This was something of an unexpected delight. Rather shamefully I’d not read any of E. Nesbit’s stories before. One of the penalties (and freedoms) in growing up the bibliophile son of immigrants is that you don’t receive, along with jam sandwiches and jelly, a long list of children’s books your parents had grown up with; I was left free to wander (and wonder) my way round the old Archway library (not the one that now exists, when I was young there was a branch in Giesbach Road and, showing where my infant priorities lay, I still remember the name of the librarian, Miss Chamberlain, all these years later, whereas I’ve forgotten the names of all my teachers from that time), making my own way through the paths and thickets of children’s literature.
So, left to my own devices, I missed much that would have been considered worthy and read much that has since been forgotten (anyone else remember Hugh Walters’ series of SF books beginning with Blast-Off at Woomera?). E. Nesbit was definitely in the worthy category but, rather like Dickens, as a grown-up I realise she was unfairly placed alongside the heavily moralistic Victorian authors. Five Children and It is completely lacking in the heavy prose and point making that I feared; instead, it is delightfully light – in its own way, near as perfect a souffle as Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The interplay between the four children, arguing and bickering their way through the story, and the inveterately grumpy Psammead, is wonderfully done, and the mishaps that befall the children after their daily dose of wish fulfillment, courtesy of the grumpy Psammead, are wonderful variations on the them of being careful what you wish for. So, I suppose, there is an underlying moralism to it, but as it’s so lightly wrapped, I swallowed it all down with a broad smile upon my face.
So, you’ve got – as a writer – your carefully worked out world, complete with dragons, various branches of the faerie folk with names artfully changed to suggest that no, you really didn’t mean Elves like in Middle-earth, and, of course, magic. After all, what fantasy world would be complete without a bit of magic, a little sprinkling of wonder and strangeness across the boundaries of the mundane that hem us into our own world. And, what’s more, the book works! You find a publisher, the public read it, clamour for more, you are rolling in authorial clover (if not money; get real, this is a first novel after all). Time for the sequel. Ah, the sequel. Now, what exactly can Wizard Wiz do – and what can’t he do? What about the Witches? Broomsticks – that’s as read. But what other powers do they have? Better start working this out.
And this is precisely where so many fantasy worlds and fantasy authors start going wrong. Yes, as one goes deeper into a secondary world, you have to work things through and understand them more deeply, but the danger with magic is to start treating it as engineering with a veneer of Latin. So, taken to its conclusion, you have a sort of Tops Trumps version of magic, where strength 5 wizards with additional special powers are, literally, trumped by the authorial McGuffin of a blocking ability or the amulet or token that trumps other powers; it becomes a Marvel/DC universe, where fans (and the Lord knows I’m one of them) can spend enjoyable hours debating whether the Hulk would beat Thor: power trumps everything.
Engineering is magic, but not the right sort of magic
But this is not magic. This is to view magic through 21st-century, scientific eyes. To put it simply, magic is not science. Science proceeds by virtue of its method, which means that while it might take a genius such as Newton or Einstein to propose a new theory, once published it is possible for anyone of reasonable intelligence to follow the reasoning by which they came to their conclusions. Similarly, science is demonstrated by experimenters of genius, like Michelson and Morley, running tests to show if predictions match results. But, once the experiment has first been run, anyone following the same method should be able to replicate the results.
Science is repeatable. That’s its point. It might take a genius to find the path through the overwhelming array of data, but once the path is found anyone should be able to follow it. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can do it.
The point of magic is that any Tom, Dick or Harry cannot do it. A magician, a wizard might take years to learn a spell, a craft, a potion but even if you, the reader (or indeed, the would-be wizard), followed the same practices as diligently and for as long, there would be no guarantee that you could repeat the spell. Magic is personal and particular; in that it resembles elite sport or virtuoso musicians. I might practice batting for as long as Kevin Pietersen, working as diligently as he does, and yet at the end of it I would not be able to do what he does. Why not? The short answer: I don’t have his talent. The slightly longer answer: I do not have the combination of physical, mental and emotional characteristics that make him a great batsman – my deficiencies ranging from poorer eyesight and being a good six inches shorter through to lacking a taste for physical confrontation as confirmation of my own abilities.
Only 9,982 hours to go
Similarly with music. Pace Malcolm Gladwell, but 10,000 hours of practice might be necessary for mastery of an art, it is not necessarily sufficient for it. I could have set aside eight hours every day on the guitar – I did, for a number of years – and yet I never even came close to mastering the instrument, and this for a particular combination of physical and psychological reasons. To coin Albert’s law: practice is necessary for mastery of an art but it is not sufficient for it; you need talent too. And by talent I mean the particular combination of physical, psychological and spiritual traits that are necessary for a particular person to master a particular skill – and note that these will differ according to person and art.
Similarly with magic. A wizard is, by nature, singular. Defining magical laws, turning it into engineering, is to filter it through the wrong lens. Try applying the laws of performance to it, and you will be on stronger writing ground.
The Four Causes
As so often when writing fantasy, JRR Tolkien provides the best example. He barely mentions magic in The Lord of the Rings, and when the Elves do talk about it, they say that what they do is not magic as understood by mortals. And nor is it. Tolkien, being well grounded in Thomistic theology, understood better than most the Aristotelian underpinning of Elvish magic and its relationship to the four causes indentified by the Stagirite, to whit the formal, material, efficient and final causes, so Elvish magic, or art as they themselves more likely saw it, was the deep understanding of causation in relation to any object and the ability to see more clearly through to its true end, and bring that about. Tolkien distinguishes this from sorcery, where the ultimate aim is the subjugation of the free will of others to the sorceror – the greatest sin within Arda, for it seeks to subvert the supreme gift of Eru (God).
So, writers, when writing magic and wizards, banish thoughts of Warhammer outcome tables and video game power ups; think rather of Yo Yo Ma or Zinedine Zidane then apply that mixture of refinement, ability and the pursuit of perfection to magic and you won’t go far wrong.
In some ways, the greatest mystery of these Peter Grant books is why they are so enjoyable. I’m pretty sure the author has only slightly more idea about what is going on than I have – the plot holes are often so glaring you need to wear sunglasses to keep reading – the writing is so right on that there is some legitimate doubt as to whether the PC in PC Peter Grant actually stands for ‘police constable’, and I strongly suspect that Aaronovitch is slowly realising just how difficult it is to wield magic in a story universe that is ostensibly our own without it devolving into something little more than engineering with pretty Latin terminology… and yet, and yet, these stories are just so much fun!
A very happy New Year to all my readers! I should have wished you a merry Christmas as well, but the exigencies of the season, culminating in a visit to A&E on the evening of Christmas Day with a toddler alternating between asthma and hyperactivity (the blue asthma pump, from which he received 30 blasts in an hour, acts as a stimulant as well as relieving asthma) rather put paid to any internet posting. So, belated wishes for Christmas and timely felicitations for the feast of Janus.
This may, on reflection, be the most violent thriller I’ve ever read. The body count among the spear carriers is, of course, high, with assorted henchmen, bystanders and unnamed villains coming to bloody ends through sprayed gunfire, explosions and all manner of mayhem. But where Tom Knox really distinguishes himself is in the winnowing fan with which he sifts his major characters: by the end of the book, there’s barely a single named character left standing. So, word of advice if you read the book: don’t get too attached to anyone; they probably won’t make it to the end alive.
Having said that, this is real page-turning stuff, whisking through gruesome murders (only, they turn out not to be murders but something much worse, believe it or not), enough exotic locations to stretch the budget of a major Hollywood studio, and brisk run throughs of the more sanguinary of South American native cultures, in particular the quite horrible Moche.
As an aside, the Conquistadors, having been extolled for centuries as Western Imperialism rolled across the globe, have over the last fifty years been denigrated and reviled for precisely the same reason: as the first wave of imperialists. And, yes, they were, some of them, blood soaked, gold mad and, in some cases, actually mad. But reading about the native South American civilisations, seethed in the blood of human sacrifice on a truly industrial scale, I begin to wonder if our current excusing of this as charming cultural practices is as patronising as the previous attitude of dismissal; maybe – and I say this with hesitation – maybe not all cultures are equal; maybe some cultures should be destroyed. And, yes, wiping out the Aztecs meant the loss of some fabulous feathered head dresses but should any culture that depends on ripping the heart out of people actually be allowed to exist? At least the Conquistadors suffered no paralysing bouts of moral equivalence; they brought the blood priests down.
Going back to the author, did you know that Tom Knox is the son of DM Thomas, author of The White Hotel and major literary figure of the 1980s and 90s? Literature, like politics and movies, is turning into a family franchise. I thoroughly enjoyed Tom Knox’s blogs in the Telegraph, so thought I’d try his books. While this isn’t likely to win the Booker Prize (although I bet many more people will finish it than have finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North or even Midnight’s Children, the novel that pipped The White Hotel to the Booker Prize), and it still carries a few infelicities that are the mark of a first-time thriller writer (a Guardian journalist as brawling, tough guy hero?), its pace and inventiveness and the truly extraordinary imagination applied to methods of dying means that I am sure I will read some more of his thrillers in future. But, on the whole, I’m rather glad this hasn’t been optioned and turned into a film. There are some things I would rather not see, and this book has quite a few of them!
Skimming the other reviews for The Anglo-Saxon World, I see I’m just adding to the consensus but, you know, sometimes a consensus exists because something is true: this really is the best one-volume introduction to the Anglo-Saxon world around. It’s not cheap, but it is worth every penny.
Nick Higham’s writing style has improved immensely since he wrote The Kingdom of Northumbria A.D. 3501100 (my go-to guide when working on Edwin High King of Britain and now Oswald: Return of the King), and he now combines engaging prose with his immense knowledge of the subject. Really, no criticisms; if you want to learn about the history and culture of the Early Medieval Period in Britain, read this book.
I read all – well, nearly all, I don’t think I tracked down Tintin in the Land of the Soviets – Tintin books when I was young, but I’d never read one of Herge’s other books before, so this was a delight. It has all the Herge virtues of humour, characterisation and keen observation, but something I saw as an adult, which I would have missed as a child, was its comfortable position of European, notably Enlightenment, cultural superiority over Asian, specifically Indian, cultures. Actually, despite being half Asian, I didn’t mind this a bit; it came as a bracing blast of self confidence, although of course the current Western cultural cringe is just as mired in self superiority, it just doesn’t realise it; now, all the world’s problems are the result of Western actions (an attitude memorably exemplified in a Guardian article on Jamaican attitudes titled ‘Their Homophobia is Our Fault’ – can’t non-Westerners do anything on their own, even be prejudiced?). So, thoroughly enjoyable.
Yes, Robert Galbraith is really JK Rowling. Yes, JK is unfeasibly wealthy and ridiculously successful. And, yes, as a much poorer and less successful writer, I ought to ameliorate my jealousy by writing an excoriating review scraping away her technique to reveal a writer buoyed up by an adoring, Hollywood-fed public and hard-working editors. Sadly, I can’t, because this is bloody good. Rats! Rats and double and triple rats. This is really unfair. At least with Dan Brown it is an easy matter to mock his success by citing his prose but, damnit, I can’t do that with JK; she can write.
All right, let’s abandon plan A. Here goes with Plan B: I am an early Rowling adopter. I read the second Harry Potter just after it came out, which puts me some way ahead of the fame bulldozer that began to shovel everything else out of the way once the film of the Philosopher’s Stone came out. I read each Potter thereafter as they came out, and loved them all (except number 5, of course, where all Harry does is SHOUT IN CAPITAL LETTERS). I admired how JK dealt with fame, vast amounts of money and the Scottish referendum, not to mention the efforts of some Christian apologists who really should have known better to paint her as the gateway to the occult and, in one dreadful case, imply that she is possessed by the devil (Michael O’Brien, what were you thinking?).
So, plan B: yay for JK! She writes, and well. She makes you (or at least me) want to keep turning the page well past my normal bedtime. Yes, the finger of writing fame seems to have got stuck at ROW for some reason that no one can really understand, but that is just the public appetite, no more explicable than the Marie Celeste or Kim Kardashian; it’s a phenomenon, as random and powerful as lightning and, for the recipient, possibly just as frightening. So all praise to JK for writing a riveting, pacy detective novel, with a wonderful sense of London (particularly for someone who lives in Edinburgh) and great characters.
Plan C: go out and read The Cuckoo’s Calling (but get it from the library – as a much less successful writer, I need the money more than JK does).
I was a big fan of Heinlein’s juvenile novels when growing up – I’m still a big fan of them now – and I have kept my collection neatly lined up on a shelf over the years, occasionally dipping into favourites. My favourite is probably Have Space Suit, Will Travel, but Starman Jones runs it close.
Anyway, I’d not read Tunnel in the Sky for a long time, so I picked it up for a re-read (my edition dates from 1978 when it cost 60p!). In the end, I found it slightly disappointing. Tunnel in the Sky has all Heinlein’s usual virtues of tight writing and an apparently effortless evocation of a future Earth society, but it also showed some of the vices that were later to dominate his work: notably the tendency to use a novel as a showcase for his political and philosophical ideas. So what is basically a SF Swiss Family Robinson becomes an essay on ideal forms of government, complete with compulsively verbose older authority figure (although, on rereading Swiss Family Robinson, it also featured a compulsively verbose older authority figure, the father, so maybe Heinlein pinched this constant character from a Swiss pastor. Sounds unlikely, but stranger things have happened). Of course, being early Heinlein, it doesn’t lose the story completely, far from it, but if Churchill had, by some chance, reviewed 1950s science fiction he might have decided that it would have benefited from less jaw jaw and more war war.
Tincture Journal, the fine Australian literary magazine, has a new issue out now (rather confusingly, for us northern hemisphere readers, called their summer issue) which features stories and poems by some excellent writers, and my piece on the perils of waking up in the middle of the night when someone rings your door bell, ‘Knock Knock’.
To buy a copy – and the editors actually pay their writers, so please support them – go here.
