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Adventures in Bookland: Kingmakers by Timothy Venning

30 May 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

The great strength of this book is the forensic detail with which it examines the Marcher lords, the Anglo-Norman barons installed by William the Conqueror to guard his border with Wales. Unfortunately, this is also the book’s great weakness. For those uninitiated into the murderous feuds and labyrinthine family politics of the region, the endless succession of betrayals, murders and double crossings dealt out through generations of bloodshed causes the eyes to glaze over and the head to nod. The author’s extreme reluctance to use paragraphs – their average length is four pages – also does not help to bring into focus this parade of feuding barons and fratricidal Welsh princes.

To deal with the author’s virtues first, I must note and commend his command of the source material. Only someone completely at home with the history of the Marcher lords could negotiate the extraordinarily complicated family feuds and rivalries that drove much of the politics of the region. Timothy Venning clearly has no difficulty in remembering that, for instance, Gerald of Windsor’s wife, Nest, was the daughter of Rhys ap Tewdr and mistress to Henry II, and together they produced Maurice FitzGerald, who would go on to found the Fitzgerald dynasty in Ireland, another son who produced the Carew family via his lordship of Caer Yw Castle, and a daughter who was the mother of the historian Gerald of Wales. Indeed, such is Venning’s command of the intricacies of family relationships that this reviewer thinks it a shame he did not live then: he would have understood perfectly the extraordinarily complicated knots of relationships that drove the history of the Marches and, later, Ireland. For the reader who takes similar delight in learning the dynastic details of the time, this book will be perfect. I know of nothing to match its attention to familial detail.

But this is also the book’s great fault. The mark of a great historian is the mastery of detail combined with the gift of knowing what detail to include and what to exclude. There is no doubting Venning’s mastery of the detail, but very little of that detail is excluded from the story, meaning that the general reader is likely to be quickly overwhelmed by the succession of names. Venning’s thesis is that the Marcher lords played a major part in the power politics of medieval England and he certainly makes that case, but he could have done so just as well by focusing more closely on the more significant interventions in the monarchy by these lords, rather than seeking to cram in to his book pretty well every battle and plot between the Conquest and the accession of Richard III, when the book ends, sputtering out in the heavy rain that drowned the revolt of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham.

That the book should end thus, with a final addition of detail rather than a rounded summing up of what has gone before, rather tells its own story: it’s a book of pieces stuck into history, but with too little narrative drive to push the general reader through to its conclusion.

Adventures in Bookland: Conclave by Robert Harris

29 May 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review


Once, when visiting Rome, my friend and I determined to get up early, really early, to get to St Peter’s as soon as it opened in the morning – at 6am if memory serves. Walking across the square on a crisp Roman morning, our shadows stretching before us and the rising sun at our backs, we arrived just as the doors were opened, and we entered into great silence. But then, through that silence, walking as softly as a dream through the vast and, at that hour, empty interior of the basilica, came a column of cardinals, vested in red and white. They went in silent procession across the nave and disappeared through a distant door and we watched as these princes of the church passed us by.

It was a memorable moment. This book doesn’t really match that, unfortunately. It’s a well-told story, that fulfilled the first and most important requirement of any story: I always wanted to know what would happen on the next page. But as a thriller, it didn’t really thrill. As the title suggests, the story is about the meeting to elect a pope following the death of the previous holder of the keys of St Peter, and almost all the action takes place during the conclave. However, the scandals that bring down a succession of papabile before they can gather enough votes to be elected pope are so obvious as to be totally predictable, while it’s absolutely clear just who will finally end up as pope. Harris must have been aware of this, as he throws in a final twist after the obvious – to the reader if not the cardinals – candidate is elected. However, the twist is really rather risible.

This is not to say the book is bad; it’s not. It just could fairly easily have been better. The characters are interesting and Harris makes some attempt at rounded characterisations even for a papabile whose doctrinal positions he evidently disagrees with. But it’s all just too predictable.

Adventures in Bookland: Half a King by Joe Abercrombie

21 May 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review


Half a King, all a book, one quarter of a review.

Good narrative, generally well-drawn characters, interesting new world (is it some future, post-apocalyptic version of our own? – if anyone has read the rest of the books in the series, can they tell me), some coincidences that, when you put the book down and think about it, push credulity.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Confessions of a Ghostwriter by Andrew Crofts

21 May 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review


There are times when you just want something light and fluffy and gossipy to read and what could be better, I thought, than the confessions of a ghostwriter. Surely we’d get to hear the dirt dished on people who hide behind someone else’s words and some insight into the world of high-money vanity publishing? Well, we get a bit of the latter but unfortunately Andrew Crofts is far too discrete to name any of the names you actually want named. When he does drop a name, it’s only to tell us about a time when he nearly got to write somebody’s memoir. So, it fails on the gossip front. But it also, and most surprisingly, fails on exactly the front that Crofts warns against with respect to people wanting their stories told. As he says (on page 94) ‘anecdotes alone will not hold a reader’s attention for 200 or more pages’. Turns out, he’s quite right. I gave up at page 158.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck

15 May 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review


Back when I was at school, I had a John Steinbeck phase, courtesy of an unusually well-stocked school library and a school where anyone wanting to escape the feral chaos of breaktimes had one of two choices: retreat to the library or joining the cadets. Naturally, I chose the former option, and there encountered for the first time John Steinbeck and W Somerset Maugham, two authors who are forever associated with St Aloysius’ College in my memory. As far as Steinbeck was concerned, I remember reading East of Eden, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row (although pretty well nothing remains in memory of the last of these). But well-stocked though our school library was (a relic of the time when the school had been a grammar, before it went comprehensive and comprehensively lost its way), it didn’t have Cup of Gold. A pity, because a book subtitled A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History would likely have appealed to a fourteen-year-old boy looking for some escape from the school’s thoroughgoing violence (think Tom Brown’s Schooldays but without the Dr Arnold and rather less of the classical education, although the school did still run to Latin classes).

So having missed out on Cup of Gold at school, I came across it recently at the library – just as it was about to be thrown out. With the running down of public libraries, my old school library was much better stocked that even large libraries are today. One reason for that is the way books are removed – even classic books – if they are not taken out often enough according to some arbitrary algorithm sitting on a computer system. By that algorithm, Cup of Gold was to be deleted – I arrived just in time to give it a new home.

Having saved the book, I finally got round to reading it, my interest piqued by learning in the introduction that this was Steinbeck’s first novel. And, yes, it has all the hallmarks of a young man vigorously exploring just what he can do with this marvellous, overflowing cup of words that he has set in front of him. In Steinbeck’s case, the answer is a lot (although in later books he would choose, rightly, not to do some of the things he does in this one). Things such as spending the first half of the book in a cod mystical Wales (did Steinbeck ever visit Wales? My suspicion, from reading this and visiting Wales, is no), then rushing through the major part of the hero’s life in the second half, with the ending rather tacked on. So, yes, structurally it’s a bit of a miss, but one that carries the reader along with its sheer exuberance. Luckily, Steinbeck learned other skills to marry to the exuberance, and wrote better novels, but read this for an insight into a young writer flexing his artistic muscles for the first time.

Adventures in Bookland: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

12 May 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review


Son number 1 is doing his GCSEs and, for their set text, they are reading The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Lucky boy – it could have been Bleak House! Much though I love Bleak House, trying to plough through 800 pages of Dickens, searching for ten or fifteen suitable quotes, is really not something you want to be doing in the midst of revising for ten other exams. Instead, they’ve got 65 pages of Stevenson and, to help him, I reread the book myself. It’s been years since I read it and the first thing that surprised me is just how short the story is. It looms much larger in memory than its 65 pages warrant. In part, that is probably because of the place the story has taken in our culture, with the title becoming an adjective for a double-sided individual (so long as one of those sides is dark). But it’s also because the story is so good. On a purely technical level, the way Stevenson switches viewpoints and voices to pull the reader into the story is extraordinary.

Reading the story, I tried to imagine what it must have been like to read it before Jekyll and Hyde had entered everyday vocabularly. In this imagined ignorance, the story’s impact is quite overwhelming – particularly since Stevenson sows the story with so many hints that Hyde is the product not of scientific experiments gone wrong but sexual escapades gone even wronger. For the Victorian, until the final denouement, the story must have seemed to be driving towards Hyde’s unveiling as Jekyll’s illegitimate son, blackmailing his father into accepting him as his heir. Only at the end is all made clear, and the full extent of the darkness in Hyde’s soul made clear.

Having reread the story, I came to the conclusion that it more than deserves its place in the dark places of our dreams and imaginings.

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Teardrop Island by Cherry Briggs

5 May 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Travel


The great task for a travel writer is to transcend the what-I-did-on-my-holidays subtext of the genre. The Teardrop Island escapes this, somewhat, by being more accurately subtitled ‘What I did on the Weekends During My Work Placement’. Having taken a post teaching English in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, Briggs, to her credit, wanted to find something to keep her from the ex-pat round of escaping the city to the beaches or hills, there to moan about the country that had given them home. She found it in the writing of James Emerson Tennent, one of those extraordinarily industrious Victorians who combined a public life – in Tennent’s case he was colonial secretary of Ceylon from 1845 to 1850 – with artistic and literary endeavour. Tennent combined both in his two-volume Ceylon. An Account of the Island, Physical, Historical, Topographical with Notices of its Natural History, Antiquities and Production and Briggs, having been given the books, decided to follow in his footsteps around modern-day Sri Lanka.

Although The Teardrop Island is entertaining enough, it does not really escape the usual tropes of light travel writing: long accounts of uncomfortable bus journeys, meetings with eccentric locals, a little light history. In comparison, the extracts from Tennent that Briggs rather unwisely includes are enough to suggest that the Victorian was a better writer, a more perceptive traveller and, most surprisingly of all, less patronising about the natives than a modern-day, painfully right-on Western traveller.

Right, I might be being oversensitive here, but let’s lay the cards out straight. My father is Sri Lankan (half Sinhala and half Tamil to be precise). So the country and the people are in my blood. And, frankly, I found this book deeply patronising to the people and the cultures of Sri Lanka.  Of course, I’m sure Briggs had no intention of being patronising, and she is clearly completely unaware of doing this, but the deep-rooted condescension becomes clear whenever she attempts to deal with any aspect of religious belief, and shades over into her frankly inadequate attempts to give the history of the long civil conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

Briggs had the advantage of travelling the island not long after the final defeat of the Tigers, gaining access to many places that few westerners, apart from agents of NGOs, had seen for a decade or more. Without, apparently, realising it, she also shows quite clearly the cafeteria compassion and cultural imperialism of modern NGO workers – from talking with my Sri Lankan relatives, it’s clear that the big international aid organisations are seen there as being mainly in the business of providing a comfortable, conscience-satisfying living to people who like to justify a tax-free salary (UN and WHO employees pay no tax) and jet-setting lifestyle on the backs of people’s poverty and misfortune. (Apparently, in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, Sri Lankans took to calling the Toyota Landcruisers that were the preferred mode of transport of NGO workers, vulture wagons.)

There is, though, some entertaining writing to be found here, and it’s a light, quickly read introduction to Sri Lanka, in a field with few other competitors bar the usual travel guides. If you’re not actually deeply rooted in the culture and people of the place, you’ll almost certainly find the book completely fine. For myself, I’m grateful to have been introduced to James Tennent’s writing and it has whetted our anticipation for our trip to Sri Lanka in the summer, so it was a worthwhile read.

 

 

Photos from Prinknash Abbey

26 April 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Things You Never Knew, Writers

I had a wonderful stay at Prinknash Abbey with the Benedictine monks there before giving a talk on the Northumbrian kings on Tuesday 25 April at the abbey shop. The community made me most welcome, but I must give particular thanks to Fr Mark and Fr Martin, and Brother Chris for their warmth (and for coming to my talk!). This short experience of the monastic life was enough to tell me that only the most extraordinary of people have the discipline and dedication to lead such a life. At the shop, Caroline Turley made sure everything ran as smoothly as the coffee they serve in the shop (and it turns out she has three sons too). And the people who came to the talk made for the most wonderfully attentive and inquisitive audience – thank you all.

Here are some selected photos from my stay (there’s many more – ask if you want the rest).

My room in the guest wing (no radio, no TV, no WiFi – just silence and the view).

And this was the view from my window.

Looking over the Vale of Gloucester

While this is what the abbey looks like.

Prinknash Abbey from the front

And this view is from the monastic enclosure which is not open to the public.

Looking up to the abbey from the monastic enclosure

The abbey in bright morning sun.

The morning sun casts the shadow of the bell tower on the wall behind

Some views of the monastery garden which is being renovated.

The wonderful display of my books that Caroline had created in the monastery shop.

And this is me with Caroline Turley, the woman who organised everything so well.

Some of the lovely people who came to hear me speak about the Northumbrian kings.

And me thanking Fr Mark Hargreaves for asking me along in the first place.

Acceptance notes – no.16 in a series

26 April 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Acceptance Notes
Yay! An acceptance.

Now this is nice: one of my favourite short stories, The Wall at the End of the World, has been accepted for publication by New Myths magazine. Here’s the acceptance note:

Hi Edoardo,

I really enjoyed reading “The Wall at the End of the World,” — and I hope our readers will too!  We’d like to publish it in our June issue.
Pasted below is our contract and a short questionaire.  Please check over and fill both out and return them to us as soon as possible.
Within the next week or so, I’ll be getting back in touch with you regarding any editing suggestions I might ask you to consider.  I look forward to working with you on it.

Adventures in Bookland: Eagle in the Snow by Wallace Breem

17 April 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Writing


Among writers of historical fiction, Eagle in the Snow has achieved semi-legendary status. It was first published in 1970 and, largely through recommendation, has remained in print ever since (no small feat in itself when the author, Wallace Breem, died in 1990).

It’s the subtlety and mood of the book that gives it its power and creates its status. It’s the story of the dying of things: empires, men, armies, a civilisation. It’s the story of a man born out of time, fighting against the dying of the light. It’s a story of the end of Rome suffused with the nostalgia for fallen things that is a legacy of the northern tribes that defeated the Empire and replaced it on this island. That’s the unspoken, because never acknowledged, paradox at the heart of this book. While there were elements of nostalgia for a lost golden age in Roman civilisation, the twilight mood of Eagle in the Snow is a product of a people and a writer whose civilisation rests upon three supports: the Classical tradition of Rome and Greece, the Judeo-Christian and the foreshadowing of ultimate loss that results from the Ragnarok of the Anglo-Saxons. So this is a book of the defeat of a civilisation that is made into the work of art that it is by the worldview of the civilisations that defeated and supplanted it.