’Neill (and lest I be accused of special pleading, note that O’Neill is an atheist and a sceptic).

The consistency with which science writers regurgitate these old lies makes me wonder, in my more paranoid moments, whether there really is a hidden agenda. But no. It’s far more likely to be the lazy assumptions of unexamined prejudice – something as prevalent among scientists and science writers as any other section of the population. So, for this egregious lapse, I’m knocking an extra star off: two out of five stars for A Space Traveller’s Guide to the Solar System. Try reading some of Patrick Moore’s books about the solar system instead – at least he can write.