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.
You can dispense with psychological testing, horoscopes, compatibility checks and relationship counselling, all the panoply of means devised to test whether you and your proposed spouse are destined for a lifetime of conjugal bliss or will split, amid recriminations and bitterness, in a few years’ time, for I have found the answer. To know whether you are truly compatible, find out what he or she thought of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ and the age at which your intended first read it.
For myself, ‘The Wind in the Willows’ is the first book I can recall reading – my mother tells me I was five at the time but since she is firmly convinced of my genius we can probably take that with a pinch of salt – my little legs, marked with the signature pattern of British Rail upholstery, drumming against the metal beneath the seat in one of those old-fashioned train compartments as I breathlessly read through to the end, oblivious of the delight I’m told I caused the other passengers as this small, brown boy plunged into the most English of literary landscapes. I re-read ‘The Wind in the Willows’ many times when I was young, and regularly through the years, managing to keep my edition in good condition. But this time, when I went to read the story again, for a change I picked up my wife’s edition, to find it marked with the inscription ‘Harriet Whitbread 1975 Christmas’. So she was six when she first read it, and it has travelled with her through an itinerant life as an actor, through digs and flats, to finally settle with me; we were destined from the moment we each entered Grahame’s England.
So there, that is the answer. If you and your intended both read ‘The Wind in the Willows’ at about the same young age, if you both skipped past ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ chapter because you didn’t really understand it but now find that it has become close to your favourite part of the book, if you both want to take tea with Toad and settle down next to the fire with Rat and Mole, then you have met your soul mate and a life time of domestic happiness is ensured.
However, if neither of you have read ‘The Wind in the Willows’, then you place yourselves at the mercy of Aphrodite; will she make her blessing permanent, or temporary? In all likelihood it will be a marriage that endures rather than blesses. And if your reaction to ‘The Wind in the Willows’ differs then, I am sorry to say, you are surely destined for divorce; far better not to marry, and find someone else who read the story at the same time as you and appreciates it as you do.
And if you tried to read ‘The Wind in the Willows’ as a child and found it undreadable, objectionable or boring, which opinions you still hold despite being grown and able to know better, then I, for one, am glad never to have made your acquaintance.
Is this weird? I get a huge thrill in tidying up my writing desk when the rest of the family, who encroach on it constantly, have covered it in tottering mounds of books, magazines and papers, not to say messing up its perfectly logical internal arrangement.
My tidy desk
Here it is, looking pristine and neat. Isn’t it lovely?
