the last book I read

The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble.

Jane Gray - no, not that one - is having a mixed time of it. A published poet - hooray! - but not writing much these days - boo! - and about to give birth to her second child with husband Malcolm - hooray! - who has just moved out of the family home after an irretrievable breakdown of their marriage - boo!

Luckily she has a bit of help managing this emotional rollercoaster from her cousin Lucy and her husband James, not to mention some more practical assistance with giving birth at home (to a daughter, Bianca, to go with son Laurie who is about three) and subsequent basics like getting to the toilet and acquiring shopping. 

We get a bit of back-story now: Malcolm is a guitarist and singer, quite highly-regarded in the particular musical circles he moves in (vaguely folky, maybe even a bit classical, as far as we can gather). The exact circumstances of his and Jane's split aren't made completely clear, but there seems to be an implication that Jane suspects he might secretly be gay - nonetheless it seems that post-split he has managed to shack up with another woman, so who knows. James, on the other hand, is a slightly shady car-dealer and occasional amateur racing driver.

Anyway, any doubts about the irrevocability of the split are soon, as it were, put to bed, as James' extreme attentiveness to Jane's welfare extends to his volunteering for helping-out duties without Lucy in tow and, during one of these, ending up in Jane's bed for a bit of light and cautious post-partum firkytoodling. The relationship continues as James' "business commitments" allow him a plausible smokescreen to be away from Lucy for days at a time, time he spends popping over and being jovial Uncle James for the kids for a while before taking Jane upstairs for a good seeing-to.

Eventually a "business trip" presents itself that offers an opportunity for James and Jane to get properly away, in this case to Norway where he is personally delivering an Aston Martin to a customer - inevitably in some shady way involving dodging tax, duty and/or insurance. The trip involves catching a ferry from Newcastle and so James and Jane and the kids head off there in the Aston Martin. All goes well until the car hits a brick dropped from a lorry ahead, flips over the central reservation, gets hit by an oncoming car and ends up ploughing into a tree on the opposite verge. By some miracle Jane and the kids are unhurt, but the driver of the oncoming car is dead and James is severely injured. All a bit awkward for Jane - James was scheduled to be away for two weeks, so as long as he recovers within that time they can get away without being rumbled. But James' injuries are more serious than that, and, in any case, what if he dies? Don't Lucy and his parents have a right to know? Jane bimbles around uselessly for several days until the decision is taken out of her hands by Lucy phoning her at her hotel - Malcolm has rumbled them and told her and she has made the necessary enquiries and found out what's happened.

Thankfully it turns out that James will make pretty much a full recovery - after Lucy arrives and takes charge of his convalescence it becomes clear to Jane that their affair will be over, though once he's recovered they do manage to meet up for a bit of valedictory fucking. Jane finds herself OK with this and moreover finds that the experience has rekindled some of her poetic inspiration. 

So what to make of this? I recall in my short but rambling review of Drabble's A Natural Curiosity back in the very very early late-2006 days of this blog I bemoaned not quite grasping what the book was meant to be about or what its purpose was. I think I have similar feelings here, although I guess I do see some of the purpose: The Waterfall was written much earlier in Drabble's career (1969) and embodies some proto-feminist themes like female independence, female control over sexuality and fertility, not having to settle for a man just because he is the major breadwinner and father of your children, getting sexually involved with men just because you want to rather than for any ulterior motive involving marriage or support. That said, and despite the back cover blurb describing the novel as "a bitter-sweet song of sexual love", there's never much insight into what attracted Jane to James in the first place. We don't get any clear sense of unstoppable lust from either participant, especially not Jane who is a strangely inert and passive central character. James' motivations are similarly opaque, and even allowing for his business trips it's unclear how he's able to conceal the affair from Lucy. 

Those considerations aside this is perceptive in its observations about 1960s sexual politics and the messiness of love and childbirth, without any of the central characters being engaging enough to really make you care very much about what happens to them. I'm not sure I really buy its being described here as "experimental", unless that refers to the occasional shifts between first-person and third-person narrative voices; this seems like a very low bar to clear for "experimental" status, though. I think Margaret Drabble probably suffers a bit from her surname being ripe for cheap puns on the word "drab" as well as other related puns. Of the three novels I've read from her lengthy career The Radiant Way is probably the best. 

here's summit I prepared earlier

A bit of an end-of-year tidy-up of unblogged stuff here, in particular this photo which I came across when looking at some stuff on Google Photos with the kids. You'll be aware that I've posted a few mountain summit and trig point shots here over the years, but I am pretty confident that this is the one which features the largest group of living individuals (I don't say "people" for reasons that will become obvious shortly).

So this is the culmination of a walk we organised with the members of the NCT group we were part of while in the last stages of expecting Nia in early 2012. Members of the group have been the subject of previous expeditions featured here in the past, but those were mainly Dad-centric expeditions leaving the wives and kids, bless 'em, at home. This time we decided we wanted to do a more inclusive thing and take everyone (or everyone who wanted to come and was available, anyway, which in our household meant me and Nia); that meant some careful planning so as not to go hog-wild and devise some terrifying 15-mile ridge scramble that would take all day and probably result in some deaths. 

Having been given responsibility for route planning, what I came up with was a walk featuring as its centrepiece and highest point Pen Cerrig-calch, the mountain that overlooks Crickhowell, and which also takes in on the way up the Iron Age fort of Crug Hywel which gives the town its name. Route map and altitude profile are below.

It's a fairly simple straight-up-and-down sort of route, and at about six and a half miles probably about right for a group including six adults, five kids (aged between eight and ten) and two dogs - all of whom, if you look carefully, are included in the summit photo at the top of this post.

By my reckoning I'd been up here twice before, once with Huw and his dog Baxter in December 2013 when we did a similar walk which also took in the neighbouring (and slightly higher) peak of Pen Allt-mawr, and once as the first part of my epic 19-mile solo Black Mountains horseshoe walk in April 2010. The one thing almost all walks starting from Crickhowell have in common is that you pop into The Bear for a pint afterwards, something we made sure we adhered to here.

the last book I read

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. 

Our unnamed narrator is a woman in her early twenties, carrying out a menial and pretty unrewarding job as personal assistant, companion and general dogsbody to the dreadful Mrs Van Hopper, who is rich, brash, American and generally frightful. Into their orbit in the Monte Carlo hotel where they are currently staying comes Maxim de Winter, fortysomething, slim, handsome, but troubled in a moody and - hey - slightly sexy way. Once Mrs Van Hopper has been conveniently removed from the field of play for a couple of weeks by a well-timed bout of illness our narrator and Mr de Winter find themselves mutually at a loose end and end up spending some time together. He is twenty years older than her and a bit prone to mysterious periods of enigmatic silence, but he evidently finds her company refreshing and ends up asking her to marry him (and ditch Mrs Van Hopper into the bargain).

After a low-key wedding the new couple return to England. But where will they live? Well, it just happens that Maxim has a mahoosive country house called Manderley in south-west England (probably Cornwall but never explicitly identified as such). So the new Mr and Mrs de Winter rock up there in their fancy motor car and move in. Gargantuan house, hot and cold running servants, all the pâté you can eat, plus extensive grounds and access to a private cove and harbour - what's not to like? Well, a few things, actually: most significantly the lingering influence of Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, who drowned off the coast nearby a year or so earlier and the remnants of whose presence can still be felt around the house, in things like the decor and menu choices but more directly in the form of Mrs Danvers, Manderley's housekeeper and dominating presence among the staff, and who (it soon becomes clear) had a very close relationship with Rebecca and was utterly devoted to her. 

A more assertive character might take a new broom to all this stuff and put their own stamp on the place, but the new Mrs de Winter is a slightly shy young woman and is a bit intimidated by the whole affair, and by Mrs Danvers in particular. Indeed it soon becomes apparent that Mrs Danvers' devotion to her former mistress may have made the short but significant journey from devotion to obsession - having set up home in Manderley's east wing, Mrs de Winter discovers that Maxim and Rebecca's former rooms in the west wing have been kept by Mrs Danvers in pristine condition exactly as Rebecca left them on the day she died: dust-free, clothes in the wardrobe, fresh flowers, nightdress laid out on the bed.

Rebecca's continuing influence seems to extend to Maxim as well, though, who is occasionally remote and uncommunicative. As a consequence the subject of Rebecca is never raised around the house, and tension and mutual misunderstanding continue. Is Maxim still in love with Rebecca? Does he regret his hasty second marriage? Will anyone actually talk to each other and find out? Things come to a head when the de Winters agree to host a fancy-dress ball at Manderley and Mrs de Winter is manipulated by Mrs Danvers into commissioning a costume resembling one of the de Winter ancestors, only to find that it is an exact replica of something Rebecca wore shortly before she died and that her husband now refuses to speak to her for the remainder of the evening. 

More important real-world considerations intervene the following day when a large ship runs aground on the rocks near Manderley. That of itself doesn't directly affect the inhabitants of the house, but when a diver goes down to assess the damage to the ship's hull he discovers Rebecca's boat, the one she went out in on the night she drowned, on the sea-bed nearby; not only that but the remains of a body are in the cabin. 

The de Winters (their disagreement of the previous night seemingly forgotten) discuss this new development: who could the body be? Rebecca was supposedly alone on the night she died and her body was washed up, battered by the sea and rocks, months previously, identified by Maxim and interred in the family crypt. Yeah, well, about that, says Maxim: actually [MULTIPLE PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD] I lied - the body in the boat will be found to be Rebecca's. But how do you know, dear? Well, because I shot and killed her and then put it there. 

The full story of Maxim and Rebecca's marriage then emerges: enraptured by her beauty and charisma and (I like to imagine) eye-watering sexual proclivities Maxim married her without getting to know her very well, just as he had with the second Mrs de Winter, but unlike the second Mrs de Winter Rebecca turned out to be a borderline psychopath: controlling, violent and pathologically unfaithful to Maxim including having a long-running affair with her own first cousin, Jack Favell. 

While Mrs de Winter is still giddy from the revelation that Rebecca is not, in death, a rival for her husband's affections, and that in fact he detested her, it soon becomes clear that there will be an inquest into her death and that Maxim will be required to testify and answer some awkward questions. These don't include having to explain why she was shot, as luckily his bullet passed straight through her without smashing into any bones, but do include having to account for the fact that the boat appeared to have been deliberately scuttled. The inquest eventually reaches a verdict of suicide, but back at Manderley Jack Favell turns up wanting some answers about a note she sent him on the day of her death and a mysterious visit to a London doctor a few days earlier. The de Winters, Favell and one of the officials from the inquest hotfoot it to London (no mean feat in the days before the M5 and M4) to track down the doctor and determine the purpose of her visit. Was she pregnant? If so, who by? And does that make it more or less likely that she subsequently killed herself?

The doctor retrieves his notes and reveals that no, she wasn't pregnant, but instead had some sort of inoperable tumour that probably would have killed her within a year. We are invited to conclude that she then goaded Maxim into killing her by claiming to be pregnant with someone else's child, thus avoiding a lingering and painful demise. Released from the prospect of Maxim getting put away for murder they speed back towards Manderley, learning on the way that Mrs Danvers has done a flit, presumably tipped off by Favell. Maxim has a Bad Feeling and wants to get back to Manderley as soon as possible, driving right through the night to do it, only to arrive back to a dark and moonless night but with an odd crimson glow on the horizon. Yes, you know what they say: red sky at night, Manderley's alight.

Just as with Pride And Prejudice and probably a few other titles on this list, my expressing an opinion is unlikely to change the accumulated weight of critical opinion about Rebecca, so embedded is it in literary culture from its famous first line onwards. As it happens, I enjoyed it greatly, building from its mundane opening May-to-December romance via the various plot revelations to increasing levels of weirdness and borderline hysteria, with the accompanying (but skilfully avoided) risk of ridiculousness. It seems to me as much a novel about the ridiculousness of arbitrary social structures based around class and sex as it is one about manipulation, betrayal and murder, but there is of course no problem with it being both things. Both of the principal protagonists have traits that will irritate modern readers: Maxim is remote, emotionally distant and generally a bit of a pompous and insensitive arse, and the second Mrs de Winter is frustratingly pliant and unassertive, although she does grow a pair somewhat in the second half of the book. Mrs Danvers' motivations remain slightly opaque: while it was evidently narratively OK to strongly imply that Rebecca was a cock-hungry man-eater and that the little seaside cabin she used to use for assignations was regularly liberally festooned with jism, giving anything more than the faintest nod towards the notion that Mrs Danvers loved Rebecca in that way would probably have been unacceptable in the 1930s. 

On a similar subject, when the famous Hitchcock adaptation was made in 1940 they were obliged to alter the circumstances of Rebecca's death so that it was accidental (slipping on the wet quay and hitting her head), as the accepted moral code in force at the time for films would not allow a spouse to get away with murder. I have never seen that film, nor, perhaps surprisingly, have I acquired any knowledge of the plot of the second half of the book over the last several decades, so all the various twistiness was pleasingly fresh and surprising to me. Daphne du Maurier's books were a rich source of material for films, notable examples being The Birds and Don't Look Now (both based on short stories). 

Lastly, our protagonist is never named during the book (apart from being the second Mrs de Winter, of course) but does let slip on one occasion that people regularly mis-spell her name, so I like to imagine it being Paraphernalia or Emphysema or Chlamydia or something. Other books featured on this blog whose principal protagonists are never given a name include Rogue Male, The Road, Blood Meridian, Surfacing and The Memoirs Of A Survivor.

let's polish up this list, me old dutch

Obviously I can't leave that link at the bottom of the last book post hanging, so here's an updated version of the list in that 2015 post about novels originally written in other languages, and read, by me, just to be absolutely clear, in English translations. I think the only novel I've read any substantial amount of in another language was Le Grand Meaulnes which I was required to have a crack at in about 1986 as part of the AO Level French syllabus (and as you can see below I cheated a bit by having an English copy to hand as well). As an aside, even if your spoken/written French is reasonably good, as mine was, the bar to reading novels in French is fairly high owing to the sudden lobbing-in of a whole new tense (almost never used in colloquial French) and associated verb forms that you have to get to grips with. 

Anyway, the main thing to note here is that the two most prominent European languages that were missing (and which I specifically mentioned in the previous post) are now ticked off: Polish by Solaris and Dutch by The Dinner. There are still a few more obscure European languages omitted, most notably Finnish, Romanian and Bulgarian, but there is a lower probability of coming across one of those on a random browse through a second-hand bookshop. I'm taking the view here that my reading of some of the Moomin books with Alys doesn't count, especially since the bare minimum of research after writing the first half of this sentence reveals that while Tove Jansson was Finnish the Moomin books were actually written in Swedish.

• Italian: Alessandro Baricco, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Italo Svevo
• French: Alain-Fournier, Michel Houellebecq, Françoise Sagan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Yann Queffelec
• Norwegian: Knut Hamsun, Jostein Gaarder, Jo Nesbø
• Russian: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Danish: Peter Høeg
• German: Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll, Patrick Süskind, Elfriede Jelinek, Elias Canetti
• Czech: Milan Kundera
• Swedish: Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell
• Hungarian: Sándor Márai
• Spanish: Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Isabel Allende
• Japanese: Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Kenzaburō Ōe, Yukio Mishima
• Hebrew: Amos Oz
• Portuguese: José Saramago
• Dutch: Herman Koch
• Polish: Stanisław Lem

the last book I read

The Dinner by Herman Koch.

Well, you know what they say - you can choose your friends, but you can't choose your relatives. So when Paul Lohman gets a call from his brother Serge inviting him to dinner at a swanky Amsterdam restaurant he is not immediately filled with joy. But, nonetheless, turning Serge down isn't really an option for a number of reasons - firstly, Serge is a man of some power and influence, a successful politician and a possible candidate for Prime Minister at the next election, and so generally what Serge wants Serge gets. 

But there is another reason as well, and that has to do with their respective children: Paul and his wife Claire's son Michel, and Serge and his wife Babette's two sons, Rick and Beau. Something has happened, and the families need to discuss it in order to decide what to do about it. But broaching this sort of subject is a bit awkward, as Paul isn't sure how much (if anything) Claire knows already, and it's generally the sort of distasteful subject you want to knock back a couple of bottles of wine before discussing.

Eventually (via a series of flashbacks) the point of this particular meeting in this particular restaurant emerges: Rick and Michel have committed a crime. Not just any old crime, though: murder, or manslaughter at the very least. On a night out a few weeks previously they went to withdraw some cash from an ATM and found access blocked by a homeless woman in a sleeping bag. During the course of some light recreational putting the boot in things got out of hand, some of the debris in the ATM enclosure proved unexpectedly flammable and, well, one thing led to another and she died. I mean, we've all done it, right? Learn a lesson, don't set fire to any more homeless people and we'll say no more about it. Trouble is, it's not quite that simple any more. Some grainy footage of the incident has been uploaded to YouTube and been picked up by the news networks. No-one's obviously identifiable, but the parents know who is who. But who uploaded the video? Not Michel or Rick, it seems. But it seems that Beau, Serge and Babette's adopted son from Burkina Faso, may have played a part and moreover may be blackmailing the other two boys.

We now get some back-story, partly to establish the kids' characters a bit, but mainly to focus on Paul. Formerly a history teacher, his teaching career came to an abrupt end after what he makes sound like a minor series of infringements - an unnecessarily aggressive review of a female student's work, some mildly contrarian in-lesson discussions about the holocaust - but which we soon realise are filtered through a pretty dense Unreliable Narrator filter. It's not just that, though - later on while Paul is being a house-husband his wife Claire gets ill and spends quite a bit of time in hospital, and it's clear (though Paul doesn't describe it this way) that he (left in sole charge of Michel) doesn't cope very well, and when Serge and Babette come round to suggest that they look after Michel for a while he belts Serge in the kisser with a hot saucepan.

Later on, when one of Michel's school essays is deemed to contain some unacceptable thoughts on the subject of capital punishment, Paul is summoned to the school for a discussion with the headmaster, a discussion which culminates in Paul beating the headmaster up. 

So we are invited to be mildly suspicious about Paul's motivations, and about how many of his slightly worrying personality traits he might have passed on to Michel (generally regarded by both sets of parents as the ringleader in any cousinly activity). Serge, on the other hand, seems to want some sort of public confession and proposes holding a public press conference to simultaneously reveal his own son and nephew as the perpetrators and announce the end to his own candidacy for Prime Minister. Paul and Claire quickly agree that this cannot be allowed to happen and hatch a scheme to stop him.

The book this reminded me of most strongly was We Need To Talk About Kevin with its basic theme of Middle-Class People Fucking Up Their Kids And Generally Being Awful. I haven't read it but The Slap seems to cover similar territory. As a reader your main feeling is that you're being goaded into taking up positions of general intolerant awfulness: yeah, OK, homeless people should make an effort not to be so malodorous or it's no wonder people set fire to them; yes, of course the general bleeding-heart sensitivity of modern students makes you want to punch them square in the face; yes, those who adopt children from African countries only do it for some sort of Madonna-esque virtue-signalling; yes, of course the kids adopted via this route will betray you, their saintly white benefactors, at the drop of a hat. The other thing I was put in mind of was the work of Michel Houellebecq, though to be fair The Dinner is less overtly racist and bonkers. 

So it's enjoyable reading, though bracingly cynical and with no attempt to make you warm to any of the characters. I haven't checked exhaustively but I think it may also be the first novel on this list originally written in Dutch - certainly this list from 2015 reckons that there hadn't been any yet.

[POSTSCRIPT] I meant to add for completeness that The Dinner has been filmed three times, once in Dutch, once in Italian and once in English. I suppose it's obvious material for filming - spicy subject matter, but most of the action happening to four characters sitting round a restaurant table, so presumably fairly cheap to film. Anyway, the English version starred Richard Gere and Steve Coogan as the brothers and Laura Linney, Rebecca Hall and Chloë Sevigny in supporting roles - three women, incidentally, because the film-makers chose to give Serge (Gere) a wife and an ex-wife for some reason.

grim (reaper) and bear it

No sooner has a respectable period of mourning and scythe-sharpening elapsed after the death of Hilary Mantel than the Grim Blogger strikes again. And once again it's someone who, while not seventeen or anything, was perhaps not at the top of the list of expected next victims. And that person is science fiction author Greg Bear, who died at the weekend after heart surgery complications at the age of 71. 

The inordinate length of time it took me to get round to reading Eternity means that the "curse length" value for Bear in the table is one of the lowest at only just over a year - only Michael Dibdin, José Saramago and Philip Roth's deaths had a shorter gestation period. This feels a bit odd, though, as it's been at least 30 years, probably a bit more, since I read Eon. But, hey, I don't make the rules. Oh, hang on ..... I'm getting a message in my earpiece that says I literally do make the rules, in their entirety. But, whatever, here is the full list of all thirty-two authors who have met their demise during the lifetime of this blog.

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	95	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d

the last book I read

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry.

Tom McNulty is just a simple Irish country boy in the mid-19th century American west. And what is there for a simple Irish country boy to do in the mid-19th century American west? Well, there's always showbiz. Tom and his friend John Cole, wandering teenage wastrels both, happen into a saloon in rural Missouri where the landlord is on the lookout for an act. I mean, ideally some girls to entertain the punters, but girls being in short supply he has the idea of putting these two pretty young teenage boys into some flouncy dresses and having them cavort around the stage.

And a very fine job the boys make of it as well, and they're quite the sensation in the local area. But eventually the bloom of youth wears off them and they're a bit too burly and stubbly to convince any more, not to mention having trouble fitting into the frocks. so it's a regretful farewell to the stage and off to enlist in the army, this being the obvious other thing for young men without much of that fancy book-learnin' to do.

Plenty for army boys to do in these exciting times, not least persuading those pesky native tribes to vacate the land so that the American Dream can be enacted upon it. During the course of a particularly brutal purge of some Sioux, Tom and John find themselves entrusted with the care of Winona, a young Sioux girl whose family have been massacred. During a break from fighting they set up home together as a little family group.

It should probably be made clear at this point that Tom and John Cole are more than just good pals, topping chums, brothers in arms, etc. This is hinted slightly coyly in the early part of the book and then driven home, as it were, with this short paragraph:

Righto, then. During this period of tranquility Tom resumes his habit of wearing women's clothing, sometimes for showbiz purposes, sometimes just casually round the house.

All good things must some to an end, though, and this time it's not the natives that need quelling (though there's always a bit of that going on in the background); no, this time it's white man against white man in the American Civil War. If anything this requires wading through even more brutal slaughter than before, not to mention a period of being captured by Confederate troops, imprisoned, and barely avoiding starving to death. After finally being released they collect Winona and make their way down to Tennessee where an old army friend is running a tobacco farm and needs help. 

Once again there is a brief period of tranquility and domestic bliss, and once again it's short-lived - first some dubious characters that they met on the road on the way to Tennessee and exchanged gunfire with track them down and require further gunfire and close-range slaughtering to get rid of, and secondly word comes from Tom and John's old commanders in their Sioux-quelling days that a bargain has been struck for the return of some white hostages, but that it involves giving Winona back to what remains of her family. 

Tom re-enlists in the army and delivers Winona back to reluctantly oversee her handover. As it happens after someone looks at someone in a funny way or coughs at the wrong moment the handover descends into a hail of hot lead and arrows in both directions and Tom and Winona are just about able to escape and make their way back to Tennessee, though not without Tom having to dispatch an old colleague of his who is intent on killing Winona.

And so domestic bliss descends again. There is, however, the small matter of Tom's desertion from the army and that small and isolated incident of murder, and sure enough eventually the authorities come for him. Rather than have everyone on the farm dispatched in a climactic gun battle Tom consents to be taken away to trial. Is this finally it, or will there be a last-minute reprieve?

Well, more in that in a minute. This is variously a story of war and conflict, a love story and an empowering LGBTQ+ story - in that while obviously the central couple of Tom and John are gay there's also the element of what you might call, if you were so inclined, Tom's genderfluidity, or, if you preferred, Tom's penchant for wearing dresses. There's an oddly dreamlike quality to the whole thing that means that while some of the descriptions of people being decapitated by cannonballs are quite graphic, there's never much of a sense of immediate peril to the main protagonists (contrast, for instance, with something like Blood Meridian which is set at a similar time). The first-person viewpoint contributes, of course: unless you're doing something slightly experimental or you're going to switch viewpoints dramatically your I-guy isn't going to die halfway through the book. The whole business with Winona is slightly odd, too: she pretty much instantly switches to regarding Tom and John as surrogate parents, despite them being implicated in the wholesale slaughter of her actual family before (to their credit, obviously) saving her. And finally (PLOT SPOILER ALERT) while the temptation to give Tom a last-minute reprieve and a happy ending was evidently overwhelming, I couldn't honestly say the resulting plot swerve was very plausible.

So it was fine, but I can't say I was knocked sideways by it in quite the same way as the judges for the 2016 Costa Book Award evidently were. My list (i.e. ones I've read) for the novel award here goes: 1976, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1987, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2016, 2019. Days Without End also won the 2017 Walter Scott Prize, a relatively new award specifically dedicated to historical fiction; Wolf Hall is the only other winner I've read.

arselebrity beardylikey of the day

A bit of background for this first one, although I suspect you'll be ignoring it as you'll already be mesmerised by the photo. I'm going to press on anyway, though, just in case anyone's still reading. Nia went on a residential weekend with the school a couple of weekends ago to the Urdd centre in Llangrannog in west Wales. Lots of exciting outdoorsy stuff that was right up her street including go-karting, zip-lining, various muddy assault courses and some leaping off a high-ish tower onto a giant inflatable landing mat. This mat came equipped with some odd orifices at the sides which I assume are to allow venting of air at the point of impact to prevent damage, but which could fulfil a completely different function for all I know. They certainly have the look of orifices which fulfil a different function, specifically the hindquarters of various species of ape in full oestrus.

Secondly, my old mate and former work colleague Harry (and his rather magnificent lockdown beard) and the late Dusty Hill, bass player and occasional vocalist (on some of the shoutier numbers) with Texan blues-rockers ZZ Top.

the last book I read

On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming.

The name's Bond; James aaaaahh well you know the rest. Hush hush, double-0 status, licence to kill, all that malarkey. Plus all the willing women you can eat, of course. But shut up, because this time Bond has met a Proper Lady, and she's a corker. Cool, enigmatic, drives fast, lives dangerously, plays cards, absolute FILTH in the sack, all the major boxes ticked. But it turns out she's got some psychological issues and Bond ends up having to rescue her from topping herself by walking into the sea at the exotic resort of Royale-les-Eaux (which you might remember from Casino Royale).

No sooner has Bond wrestled Tracy out of the surf than they are set upon by some goons and spirited away by boat to some secret location where Bond assumes they will be summarily executed and he will have to cook some fools in order to escape. Not a bit of it, as it turns out, as the abduction turns out to have been organised by Marc-Ange Draco, who is not only the head of the Corsican mafia but also, as it happens, Tracy's father. He explains the circumstances of his meeting and courting Tracy's English mother (a bit more rapey than most modern courtships) her subsequent death, Tracy's struggles with depression and his firm belief that what she really needs to keep her on the straight and narrow is the firm hand of a strong man to slap some sense into her and occasionally administer a brisk corrective rogering, and, moreover, his belief that Bond is that man and that he will pay him a million dollars to keep her safe.

Bond refuses the money, but agrees to keep an eye on Tracy on the condition that she undergoes some proper treatment for her depression. Meanwhile, work considerations intervene. Bond has been engaged in a cat-and-mouse battle with the shadowy SPECTRE organisation and its kingpin, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, but the entire crew seem to have gone to ground. With a bit of help from Draco's European network of contacts, Bond gets wind of a mysterious count occupying a mountain-top retreat in the Alps who is currently engaged in a correspondence with the College of Arms to determine his right to the hereditary title he's claiming. Could this be our man?

After a quick five-minute visit to gain the rudiments of knowledge about genealogy, the British aristocracy, heraldic symbology and what have you, Bond assumes the identity of Sir Hilary Bray, Shield-Wrangler Pursuivant or some such nonsense, and cooks up a pretext for a personal visit to check certain aspects of Blofeld's claim in person. When he arrives, he finds that the count (who makes no secret of his identity as Blofeld) is running some sort of clinic for rich young women to cure them of their phobias by a combination of fresh air, exercise, some slightly odd hypnotic techniques and of course The Drugs. While providing a convincing veneer of doing genealogical research and interviewing Blofeld about his ancestry, Bond strikes up friendships with the girls to try and work out what kind of supervillain shit Blofeld is really up to. As luck would have it one of the girls, Ruby, not only seems keen on him but has a bedroom just down the corridor, so Bond sneaks out of his room one night, gives Ruby a teeth-rattling seeing-to and then listens in while she slumbers post-coitally and the hypnotic tape plays. It's a bit disappointing, though, just some shit about not being afraid of chickens.

The shit hits the fan pretty soon, though, when another Secret Service operative is captured snooping around the complex, brought before Blofeld, and clearly recognises Bond. Bond manages to shrug it off as the ravings of a badly-beaten madman but knows the jig will be up as soon as the thumbscrews are applied and the other guy talks. Sneaking out of his room in the dead of night he manages to steal some ski equipment and speed off down the mountain, hotly pursued by Blofeld's goons. He manages to outrun them to the nearest town where who should he literally run into but Tracy, seemingly having regained her marbles and just gadding about on the slopes. She helps him escape and return to England where he debriefs M and some chaps from the Ministry of Agriculture who are interested in one of Blofeld's previous patients and the outbreak of fowl pest that happened near her home just after she returned. The man from the Ministry is a pretty sharp cookie, as it turns out, and soon joins the dots to reveal Blofeld's dastardly scheme: hypnotise the girls to spread various crop and livestock diseases on their return to Britain, crash the economy, and make a fortune shorting the pound and anything else he can think of. 

Obviously Blofeld's monstrous scheme must be stopped: but how? Well, fortunately Bond has a list of all the girls' names, so they can be tracked down and detained and relieved of any anthrax they may happen to be carrying. But how to take down Blofeld's mountain lair? At this point Bond calls upon Draco again to rustle up a helicopter and some hand-picked Corsican badasses and mount a raid on the facility. This they do, but Blofeld has thought ahead and concocted an escape plan involving hurling himself down the nearest bobsleigh run on a tea-tray. Bond grabs his own tea-tray and pursues him, but loses him. The mountain-top lair is blown up in a satisfying way, though. 

After the dust has settled, Bond applied himself to other matters, specifically marrying Tracy and setting off on a honeymoon. As Bond stops the car to remove some of the wedding streamers and ribbons, however, a Maserati speeds alongside and empties a hail of bullets into the car, killing Tracy. 

As with Casino Royale it's hard not to view this through the prism of having seen the film several times. In this particular case the film (George Lazenby's only outing as Bond) follows the plot of the book pretty closely, and where it does diverge from the plot - to provide some opportunity for Blofeld to do the Let Me Explain My Evil Plan thing, and be a lot more specific about what the girls are being hypnotised to do - this actually helps quite a bit, as the book's having the guy from the Ministry extrapolate the whole plot from Bond's flimsy evidence was a bit implausible. Also a bit odd is the idea that neither Bond nor Blofeld would recognise each other, particularly jarring in the film when the audience knows that they've met in previous movies, even though it's masked a bit by both characters being played by different actors from previous films. It works in the book because in the only previous book to feature Blofeld, Thunderball, the two characters never actually meet.

Anyway, it does what it says on the tin and it's a better book than Casino Royale, though probably not quite as good as Dr. No which remains my favourite. My venerable pre-decimalisation Pan paperback has been on my shelves for probably upwards of 25 years. 

dismanteled

It's been a while, but evidently the Curse Of Electric Halibut has been biding its time, like a coiled python drowsily digesting its last victim (Joan Didion in December 2021) and has lazily flicked open a baleful eye and decided that the time is ripe for another victim. This time it's Hilary Mantel, recipient of mega-sales and fame (by serious novelist standards anyway) since the 2009 publication of Wolf Hall, the first of her trilogy featuring Thomas Cromwell. Both Wolf Hall and its 2012 sequel, Bring Up The Bodies, won the Booker Prize, securing her membership of the select group of people who have won it more than once - JM Coetzee, Peter Carey and Margaret Atwood are the others, plus arguably JG Farrell if you count the retrospective award cooked up for novels published in 1970. 

Mantel had a perfectly respectable literary career before Wolf Hall, writing odd novels with a mainly contemporary setting. The late-career shift from odd novels with a modern setting to perhaps slightly less odd novels centred on real historical figures (though with some quite large liberties taken with strict historical accuracy) is vaguely reminiscent of Beryl Bainbridge. though Bainbridge's historical novels were pretty terse at around 200 pages and The Mirror And The Light, the concluding part of the Cromwell trilogy, is a meaty 875 pages.

Mantel was a relatively youthful 70 when she died, but had endured a lifetime of health problems mainly associated with years of undiagnosed endometriosis. Only Iain Banks, Michael Dibdin, Henning Mankell and Helen Dunmore were younger when the curse came for them, and only Alison Lurie and John le Carré had to wait longer after the initial book review for the icy hand of death to finally alight on their shoulder. 

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	95	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d

going postal

Another series of tenuously-linked thoughts, if you'll permit me. Firstly, someone retweeted this tweet into my timeline the other day:

I simply refuse to believe that *anyone* older than 8 is so catastrophically unobservant about the world they live in that they are "only just realising" this. pic.twitter.com/hzVCpYzR0l

— Paul Sayers (he/him) (@RandomCharStr) September 18, 2022

Now I'm all about the making unduly harsh snap judgments without giving people an opportunity to defend themselves, as you know, but still, this seems a bit over-the-top to me. Apart from anything else, who even uses snail mail these days? Certainly not The Kids, bless 'em, who are too busy doing things The Kids do these days like making TikTok videos and eating ass, so the opportunity to gaze upon a postbox frontage while posting multiple items and ruminate upon what all the various letterings stand for is a fairly niche thing in 2022.

I mean, I'm pretty sure if someone put the picture attached to the tweet in front of me I could have worked out what it must mean, but the only reason I know what the letters on the front of a postbox mean in relation to the royal cypher in particular is because we used to have a VR postbox in the village we lived in (specifically, this house) on the outskirts of Nottingham for a couple of years around 1981/1982, and I recall one or other of my parents explaining its significance to me. I'm obscurely chuffed with myself that I was able to drop the StreetView man right on the postbox's location first time 40-odd years later. Frustratingly, the lane was evidently too narrow at this point to squeeze the Googlemobile down so you can't actually see the lettering on the box, but fortunately someone's captured it here. 

Anyway, you'll be saying the name of the village (Normanton-on-the-Wolds) by emphasising the first syllable of NORmanton, right? I mean, like any normal person would. And, just to be clear, you would in this case be right to do so. But not in all cases, goodness me no. I have only a few memories of visiting nearby sites of outdoor interest during our briefish time living in Normanton - the watersports centre at Holme Pierrepont, the vast grassy expanses of Clumber Park - but I do have a clear memory of going for a walk on the banks of a large area of water and snooping round a church which was half-submerged in the water. This hazy memory only shimmered into sharp focus a couple of months ago when we went for a brief camping trip in Rutland, at a site a couple of miles south of Rutland Water. Among the other fascinating information available about Rutland Water (notably that it's the largest reservoir in England by surface area) is the semi-submerged church on its banks at Normanton, prominently featured in much of the tourist literature. We didn't actually have time to visit as part of this trip but I did have a chat with a knowledgeable bloke while scoping out some watersport activity and he talked briefly about the church, and I did do enough Googling to confirm that it is indeed the same church we visited 40-odd years ago, when the reservoir had only been in fully-filled existence for a year or two. Interestingly, though, he clearly and specifically pronounced it NorMANton with the emphasis on the middle syllable. A quick look at a map of the area reveals that there is a place called Manton a few miles to the west, so it's not utterly ridiculous to conclude that Normanton may be a contraction of "North Manton" and the contracted name has retained the accenting from the original name. Note that I'm leaving aside the obvious observation that it should really be called East Manton given its geographical position. 

There are quite a few other places called Normanton in England, notably Normanton le Heath in Leicestershire which featured in the lists here.

Anyway, a small selection of Rutland photos can be found here. It's not just British place-names - here's a list from Bill Bryson's excellent Mother Tongue featuring US place-names with counter-intuitive pronunciations:

I hate you, Butler

A couple of related things following the sudden death of rugby pundit and journalist (and former Wales rugby captain) Eddie Butler. Firstly that while I do retain some vague memory of seeing the Grand Slam game in 1978 and probably a handful of other less individually memorable games from the same era my formative rugby-watching years were in the early 1980s when pickings were a good deal slimmer in terms of Welsh wins, let alone titles and trophies. The statistics are stark: 1969-1979 brought eight championships (two shared), three Grand Slams and six Triple Crowns, while the period from 1980-2004 brought two championships (one shared), no Grand Slams and one Triple Crown (in 1988). Obviously I've chosen the dates carefully there for maximum impact, and things have picked up quite a bit since 2005, but it's quite a contrast. Butler came into the team and served a stint as captain during the early part of that era (his debut was in 1980).

I recall that during Butler's time in the Welsh team and particularly on his being named as captain in 1983 there was a bit of suspicion of him in some quarters owing to his public school and Cambridge University background (and not, presumably, something more appropriate like coal-mining). Similarly during his career as writer and broadcaster his penchant for slightly flowery poetic flights of fancy was a bit Marmite-y, and occasionally prompted the thought that he was enjoying the sound of his own voice more than the audience was. But his occasional commentary sparring with Brian Moore was always entertaining and clearly derived from mutual affection, like for instance this entertaining exchange about Gavin Henson's leg-shaving habits before he kicked the monster penalty that defeated England and started Wales' 2005 Grand Slam campaign.

He also did some interesting stuff outside of the narrow subject of rugby union, including this half-hour documentary about his birthplace and my place of residence, the city of Newport. Among the many interesting historical snippets included are a bit about the city's key role in the Chartist movement, the Newport Rising in particular, and the role of John Frost in all of it. Frost managed to avoid being massacred and lived to the ripe old age of 93, long enough to be pardoned for his role in the uprising, but not long enough to see various Newport landmarks being named in his honour including John Frost Square in the city centre and John Frost School.

We'll come back to the square in a minute, but the school illustrates the city's rather incoherent approach to commemorating its Chartist history: it was renamed (it was formerly plain old Duffryn High School) in 2015, but only two years earlier the city had approved the demolishing of the Chartist mosaic/mural in the city centre, albeit in a rather unprepossessing location on an underpass wall. 

Anyway, back to John Frost Square, in a roundabout sort of way (that's a hilarious pun, for reasons that you'll see in a minute) - I was delivering Nia to her best friend's house at the weekend for a sleepover and pointed out the big clock sitting on top of a pair of steel columns that occupies the roundabout at the entrance to the new(ish) Glan Llyn estate, which in turn occupies part of the western end of the vast Llanwern steelworks site. Anyway, I told Nia that I was vaguely aware that the clock used to be in the city centre somewhere and moreover had some sort of mechanism that opened up the top and did something dramatic on the hour.

Further investigation reveals that it is a mechanical sculpture designed by a guy called Andy Plant , was formerly situated in John Frost Square (between about 1994 and 2008, as far as I can gather - there is some info on that Wikipedia page) and did some fairly bonkers stuff as part of its on-the-hour routine. It does seem a pity that the mechanism isn't operational any more - I've no idea whether it's still in there but needs a squirt of WD-40 or if it's been removed, but if it's the former (as seems more likely, on balance) it seems a shame not to spend a bit of money repairing it. That said, it doing its thing in the middle of a roundabout might be deemed a bit of a distraction hazard for motorists and there might not be the appetite for another relocation (nor indeed anywhere for it to go).

Just to clear up another couple of Newport claims-to-fame in the Butler documentary: it is certainly true that Joe Strummer lived in Newport in the 1970s (when he went by the name Woody Mellor), but it seems to have only been for about a year between 1973 and 1974, so any formative influence on his later work with the Clash seems a bit dubious. Even more dubious is the claim that Newport was the place where the mole grip was invented, as there seems to be a general consensus that it was invented (admittedly under a different name) in Nebraska in the 1920s. Newport was certainly the centre for UK manufacture from the 1950s onwards, but anyone claiming that means they were invented here needs to, so to speak, get a grip. 

the last book I read

The Road Home by Jim Harrison.

Meet the Northridges - they're a twentieth-century family. From the state of Nebraska, they are living through some history. It's a tough place, Nebraska - the endless grassy plains, the rivers, the occasional tornado ripping through and destroying everything you own - and breeds tough people. And sure enough the family patriarch who narrates the first section here, John Wesley Northridge II, is an uncompromising and irascible old character, of half-Lakota ancestry, made almost entirely out of knuckles and gristle. Already an old man when we first meet him in the mid-1950s, he lives a fairly solitary existence on his remote farm, something that suits him very well, thanks very much.

The only people he consents to spend time with regularly are his old friend and neighbour Lundquist, his daughter-in-law Naomi (wife of his late son, John Wesley Northridge III) and, favourite of all, his granddaughter Dalva, only in her early teens in this part of the novel but already a fierce and independent girl not prepared to take any shit from anybody, including her grandfather.

John Wesley has an odd encounter with a Native American, Smith, who he has not seen since childhood, and decides that his life is drawing to a close and that some mental stock-taking is probably in order. He reminisces at some length about his younger life, lovers, wives, children, adventures, and frets about what will become of his family, especially Dalva, who by this time has already got herself knocked up by an unsuitable young man and had to give up the baby for adoption. 

We then shift narrators and jump forward nearly 30 years to the mid-1980s, and Nelse, who we soon learn is Dalva's son, is contending with some challenges of his own: his slightly ill-defined job as some sort of nature ranger, his clandestine relationship with his girlfriend J.M., inconveniently married to someone else right now, and the recently-acquired knowledge of his true parentage and the desire to know more, maybe by actually meeting in person. Eventually after much indecision he decides to seek out Naomi and Dalva, on the flimsy pretext of doing a bird survey on their land (a subterfuge that soon collapses once he meets them). After an initial period of wariness he is soon integrated into the family and decides to stick around for a while, a decision cemented by J.M.'s coming to join him, having ditched her no-good husband at the cost of a couple of black eyes. 

So far so idyllic, but there is a cloud on the horizon: Dalva has been nursing some unspecified abdominal pains that she should really have been to the doctor about a while back, and when she does she finds that her worst fears are realised and she has a fairly advanced case of ovarian cancer. This prompts a bout of pre-death contemplation of her own (though somewhat more premature than her grandfather's as she is only in her mid-forties), and she enlists Nelse's help to set a few matters straight before she embarks on her final road trip to end things in a manner of her own choosing rather than in a hospital bed.

The narrative described, above, as engaging as it is, isn't really the point here - it's more about the background against which it all takes place, encompassing nearly a century of American history from Wounded Knee onwards. It's also about the individual characters, principally the assorted narrators: John Wesley and Nelse as already mentioned, but also Naomi, Paul (John Wesley's other son) and Dalva. It's also, more than most novels, about the physical landscape within which it's set and the living creatures (not just human) who inhabit that landscape, and also the characters' physical connection with the natural world, be it through work-related physical effort, recreation or carnality.

I discovered after having started The Road Home that it's actually the sequel to an earlier novel, called simply Dalva. I am here to tell you that I didn't feel like I was missing anything here by not having read that already, but that I do now intend to seek it out and read it, as I enjoyed this tremendously. Harrison is probably best-known for Legends Of The Fall, a short novel from 1979 made into a film in 1994 starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins among others. Another story from the same collection, Revenge, was also made into a film starring Kevin Costner in 1990.

I suppose if one were being hyper-critical one might say the first half of The Road Home is better than the second, John Wesley Northridge II's voice being the most compelling one telling the most compelling story, and once Nelse's section that follows it has finished all the major revelations have happened, apart from the news that Dalva is going to die. This is minor stuff, though, and I recommend it highly, although you should be aware that it's a big book in every sense - 446 pages in a too-big-for-the-bookshelves format the same size as House Of Leaves.