here's something bulbous you may be interested in

Allow me to introduce my Great Kitchen Light Bulb Experiment. Our kitchen is lit by, among other things, twelve recessed spotlights in the ceiling, which take the little screw-in R50 spotlight bulbs. All great, and very illuminating, but I suspect that they were wired in (probably by my predecessor, whose enthusiasm for DIY considerably exceeded my own) to a circuit that previously serviced a couple of fluorescent striplights or something similar. What that means is that the circuit is a bit overloaded, the practical upshot of which is that the bulbs tend to blow a lot and it's a constant running battle keeping enough working lightbulbs installed to see what you're cooking.

Normally we buy these standard incandescent 40-watt bulbs from B&Q, though elsewhere in the house we've gone energy-saving wherever possible. So I thought I'd try an experiment: buy a range of different ones and keep a log of when they fail. It's not especially scientific, but it keeps me off the streets. Here's the smorgasbord of illuminatory delights I purchased from B&Q yesterday:

A quick run-through from left to right:

• these 28W halogen bulbs at £4.28 each
• the standard 40W incandescent bulbs we've been using already at £1.49 each
• the 25W version of the same thing at 99p each
• the 9W full eco-warrior energy-saving version at £7.98

There is another bulb option available - LED bulbs, also available from B&Q at an eye-watering £10.98 each. The only reason I didn't purchase one of these was that I happen to know IKEA sell them at 4 quid a pop, so I'll wait until I can get a couple of those. There were four bulbs still working when I started, so I filled the remaining 8 slots with two halogens, two 25W bulbs, the single energy-saver and three 40W bulbs, distributed as randomly as possible. Here's a handy pictorial representation of the distribution:

The way to visualise this is to imagine yourself lying on your back on our kitchen floor with your head pointing roughly north, towards the utility room at the back of the house. I did try to take a (pre-bulb-fitting) photograph from exactly that position, but the ceiling isn't high enough to get it all in. This is the best I could do (same orientation as the diagram):

My intention is to keep a log of which bulbs fail and when and track which ones last the longest. As I say, it's not particularly scientific, because the two banks of bulbs (left and right in the stuck-together photo above) are separately switchable, so some may get more use than others, plus of course some of the individual fittings may be particularly prone to frying bulbs owing to the vagaries of the wiring set-up. But it's the best I can do. I'll probably post individual updates as comments here and then summarise at some later date in a separate post.

chronicle of a death forgotten

I must just publicly chastise myself here for forgetting the pretty significant name of Iain Banks from the list of deceased authors in my recent post on the subject. Not sure how I missed him, though since he pre-deceased Doris Lessing I evidently missed spotting him in the earlier post as well. Particularly shameful since Banks is the current joint record holder for number of books featured on this list with four, a record he shares with Lawrence Durrell (dead) and William Boyd (alive).

So the definitive list now reads:

• Michael Didbin
• Beryl Bainbridge
• Russell Hoban
• Richard Matheson
• Elmore Leonard
• Iain Banks
• Doris Lessing
• Gabriel García Márquez

Honourable near-miss mentions should also go to Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike, both of whom have featured in the list, and both of whom have died during the lifetime of this blog, but in both cases shortly before they featured in a blog post - Vonnegut died in April 2007 and was first featured in October 2007, while Updike died in January 2009 and was first featured in August 2009.

the last book I read

Stoner by John Williams.

So, just to manage your expectations here, this is not the story of some guy who stumbles round California in the 1960s smoking a load of dope (a variant of that story can be found in the early stages of this book, if that's what you want). Instead, this is the story of the eponymous William Stoner, born into a poor farming family in the late 19th century and expected by both his parents and himself to inherit the farm and the associated backbreaking work and responsibility when the time comes. In an attempt to better himself he enrols on an agricultural sciences course at the University of Missouri, a course which comes with some compulsory English literature elements, and has something of an epiphany during his reluctant attendance at these extra classes on hearing a Shakespeare sonnet.

In the wake of this significant moment he immediately ditches the agriculture courses (and, with them, any aspirations of taking over the family farm) and switches to the full-blown English literature course. Not only that, but on completing his studies he immediately accepts a teaching post at the university, thus defining the course of his future life.

At the same time as he is committing himself to a life of teaching he is making equally irrevocable commitments to his future wife, Edith, a somewhat highly-strung young woman he has nonetheless fallen in love with, though (as was customary in the early years of the 20th century) without really getting to know her at all well. They marry, and it soon becomes clear to Stoner that he has made a terrible mistake. But, it's before World War I, so there's not much he can do about it. 

Clearly the personal and professional life of a university professor isn't going to involve much in the way of ray-gun battles or car chases, but some challenges present themselves nonetheless. Edith gives birth to a daughter, Grace, who Stoner dotes on until Edith mounts a concerted campaign to shut him out of her life. Meanwhile the new head of Stoner's department, Hollis Lomax, takes a violent dislike to Stoner after a disagreement over the merits of Lomax's star student, thus precipitating a feud that lasts for over twenty years. 

On the positive side, Stoner's teaching brings him pleasure and satisfaction, and in his forties he even embarks on a tentative love affair with one of his former students, Katherine Driscoll. In such a claustrophobic community it's impossible to keep such things a secret for long, but Edith seems unexpectedly mellow about the whole thing, possibly out of relief that Stoner is having his, hem hem, "needs" taken care of elsewhere. Hollis Lomax is less sanguine when he finds out, though, and makes sure that Katherine is obliged to pursue her academic ambitions elsewhere.

Stoner's health takes a turn for the worse after Katherine's departure, but he continues his teaching duties until eventually he is incapacitated by the cancer that eventually kills him in his mid-sixties.

And, erm, that's it. No light sabre showdowns, no last minute return of old lovers to declare everlasting love, no comforting reunion with his estranged daughter, no satisfying acts of vengeance against those by whom he had been wronged. But that's the point, really, it's just one man's life. A life that probably didn't work out the way he would have wanted it, either personally or professionally, but who's to say that it was a failure? He spent most of his life teaching the subject he loved, and while his marriage wasn't particularly happy he had his brief Indian summer of true love. And his problems with Hollis Lomax were mostly caused by his own admirably spiky integrity and dislike of pretence and bullshit. My only criticisms would be that it's never entirely clear what the basis for Lomax's hatred of Stoner is, or, to put it another way, why Lomax is so attached to his star student Charles Walker in the face of all the evidence that he is a liar and a bullshitter. Edith's motivations are never completely clear either; I guess we're meant to assume that the impossible situation women of marriageable age were put in in the early 20th century (and for some decades afterwards) has just sent her a bit mental.

So the point of the book is that anyone's life, however seemingly mundane, is interesting and remarkable if looked at closely enough. Williams himself was an English professor, so there's a suspicion that this is at least partly autobiographical, or at least inspired by his own life. Of course what the book also is is a hymn of love to literature, and to Stoner's own lifelong love affair with it. I suppose this does mean that it's a book likely to appeal to people who already like books, if that makes sense at all. In other words, if your question is "why would I read a novel?" this may not be the answer. I think it's a little low-key masterpiece, though, which is not to say I quite understand the extraordinary acclaim that's been heaped on it since its reissue in 2003 (it was originally published in 1965) - though, oddly, more in Europe than in America. I suppose the internet just accelerates the word-of-mouth effect. My Vintage paperback has a foreword by John McGahern, whose Amongst Women previously featured on this list. 

Echoes of other books, as always: the grimness of the brief descriptions of farming life at the beginning echoes My Ántonia, and the excruciating awkwardness of the wedding night fumblings is very reminiscent of the pivotal scenes in On Chesil Beach.

chronicle of a death foretold

Chalk up one more victim for my list of novelists who have been LITERALLY KILLED by my interest in their literary oeuvre - Gabriel García Márquez, who died on Thursday at the age of 87. The book review that was the (admittedly slow-acting) catalyst for his ultimate demise was this one for The Autumn Of The Patriarch in July 2007. That list now reads:

• Michael Didbin
• Beryl Bainbridge
• Russell Hoban
• Richard Matheson
• Elmore Leonard
• Doris Lessing
• Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years Of Solitude is probably the one you want, though I should say I've only read four of the ten or so novels that he wrote - Chronicle Of A Death Foretold and Love In The Time Of Cholera are the other two, both well worth a read. The only critical things I would say are that his penchant for slightly florid book titles may have been an influence on the lesser writers who followed and stank up the bestseller lists with their bloody tractors and mandolins, and secondly that while I realise "magic realism" implies some magical shit kicking off at some point, I can't honestly say that, for instance, One Hundred Years Of Solitude was improved by throwing in the bit about one of the minor characters levitating, any more than these two books were.

Before we get too mournful, though, consider this: now that Márquez is dead we can surely be told the full story behind Mario Vargas Llosa punching him in the eye in Mexico City in 1976, thus ending their friendship. Vargas Llosa is still alive, but he is 78, so I suggest he cracks on and spills the beans, otherwise we may never know.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day; special non-celebrity edition

A three-way today: current Prime Minister of Spain Mariano Rajoy, my beardy friend Phil, and Fred the busker from the Julia Donaldson/Axel Scheffler story book Tabby McTat, one of my daughter's current favourites.

incidental music spot of the day

Don't Worry About The Government by Talking Heads in episode 2 of Zeitgeisters on Radio 4 on Saturday. The programme's subject, Rem Koolhaas, is a renowned architect (or, if you will, "starchitect"; no, me neither), so the song was presumably chosen for its building-related lyrics, like these:

It's over there, it's over there
My building has every convenience
It's gonna make life easy for me
It's gonna be easy to get things done

This song is from the mighty Heads' first album 77 and was presumably partial inspiration for the somewhat self-mocking title of their (better) second album More Songs About Buildings And Food.

the last book I read

O-Zone by Paul Theroux.

There's been an apocalypse! Yeah, another one. This one seems to have been caused by the US government trying to dispose of several thousand tonnes of nuclear waste by stuffing it into some caves in the Ozarks, with predictably disastrous results, i.e. whole swathes of Missouri and neighbouring states rendered uninhabitable glowing wastelands. It never rains but it pours, and at around the same time the Big One has hit California, chopping Los Angeles in half and creating a new area of low-lying land called the Landslip, populated by various undesirables.

All of which has made the city-dwellers (seemingly any city, though most of the action here centres on New York) super-paranoid about being infiltrated from outside by the great unwashed (and/or starving/maimed/irradiated etc.), and so they instigate a ruthless system of checkpoints on entry and exit from the city, and employ a whole host of private security firms to police the streets, occasionally offing some innocent civilians who've been unwise enough to take a stroll after dark. Not that many people do that, though, as everyone's got their own personal jet-rotor which they use to shuttle to and from the landing pads on the roofs of their high-rise apartment blocks.

The areas affected by the eco-catastrophe retain a fascination for the city-dwellers, though, even though you need a permit and a load of protective gear to be allowed to travel out there. Fortunately Hardy Allbright works for a company that invests in vast weather-influencing technology and is always on the lookout for vast open spaces to be exploited. So on the pretext of doing some research in "O-Zone", as the area is know known, Hardy organises a New Year's jaunt out there as a novelty New Year's party for some friends and family, including his wife Moura, son Fisher (aka Fizzy; it later transpires that he's strictly only Moura's son, as there was some murky artificial insemination thing going on) and brother Hooper. It's basically your standard New Year's bash with some wine and nibbles, plus some anti-radiation suits for everyone and the addition of some deadly ray-guns just in case the area turns out not to be as uninhabited as it's meant to be.

Unsurprisingly there turn out to be people about, just wandering about eating nuts and berries (and probably the odd three-headed beaver) without so much as a bar-coded identity card between them. And when the party meets up with some of them during an excursion into the wilderness, pleasantries are soon exchanged in the form of disintegration rays, two of the primitives are offed in an explodey fashion and the party quickly sours and the partiers return to New York.

Hooper Allbright has some video footage of the excursion, though, and soon becomes obsessed with watching it over and over again, particularly the section featuring the lovely willowy 15-year-old girl, who he quickly concludes that he is in love with, and sets about organising another expedition into O-Zone to find her. He takes Fizzy with him as technical backup, Fizzy just happening to be some sort of tech-savvy super-nerd, with the usual associated raft of social interaction difficulties. Inevitably there is another confrontation and mutual grabbing of hostages, Hooper jet-rotoring off back to New York with the leggy 15-year-old and Fizzy falling into the hands of a band of "aliens", who aren't really aliens at all but various people dumped in O-Zone by the private security firms at the secret behest of the New York authorities who didn't want them in the city.

Hooper is too busy entertaining his new lady friend, so eventually Hardy decides that he'd better organise some sort of rescue expedition to go and look for Fizzy, and enlists the help of some contacts in Godseye, one of the terrifyingly deranged private vigilante groups. They head out of the city and discover that not only is there a huge expanse of America out there that's neither New York nor O-Zone, is largely indifferent to the problems of either, and is just getting on with life as it has done for decades, but also that maybe Fizzy doesn't want to be found.

O-Zone was published in 1986 and was Theroux's first proper-sized novel since his most famous book The Mosquito Coast in 1981 (the intervening Doctor Slaughter was a long short story, or a novella at best). While the setting is very different, a lot of the central themes are the same - the dire consequences of man's losing touch with the natural world, forgetting how to make things, cut down trees, start fires, roast three-headed beavers, all that stuff, and the dehumanising and alienating effect of too much technology. The "science fiction" setting is unique in Theroux's novels, and I'm not sure it really works. Too many unanswered questions, for one thing - how long ago are these catastrophic events meant to have happened? What area was affected? What about the rest of America - places like Florida, well away from the range of the radiation leak or the west coast earthquakes? Can we have a map? Even Riddley Walker gave us a map, and that was pretty vague about a lot of detail.

Other little plot annoyances: the whole business with Hooper's abduction of Bligh (the nubile 15-year-old girl) is a bit Seven Brides For Seven Brothers in her quick acceptance of her fate and acquiescence into a relationship with Hooper. And the sub-plot about Moura's search for the anonymous "donor" who fathered Fizzy is a bit inconsequential, which makes it all the more odd that it's allowed to provide the epilogue to the story, to no particular purpose. It's also quite long (547 pages in my Penguin edition) for a book in which not a huge amount actually happens.

Incidentally the weird stylised mask-wearing ritual attached to the "donation" process, presumably to draw attention away from its being just some anonymous fucking, is reminiscent of the similar rituals in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (a much better book, it must be said). The setting of a small amount of the action in a post-Big One California also echoes the similar setting of Virtual Light. And the concealment of nuclear waste by just hiding barrels of the stuff in holes in the ground was faintly reminiscent of the bit at the start of the Simpsons episode Marge vs. The Monorail where Mr. Burns gets arrested stuffing barrels into tree trunks in the park.

I stand by my earlier unreserved recommendation of The Mosquito Coast as the Theroux book you really have to read; if you want other novels I'd suggest the semi-autobiographical My Secret History, the MR James-esque ghost story (but with extra sex) The Black House and the grimy London-based The Family Arsenal. O-Zone isn't as good as any of those, so I suppose it gets categorised as a flawed but interesting genre experiment. If it's specifically a post-apocalyptic novel you're after, you'll probably be better off with The Road, Riddley Walker, The Handmaid's Tale, The Chrysalids or any of a whole host of others.

I bought O-Zone shortly after it came out, in the midst of a big splurge of buying up all the Theroux books I could get my hands on in the wake of reading The Mosquito Coast. That means it's been sitting on my bookshelves for something like 26-27 years without being read, which I suspect is some sort of record.

headlines of the day

Here's a couple of good ones off the BBC website today. The first is a sort of crash blossom as previously featured here, here and here and extensively catalogued by Language Log. As you can see, it would appear that one of the side-effects of discredited wonderdrug Tamiflu, at least according to a "major report", is that it gets you completely off your tits:

The second one falls into the separate category of stuff that is just completely impenetrable to any sort of parsing unless you already happen to know what the story is about.

It might surprise you to learn - it certainly did me - that MP Robert Syms does not in fact own any sex dolls, at least as far as anyone knows, and that moreover he was the one complaining about them. A fairly radical departure for a Conservative MP.

gladiator? i hardly noah

Couple of footnotes to the rather long Noah post:

Ray Comfort's complaining about the film (among all the shameless promotion of his own effort) reaches an adorable crescendo of utterly oblivious lack of self-awareness here:

No wonder it was listed as ‘fiction.’

Yeah, because some of the stuff they shoehorned in there was just ridiculous! Nonetheless the studio (Paramount) have felt obliged to put out a weaselly self-justifying press statement, as follows:

The film is inspired by the story of Noah. While artistic license has been taken, we believe that this film is true to the essence, values and integrity of a story that is a cornerstone of faith for millions of people worldwide. The biblical story of Noah can be found in the Book of Genesis.

It's hard to see who they're going to satisfy with that, as the actress said to the bishop. The religious fundamentalists would have wanted it to say "based on a true story", despite that clearly being nonsense, and no-one else gives a rat's arse about any supposed controversy. I guess they just did it so that they could say they'd done it.

More disappointingly, Darren Aronofsky himself, generally a more spiky and uncompromising character than the bland corporate drones who put out his films, can't quite bring himself to follow through on his supposed atheism and drops this little turd of wishy-washy accommodationist nonsense into the mix:

Ultimately, though, the director has little patience with literalists on either side of the believer-atheist divide. It's ungenerous to insist, as some Christians do, that there is only one way to interpret Genesis, according to Aronofsky. But it's also pointless to argue, as some atheists have, that no ark could possibly hold all the animals. The story of the flood has lasted for millennia not because it’s "right" – or wrong – but because it’s deep and alive and unsettling, the director said.

I have literally no idea what a "literalist" on the atheist side of the divide would look like, unless he just means someone that believes the Bible in general, and the flood myth in particular, to be literally not an accurate reflection of historical reality. And it's far from pointless to make the obvious point that pretty much every detail of the story is incoherent nonsense that doesn't stand up to the merest whiff of scrutiny.

Incidentally I've had the Ray Comfort film going in another window while I've been writing this, and I can report that it's really not what you'd expect, given that you'd presumably expect it to be mostly about Noah and the ark and the flood and all that stuff. I mean, there is a bit of that, but mainly it's far more lazy and directionless and dishonest than that, consisting mainly of Comfort's bizarre attempts to draw parallels between the lead-up to the flood and modern-day evils like gay marriage and how they may presage another Godly tantrum and a cleansing bout of vengeance, and Comfort's well-worn shtick of accosting various barely-coherent slack-jawed stoners on some Los Angeles beachfront and running rings round them with his well-practised huckster's patter. As an exercise in drumming up controversy, and more importantly business for his Living Waters ministry, while expending almost no budget whatsoever, it's quite impressive, although the naked unscrupulousness of the whole enterprise is a bit shocking, though possibly not as shocking as the Just For Men beard and hair-dye job Comfort is sporting these days.

No mention of Ray Comfort is complete without linking to the magnificent banana video. His subsequent attempts to pass it off as "satire" just make it even more delicious, since they demonstrate his utter failure to grasp what was wrong with the original in the first place.

croah's ark

Tricky times for Christian fundamentalists at the moment: what to make of the new Biblical epic Noah? You might naïvely think that it would be cause for celebratory glee, after all this is a core bit of the Christian religion being served up to a worldwide audience in a blizzard of CGI special effects and with some pretty heavy names on board - director Darren Aronofsky (a "self-professed atheist", apparently), star Russell Crowe and supporting cast including Jennifer Connelly, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson and Ray Fackin' Winstone.

But it's not as simple as that, apparently. While a lot of the more hand-wavey moderates have got behind it, or at least managed to rationalise some of the more noticeable liberties it takes with scriptural orthodoxy, most of the usual suspects have queued up to decry the movie for a variety of barely-comprehensible reasons. Scary Amish-bearded loon and noted ark enthusiast Ken Ham was far from impressed, and banana fiend Ray Comfort even went as far as making his own Noah movie for release (though not quite as widely, I would imagine) at the same time as the big-budget one. Meanwhile, Glenn Beck and Rick Warren blast the movie for perceived "inaccuracies".

The thing is, though, it's a bit rich to criticise the film for some fairly minor crimes against biblical orthodoxy - as far as I can gather these mainly revolve around the film suggesting that humanity's crime was the despoilment of the environment rather than (as the Bible says) general ill-defined wickedness, which I take to probably mean unauthorised sexy sexy times and general ignoring of God. There also seems to be a problem with the film's portrayal of the Creator who wants Noah to help him out - firstly he is a bit vaguely defined, and referred to throughout as "the Creator" rather than "God" as the literalists would prefer, and secondly Noah's attitude towards him is a bit bolshy and insufficiently forelock-tuggingly deferent and servile. Then again it's Russell Crowe, so I'm not sure what they were expecting.

The reason it's a bit rich is that it ignores the elephant in the room, which is that those criticising the film still implicitly support the idea that this guy, God - supposedly omniscient and omnipotent, let's not forget - having had his initial attempts at giving his creations free will blow up in his face in a farcical series of apple-based shenanigans, did not then magically and painlessly discorporate the handful of people who existed at that point and start again, but instead let everyone rampage around the surface of the planet for a few generations, breeding uncontrollably, until he eventually got so pissed off that he thought: fuck this shit, I'm going to drown everyone's ass, since that seems like literally the best course of action at this point, what with me being some sort of vengeful psychopath and all. To put it another way, I think basically if we reboot the human race with a tiny number of cripplingly inbred, traumatised, seasick, animal-dung-encrusted people, that'll probably improve the situation. Not only is that shockingly incompetent by any standards, it's also breathtakingly evil by any standards except the kind of standard that says: well, he's God, he can do what he wants and it is by definition good and right. Some call this the Euthyphro dilemma: I like to call it the Nixon defence.

The only reason to care about how accurately the film matches the source material is if you believe the source material to be literally true. Needless to say this introduces some problems, particularly if you also adhere to the Ussher chronology which would also have you believe that the earth is around 6000 years old, rather then the accepted scientific figure of 4.5 billion years. You will be far from surprised to hear that there is a whole branch of creationist apologetics devoted to shoehorning a whole swathe of inconvenient geological evidence into the 6000-year narrative, including some fantastic stuff about where all the water came from. As most of its adherents are American, they tend to focus on stuff like the Grand Canyon, since it's an obvious landmark that's not all foreign and suspicious. As I understand it from this version of the theory, the original flood laid down a load of sediments, in the process conveniently jumbling up a load of drowned animal carcasses into the fossil record we see today, and then a subsequent catastrophic outflow from some leftover ponded-up floodwaters carved the canyon in a matter of days.

Now obviously this is so stupid as not to really need refutation, but one of the really cool refutations that can be offered is that we actually know what landscapes carved by catastrophic floods look like, and they can be found only a thousand miles or so away from the Grand Canyon, in Washington state. These are called channelled scablands, and are the remnants of a catastrophic flood caused by the sudden emptying of a glacial lake about 15,000 years ago. Needless to say they look nothing like the Grand Canyon.

Picking holes in this sort of bullshit is all very entertaining, of course, but I must confess I don't really understand what motivates the creationists to try and come up with these just-so stories. I mean, if you believe that your God just magicked the WHOLE FREAKIN' UNIVERSE into existence in a week - a week which included a duvet day on the Saturday, let's not forget - what's to stop him just SHAZAMing all the water out of thin air, or KERPOWing the Grand Canyon into existence, or just casually excavating the whole thing himself with one scrape of his mighty fingernail? Why bother to contort yourself so horribly constructing these risibly childish theories? I suppose one answer is that otherwise the ex nihilo creation of stuff with the outward appearance of age makes God look like a bit of a prankster, and the other one is that not everyone has the critical thinking faculties to see through this stuff, and moreover some of those who don't have money that can be deposited into church coffers. Money that may now instead be spent going to see Noah, I suppose - suddenly the animosity makes sense.

throw grammar from the train

I'm always up for a bit of pedantry about grammar and word usage, and like everyone else I have my own personal line in the sand regarding what's tolerable and what's not, so that everything on one side is all THIS WILL NOT STAND and WELL THAT'S JUST NONSENSE and BLOODY KIDS RUINING EVERYTHING and everything on the other side is all well, you know, language evolves, it's fine, take a chill pill, grandad.

The obvious problem is that no two people have the line situated in exactly the same place, which makes for some interesting disagreements. So for instance when I was listening to Midweek on Radio 4 this morning and Libby Purves started complaining about people saying "it looks like X will happen" instead of "it looks as if X will happen" I had a moment of scoffing at her clearly ridiculous pedantry, just because that happens to be a usage I don't care about, or, probably more significantly, don't bother to observe in my own writing or speech.

The context of the conversation was that one of the guests on Midweek was Rebecca Gowers, the great-granddaughter of Sir Ernest Gowers, author of the still-in-print usage guide Plain Words, which she's just edited a revised and updated edition of. (You'll note that ending a sentence with a preposition is a grammar law about which I am not especially bothered about.) As far as I can gather the original purpose of the book was to encourage the cutting away of unnecessary frills and jargon from written communications - presumably of the "I remain, sir, your lordship's most humble and obedient servant" variety originally, but still relevant in these days of thinking outside the box and leveraging our core values going forward.

I was also put in mind of this article from a week or two ago by Grace Dent in the Independent, the trigger for which seems to have been the Twitterstorm over Gemma Worrall's ill-advised tweet about "our" president "Barraco Barner" [picture is from here]. The problem with the reaction to the tweet is severalfold, the main problem being that Gemma Worrall's principal crime was apparently not her woeful level of knowledge about the world and dubious spelling skills, but rather just Being A Woman On The Internet. This is about the most heinous online crime you can commit, as Caroline Criado-Perez, Anita Sarkeesian and Rebecca Watson will be able to tell you after enduring an avalanche of horrific rape and death threats after having the temerity to talk about feminism and sexism in online forums.

On the other hand, Spiked's Brendan O'Neill (writing for the Telegraph) reckons it's all OK and we should stop worrying about it, and, moreover, pointing out that the astonishing invective directed at women on the internet might just possibly be a window on some underlying societal problems is pretty much literally equivalent to implementing Nineteen-Eighty-Four-style totalitarianism. On the other hand, Brendan O'Neill is a tiresome professional contrarian and an utter bellend. You can fill up your Male Privilege Bingo card here: "the standard of discussion on the internet leaves a lot to be desired", "incivility", "delicate sensibilities".

Back to the pedantry: it's also true that a nit-picky obsession with the minutiae of spelling and punctuation at the expense of engaging with the content of the writing is a bit irritating, and suggests spare energies that might be more productively directed elsewhere. If you're involved in a heated online discussion about, say, the conflict in Syria, and you're derailing the discussion by taking issue with someone's usage of the word "decimate", you're probably not contributing anything useful. Barracobarnergate in particular illustrates how fraught with danger taking someone to task for spelling and grammar mistakes on the internet is, given that Muphry's Law will always apply.

On the other hand, writing and language exists to convey meaning and some agreement on what means what is crucial. Take “infer” and “imply” as an example: we need to have agreed meanings for words or communication will be impossible. That particular example might be resolvable a) because it’s not that important and b) by reading for context, but if I start saying “banana” when I mean “horse” and then getting all uppity and DON’T YOU OPPRESS ME when people have no idea what I’m talking about, I don’t think anyone would claim it’s somehow everyone else’s fault.

On the other hand, words' meanings do change over time, and eventually the "wrong" definition becomes the "right", or at least "usual", one. "Disinterested" is a classic example where the switch is probably now unavoidable, by contrast I had literally no idea that there was any other usage for the word "nonplussed" than its standard one of "confused" until I heard my wife use it twice in fairly quick succession in a context where she couldn't possibly have meant "confused". It was only on reading this that I discovered that it's now quite widely used to mean "unfazed" or "nonchalant", which is the context she used it in. You live and learn.

As I've said elsewhere, I try (not always successfully) to be relaxed about this sort of thing as long as the meaning is clear. So I'm not at all bothered about insisting on "different from" in preference to "different to" or "different than", since that's an entirely arbitrary rule that gains you nothing in terms of clarity. On the other hand I'm not at all happy about the "nonplussed" thing, and you can rest assured I'll be having a word next time. In general these days I take the approach of not publicly correcting stuff any more as long as the meaning is clear, while still silently judging people for their crass mistakes.

The other thing to be said about the Grace Dent article is that there's a strong element of: well, you may scoff at her rudimentary language skills and flimsy grasp of geopolitics, but she's got a job and probably earns more than you, you internet pedants with your degrees and your Nobel prizes. What are they worth now, eh? The problem with that is firstly that it seems dubious to judge the worth of a job on the basis of what you can get paid for doing it - by that rationale we value Premiership footballers more than nurses by a factor of several thousand, which I don't think many people would be comfortable with. So while it may very well be possible to make a better living as an eyebrow-plucker and fanny-waxer than as a Classics graduate I'm not sure that equates to a judgment of the two things' respective value. The other thing is that there's an uncomfortable tension between expressing dismay at the internet abuse heaped on women on the one hand, and on the other hand celebrating an occupation that in large part only exists because of some fairly ridiculous societal norms about how women should present themselves to the world: entirely hairless and orange seemingly being the current preference.

100 blogs of solitude

Couple of follow-up thoughts after the Free Fall review the other day:

Among the gazillion other awards given to Lord Of The Flies, it also appears in the TIME magazine list of 20th century novels (strictly, the 100 best novels written in English since 1923) that I've referenced here several times before. Novels in this series that appear in that list are On The Road, At Swim-Two-Birds, Infinite Jest, Snow Crash, Never Let Me Go, Blood Meridian, The Catcher In The Rye, The Corrections, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Watchmen. My current count on that list stands at 39.

Speaking of lists, you'll notice I linked to this list elsewhere in the review, mainly because it's been doing the rounds on Facebook lately and makes the contentious-sounding claim that "the BBC think you'll only have read 6 of these books", which is the perfect goad (for someone like me, anyway) to make you go "right, I'll show them: gimme that list". There's some confusion over the provenance of the list - while it appears superficially similar to the BBC's Big Read top 100 from 2003, it's not the same. Needless to say someone on the internet's done the research and tracked it down to being a list constructed for World Book Day in 2007. There appears to be no reliable source for the "you'll have only read 6 of these, you plebs" quote anywhere.

The list was apparently constructed after an online survey of 2000 people - consequently, like any such list constructed after a public vote, particularly on the internet, it's a bit lumpy in terms of content. I reckon these lists are always skewed by a combination of:

• books people may or may not have read or liked but feel obliged to nominate in response to perceived cultural obligation (e.g. Austen, Dickens, the Bible, Shakespeare);
• books people have seen a film or TV adaptation of (I strongly suspect this, and more specifically Colin Firth, explain's Pride And Prejudice's occupation of the top spot);
• nerdish obsessions (Potter, Tolkien)
• what I disparagingly like to call "book group books", i.e. the likes of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, The Kite Runner and Life Of Pi;
• fondly remembered childhood stuff (Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and The Wind In The Willows among others for people of my age or older, Potter and Pullman for the younger generation);
• books read by people that don't really read books (I presume this explains the presence of The Da Vinci Code at #42 since I can't think of any other explanation).

I totted up my total and it came to 35, which isn't especially high compared with some people's. The distribution of books I had and hadn't read was quite interesting, though - where I really fell down was that I don't have the background of doing, say, English A-level and having to wade through a reading list with all the 18th/19th century classics on it. So I've never read anything by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy or any of the Brontës, who between them account for 16 of the books on the list. I do have a copy of Pride And Prejudice - which I once got about a third of the way through but never finished - sitting on my bookshelves, along with copies of Moby-Dick and Germinal staring out reproachfully at me for ignoring them for as long as I have. One day.

I put the Pullmans and the Potters on the "not applicable" category, really - no disrespect to them and I'm sure if I was 11 or 12 they'd be the best thing ever (I suspect I'd have enjoyed the Pullmans more, though), but since I was 25 when Northern Lights was published and 27 when the first Harry Potter book was published, those weren't options open to me at the time.

I do feel slightly bad about casually dismissing the likes of Captain Corelli's Mandolin and The Time-Traveller's Wife as "book group books", which basically just means books that were very popular and a lot of people recommended to each other. It's just an aspect of my general disinclination for being told what to do, however harmlessly. A brief reading of the plot synopsis does make it sound as if Audrey Niffenegger swiped some major plot points in The Time-Traveller's Wife from Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens Of Titan anyway. I'd be inclined to put Birdsong into the same category but for the fact that I have a copy of that one which I expect I'll read once I've completed the mental recategorising of it into the category Books Whose Existence Is Acceptable To Me.

I did get the sense that of the 35 books I ticked off, a lot of them were books I'd read quite a long time ago. That's borne out by the fact that only four of them (compared to twelve from the TIME list) appear on this blog (which documents all my fiction-reading since late 2006): The Catcher In The Rye, The Great Gatsby, The Lovely Bones and On The Road, and all of those except The Lovely Bones (which, as you'll know if you read the review, would not be on any 100 Best Books list I'd be prepared to put my name to in any case) are on the other list anyway.

the last book I read

Free Fall by William Golding.

Samuel Mountjoy is a respected and established artist, but, well, it's not all been glamorous exhibitions and critical acclaim. Born to a feckless single mother and brought up in a slum, and later as the ward of a priest, he rose to the dizzy heights of having his work exhibited in the Tate.

Yes, but has it made him happy? Well, no, not really. And so as he looks back at his life with some confusion and dissatisfaction, he tries to pinpoint where the choices were made, consciously or unconsciously, that brought him to where he has ended up, and wonders whether he could have chosen differently.

As a child? It's Sammy's being manouevred by his devious friend Philip Arnold into desecrating a church that leads indirectly to Sammy being taken on (after his mother's death) as a ward by kindly old closet paedophile Father Watts-Watt.

At school? Faced with the opposing teaching worldviews of goddy, cold, bitter Miss Pringle and easy-going, gentle atheist Nick Shales, Sammy naturally chooses the path associated with the person who's been nicer to him.

In his love life? Developing a furious obsession with pretty, demure Beatrice Ifor while still at school, Sammy mounts a well-organised campaign to woo her, but, having eventually worn her down to the point of consenting to sleep (somewhat joylessly) with him, he finds that he has lost interest in her and promptly goes off and marries someone else.

Eventually World War II breaks out and Sammy finds himself taken prisoner and interrogated by the Gestapo. After a bit of verbal sparring with Gestapo officer Doctor Halde, Sammy finds himself locked in a pitch-black storeroom to reconsider his refusal to divulge any information about the series of recent escapes from the camp, and also to anticipate the delightful prospect of being tortured to obtain it. The fear and the darkness induce in Sammy what might be mild hysteria, or might be some sort of psychotic episode - and, we seem to be invited to infer, the frenzied reconsideration of his previous life that occupies most of the book - before he is released from his confinement and returned to his prison quarters, possibly as a changed man, possibly not. Who knows?

Free Fall was William Golding's fourth novel, published in 1959 at the end of the busy early period of his career that produced four novels in five years. Golding's biographer John Carey reckoned that it was the lukewarm critical response to Free Fall that prompted the five-year period of writer's block, or possibly sulking, that preceded the publication of The Spire in 1964. Frank Kermode's potted summary of Golding's early books (we'll come back to the first one in a bit) from his review of The Spire warrants reproducing here:

In the years that followed Golding did much to confirm this belief, but very little towards making himself a popular novelist. The Inheritors is a technically uncompromising, fiercely odd, even old-fashioned book about the overthrow of Neanderthal man, wonderfully distinguished but inconceivable as a big seller; Pincher Martin is as difficult as it is masterly; and Free Fall is complex, original, and in many ways reader-repellent.

I think "reader-repellent" is probably overdoing it a bit, but Golding's books are generally - while relatively short - dense, gnarly and difficult and make demands on the reader that some will find onerous and unappealing, and Free Fall is no exception. It's probably more linear and less wildly weird and eccentric than either The Inheritors (which I see I've namechecked here and here) or Pincher Martin (which I mentioned here), and to be honest, probably not quite as good as either of them, but it's still writing of great power, even when you feel like there's some Great Meaning afoot that would snap into focus if you could just look at the words from the correct angle. In the case of Free Fall this is to do with notions like choice and free will, a concept that tends to dissolve into incoherence if examined too closely, particularly with an eye not blinded by religious thinking. Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True has a series of very thought-provoking articles on free will from a secular/scientific perspective if you're interested.

Obviously the elephant in the room here is Golding's first novel, 1954's Lord Of The Flies, still appearing on Best 100 Books Ever lists 60 years after its first publication. It was one of the first proper "adult" novels that I ever read (at probably 15 or 16) and made a massive impression on me. No doubt it vexed Golding (a somewhat irascible character by all accounts) greatly that his first book was the one that defined him, but there it is. I would recommend - nay, insist - that everyone read Lord Of The Flies; what I would say to those wanting to venture further is that Pincher Martin and The Spire are probably the ones to try. Just don't expect always to understand what's going on.

Golding also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 - these two book reviews contain a couple of relevant lists.

chavalanche!

I suppose you might argue that if you voluntarily submit yourself to the hive of scum and villainy that is Matalan, you deserve everything you get. And, moreover, not one of the (relatively) upmarket regular Matalan stores either, but the Matalan Clearance outlet tucked away round the back of the Newport Cineworld like some shameful family secret.

Now I'm not knocking cheap goods, hell no, far from it - times are tight and we can't all be forking out for the latest teflon-lined kevlar-impregnated designer undercrackers at forty quid a leghole. But you need to know what you're getting into - obviously the upside is extreme cheapness of goods, but the downsides include the general random chaotic pile-it-high layout, the lack of any facilities for trying anything on, and of course most importantly the inherent dangers of spending lengthy periods hanging out with the lower orders, with their coarse features and their big sausagey fingers and their sketchy grasp of Proust. And, my dear! The smell!

I presume the reasons for not having fitting rooms are severalfold - obviously it frees up space that can then be used for flogging more stuff, plus of course it saves having to assign a member of staff to patrolling the area ensuring that none of their malodorous feral clientele have nipped in for a quick knee-trembler. The other advantage of making the customers work out what size they need essentially by guesswork is presumably relying on there being a percentage of people who get a £5 top home, find it doesn't fit, and then decide they can't face having to take it back and just stuff it in the back of a cupboard and forget about it.

A case in point: my last trip yielded a quite nice navy blue zip-up sweater-y top that turned out to be too small (but which I haven't taken back despite not really being able to wear it), a pair of corduroy jeans that fit quite nicely and I'm very pleased with, and a stripey shirt that appears to fit pretty well but which the semi-sentient creature who served me contrived to leave the anti-theft tag on. Clearly (unlike my adventure with the Talisker at Tesco) Matalan's budget doesn't stretch to installing the detectors on the exit doors that set off the klaxons when you do a runner, presumably because it's not really worth it, so it wasn't until I got it home that I realised. I suppose strictly it doesn't prevent me from wearing the shirt, but it necessitates a choice between leaving the security tag dangling out and proud and looking like a common criminal or tucking it into the trousers and enduring an unsightly bulge in the groin area, and I've already got one of those, thank you very much. Plus you'd never be quite sure going into a shop with similar security arrangements that you wouldn't set their system off and have your ass tased to within an inch of its life before you'd had a chance to explain.

So it had to go. Much information is available on the internet about getting these things off, most of it heavily caveated with some ass-covering words about only doing this if you've acquired the goods legitimately, and if you've just nicked them STOP READING NOW, etc., etc. Since I wasn't sure whether the tag attached to my shirt contained an ink pack that would splatter indelible blue stuff all over everything in the event of its getting broken I decided to go for method 3 on the first list, step one of which is to stick your garment in the freezer.

Give it 24 hours or so to be confident(ish) that it'll all be frozen, though I should note that there are those who say the ink is formulated not to be freezable in a household freezer. Bear in mind though that these people will also have got this information off the internet, so approach with caution. Note also that in theory INKMAGEDDON will only occur if you fracture the large tab (pictured), as long as you can get the small tab off the back without this happening you should be OK. Freezing everything is just a belt-and-braces approach in case of unexpected smashage.

Yes, fine, you'll be saying, but when do we get to the bit with the great big hammer and the hitting and the smashing? That time is now. Here's a video.

unrhyw un awydd peint?

Here's an interesting article listing 75 great Welsh pubs. Inevitably this prompts a bit of trainspottery box-ticking in the mind of someone who has, well, that sort of mind, so my sub-list (i.e. the ones I've been to) comprises the following numbers:

1, 8, 17, 31, 34, 37, 38, 41, 43, 44, 51, 52, 53, 58, 67, 75

- so that's 16 out of 75, which, while clearly leaving some scope for improvement, isn't too bad. Just to pick out a few notable ones:

• the Plough and Harrow in Monknash (#1) is just down the road from where our friend Kate used to live, and also not far from St. Bride's Major, former home of Charlotte Church and Gavin Henson. The one occasion I've ever been in the pub provided the slightly surreal situation of competing for the barmaid's attention with Gavin Henson - commendably she stuck to strictly orthodox bar protocol and served me first, since I'd got to the bar first. I can confirm that he is a) quite tall, b) quite orange and c) wears mirrored aviator sunglasses indoors, even in quite dingy pubs. Make of that what you will.
• we went to the Sun Inn in Llangollen (#8) on our canal-boating trip in 2000 as referenced here, before doing a bit of highly irregular permit-free overnight mooring here.
• I maintain that, while it's perfectly OK, you probably wouldn't give the Worm's Head Hotel (#31) a second glance if it weren't for the fact that its beer garden offers one of the most spectacular views in Britain, at least among views available from beer gardens anyway.
• the Bear in Crickhowell (#34) was the venue for a post-walk pint after Huw and I went up Table Mountain a few months back.
• the Ancient Briton in Pen-y-cae (#38) was the venue for a very similar post-walk pint after Hazel and I had been up the Black Mountain in the snow back in April 2010.
• I had a pint in the Ship Inn on the shores of Red Wharf Bay in Anglesey (#44) while my ex-girlfriend Anne and I were over there in the summer of 2000. 
• the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel at the foot of the Llanberis Pass in Snowdonia (#51) was previously mentioned in another pub-related list here.
• we went to the Sloop in Porthgain (#52) for lunch (and a pint) on our trip to Pembrokeshire in June 2012. 
• the Murenger House (#58) remains comfortably the best pub in central Newport, not that that is much of an accolade. It's a nice little place only marred by its being tied to Sam Smith's brewery and therefore obliged to serve their rather uninspiring beer.
• the King's Head in Llangennith (#67) has been the venue for much beery hilarity over the years, usually while we've been staying at the Hillend campsite down the road.
• we went to the Blue Anchor at East Aberthaw (#75) with Jenny and Jim after we'd taken Nia for her first visit to the beach at Barry Island.

A couple of near misses - we parked up in the car park behind Tafarn Sinc (#6) in Pembrokeshire before bagging Foel Cwmcerwyn back in 2009, without ever quite realising that it was there, otherwise we'd have gone in. I also parked round the back of the Cwmdu Inn (#2) when I did my Royal Wedding avoidance walk back in 2011. It is also quite possible that I've been in more of these (particularly the ones in Cardiff) without specifically remembering their names.

No review of a list of this sort is complete without a bit of quibbling, so I'll just add that I'd have included the Old Arcade in central Cardiff as I think they have the best Brains SA anywhere, and I also have a soft spot for the Albany just up the road from Hazel's old flat in Roath. And familial loyalty obliges me to bemoan the absence of the Lewis Arms in Tongwynlais. If you play the video below the pub list you'll notice that the beardy bloke saying nothing very interesting is drinking a pint of Wye Valley HPA in the Bell in Caerleon, which I've been to a couple of times and would also probably be on my list. It was also the venue for another slightly underwhelming celebrity encounter, this time with big-nosed shouty snooker bloke Rob Walker who seemed to be in the middle of a "10 Miles 10 Pints" fun run/pub crawl mashup at the time, judging by his and his companions' attire.

bakerman is baking bread

I caught an episode of Danny Baker's Rockin' Decades a week or two ago on BBC4, always a good place for the occasional unexpected item of interest. This one focused on the 1990s, this being apparently the third in a series, the first two of which featured, you'll be surprised to hear, the 1970s and the 1980s.

The 1990s was really "my" decade in terms of music, by which I mean the decade where I really got my horizons broadened and got exposed to some genuinely interesting and quirky (and in some cases, utterly unlistenable) stuff. Well, actually that period would include the very tail-end of the 1980s as well, which just illustrates the slightly contrived nature of carving things up into separate decades, not to mention the focus on "rock" rather than "pop", as if that really means anything, and the insistence on restricting the discussion to just British bands. But, well, you've got to impose some structure on an idea that presumably started life as Danny and some mates just chewing the fat down the pub.

Even those who find Danny Baker less irritating than I do would probably have to concede that he's never found a TV format that really worked - he's good on the radio where he can just hog the mic for a couple of hours and ramble on about whatever takes his fancy, but on TV you tend to be a bit more constrained by programme structure and length. And the format of Rockin' Decades only sort of works - the ostensibly unscripted chatty bits are fine, but there's an awkward gear-change every time Baker leans forward to deliver an obviously scripted interjection (usually introducing a clip) across his guests and straight to camera. And you can almost smell his resentment at having to let anyone else talk, given that that's time during which he has to stop talking.

The guests were fine, generally, both Josie Long and Alexis Petridis seeming genuinely enthused by being able to give their personal obsessions (with David Devant & His Spirit Wife and Earl Brutus respectively) an airing. Louise Wener had the least to say, so I should probably just observe that she is still quite foxy even though she's inevitably a bit more mumsy-looking these days, and that while Sleeper weren't all that great you should probably have Inbetweener and Sale Of The Century even if you don't have anything else.

The programme skipped across a couple of my favourite British 90s albums a bit quickly for my liking - Primal Scream's Screamadelica was passed over slightly sniffily as a shameless bit of dance-rock bandwagon-jumping and My Bloody Valentine were mentioned in complimentary terms but then passed over for a bit about Chapterhouse, of all people. And they never (to my knowledge) mentioned Teenage Fanclub at all - Grand Prix would be in my top five British albums of the 90s without a doubt.

The only thing that got my hackles up a bit was the section right at the end where everyone was asked to nominate an album - Alexis Petridis nominated Oasis' Be Here Now, which was a sort of archly ironic non-choice, and Josie Long had a Belle & Sebastian album which I suppose is fine if you like that sort of thing - I wouldn't have chosen either but they at least conformed to the programme's stated inclusion criteria. However - Louise Wener chose Garbage's first album, which is good, and which I own, but which is surely at least 90% American. I mean, yes, Shirley Manson is Scottish, but the rest of the band are American, and the album was recorded and produced in the US. Worse, Danny Baker chose XTC's Oranges And Lemons - nothing wrong with it, and they are at least definitely British, but it was released in 1989! And he must have known this, because a) he's supposed to be generally knowledgeable about music but also b) it must have been staring him in the face from the back of the vinyl LP he was holding up! If you're going to have rules, however arbitrary, then have enough respect for your audience to adhere to them, otherwise you'll just look like you're taking the piss.

Sadly none of the three programmes in the mini-series is now available on iPlayer, but here are a few YouTube clips from the 1990s edition.

mapocalypse now

One of the many fascinating things about Riddley Walker is the little map at the front of the book which makes sense of some of the corrupted place names in the book and puts the whole thing in some sort of geographical context - it's basically set in Kent after it's been radically re-landscaped by the ill-defined nuclear disaster and what we can assume to be some accompanying rise in sea level.

Here's the map (right-click and open in a new tab to enlarge):

Note how both the Isle of Thanet (aka The Ram) and Dungeness (aka Dunk Your Arse) have been severed from the mainland, while the low-lying land separating Sandwich from the sea and most of the Isle of Sheppey have been submerged. The funny thing about this is how similar it looks to this map of the same area at around the time of the Saxon invasion of Britain, so probably 5th century AD or so.

I'm not sure when Dungeness was joined up to the mainland, but the Isle of Thanet remained a proper island until the late 17th/early 18th century, separated from mainland Kent by a waterway known as the Wantsum Channel. This eventually silted up, but its course - south from Reculver, then east to the mouth of the modern-day River Stour between Sandwich and Ramsgate - can be clearly seen on modern-day Ordnance Survey maps:

In the light of what's been happening to the Somerset Levels recently, it's sobering to reflect, while making use of this virtual sea-level readjustment tool, that it would take a sea-level rise of no more than about 3-4 metres to return Thanet (and Dungeness) to being an island.

the last book I read

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.

It's 2000-2500 years after some unspecified nuclear disaster occurred in the vicinity of Canterbury. And not your low-key Chernobyl-type event with a few abandoned towns and some radioactive sheep, either, this was your full utter devastation for hundreds of miles, not a living thing left unincinerated, the ground barren for generations kind of thing.

Humanity survives, as humanity will, though in somewhat reduced circumstances - civilisation has regressed to dark-ages semi-anarchy with small bands of scavengers scratching a living off the land and avoiding the jaws of the packs of marauding feral dogs. One of the things that they scavenge is the half-buried remnants of the old pre-apocalypse industrial landscape, huge metal and concrete structures whose purpose they have no idea of. The only entertainment is provided by travelling showmen who perform a sort of adapted Punch & Judy show ("The Eusa Show") incorporating garbled elements of the supposed events leading up to The Event.

Our eponymous hero decides he wants to see a bit more of the world after seeing his father killed while trying to extract some giant metal artifact from the mud and abandons the (relative) safety of his local community to wander the old grassed-over highways of Kent and try and make sense of things. As he does so he discovers more of the garbled history of pre-apocalypse England, but also the dangers that the insatiable human need to understand poses. To borrow a line from another post-apocalyptic novel, Stephen King's epic The Stand:

All of that stuff is lying around, waiting to be picked up.

Sure enough there is a sort of miniature arms race going on as rival groups try to acquire sulphur to make rudimentary gunpowder - the other two ingredients being readily available. Given how utterly clueless these people are about proportions, safe ignition methods and the like, they are soon re-enacting The Event in miniature and wiping themselves out. Riddley takes it upon himself to take an updated version of The Eusa Show around in an attempt to prevent mankind from haphazardly working its way up to a point where it can once again destroy itself.

As it happens the plot here is, to a degree, secondary, which is just as well as not a huge amount actually happens. The most startling feature of Riddley Walker is the language in which it's written - since paper is a bit on the flammable side a disaster capable of rendering human flesh into two little bubbling pools of fat in a pair of shoes in a matter of nanoseconds is certainly going to destroy any written matter in the vicinity, and therefore the ability to read and write is a rare one, and even for those (like Riddley) who do possess it any notion of standard rules for spelling and grammar have gone out of the window, not that anyone has windows any more. Try this for size:

She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals … Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome, Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part. I dont think I took all that much noatis of it when I ben yung. Now Im old I noatis it mor. It don't realy like to put me on no mor. Every morning I can feal how its tiret of me and readying to throw me a way. Iwl tel you some thing Riddley and keap this in memberment. Whatever it is we dont come naturel to it.'

There's no getting away from the fact that this makes the book difficult to read, and requiring of a considerable investment of effort on behalf of the reader. This is not unique, of course, the most obvious other example being the Nadsat in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. Other novels to dabble with this sort of thing include Iain M Banks' Feersum Endjinn (which I should say I've never read, but whose phonetic argot seems very Riddleyesque), and of course Nineteen Eighty-Four, though that restricted itself to some academic discussion of Newspeak rather than attempting to render any of the narrative in it.

The most obvious point of comparison is with Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Riddley Walker arguably being much the same story but with a much more immediately destructive initial event and 2000+ years of distance. In a way it's a more optimistic novel than The Road, though, as at least it's clear that organic life will survive, in whatever form, at least until humanity works out a way of obliterating itself again. The Road retains the implicit possibility that despite the commendable will to survive of the protagonists, the utter collapse of plant life may mean that humanity is fucked.

The other principal thing this has in common with The Road is that it is absolutely essential reading for anyone who is even slightly interested in modern fiction. Ignore the "science fiction" tag, as I think we've established that these words have no meaning. It's very different from the other two Hobans in this list, Come Dance With Me and Kleinzeit; those are charmingly playful, this is deadly serious.