When you think of urban fantasy, almost inevitably somewhere like London or New York comes to mind. Despite being a Londoner (a born one at that, so I can look down my nose at all the dick-come-latelys [dick after Dick Whittington of course] that pretend they understand the Great Wen) even I have to admit that leaves a lot of urbanity out of the picture.
So thank you, James Brogden, for bringing a city long overlooked out of the shadows, or the Narrows, and into the enchanted ley light of literature. This is a wonderful book that succeeds in doing something most people – and certain any Londoner – would consider impossible: it casts Birmingham as a believably magical place – although I think it more than appropriate that the Bull Ring should be the putative site of the Apocalypse, as our evil villain seeks to drill down to the core of the worlds and become, well, God, or at least, in Brogden’s theological imagination, the usurper of Aristotle’s unmoved mover (although presumbably Barber apotheosised would have adopted a more hands-on approach to deity).
Hugely enjoyable and I would be straight on to reading Brogden’s next book, Tourmaline, if any borough in the London Libraries Consortium stocked it. Shamefully, none do. I may be forced to actually pay for it myself (yes, Brogden really is that good).
Like many others, I suffer from PTRD – post-Tolkien reading disorder: the deepening sense of despair that slowly overwhelms a reader as he discovers that, in the field of fantasy fiction, he started at the top with the Good Professor and ever since then he has been coming down from the mountain of the worlds, into the flat plains – or, in some cases, stagnant pools – that comprise the world-building imaginations of other writers.
Let’s be clear about this: no one, and I mean no one, will match, let alone beat, Tolkien in the depth, breadth, height and profundity of their world building. The reasons for this are multiple, and mainly lie in the peculiar, and unique, range of gifts Tolkien brought to the creation of Middle-earth: most notably his astonishing grasp of the deep structure of language accompanied with the imagination to wield that creatively, and his profound, but non-allegorical faith, that transmuted the considerable suffering of his life into the meditation on divine providence that underlies his work.
So it’s hardly any surprise that, after discovering Tolkien and falling on any book that mentioned JRRT on its cover (‘comparable to Tolkien at his best’ – I’m looking at you, publishers of Stephen Donaldson), and finding out that none of them were comparable to Tolkien – and having fallen to the depths of Shannara – I shunned fantasy completely for many years. Recently, I’ve put a toe back into one or two of the pools in the Wood Between Worlds, but only for the relatively new genre of urban fantasy, which is making some progress (although I fear its obsession with the noumenal nature of tramps and hobos threatens towards self parody). So Anna Thayer’s ‘The Traitor’s Heir’ is the first proper, secondary world fantasy novel I’ve read for many years, and what a relief it was to enjoy it thoroughly. By keeping its focus strictly on the human (with a bit of magic thrown in) it avoids the unfavourable comparisons with Tolkien, while the emphasis on the struggles of the good does actually bear comparison with what Tolkien is doing in ‘The Lord of the Rings’. So, thank you, Anna, for reawakening my interest in secondary-world fantasy. Now for the second volume in the trilogy, ‘The King’s Hand’.
Towards the end of a book which he has informed, inspired and, indeed, haunted, Edward Thomas steps from the byways and pathways he has taken through Robert Macfarlane’s imagination – mental, mapped and physical – into the foreground: Macfarlane gives the reader a short biography of the man. In the course of it, he tells us that Thomas was something of a literary hack, churning out reviews and books for pay, but what he wasn’t, surprisingly, was a poet. It was only after Thomas struck up a friendship with Robert Frost, and the American worked through one of Thomas’s essays, striking it into lines of verse, that he realised what he was and what he wanted to be: a poet.
Reading Macfarlane’s studied, and studiedly beautiful, prose, it’s hard not to think that he’s waiting for a modern-day Robert Frost to do the same to his work. In many ways, poetry might suit Macfarlane better: as with Thomas and many of the other people he meets or reads in The Old Ways, he is trying to express something that merges into, or emerges from, the inexpressible; something more fundamental than emotion; maybe, simply, motion, as experienced and walked by each of us, every day. Walking, the first and most fundamental means of motion, is, in this book, revealed as mysterious and profound; separated from inactivity (note, not stillness) by as deep a gulf as that which divides the living from the dead. Robert Macfarlane walks, therefore he is.
Admittedly, I’ve not been to Mordor, just Harrogate (a considerably pleasanter place), but it was just as much a journey into the unknown: my first history festival, my first literary event, my first time meeting other writers; presenting myself at the reception desk, I was a most unlikely virgin!
But I’m delighted to say it all went well. I got to meet and speak with people whose books I’ve read, one of them actually bought my book (thank you, Giles Kristian!), I had a free supper while talking with some lovely members of the public, met the brains behind Salon London (the lovely Helen Bagnall) and the voice of Scotland (the enchanting Sara Sheridan). And here are some photos to prove I was there!
First, one of me with my books (a slightly pathetic show compared to the feet of shelf space required for other writers but gratifying nonetheless).
Me and my books (dark glasses not because I’m too cool but because I’d just come in from outside)
Then one of me sidling in between two of the best young writers of historical fiction in an attempt to catch some of their lustre: Ben Kane (left) and Giles Kristian (right).
Ben Kane (left), me (centre), Giles Kristian (right)
And finally, but certainly not least, the two finest beards in Harrogate, possibly the world: Robert Low (author, journalist, raconteur, life liver) and Irving Finkel (Assyriologist and rediscoverer of cuneiform tablets from Babylon with instructions on how to make the Ark).
Wonderful story. Two boys – united by friendship and a determination to pass through school entirely unnoticed – discover a strange machine, hidden in a cave, and take it home. Given that the cave also contains the skeleton of a Roman centurion, the machine must be old. But did the Romans build machines? Trying to figure out what it can do (pretty well everything turns out to be the answer in the end) causes them to blow their school anonymity as they start asking questions (shock, horror) and they even start to study independently. Norriss writes with a delightfully light touch and the two heroes, and the suspicious deputy headmistress, are wonderful creations.
And, on further thought, I’m going to give this book the ultimate 5-star accolade: it really is one of the best children’s books I’ve ever read.
Remarkable. Surrealism, the coldest literary form, with heart and soul. Each story turns on the extraordinary, but the extraordinary accepted without question, from the the titular man who walked through walls to the seven-league boots for sale in a junk shop. There is great theological insight too in some of the stories, combined with considerable humour, for example the old lady, widely believed (particularly by herself) to be a saint who finds that the only way she can get into heaven is to pose as the regimental whore for her reprobate nephew’s army unit.
But it is the insight into humanity, particularly the humiliations of everyday poverty, that give the stories emotional heft and depth, and lift them above the usual exercises in literary form that anaesthetises most exercises in surrealism and magic realism.
I first gave this book four stars, but the way the stories have remained with me suggests that I have undersold it. This is definitely a five-star book.
A generally well produced journey through the archives of the Guardians of the Galaxy. I grew up in the 70s reading Marvel Comics, with Jim Starlin’s Warlock series a particular favourite, but I seem to have missed the Guardians then. It’s interesting to see how they’ve evolved, through the various sub universes of Marvel space, into the team of today. The earliest work (1960s) has a freshness of line that is lovely to see, and while the storyline seems a little naive a half century later, it’s still refreshing in its imaginative sweep. This imagination is really allowed to let rip in the Rocket Raccoon story set in Halfworld, a planetary lunatic asylum where intelligent animals look after the insane and two toy barons – a mole and a lizard, fight it out with killer clowns and assassin bunnies. The writer had some serious fun with the premise.
Moving more up to date, Dan Abnett’s take features his trademark ability to chop up timelines in such a way that characters are illuminated and sly jokes slipped in, all while maintaining narrative tension. A star comes off for the very sloppy proofreading in the prose character histories at the end of the book, where each Guardian is named and profiled.
An enjoyable romp through St Matthew’s version of Christmas – the reviewer on the front cover who compares it to St Luke’s Gospel mashed with A Game of Thrones clearly hasn’t read the infancy narratives recently – which is probably at its best when it sticks closest (relatively speaking, since the wise men are, in this version, clever and ruthless criminals) to the Gospel. Not to say there isn’t considerable fun to be had in the inclusion of zombies, Pontius Pilate and enough blood shed to float a small boat down the Nile, but it does get just a trifle far fetched. Still, it’s nice to see that Grahame-Smith takes the essential point of Christmas, the Incarnation, seriously – this is not just another boring exercise in contemporary debunking. Do steer clear if you find written violence off putting, though, particularly in light of current events, potential readers should note there are a number of graphically described beheadings.
There’s an excellent article by Claire Musters on the future of Christian fiction on Christianity Today, with some fascinating comments from a couple of the new writers that Tony Collins at Lion Fiction has found and published – and me, too. The other writers are much more interesting. Here’s an extract:
“I write books about people – the choices they make, both good and bad, and how those choices influence the present. This aspect is particularly important: that my central characters do not always make the right choices. They make mistakes and sometimes – even knowing it is wrong – continue to do so. Yet their faith is important to them and they try to live guided by it.”
Mortal Fire by CF Dunn
Dunn believes that it the characters’ humanity, their struggles, compromises and efforts to put wrongs right again, that is key to her writing because it reflects life as we all experience it – irrespective of the fact that we live in a different century to the people in her novels.
Her faith is an intrinsic part of the writing process: “I set out to write books for the general market – wait, scrap that – I set out to write books for people irrespective of their beliefs or none, but I do so as a Christian, and can no more divorce my writing from my faith than I can the blood running through my body.”
Northumberland, the most sparsely populated county in England, is the nearest thing to wilderness south of Scotland. There are only 63 people per square kilometre and, standing on a mile of pristine beach, with a castle brooding over the shore and hills fringing the horizon, I wonder why. Then the wind starts. Ten minutes later, I’m sandblasted from the beach. So that’s why no one comes here.
Puffins on the Farne Islands
Well, no. It’s not just the weather, though a typical Northumbrian day will include four seasons, a taste of an Ice Age and half an hour trying to see the hand in front of your face when the sea fog (sea fret as the locals call it) rolls in. Northumberland is border land, it’s been border land since the Romans came up here, decided they’d gone far enough and built a wall, and its history dictates its present in a way unknown elsewhere in England.
There’s no better way to understand history than digging it up, and with the Bamburgh Research Project (www.bamburghresearchproject.co.uk, from £171 per week) I could do just that. The BRP is an ongoing archaeological project, open to volunteers, excavating in and around Bamburgh Castle. If there’s a more spectacular place to do archaeology, I don’t know it. The castle squats on a huge great hunk of dolerite, an outcrop of the Great Whin Sill that formed 295 million years ago when magma squeezed between two layers of softer rock and set hard. Since then, the soft rock has been eroding away, and outcrops of the Great Whin Sill form some of the key landscape features of the north, including High Force waterfall in Durham and the Farne Islands, a couple of miles out into the North Sea from Bamburgh.
Digging for understanding
“You can tell by the sound your trowel makes what you’re digging through. Grit is hard and clacking, sand is abrasive and scraping, clay produces a smooth hiss.” Paul Gething, co-founder and co-director of the BRP, sits back on his haunches and explains to the week’s intake of volunteers what we need to look – and listen for – as we excavate. Among the amateur archaeologists are students gaining credits for archaeology degrees, a seventy-year-old inspired by Time Team and those inspired by what Paul calls “the raw power of the past”. Most spend the week camping with the archaeologists at a nearby camp site, juddering in to the castle each morning in a bumpy Land Rover before spending the day digging with increasingly finely graded implements (culminating in the gingerly wielded toothbrush that I used to scrape sand from a tibia emerging from a rediscovered graveyard), sifting excavated materials through flotation tanks, and tagging and bagging the day’s finds (from the ubiquitous bones and pottery, through stycas – Northumbrian coins – to exquisite pieces of gold jewellery).
Yeavering Bell
But if you’re the sort of person who finds even the handful of people on the beach at Bamburgh too invasive, head inland. In the lee of the Cheviot Hills is Ad Gefrin. It’s a field now, but it was once the summer palace of the kings of Northumbria. Looming over Ad Gefrin, the conical hill of Yeavering Bell is also testament to the illusions of power. During the Iron Age, the greatest chieftain of the land built a fort atop the hill, its great, tumbledown stone ramparts still crowning the summit. But the chieftain is forgotten, his people gone and, as I stand on the summit, I reflect that I have not seen another human being all day. And, rubbing aching legs, that our ancestors must have had thighs like bloody tree trunks.
Watched bird bites back
A mile out from Bamburgh and accessible by boat from Seahouses (www.farne-islands.com, from £13), the Farne Islands provide a clucking, hissing cornucopia of life: 37,000 pairs of puffins, 50,000 guillemots, more than 20 other species of birds and 6,000 grey seals. St Cuthbert lived as a hermit on the island in the seventh century, when he instituted laws for the protection of Eider ducks and nesting birds; the National Trust rangers that live on the islands today continue his work. There’s stiff competition for the posts, but the eleven rangers, who remain on the islands for nine months from April to November, have as raw an experience of nature as anyone in Britain.
But that’s Northumberland: England’s last wilderness.
Recommendations
Eat
Seahouses has a number of establishments vying for the title of best fish and chips shop in the north east. Neptune Restaurant (www.neptunefishandchips.co.uk, from £7.95 for cod and chips, with pot of tea and bread and butter) is one of the main contenders. The Copper Kettle Tearooms (www.copperkettletearooms.com, mains from £4.95) in Bamburgh cooks its home prepared food fresh each day, so can run out in the afternoon – get there early.
Drink
Most Northumbrian pubs serve hearty food, but a good pint can be had at the Castle Inn (http://castleinnbamburgh.co.uk/, pints from £3) in Bamburgh and the backdrop is hard to beat. Local pubs can be insular, but the Victoria Hotel (www.victoriahotel.net, from £3.40) is friendly and doesn’t demur when BRP students spend hours over a single coffee while using its free WiFi.
Stay
Up the coast from Bamburgh, Pot-A-Doodle Do Wigwam Village (www.northumbrianwigwams.com, from £15 per person per night) provides accommodation in wooden wigwams, with three yurts thrown in for good measure. The living quarters at St. Cuthbert’s House (www.stcuthbertshouse.com, from £90 for a double), a renovated 200-year-old chapel, are considerably more luxurious. Their breakfasts, locally sourced, are wonderful.
