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Adventures in Bookland: The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch

26 February 2019
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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

26 February 2019
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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

26 February 2019
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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.

 

The Perils of Context

7 February 2019
Edoardo
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Categories: Things You Never Knew

Why it’s always a good idea to check the dictionary rather than relying on context to reveal the meaning of a word: I thought ‘afflatus’ meant farting. Turns out it means ‘a divine creative impulse or inspiration’. I only wish I could remember the context where I read it and thought afflatus meant farting!

Adventures in Bookland: Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth

31 January 2019
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

There are three essential works for anyone interested in going deeper into Tolkien’s writing and thought: Humphrey Carpenter’s biography, Tom Shippey’s philological appreciation, JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century, and John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War. While Tolkien, famously and justly, abhorred the mining of an author’s life for the coal seam of his literary material, Garth’s study of Tolkien’s war, and that of the other three members of the youthful coterie that had gathered around him, the TCBS, is both an appreciation of the subtle weaving of thought, experience and action, and an examination of that generation, raised at the height of Empire, who bled out in the holocaust of the First World War. If anything, the two members of the TCBS who died in France, GB Smith and Robert Gilson, are portrayed even more vividly than Tolkien himself. It is clear that Tolkien was a writer who particularly required the frank and unvarnished feedback of men whom he admired and who resonated with him: most famously CS Lewis, who cajoled and encouraged the writing of The Lord of the Rings but, Garth’s book shows, Smith, Gilson and Wiseman similarly played midwife to the birthing of Middle-earth through their talks, discussions and shared ideals. For someone who has always been solitary in his creative endeavours, I find this aspect of Tolkien’s work fascinating and inscrutable. I’m also, I think, rather jealous. Would that I might say, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…”

 

Adventures in Bookland: Brian Helsing 1 by Gareth K Pengelly

31 January 2019
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

What would an English Buffy look like? Pretty much like Brian Helsing. Tall, lanky, generally useless, largely clueless, with a stomach for cheap cider, a taste for cheaper weed, and a thoroughly British way with profane language.

So Brian, the world’s worst second-hand car salesman, having been taken for a ride, literally, by a car-buying vampire babe, finds himself unwittingly recruited as a Helsing – a slayer. To everyone’s surprise, not least his own, he survives (at least until the sequel).

It’s all great fun and as unCalifornian as it’s possible to be.

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle

31 January 2019
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

So, you’re the writer who has created the single most popular and widely recognised character in literary history and – you’re thoroughly sick of your creation. You’ve killed him off, sending him over Reichenbach Falls, and still he stubbornly refuses to properly die: a Hollywood villain before films had even been invented. So what do you do now? If you’re Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you set out to create another character as memorable, as distinctive and as iconic as Sherlock Holmes.

Professor Challenger. A genius.  Check. Acerbic. Check. Suffers fools badly. Check.

What was that name again?

Yes, it’s true, Conan Doyle’s new Sherlock wasn’t, on the surface, that different from the old Sherlock. But Professor Challenger never won over an audience in the same way as the resident of 221B Baker Street did. In part, that’s because Challenger is simply a boor, an intelligent one but a boor and a bully, whereas Holmes is never boring and only occasionally bullying, and that mostly to Dr Watson. But that, of course, is the second part of the equation. As with Holmes, the story is told from the viewpoint of the sidekick, a young journalist called Malone (Anglo-Irish if I remember correctly).

With Holmes and Watson, Watson is as important as Holmes. With Challenger and Malone, Malone is in many ways the more complete character – Challenger is a caricature of Holmes – but Watson on his own can’t sustain a series, and neither can Malone.

Nonetheless, the story is entertaining; an enjoyable breeze through early-20th century Edwardian life transplanted to South American jungles.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Ancestral Journeys by Jean Manco

18 January 2019
Edoardo
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Categories: Archaeology, Book review, History

Few books manage to be simultaneously so fascinating and so eye glazing. The tale of the movements of the successive waves of people that have made and remade Europe is fascinating, and the new science of DNA analysis that allows for the extraction of ancient DNA and its comparison to the modern inhabitants of a country is a salutary corrective to the strong tendency in archaeology and historical studies in the latter half of the 20th century to deny all movements of people in favour of cultural overlay and small groups of elite warriors while the peasants remain, lumpen and unmoved on the land (although these lumpen peasants do, by this view, display a remarkable ability to change languages and cultures at the arrival of a new bunch of guys waving swords). Since all the contemporary accounts of the age of migration talk about the movements of peoples, it’s good to accord the contemporary witnesses some credit for telling what they saw. However, on the eye glazing front, I defy anyone to get through a few pages of Y-DNA haplogroup R1a1a and the like without their head drooping.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Archaeology of the Bible by Jean-Pierre Isbouts

18 January 2019
Edoardo
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Categories: Archaeology, Book review

Coffee-table book of Biblical archaeology. Beautifully produced, with a great deal of reasonably useful material about the wider historical and archaeological context, but written with a definite although veiled Biblical minimalist view. That’s the view, adopted by some scholars, that there is essentially no, or very little, historical value in the Bible. They see it as a theological, cultural and political document, reflecting purely the realities of the times when the various books of the Bible were written, with an assumption that they were written much after the events that they supposedly record. Thus the stories of David and Solomon and the United Monarchy are not a history of what actually happened but an invented genealogy and hence rationale for much later kings. While a strong strand in Biblical archaeology, it’s by no means the only one, but there’s very little in this book to suggest that there any other interpretations of the evidence beyond those presented here. Somewhat disappointing.