‘Hm,’ says Jasper Fforde, ‘I’ve set my world up, I’ve introduced my main characters, I’ve got my themes… I know, let’s have some fun.’
And my goodness me, fun he has – as do we, the readers. This is quite, quite wonderful – reaching a crescendo of comic invention allied to an excellent crime fiction plot: it’s no use going all metafiction if you ignore the basics (Stephen King, I’m looking at you and the end of the Dark Tower series).
Jack Spratt, Mary Mary, Ashley the Alien are all back and facing the psychopathic Gingerbreadman (‘Is he a biscuit or a cake?’ On this question rides all). It’s wonderful seeing an author at the height of his powers really letting rip – my only question is when is the third volume going to come out?
It’s not easy being an egg – particularly one that’s nearly five foot tall, with arms, legs, a predilection for sitting on walls and a fondness for alcohol. So, it’s not so surprising when Humpty Dumpty has his great fall – case closed, you’d have thought, for Inspector Jack Spratt of Berkshire’s crack (because that’s about all the space they have) Nursery Crime Division. But Inspector Spratt – who definitely doesn’t eat any fat – smells something rotten, something eggy, and it’s not Humpty…
Quite wonderful. I’ve been reading Jasper Fforde since the first of his Thursday Next novels came out and find him, along with Philip Reeve, the most consistently enjoyable and inventive writer working today, but I think he outdoes himself with the Nursery Crime books. If there’s any criticism I have of the Thursday Next books it is that I find Thursday herself a slightly bland heroine, but the characterisation of Jack Spratt works really well here and, if anything, improves in the next book in the series.
So, if you haven’t already, visit Reading and spend some time with nursery rhymes.
This is a delicious book – in the same manner that taking tea with an extremely well-read, gossipy and slightly camp vicar would be. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine sipping at the cup, with a slice of cake on the table, as Bishop Moorman (he was bishop of Ripon) holds forth on the failings and foibles of his predecessors in ecclesiastical office.
In fact, this might be the best one-volume history of England I’ve read. By using the church as the lens, it magnifies and illuminates history in all sorts of interesting ways; something comparable (although over two much longer volumes) was done by NAM Rodger in his Naval History of Britain, with similarly fascinating results. The history of a country is so multi-faceted that a single volume work can easily either lose itself in distinctions or fall into triviality – Moorman, and notwithstanding his occasionally waspish tone, does neither. The only regret is that the history stops just after the Second World War (although checking the records, there was a revised 1973 edition which would be worth reading – I read the original ’53 printing) and it would be fascinating to know his assessment of the last half century. As it is, Bishop Moorman must be looking at all our goings on with the wry amusement of the dead at the antics of the living.
Give him something else to be amused at: seek out and read his book.
Have you ever seen, while walking at dusk or dawn through a wood, a shape looming from the shadows, irregular, tall, monstrous – reaching high but not a tree? I have, and it’s made me stop and step back, suddenly nervous, until I realise it for what it is: ivy, growing up and round its host, swamping it so much that the original tree is all but lost to view, a few branches and leaves poking out at the top but otherwise smothered in the ivy’s deep green.
Atheism is like that. Essentially, it is parasitic; it requires the support of a religious culture to hold it up – take that away and, like ivy, it will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
In this excellent book, Nick Spencer is much politer in his assessments. What he does do is cover, in clear, craftsman prose, the intellectual history of the last five hundred years of Western thought, showing in particular how atheism, as a recognisable school of thought, has arisen in reaction to distortions in theology and, particularly, overwheening religious power when associated with the dominant polity of the time. The greater the identification between religion and repressive state, the greater the fury against God and his ministers – and really, not surprisingly.
The boiled down summaries of complex philosophical and political debates are excellent, and come leavened with an entertaining slice of anecdotes. The philosopher, AJ Ayer, comes out particularly well: a fascinating character, with the chutzpah to run a string of mistresses (he accidentally sent identical love letters to two of them, who compared the missives to check), he once faced down a raging Mike Tyson by answering, when Tyson inquired if he knew who he was – ‘the heavyweight champion of the world’ – with the wonderful reply, ‘And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.’ Who couldn’t warm to a man with such courage – and I hope and expect that God will show him similar respect. Spencer does an excellent job of keeping his own biases from his writing, dealing fairly with all concerned and showing a particular, and justified, admiration for the working-class atheists who founded the Chartist movement.
In fact, the only group who might be miffed about his assessment is the vocal band of New Atheists but then, once you’ve written about Nietzche, Feuerbach and Marx, the posturings of the new boys become all too clear: they really are not in the same league.
Overall, an excellent survey and highly recommended.
The best sort of review is short, to the point and gives the clear impression that the reader’s life has been fulfilled from reading your book. An example: this reaction to Oswald: Return of the King, on Amazon.
It could be. And I’m not saying it shouldn’t be. Hegarty is a fine writer and the story is engaging, the (reluctant) hero a winning mix of moral courage and physical awkwardness, and my 11-year-old son absolutely loved it and is waiting eagerly for the next instalment, so it has all the necessary ingredients (and a really good cover). But (you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you?), but, for myself, I am getting a little bored with this style of comic fantasy, where monsters turn out to be misunderstood outsiders, a quip is never more than a paragraph away and each chapter is really short. Like the sentences. If you like this sort of writing, then Darkmouth is as good an example as you’ll find; buy it, read it, and help a writer support his family. As for me, I’m beginning to long for discursive sentences, complex sentence structures, replete with sub clauses and diversions, and less than fifteen paragraphs on a page. Time I read some Dickens, I suppose.
Which was the worst century in Britain’s history? The absolute worst to have to live through? There are plenty of candidates. The 14th century, when the Black Death arrived on these shores and killed a third of the population, has a pretty strong claim to the title. Then there’s the fifth century, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, when everything collapsed and the native Britons were driven, by sword and spear, into the margins of west and north by bands of marauding Anglo-Saxons. Mind you, having done that to the Britons, and become the English, the ninth century has strong title to the worst century, as the Vikings returned the favour and destroyed three quarters of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
Or what about after the Norman Conquest? Pretty much the entire local aristocracy either killed or displaced by the Normans and, according to Paul Kingsnorth, the biggest land grab in history, as everything became the property of the king. Then there’s the sixteenth century: Reformation, revolt, Henry executing people left right and centre, and the ever present terror of the Tudor spy network, informing and betraying. A single sentence spoken out of place and heard by the wrong ear could be enough to have you executed.
Then there’s the destruction of the Wars of the Roses, the poverty of 19th-century industrial slums, or not one but two World Wars and a Depression packed into the first half of the 20th century. All good candidates for worst time to be born. But, having read Ackroyd’s Civil War, I will now plump for the 17th century: of all the ills that can befall a country, none exceeds civil war, and, although exact death tolls are hard to come by, the casualty rate likely exceeded that of the Great War. Even when the war was over, political uncertainty persisted, plus this was the century of enclosures, when the poor were forced from the land. So, come on down, 17th century! You have taken the prize: the worst century in British history!
What’s real? At the end of The Realt, when all expectations (at least mine) have been confounded, that I suppose is the question that remains. What is real? I suspect we all dream of other worlds, although where we place them may differ: among the stars above, in the hope of heaven and the fear of hell, in realms of faerie within hollow hills or beyond the turn of tide. Even when our own world was still without known limits, we dreamed of other worlds; how much more, now, when the bounds have been sent the earth bent back upon itself: travel far enough now and all we shall accomplish is to return to where we started from.
In The Realt, there is another world, a world to which we all have access, although some of us see more of it than others: the dreamworld. This is a real, physical world, split from our own in ages past, and much like ours, although rather picturesquely caught in a quasi-Victorian era. It is not, itself, a world of dreams, but dreams, and dreamers, from our world may enter it, and, bringing their dreams, wreak havoc there – CS Lewis was all too right in making the Island Where Dreams Come True the most fearfull of all the isles the Dawn Treader encountered on its long voyage into the uttermost east.
Keeping the worlds apart is a shadowy but ultimately powerful organisation called the Hegemony, which wields exactly what it says on the security pass. But between the worlds, monsters lurk, Lovecraftian (without all the turgid prose) gods of horror and despite, waiting to be woken from their millennial sleep so that they might rise, and feed.
Brogden’s writing ripples with imaginative energy and taut prose, the horrors leavened with staring-into-the-face-of-hell wit, as he propels his cast of characters towards the, for me, completely unexpected denouement of this second volume of the Tourmaline trilogy. I know, I know the middle instalment is supposed to darken and deepen things – I remember my story making lessons from Joseph Campbell via a deep-frozen Han Solo – but I can safely say I didn’t expect it to get that dark and that deep! Now that James Brogden has thrown every expectation I had as a reader up against a brick wall, leaving them broken and shattered, I can only wait with a mixture of excitement and some little trepidation what he has in store for the final volume of the Tourmaline trilogy.
For readers of dark fantasy with a gritty urban feel – you can’t get much grittier than Birmingham after all – this is quite exceptional work. For myself, I’m only glad that I get to read Brogden’s work rather than live in his world. It’s a tough question: I too dream after other worlds but, if I could, would I want his world to be real? It is a world of wonders, after all, much like, say, the Warhammer 40k universe is, but also a world I’d much rather visit in the imagination than reality. But if the choice was a flat, so-this-is-all-there-is universe and Tourmaline, I’d probably plump for Tourmaline (at least at the beginning of the book: having read the sneak preview of volume three that comes at the end of the book, I’ll have to read it first to see whether I’d still want to visit!). But, leaving that aside, if you enjoy books such as Stephen King’s Dark Tower sequence or Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasies, the Tourmaline trilogy should go straight to the top of your reading list. Just remember to thank me when you dream!
(And a final point: this is the second great cover design from Snowbooks – let’s see if they can make it three on the trot with The Amity, the last volume in the trilogy.)
Dr Faustus first made his pact with the devil on the London stage in 1572. It’s hard reading it not to think that Christopher Marlowe had concluded his own bargain a year or two before – and like the hero of his play, they were both short changed. Reading it now, after Reformation, Enlightenment, wars world and otherwise, Modernity, Post-Modernity and everything else, it still shocks; its impact near five centuries earlier in the middle of the religious upheaval of the Tudor dynasty must have been overwhelming.
Dr Faustus, speaking with the devil’s own despite, pours scorn over all, but most particularly the religion that had formed, then broken apart, the civilisation of which Marlowe was part.
Philosophy is odious and obscure.
Both law and physic are for petty wits.
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vile…
But when men make God the reason for their hatred, is it any wonder that others heap coals upon this image and make pacts with a devil who must seem the lesser of the two calamities. What Marlowe really believed is unknown, buried beneath lies and rumours and slanders, aimed not so much at him but the richer and more powerful men, notably Sir Walter Raleigh, with whom he was associated. Tudor power politics was a blood game but its rules were laid with ink: was Marlowe the heretic, the atheist, the sodomite and blasphemer the Baines note suggested he was, or were these the casual calumnies of the underworld of spies and recusants, traitors and fanatics and rogues where Marlowe swam. That he was enlisted as a spy by the Privy Council seems fairly clear, but beyond that, it’s difficult to know anything for certain in this murky time. In one sense, Dr Faustus is a medieval morality play, updated, yes, but still with a clear sense of evil (although a rather shakier sense of the good), and justice is done, and seen to be done, in Faustus’s condemnation and damnation at the end of the play. But, on the other hand, Faustus’s almost complete lack of sense for the power of redeeming grace suggests powerfully that Marlowe may also have felt that absence in the milieu of the burnings and executions of the Reformation.
Maybe Marlowe fascinates so because he seems at once a thoroughly medieval man and yet, also, the first truly modern one – in fact, almost post-modern in his scepticism of the rules and mores of his society. Dr Faustus looks at the world around him and has the courage to call it all a sham, and there lies the tragedy: for there is a clarity of vision there that is then clouded and blurred into the petty lusts and (really rather funny) ragging of Pope and cardinals. Dr Faustus is, clearly, the work of a young man, with all the rage of the young fresh burning against the mess they have discovered their elders and supposed betters have made of the world. It burns still.
