happy quadricentennial to me

So as I coyly alluded to in the previous post, the appearance of an Anita Shreve book in this list often marks a key moment in its history, an anitaversary if you will, and this one is no exception, being the 400th book to appear in this list since The Weight Of Water almost exactly 18 years ago. I see that last time (Sea Glass was the 300th book) I provided some stats, so I'll update them here:

Milestone	Date	Days	Pages	Pages/Day
100	15th September 2010	1474	28361	19.24
200	2nd February 2015	1601	30761	19.21
300	16th September 2020	2053	31782	15.48
400	30th September 2024	1474	33460	22.70

• Note that this was the joint-quickest century on record, oddly occupying the exact same number of elapsed days as the first one. Note also, however, that each century has involved longer and longer books, on average anyway, and so the last hundred were read at the highest pages-per-day rate of all. Note also that the first ever book review was in a September (2006), and then three of the subsequent milestones (all the ones involving an Anita Shreve book, as it happens) also took place in September (2010, 2020 and 2024). Coincidence? OR IS IT??!!
• Longest book in the fourth hundred was The Pope's Rhinoceros at 753 pages; shortest was The Thirty-Nine Steps at 119 pages. 
• Number of distinct authors for each hundred in chronological order: 93, 88, 92, 93.
• Number of authors who were new to me (generally, not just among books reviewed here) for each hundred in chronological order: 40, 36, 42, 55. The fourth hundred was therefore by a comfortable margin the most adventurous in terms of trying new stuff, which is interesting, but which I'm not aware of having been a conscious decision.
• Male/female split for each hundred in chronological order: 75:25, 72:28, 80:20, 71:29. So the fourth hundred was the most female-author-heavy yet, but only by one and still with a male to female ratio of well over two to one.

The "most read authors" chart now looks like this:

Number of books	Author(s)
11	Iain (M) Banks
7	TC Boyle
6	Ian McEwan Russell Hoban William Boyd
5	William Gibson Jim Crace John le Carré
4	Lawrence Durrell Anita Shreve Beryl Bainbridge Robertson Davies Patricia Highsmith
3	Cormac McCarthy Stieg Larsson Hilary Mantel Alison Lurie Graham Swift Paul Theroux Anne Tyler Barbara Trapido Marilynne Robinson

the last book I read

Strange Fits Of Passion by Anita Shreve.

Mary Amesbury has just moved into a rented house up on the Maine coast with her baby daughter Caroline. Except she hasn't, because Mary Amesbury doesn't exist, and actually the woman who's rented the house is Maureen English, a journalist from New York, on the run from her alcoholic and physically abusive husband, Harrold.

Arriving after a hasty departure from the couple's New York apartment, Maureen/Mary has only her car, some baby stuff, and a limited supply of cash. She also has some very obvious facial bruising which prompts sympathy but also attention that she doesn't really want, and her attempts to pass it off as the result of a car accident don't really fool anyone.

Mary settles into her new home, a seaside cottage in the small community of St. Hilaire, where the main business is fishing and indeed the cottage (rented to her at minimal cost by a sympathetic local widow, Julia Strout) is right next to the main mooring-place for the local fishing boats. Inevitably a young and apparently single woman attracts some curiosity and attention and fairly soon Mary is having regular clandestine meetings with Jack Strout (a cousin of Julia's late husband) who pops in in the early hours of the morning on his way to his fishing boat to tickle her clam, pop his tackle in her box, and so on and so forth. Jack is married, though fairly unhappily, to a wife, Rebecca, crippled by some sort of depressive illness. But he has no thought of leaving her and soon isn't going to have an excuse to visit any more as he'll be mooring his boat up for the winter.

Jack and Mary's secret is partly revealed when Caroline contracts a sudden fever and they have to take her to the local hospital. More seriously, the visit also entails the doctor phoning the family doctor in New York to get details of which antibiotic Caroline is allergic to (Mary can't remember). Mary is frantic that this will provide a way for Harrold to track her down, and sure enough it's only a matter of days later that a stranger is seen in town asking questions - questions like: has anyone seen a young woman with a baby? Most people are wise to what's going on and remain tight-lipped on the subject but inevitably someone blabs and in no time at all Mary is awoken near dawn not by her expected visit from Jack but by Harrold, who gets her to come downstairs with the promise of a reasonable discussion about things but then attacks her with a fork, rapes her and passes out in a chair in a drunken stupor. Mary considers stabbing him but decides that she can't bring herself to do it, and so heads out to Jack's boat where she knows there is a gun. She arrives back just as Harrold is starting to stir and shoots him dead just as Jack arrives.

This is where the main section of the story (set in 1970 and 1971) ends, and we zoom back out to the framing device, which is this: twenty years or so later, fellow journalist Helen Scofield seeks out Caroline, now a college student, to hand over the various interview transcripts that she used to write a magazine article on the case not long after it happened and while the lengthy murder trial process was still in progress. The article attracted some considerable publicity and gave Helen a career boost that went on to make her a wealthy author of true-crime books, but she has come to feel some guilt for how she portrayed Maureen/Mary in the article and thinks that it may have swayed the judge into giving her a more punitive sentence than he might otherwise have done. 

Framing devices of this sort are tricky - too long and people get frustrated wanting to get through the wibbly-wobbly dissolve to the actual story, too short and it feels tacked-on and perfunctory. I can see why it was presented in this way; it allows the author to examine changing attitudes to domestic violence over a couple of decades, the original article playing up the angle of: maybe she asked for it, maybe it was just a bit of rough sex gone too far, maybe she and Jack cooked up the murder between them so they could continue their illicit relationship, etc. The device of having the main narrative be presented as a series of interview transcripts is slightly problematic as well: most of it is in Mary's voice and inevitably some of the more flowery descriptive passages read very much as something a novelist would write, but not necessarily something someone would say in an interview. 

So the structural scaffolding is a bit too visible to the reader, but the story being told here is compelling and plausible, and doesn't fall into the trap of making its protagonist too saintly. It's one of the earliest novels of Anita Shreve's long career (published in 1991; the other three Shreves on this list are from 1997, 2002 and 2004) and maybe that explains the tendency to structural tricksiness. It must also be noted that the central plot resembles a sort of gender-swapped version of The Shipping News, and resembles even more closely the plot of the 1991 Julia Roberts film Sleeping With The Enemy, itself based on a 1987 novel of the same name. There is also a reference towards the end of the novel (in the section that reproduces the notorious magazine article) to some aspects of Mary's life resembling Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; that previous work is referenced much more explicitly in When She Woke. 

Seasoned blog-watchers will know that the appearance of an Anita Shreve novel often marks a milestone of some sort; more on this in a later post.

the last book I read

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M Banks.

Ah, Earth. You can keep all your exotic worlds populated by giant sentient slugs and super-intelligent shades of the colour blue, and your Dyson spheres and your infinitely-long quantum singularities, you can't beat good old Earth. Having said that, this earth is a bit different from the one you and I are familiar with. For a start, there's no Swindon, and furthermore there seems to have been some non-specific apocalypse that's left a lot of high-tech megastructures, nay, indeed, gigastructures around that no-one knows how to use any more. 

That's not to say people are just sitting around, though: there are things to be done. Gadfium is the Chief Scientist of the ruling class and is tasked with interpreting some weird goings on on the Plain of Sliding Stones, some sort of equivalent of Racetrack Playa with much mystical divination applied to the movements of the stones. Gadfium determines that the recent highly unusual movement of the stones is some sort of coded message from the upper levels of the gargantuan Serehfa Fastness, a kilometres-wide, kilometres-high castle parts of which no human has visited in decades. 

Bascule is a Teller, one practised in communication with the Crypt, a sort of virtual cyberspace realm where much information is stored, sentient programs roam freely and dead people's mind-states are uploaded so that they can live on, in some sense at least, after their deaths. "Death" isn't as final as we might imagine as some uploading of mind-states into new physical bodies goes on, but there is a limit after which you only get to live on in virtual form. 

As if to illustrate this, Sessine, a high-ranking government official, is unexpectedly assassinated by one of his bodyguards. This being his last physical life he then awakes in the Crypt's reality and is then rapidly killed another half-a-dozen or so times in quick succession, just to emphasise that someone really wants him properly dead. Eventually he awakens in a location that turns out to be a secure space that someone set up for him many years before in highly-prescient preparation for just this sort of series of events. That someone turns out to be himself, or at least a previously-uploaded copy of his former mind-state. So now all Sessine has to do is work put who multiply-murdered him and see what he can do about it. Time is on his side, though, as each second in the "real" world corresponds to many days in Crypt time.

Speaking of real-world reincarnation, while all this is going on a young woman awakens in a mysterious building, wanders around a bit and encounters some kind and helpful people who clothe her and accommodate her while she tries to remember who and/or what she is. What she is, it turns out, is some sort of sentient program from within the Crypt, sent into the "real" world to facilitate the passing of some knowledge to those that need it, knowledge of this kind having been suppressed for many generations by the ruling class. This is as a result of some upheaval involving a significant chunk of humanity (the Diaspora) leaving the planet to spread themselves out across the galaxy and beyond, and those left behind instituting some sort of science-denying regime to further their own ends at the cost of being able to avoid a planetary-scale catastrophe should it occur. And well whaddaya know here is exactly such a catastrophe, the solar system's slow drift into a huge dust cloud, a process known as the Encroachment whose end result is likely to be the extinguishing of all life on Earth.

Sounds bad, right? Well, yeah, and it will require some co-operation between the various protagonists to get out of this tight spot. Firstly, Gadfium, with some virtual-realm help from Sessine, has to help the real-world Asura survive long enough to deliver her message to those that need it, not straightforward given that most of the ruling elite want her rubbed out, and then Bascule has to physically gain access to the upper reaches of the Fastness to make contact with whoever has been sending the cryptic messages and facilitate them and Asura making contact with each other to unlock the mechanism for averting disaster.

That mechanism, the "feersum endjinn" of the book's title, is never very clearly explained, but appears to be some system of propulsion powerful enough to shift the entire solar system out of the way of the Encroachment. Which is nice. 

But why the krayzee spelling, you'll be asking. Well, that's because all of the sections told from Bascule's perspective are rendered in this way. Something that, if you're a tedious literalist like me, might make you ask: since this only works with written text, does that mean this is some sort of journal that Bascule is keeping? 

You might also say: just a minute there, this is a very similar device to the one used throughout Riddley Walker, and in fact there are some other similarities as well, notably the whole thing about remnants of an ancient civilisation ill-understood by a technologically-regressed population. I mean, there are differences: the guys in Riddley Walker were properly back at the bashing rocks together stage whereas here they've still got machines and computers and stuff. 

Now that we've cracked the seal of comparing bits of Feersum Endjinn to other things, let's do a few more: the whole separate virtual realm that the living can port into in some way is familiar from William Gibson's Neuromancer and its sequels, not to mention countless other books, and the thing about stepping down levels of reality and finding time slowing down relative to the "real" world will be familiar to anyone who's seen Inception. And the thing with Asura as human bearer of some piece of corrective computer code which has to be re-inserted into the virtual realm in some way to fix things is not unlike the function of Keanu Reeves' character in the Matrix movies. The business of digging into the substrate of the Fastness that some of the military engineers have been tasked with doing to try and unearth something is a bit like the similar operation that's going on in one of the sections of Banks' own Culture novel Matter, and, lastly, the adventurous go-getting segment of the population of a planet finding a way of separating itself from their less-adventurous fellow-planet-occupants is similar to what happened to the Golgafrinchans in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, only in reverse (i.e. there it was the useless segment, telephone sanitisers and all, who jetted off in the spaceships).

That's not a blanket accusation of plagiarism, by the way; for one thing both Inception and The Matrix post-date Feersum Endjinn (published in 1994) by several years, and many of these tropes are widely-used across the world of speculative fiction. I do think it's almost impossible, though, that Banks wasn't influenced by Riddley Walker (published in 1980). 

Anyway, I enjoyed this more than the other non-Culture (but still with the "M") Banks, Against A Dark Background, even though there a few things that don't really add up: the purpose of the weird gibbering flayed skulls that pop up occasionally in the in-Crypt sections isn't very clear, unless it's just a general indication of the descent of certain parts of the virtual world into chaos, and, more fundamentally, the idea that the leftover engineering on Earth could include something able to invoke the movement of an entire freakin' solar system in such a smooth and non-disruptive way as to not throw any of the planets off into deep space is a bit, well, implausible, even with the slightly different plausibility parameters that reading a science fiction novel requires. It's lots of fun, though, and at 279 pages fairly short by Banks' usual chunky standards. 

Feersum Endjinn won the British Science Fiction Association award for best novel in 1994; other winners on this list include Inverted World (1974), Banks' own Excession (1996), The City & The City (2009) and Ancillary Justice (2013). 

celebrity deathylikey of the day

The large number of photographs of Italian footballer Salvatore "Toto" Schillaci on the internet this week, in the aftermath of his death aged 59, prompted me to notice that he looked a bit (to me, as always, just to pre-empt any "no he doesn't" nonsense) like comedian Geoff Norcott.

Schillaci was one of those sportspeople who, rather than having a long and glorious career, flowered briefly and gloriously and then didn't do much else - Bob Massie rather than Glenn McGrath, say, or Vinod Kambli rather than Sachin Tendulkar. Seven of his sixteen international caps, and six of his seven international goals, came during the 1990 World Cup where he won the Golden Boot, although, oddly, it was known as the Golden Shoe at the time. 

Geoff Norcott's USP seems to be that he is a rare "right-wing" comedian in a profession dominated by instinctively left-leaning people. Personally I'm not convinced these terms have a great deal of meaning, and certainly if you watch Norcott's stand-up routines he comes across as a fairly engaging blokey sort of bloke, rather than, say, Hitler. 

the last book I read

The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbø.

Meet Harry Hole. He's a maverick cop, who doesn't pay by the - hang on *checks notes* ah, I see we've met him before. You may assume that all the standard checklist items that applied last time - alcoholism, broken personal relationships, constantly on the verge of disciplinary procedures and/or dismissal from the force for general unreliability and, dammit, insufficient deference towards the pompous stuffed shirts at Norway Central, but a semi-mystical ability to sniff out wrongdoing and bring its perpetrators to justice - apply equally well here.

And Harry's mystical Crime Whisperer powers are sorely needed, because after a couple of murders in the central Oslo area it looks like the police might have a serial killer on their hands. Firstly Camilla Loen, shot in the head in her shower and found with one of her fingers removed and a small red five-pointed diamond under one eyelid. Then Lisbeth Barli, gone missing from the flat she shared with her husband, Wilhelm. No body, but the police receive a finger, verifiably hers, wearing a ring with the same five-pointed diamond in. And then Barbara Svendsen, a secretary at a legal firm, executed in the women's toilets at her office, and with the same symptoms (plus diamond, minus finger). 

Harry is assigned to the case, but there's a problem - his partner is Tom Waaler, a senior officer Harry strongly suspects not only of being corrupt but also of being involved in the killing of one of Harry's colleagues on a previous case, possibly in a bid to cover his own shady tracks. And sure enough while Tom and Harry get down to organising their investigation, and Harry gets down to trying to exert a bit of self-discipline and stay off the sauce while the case is in progress, Tom also makes it known that the reason he's swanning around in a fancy sports car while Harry is still running his knackered old Ford Escort is that he and a group of associates are involved with some, hem hem, extra-curricular activities which he'd really like to get Harry involved with, once he's proved his loyalty. Just the usual stuff like rubbing out people that the standard tedious police processes of actually gathering admissible evidence and the like can't touch.

Back on the case, Harry's detectival insights lead him to deduce that the murderer is choosing his murder targets not by their identity but by their location, the sites of the murders drawing out the points of a pentagram, a symbol of much mystical significance. The police's assumptions about where he will strike next turn out to be wrong, though, as it turns out Camilla Loen wasn't his first victim after all. Some further insights reveal that the likely murderer is the son of the occupant of the house at the fifth and final point of the pentagram, a man named Sven Sivertsen.

Sure enough Sivertsen is arrested and taken into custody, and Harry is given his first assignment by Tom Waaler: make sure Sivertsen has a tragic accident while in his cell. Instead, Harry busts Sivertsen out and spirits him away, having had one of those classic WAIT A MINUTE IT WAS SOMEONE ELSE ALL ALONG moments of clarity. And sure enough while Harry leaves Sven handcuffed to a radiator he goes and confronts the actual murderer, who turns out (SPOILER ALERT) to be Wilhelm Barti, wife of the disappeared Lisbeth, the whole satanic serial killer thing being an elaborate bit of hokum to throw the police off the scent of his actual motive - a bit of the old spousal murder, with the added spice of throwing suspicion onto Sven Sivertsen, his wife's secret lover. 

Wilhelm conveniently offs himself by jumping out of the window rather than face trial, and so Harry is free to return to Sven and detach him from the radiator. There is still a problem, though, and it's that Tom Waaler wanted Sven dead not just as a test of Harry's loyalty but also because Sven was involved with some gun-smuggling activities that Tom had a piece of and could potentially incriminate him. Tom then turns up with Harry's on-off girlfriend's son Oleg as a hostage, and a tense stand-off ensues, broken by Harry outwitting Tom and causing him to be sliced in two by a descending lift. 

So all's well that ends well, then: Harry tentatively decides to stay on as a detective, having considered jacking the whole thing in, not to mention flirting with the possibility of just being sacked, and tentatively rekindles his relationship with Rakel, Oleg's mother. That's all lovely, of course, but does illustrate a structural problem with the long-running troubled maverick cop series - it's going to be necessary to have Harry piss that domestic bliss and professional success up the wall by the start of the next book in the series, just so that he can navigate broadly the same narrative arc again there. It's almost as if there are actually twice as many stories in the series, the intervening ones featuring Harry getting back on the sauce and making disastrous professional and domestic decisions, and it's only the ones where the arc goes in the opposite direction that the author has chosen to write about. Same goes for the other rumpled genius types like Rebus and Wallander.

Those observations aside this is probably better than the other book in that series in this series (if you see what I mean), The Redeemer, whose plot turned on a couple of implausibilities that were a bit jarring even for the serial killer/maverick detective genre. That book is actually this one's immediate successor in the Harry Hole series - they are the fifth and sixth in the series respectively, although if Wikipedia is to be believed then The Devil's Star is actually the first of the series to be published in an English translation, in 2005. 

If you're as childish as me you'll be sniggering at Harry's surname, and perhaps at his creator's charmingly naïve failure to consider how that name would be rendered by English-speaking readers. You can imagine the screenwriters of any English-language adaptation having to be careful that they don't include any lines like these:

• you're a hell of a man, Hole
• clean yourself up - you look like a bum, Hole
• the suspect's being a real pain in the arse, Hole

If you're interested there are some tips on pronunciation here - basically imagine saying something like "who left the gas on?" and then stopping just before the "f" in "left". I can't say how they managed with it in the 2017 adaptation of The Snowman (starring Michael Fassbender as Harry), as his name doesn't feature in the trailer.

thomas' hill figures

A couple of further thoughts prompted by having a look through my new (well, new to me, anyway) copy of the Morris Marples book. Firstly, a bit of orientation for those new to the whole chalk hill-figure business: basically the only one of these with any claim to proper antiquity is the White Horse of Uffington, well-established as being at least late Bronze Age or early Iron Age and therefore most likely around 3000 years old. Almost all of the others were created in a spree of enthusiasm for the form lasting about 100 years from mid-18th to mid-19th century. The two giants at Cerne Abbas and Wilmington may have some claim to be older than that, and things like the Whiteleaf Cross and the Watlington White Mark may be Christian sanitisings of earlier pagan symbols (translation: GIANT COCKS) but it's all highly speculative and frankly not particularly convincing. Marples, to his credit, comes to much the same conclusion.

As I said in the previous post, I've visited the Uffington horse a few times, anything up to half-a-dozen or so I would guess. I recall also visiting the Cerne Abbas giant (including its GIANT COCK) during a family holiday when I was a teenager. The only other white horses I recall having actually seen are the Westbury one (which can be seen from the train) and the Cherhill one, which is visible from the A4 and which we stopped at at least once while I was being delivered from Newbury back to Bristol for the start of a university term. We also used to go to a pub on the outskirts of Chippenham (a few miles up the road) for lunch which was called The Lysley Arms at the time and which I see is now called The Pewsham. The food was very nice when we used to go there and looks pretty good now, though I will point out that - now I think about it - I haven't been there for over thirty years. I mean, Christ.

The only other one I think I've seen in the flesh, or in the chalk, if you will, is the Osmington horse which I have this picture of me in the vicinity of looking slightly fat and hungover (though still with a reasonably impressive head of hair) in January 2016. 

Osmington is also, you'll recall, the birthplace of cheese racing, the actual location being the campsite at Osmington Mills a couple of miles down the road from the horse.

Anyway, for no particular reason other than that it amused me to do it, here's the horses in their current form courtesy of Google Maps' aerial photography. 

Don't strain your eyes squinting for the last one, as it's not discernibly there any more (it would have been in the green strip at the bottom of the photo). It is listed in the Marples book as Woolborough but all present-day mapping lists the location as Woolbury. The horse, a small and pretty rough affair made out of flints embedded in the turf, was supposedly still there in the late 1990s after being rediscovered and tidied up a bit but now seems to have subsided beneath the vegetation again.