the last book I read

The Last Life by Claire Messud.

Sagesse LaBasse's life seems pretty sweet, on the face of it: her parents and grandparents own and run a hotel on the Mediterranean coast of France and she spends a lot of time just hanging out by the pool with her friends. But she's a teenager (about fifteen when the book starts) so a certain amount of surly teenage dissatisfaction is pretty much de rigueur, n'est-ce pas? 

To be fair, Sagesse does have some actual stuff to worry about as well: her younger brother Etienne suffered some severe brain injuries after being deprived of oxygen at birth and survives at home only with the provision of round-the-clock care from family and a series of nurses. Sagesse is also something of an outlier among her peers in terms of her background: her mother Carol is American and her father's family were pied-noirs (or possibly pieds-noir or maybe even pieds-noirs), French people of European descent who lived in Algeria when it was a French colony and who almost all relocated to mainland France after Algeria's independence in 1962. In late-1980s/early-1990s liberal France reminders of France's colonial past are a bit unwelcome, and people who were involved tend to get the side-eye as potential closet racists. 

Things start to deteriorate when Sagesse's grandfather, finally exasperated beyond reason by Sagesse's friends' noisy late-night cavorting in the hotel pool, fires a gun from the upstairs balcony and injures (fortunately not seriously) a couple of them. Sagesse herself, as it happens, isn't among them as she is down on the beach a short distance away being inexpertly fingered by her teenage boyfriend Thibaud. The parents aren't prepared to take "not severely injured" for an answer, though, and proceed with the enthusiastic pressing of charges against Sagesse's grandfather. This causes some tension with Sagesse's best mate Marie-Jo, one of the key witnesses, and they drift apart.

At her mother's suggestion, Sagesse visits her American cousins in New England as an escape from all the awkward legal business, and again finds herself an outsider, this time for her half-Frenchness rather than her half-Americanness. Some things are common to the teenage experience the world over, though, and after falling out with her cousin Becky over a boy, and drinking too much at a beach party and being fountainously sick, Sagesse makes her way back to France.

Grandfather ends up getting a seven-month prison sentence, during the course of which Sagesse's father takes a more active role in running the hotel's affairs. It also becomes clear to Sagesse that Dad is running certain, hem hem, "affairs" of his own a little closer to home after she and some school friends arrive home unexpectedly. Grandfather's release, on the face of it cause for family celebration, has the opposite effect on her father as he is gradually ground down by Grandfather's insistence on being involved in the day-to-day running of the hotel. While it's almost certainly not the only factor - he appears to have what would today be described as some sort of bipolar disorder - this may have contributed to father's eventual decision to drive out along the coast to a favourite beauty spot, sit in the car overlooking the ocean and shoot himself in the head.

The disintegration of her family almost complete, Sagesse heads off to boarding school in America. On her return at the end of the year she finds her mother shacked up with a new man and contemplating shuffling Etienne off to some permanent care facility so that she can enjoy a bit of middle-aged freedom before it's too late. Grandfather, perhaps fuelled by outrage at this development, has a massive stroke and requires a permanent care facility of his own. Sagesse is a bit outraged on Etienne's behalf as well, though needless to say not enough to volunteer to jack in her studies and come home to look after him herself.

And so we end, via a quick framing device featuring Sagesse, a few years later, pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University and seemingly content with a fairly solitary existence, the odd fleeting lover aside.

Well, so far so standard coming-of-age novel, you might say: teenage protagonist, parents and grandparents of various degrees of eccentric grotesqueness and shouty oppressiveness, funny feelings and furtive sticky fumblings, you know, down there, occasional envious encounters with contemporaries of impossible beauty, fabulous riches or devil-may-care freedom, contemplation of all of the above from the remove of a few years hence, full adult sophistication having been gained in the intervening time. There's something in that, but at the same time there's plenty here to lift The Last Life above the formulaic, in particular the complications of the family's Algerian background, and some kicking around of ideas about how we perpetually re-invent ourselves, even to the extent of re-inventing our own pasts to better fit the stories we want to tell in the present.

The Last Life was Claire Messud's second novel, published in 1999; it was her third novel The Emperor's Children in 2006 that gave her her big breakthrough sales- and awards-wise. There's a touch of the "write about what you know" here, as Messud's own father was a pied-noir - these days Messud is half of a major literary power couple with her husband, critic James Wood. 

Anyway, The Last Life is very well-written and enjoyable without doing anything especially startling. The previous book in this series to feature Algerian independence as a major plot point was the rather faster-moving The Day Of The Jackal. 

pando moany mum

Here's one for the COINCIDENCE? OR IS IT?* files: 

Adjourn to bed and pick up my current book (featuring trees prominently as a narrative theme, it must be said) and literally on the next page what do I see but this 2/2 pic.twitter.com/E0O3M34xEh

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 16, 2023

It can now be revealed that the book I was reading at the time was The Overstory - there is in fact further reference to these aspens later in the book that makes it clear that it is specifically the massive Pando colony that's being referred to. 

The quaking aspen colony is named because "pando" is Latin for "I spread"; it turns out it's also quite a widely-used brand name for a variety of companies doing a variety of things. Once again, though, my instinctive reaction is coloured by my recent experience as a father of three young-ish children and my immediate thought was of Bing's panda friend and his disinclination to wear the yellow shorts he always starts off an episode wearing. 

Huwie was quite into Bing a couple of years ago and I see I tweeted about it an embarrassingly large number of times. It does seem to be a thing that generates strong feelings among parents, as this Mumsnet thread demonstrates.

* as always: yes; yes it is.

there we are then

Well.

approach with caution

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

unn believable

A couple of footnotes to the last post - I have no idea how likely Siss and Unn are as names for young girls in 1960s Norway (The Ice Palace was published in 1963) but as a father of still fairly young children I can still vividly recall our nightly appointments with In The Night Garden and its cast of weird squishy nonsense-spouting primary-coloured characters, including the Tombliboos. Those are the three stripy mofos with the spotty trousers (source of much oh-no-we've-all-got-each-other's-trousers-on confusion and hilarity) who live in, and I quote, "an extraordinary bush". Stop sniggering at the back there. Anyway, their names are Unn, Ooo and Eee, for reasons which I assume are obvious. It wouldn't really have been in keeping with The Ice Palace's rather sombre tone for Unn's two sisters to have suddenly shown up and started playing the drums and having comical trouser mishaps, but the thought did briefly cross my mind.

Another example of inappropriate hilarity at serious moments was provided last weekend when the girls decided that we should watch The Railway Children for our Saturday night movie. Anyone who's seen this will know that the last scene (it's actually not quite the last scene, but you know what I mean) is a legendary not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house moment (unlike some other Jenny Agutter movies which demand a ready supply of tissues for different reasons). To guard against succumbing to this I was idly imagining whose appearance out of the smoke (i.e. in place of Iain Cuthbertson) would be most amusing, and I came up with Mr. Blobby; cue me ruining the scene for everyone with some most inappropriate guffawing. Here is roughly how I imagined the scene; you'll have to supply the sound effects yourself.

the last book I read

The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas.

Siss is just a regular girl (not sure if her age is ever stated explicitly, but I think we are to assume around eleven or twelve) in the frozen Arctic wastes of rural Norway, just trying to get through the day without falling into a fjord and freezing to death, getting trampled to death by a moose or dying after eating some tainted rakfisk.

Siss is a popular and influential girl at school and so when a new girl, Unn, arrives, the class look to her for a definitive thumbs up or down. Siss is intrigued by Unn - quiet, reserved, very happy to be in her own company at break-times and not mingle much with her contemporaries - and arranges a visit to her house after school to get better acquainted.

The visit offers further intrigue - Unn has come to live with her aunt after her mother's death, her father being absent long since and known to Unn only through a couple of old photographs. Unn also alludes vaguely to some dark secret, the details of which she keeps to herself but which she imagines may be visible to Siss in some way after they undress in front of each other (what, you mean you don't do this on a first visit to someone's house). Siss is made a little uncomfortable by all this but the two make a promise to be BFFs before Siss heads home.

Unn herself is a bit spooked by the intensity of this first meeting and decides to bunk off school the next day to avoid the awkwardness of having to meet Siss in front of everyone else. Luckily it's midwinter and there are lots of icy delights to explore, notably a frozen lake and, near its outflow, a spectacular frozen waterfall that the locals call the Ice Palace. Unn ventures into the ice palace, mesmerised by its weird beauty and the unearthly creaking and cracking noises that it makes. But the constant thawing, cracking, dripping and re-freezing mean that the ice palace is constantly re-shaping itself, and where there is beauty there is also danger.

Siss is surprised by Unn's absence from school, and heads for her aunt's house to check on her, only to find that Auntie hasn't seen her either. The alarm is raised and a search commences, including the lake and the ice palace, but no trace of Unn can be found. 

Obviously life goes on, for everyone else anyway, and Siss' schoolfriends want to welcome her back into their group, But Siss is mindful of her promise to Unn and keeps to herself, fiercely guarding Unn's empty desk against anyone wanting to re-use it. But where does it end? It's increasingly obvious to everyone, even as they diligently continue searching, that Unn isn't coming back.

Springtime arrives and things start to warm up - relatively speaking anyway, it's still Norway - and the lake ice starts to thaw. Unn's aunt decides to sell up and move away, and encourages Siss to move on with her life and set aside her promise to Unn. And so Siss and her schoolfriends make a final trip to see the ice palace before its eventual inevitable collapse.

The Ice Palace tells a pretty simple story in a stark, understated way. The central metaphor is pretty straightforward - the chilly hardness and subsequent thawing of the waterfall being echoed by Siss' coldness towards her friends in the aftermath of Unn's disappearance and her eventual re-acceptance into the group. There is some deeper, darker stuff going on as well, though - Unn's dark secret is never revealed, and there are some hints of burgeoning pre-teenage sexuality both in Siss and Unn's charged first encounter at Auntie's house and in Siss' tentative friendship with the boy who seems to have become a leader of the group of schoolfriends in Siss' absence. And it's never completely clear what's happened to Unn - we assume she's frozen to death and been entombed within the shifting walls of the ice palace, but if that's true then at some point during the spring thaw her semi-frozen corpse should slurp out of the ice and spoil someone's picnic. Maybe she will just be washed away with the collapsed remnants of the ice palace and never be found.

There's always an interesting contrast involved in following a pretty long book with a very short one - The Overstory had lots of characters, lots of digressions into arcane bits of tree-related lore, peaks and troughs in terms of the relevance of what's currently going on to the perceived main thread of the narrative, and no desire to coyly allude to things where devoting a whole chapter to them will do instead; The Ice Palace has none of that, being all told from Siss' point of view except for the chapter where Unn ventures into the ice palace, and with pretty much nothing in terms of fat on the bones and certainly no desire to explain itself beyond the ruthlessly-imposed bounds of the story it sets out to tell. None of that is a value judgment, it's just interesting. I enjoyed The Ice Palace very much, and it certainly passes the "lingers oddly in the mind" test that I mentioned here and here, and the "interesting short novel that's probably ideal film material" test that I mentioned here, here and here. And sure enough it was filmed in 1987 - what appears to be the complete movie is available on YouTube here.

this story works on many levels

One thing I could have added to the review of The Overstory is that the endpoint of Patricia's logical train of thought about how to save the planet, i.e. as many of us as possible need to die, is strongly reminiscent of the stated aims of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which you may remember from this post from way back in 2007 - they appear still to be going, those of them who haven't gone voluntarily extinct, anyway. More generally I'd agree with this Guardian review's comment that there's just a suspicion that "something slightly antihuman has crept into the philosophy" - don't forget that what most people mean when they voice the vague concept of "saving the planet" is "saving humanity in something like its present form"; the planet, after all, will be fine, for the next few billion years until it gets engulfed by the sun anyway. Knowing that after our demise our shattered cities will be repopulated by glorious verdant ranks of trees is nice and all but small comfort to most people, as we won't be there to see it, and in any case would only complain about access to Sainsbury's being partly blocked by a massive baobab full of hooting gibbons.

A bit of detail on the novel's slightly clunkily punny title, as well: the overstory is the topmost layer of plant life in a forest with the understory being, as you might expect, under it. That's "story" as in level or layer; in UK English it's more usually rendered "storey" but US English often omits the "e".

the last book I read

The Overstory by Richard Powers.

Hate trees? You'll hate this. Then again, what kind of idiot hates trees? Those great big lovable wooden bastards are everyone's friends: you can climb in them, shelter under them, eat the fruit and nuts they produce (even when the fruit is actually a berry, the nut is actually a seed or a legume et tediously cetera), and then cut them down, chop them up and use the wood to build boats, houses, aeroplanes and what have you. Trouble is, once you cut a tree down, it's dead, and it takes bleedin' centuries to grow a new one. So you have what you might call a sustainability problem and a requirement for humanity, as the de facto custodians of the planet, to manage the available resources in a responsible way. So are we doing that? Are we fuck. Now read on...

Enough of this Meetings With Remarkable Trees stuff, though - let's meet some actual people. Each of the principal protagonists gets an introductory chapter, each chapter recounting some childhood background loosely associated with a particular species of tree. So Nick Hoel gets an American chestnut on the family farm, valiantly holding out against the merciless sweep of chestnut blight across North America in the early 20th century; Chinese immigrant's daughter Mimi Ma gets a mulberry in the garden of their family home; Adam Appich gets a maple; Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly get an oak and a lime respectively; Douglas Pavlicek gets a Douglas fir (though the tree that rescues him when he parachutes out of a burning plane in Vietnam is some exotic species of fig); wheelchair-bound software genius Neelay Mehta gets a fig; Patricia Westerford gets a beech; Olivia Vandergriff gets a ginkgo.

Having introduced our characters (generally as children) we now zoom ahead and gradually meet them all again as adults. Olivia Vandergriff's life is transformed when she is shocked - literally - out of her slightly aimless student existence by a badly-wired bedside lamp and, convinced that some higher power is using her as a conduit, heads off on a cross-country trip in her car with some fuzzy-edged ideas about saving trees. On the way she meets up with Nick Hoel, tending to a dying chestnut and an empty house at the family farm in Iowa, and he agrees to join her.

Eventually Olivia, Nick, Adam Appich (now a psychologist), Mimi Ma (an engineer) and Douglas Pavlicek (a drifter and occasional forestry worker) form a loose collective campaigning for environmental reform. This starts as the usual non-violent chaining themselves to bulldozers and occupying trees (Olivia and Nick spend most of a year up a giant redwood) but eventually the group as a whole decide that the only way to shock humanity out of its gradual and inexorable slide towards irreversible eco-disaster is direct action, and moreover direct action of the destructive and explodey variety.

Meanwhile Patricia Westerford, a botanist specialising in trees, writes a paper detailing some of her theories about how trees communicate with each other and is roundly mocked by her colleagues for such crazy hippy-dippy nonsense.

Chastened by this experience, Patricia retreats to a hermit-like existence as a forest ranger for the next couple of decades until scientific orthodoxy catches up with her and she belatedly becomes a celebrity, helped by a book contract and subsequent popular-science bestseller.

It soon becomes clear that humanity isn't going to suddenly have a big collective moment of clarity, shrug off its slash-and-burn ways and embrace a more sustainable but less comfortable way of life, and things start to fall apart. The whole eco-terrorism gig, always a bit perilous, goes spectacularly tits-up as the group botch the bombing of a development project which is about to dispatch an area of forest and Olivia dies. After ceremonially lobbing her corpse on the resulting inferno, the group disperses and all take up separate lives, but with the nagging knowledge that The Man may one day come for them.

Ray and Dorothy have led a more conventional life, his income as a prominent lawyer keeping them comfortably off. Tensions arise when they are unable to have children, and ramp up when Dorothy has an affair. Ray's reaction to this is to have a spectacular brain aneurysm and require round-the-clock care for the rest of his life, something Dorothy commendably abandons her carefree boning to do. Pretty clearly Ray isn't going to be up for any tree-related activism but he and Dorothy fill their later years conducting a quiet suburban rebellion and letting their garden re-wild itself, much to the chagrin of the neighbours.

Patricia, meanwhile, a couple of bestsellers notwithstanding, has decided that the best thing humanity can do for the good of the planet is hasten its own demise, and that only a spectacular gesture in this direction can engage people's attention. So she agrees to be a guest speaker at an eco-convention and plans to commit suicide as a spectacular climax to a lecture. Will this shocking gesture do any good?

Adam, meanwhile, is giving a lecture of his own, having resumed his career as a psychologist. One day the inevitable happens and a team of armed FBI agents shows up in the back row; Adam immediately knows what has happened. But maybe he can use his subsequent high-profile domestic terrorism trial as a means of publicising the cause?

Neelay, meanwhile, has become one of the richest individuals in the USA by designing a series of computer games. Inspired by Patricia's actions he turns his attention to designing some sort of bot army that can use Big Data to co-ordinate a response to the climate crisis. Can AI succeed where humanity has failed?

So I'm pretty sure all but the most bone-headed denialists acknowledge that climate change is a thing, and that one of the primary causes is galloping deforestation, sustained by humanity's uncontrollable breeding habits and voracious appetite for wood for all manner of uses. What, The Overstory asks, are we going to do about it?

Well, the short answer is: no easy answers are offered here, and probably rightly so given that this is at least ostensibly a novel set in the real world where people are reluctant to give up their colour TVs and digital watches and suddenly start living on acorn paste and ferns. While there are some encouraging signs of a spread of eco-activism following some of the high-profile events (Adam's trial, for instance) it's still all very slow and there seems to be a suggestion that technology (most likely Neelay's bot army) will be the thing most likely to save us. Personally I'm not persuaded that this is true and am highly suspicious that those who are haven't seen The Matrix. 

Structurally the book is a bit odd - the character introductions in the first section ("Roots") are compelling little short stories and probably the most focused and enjoyable bits of the book. The remaining sections ("Trunk", "Crown" and "Seeds") seem a bit unfocused in comparison (the book as a whole is a beefy 625 pages) and feel like they could have used a trim - it's not very clear to me, for instance, what purpose Ray and Dorothy's story serves here and what would have been lost by leaving it out. You might also reflect on the momentous and life-changing (life-ending, in Olivia's case) activities of the eco-terrorism group and ask: what did that actually achieve, in the end? You'd probably, if you were honest, have to answer: well it isn't very clear at the end, but possibly not much. 

That said the depth of research here and evident love of the subject is impressive and the story being told is never less than compelling, and anything that prompts us puny humans to think on a timescale not directly tailored to our own brief lifespans is probably valuable. So it's highly readable and thought-provoking without my being completely knocked sideways by it in the same way as the judging panel for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize evidently were. Previous Pulitzer winners here include Breathing Lessons, Foreign Affairs, The Bridge Of San Luis Rey, Gilead, Beloved, The Grapes Of Wrath, The Road, Independence Day, A Thousand Acres and The Shipping News.

the path of righteousness

A quick follow-up to the previous post which also serves as an opportunity to plug the fantastic map-related service provided by the National Library of Scotland. My particular favourite thing is the facility they provide to view old and new maps side-by-side on the screen. Here's the Gaer hillfort area in a contemporary aerial photo and (on the left) a map which purports to be from around 1900. I've reproduced the map bit below:

What you will notice (in the red circle) is that there used to be a tunnel under the railway, carrying some sort of path. If you zoom in on the contemporary map you will see that there are still some markings on the ground that suggest it might be still there, and sure enough if you drop the little yellow StreetView man at the end of Golden Mile View you can see it. The footbridge just south of the tunnel that goes over the river is still there, as it happens, and having been closed for a number of years was recently re-opened to provide access between the park and the new housing developments north of the river. 

Well, hurrah, you might say, problem solved. Yes, the inter-park access would be better situated at the bottom end of the park, but at least it exists. Trouble is it doesn't, for two reasons: firstly it looks from the StreetView picture as if the tunnel may be fenced off (though it's hard to see), secondly even if you could get there from Golden Mile View the M4 is now in the way of getting there from the Gaer hillfort area. 

Golden Mile View, by the way, is so named because of the section of railway which ran through Tredegar Park and was subject to tolls payable to Lord Tredegar, whose land it was, the name being an allusion to the substantial sums his lordship was trousering each time a train ran over the route. 

dum dum de dum dum de dum dum de PARK STRIFE

More non-book-related posts, for the love of God, you say? Electric Halibut hears your anguished cries and rides to the rescue on his wingèd steed, entirely naked except for a pair of rather splendid patent-leather riding boots and a dab of Blue Stratos behind the ears.

So, as I mentioned a while back, we moved house during 2022, and of course one of the things that does (unless you've literally moved to the house next door, anyway, which sounds literally insane but which some of our friends literally did a few years back) is put you in the vicinity of some different parts of the city, in particular interesting green areas which might be worthy of exploration.

So what the aerial photograph and map above show is some near-contiguous areas of green parkland in the general west Newport area, Newport being essentially divided into western and eastern halves by the River Usk as it makes its meandery way north-south through it. Those areas are, broadly speaking:

• The little wooded area and park adjoining the northern edge of the mahoosive St Woolos Cemetery and accessible at its northern end from the roundabout on Risca Road; it is allegedly called Coed Melyn Park, which my rudimentary Welsh skills tell me just means "Yellow Tree Park". I can confirm that outside of certain times in autumn the trees are, in fact, predominantly green;
• the parkland area containing the Gaer hillfort;
• Tredegar Park (not to be confused with Tredegar House, below);
• Tredegar House and its surrounding park (not to be confused with Tredegar Park, above).

I have marked those four areas on both images above as yellow, red, blue and a sort of pale mauve, respectively (going from north to south). As you can see they are all very much adjacent to each other, but the connections between them aren't as simple as you might expect. This, in a nutshell, is the point of this post. Let's have a look at them in turn, starting from the top. 

The first one is the connection between the bottom of Coed Melyn Park and the top of the Gaer hillfort; nothing fancy here but you can take a short walk from where the footpath emerges onto Western Avenue, cross Bassaleg Road via the traffic island and enter the park via its main entrance (there are several others along the park's eastern edge). So far, so good.

Take a walk in a broadly southerly direction through the park, maybe via a detour to the top of the hillfort (lots of trees so the location of the actual top is not particularly clear) along the recently-upgraded path and you will find yourself quite near, as the crow flies anyway, to Tredegar Park. So you'll be wanting, I would imagine, to continue your pleasant walk in that direction. Well, I've got some bad news for you, bucko, because there are some insurmountable obstacles in your way, specifically the River Ebbw and a railway line. If you want to continue to Tredegar Park then you'll have to follow the path round to where it ends at the gate at the end of Wells Close, find your way to the footbridge over the railway and then follow the roads round through the main car park and into the park. That's the green line on the map; the two red lines show imaginary crossings which would obviously be much better but would require some quite substantial engineering to bridge both railway and river. The only saving grace with the railway is that it isn't the South Wales main line (that takes a more southerly route to get to Cardiff and points west) but the more minor branch line to Ebbw Vale, calling at (among other places) Pye Corner as mentioned here. 

Let's assume you've now made the long trek round and have enjoyed all the various delights Tredegar Park has to offer - some outdoor gym equipment, football pitches, a playground, some pleasant riverbank areas - and fancy completing your journey by visiting Tredegar House and its pleasant grounds. Well, strap yourself in for a connecting journey of even more unimaginable complexity and inconvenience, as you'll need to exit via the car park and take one of two possible on-road routes to get round to the only available access points on the south side of the house. How much more convenient it would be, you might think, if one could simply traverse the busy lower reaches of the A48 as it approaches junction 28, where the two parks are probably a hundred yards apart, at most. I mean, you would need a footbridge to avoid being messily dispatched by an HGV, or possibly an underpass to avoid having to thread a footbridge around the ornate (and now unused) pair of gates that face the road at this point.

How utterly marvellous to be able to get on your bike up around Risca Road (in the vicinity of our new house, for instance) and cycle in traffic-free bliss all the way down to Tredegar House; yes, maybe a couple of points where you might have to dismount to traverse a bridge but, really, tish and pshaw to that, certainly in comparison with the current situation. So come on, Newport City Council, how about a bit of joined-up thinking?

if there's a russell in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now

After a period of relative inactivity comprising only one authorial death in a little over eighteen months, the Curse of Electric Halibut is back in business properly now, the latest victim being the third in a little over three months. This time it's American author Russell Banks, the title of whose 1991 novel The Sweet Hereafter eventually became too much of a temptation, the curse evidently having a keen sense of irony.

That book, the only one of his I've read, featured here in December 2018, which gives a curse length of just over four years. Banks was 82 which I suspect (and I should point out I haven't done the detailed calculations) shifts the average age hardly at all.

Banks is the second Russell to feature on the list, after Russell Hoban. That's not unique, as there are a couple of Williams and a couple of Johns on the list (and two people called James if you unpack JP Donleavy's initials), but his sharing a surname with another featuree (Iain Banks) is.

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	95	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d

the last book I read

Count Zero by William Gibson.

Turner is a man who Gets Shit Done. Usually the messy kind of shit the big corporate overlords don't want to get their hands messy with as it involves activity on the borderline of legality, or well on the other side of it, like stealing stuff,  shooting people in the face, that sort of thing. Only one thing hampering Turner's acceptance of further work in that line at the moment: he hasn't got a body! Well, he has, or most of one, but it's in a a preservation vat in more separate pieces than he would ideally like at the moment. 

The benefit of being extremely useful to lots of rich and powerful organisations, though, is that they have an interest in seeing you get grafted back together after being messily exploded, and Turner's body (or all the bits of it that could be scraped off the street in New Delhi where he was dispatched, anyway) is soon rebuilt, his memories gradually re-enabled, and soon he finds himself recuperating in Mexico with a lady sharing his bed. You can't trust anyone, though, and it turns out she's just been testing him out to ensure he's fully recovered in every department, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Having reported back to her superiors that Turner seems fine, he is quickly picked up for a new assignment: arrange the pick-up and recovery of a guy called Mitchell who wants to defect from one slightly shady bio-software mega-corporation to another. This involves Turner and his team hiding out in the Arizona desert with a team of medics who will scan Mitchell for any bio-booby traps (his brain is wired to explode, his hair has the plague, his entire leg is a missile, etc. etc.) before he is jetted off to his new employers to do all the new joiner stuff like being shown where the coffee machine and toilets are.

Needless to say, things don't go entirely according to plan and the person that arrives at the desert location in a rickety ultralight is Angie, Mitchell's daughter. Realising something dodgy is afoot Turner grabs Angie and scarpers in a high-powered jet, just in the nick of time as the hideout and everyone and everything in it is vaporised in an explosion.

Let's park what we might call Plot Strand #1 for a moment and pick up the next: Bobby Newmark is a fledgling hacker and cyber-jockey, surfing the collective virtual reality of the matrix under the moniker Count Zero, which would be a lot cooler if it were not self-applied. Pretty much the first actual cyber-job he takes on, testing out some security-penetrating software for a contact, nearly ends in his death as he encounters some black ICE which attempts to liquidise his frontal cortex, and he is only saved by the intervention of a mysterious entity with a female voice. After this close encounter Bobby has become known to certain powerful entities and has to make use of some of his (not entirely trustworthy) contacts to facilitate escaping and staying hidden.

Meanwhile, Marly Krushkova, former art gallery owner currently in disgrace in the art world for inadvertently passing off a forgery as real (thanks to the shady activities of her no-good ex-boyfriend) is contacted by the agents of a mega-rich art enthusiast called Josef Virek with an assignment: find the artist responsible for the real artworks that her fake was modelled on. Budget effectively limitless, no particular set method, just follow your instincts.

Bobby's attempts to find out where his dodgy software came from take him to the Sprawl, the partly-derelict, mostly-lawless mega-conurbation that occupies most of the east coast of North America from Boston to Atlanta. Turner and Angie eventually make their way there, too, via a brief stop-off to hole up with Rudy's brother, a brilliant engineer and chronic alcoholic, and "borrow" his armoured hovercraft for the trip, something that immediately comes in handy as they are attacked by a couple of guys in a helicopter and Turner is able to use the hovercraft (and a great big gun) to shoot the 'copter down and ram it, killing the occupants, who turn out to have been sent by the people who hired Turner in the first place to tidy up some loose ends.

Turner and Angie end up holed up in the same apartment as Bobby and his friends, whereupon it turns out that Angie is the female voice who saved Bobby earlier, and that moreover she has some bio-implants that enable her to jack into the matrix without having to engage with any computer hardware. Furthermore both she and Bobby have had cyber-encounters with mysterious beings of seemingly limitless power who seem to adopt the personas of voodoo gods when interacting with humans. 

Marly, meanwhile, has travelled all the way into low-earth orbit to discover the creator of the artworks, which turns out to be an AI entity inhabiting an old mainframe satellite. It further transpires that Virek doesn't have much interest in art for art's sake but instead has detected some AI/bio-software elements in the artworks and wants to make use of that stuff to get him out of his vat and give him effective immortality. The various protagonists of the various strands of the story have to come together to stop him.

Count Zero is a sort of loose sequel to Neuromancer, one of the seminal works of 20th-century speculative fiction (as I have banged on about tediously here before). It doesn't share any major characters with the earlier book but is clearly set in the same fictional universe, a small number of years later (its relationship with Neuromancer is similar to Idoru's with Virtual Light, if you like). There is just a tangential mention, easy to miss in passing, of a couple of people who are clearly meant to be Molly and Case, Neuromancer's principal protagonists, and Turner's physical disintegration and rebuilding here is very similar to Case's neurological destruction and rebuilding at the start of Neuromancer. The mysterious AI entities who control much of the plot (the squishy puny humans merely scuttling round enacting their plans in the physical world) are presumably meant to be fragmented versions of Wintermute and Neuromancer, the earlier book's twin AIs.

Purely as a rollicking adventure story Count Zero probably works better than Neuromancer; just as with Bring Up The Bodies and Eternity part of this is down to being a sequel and therefore being able to skip a lot of world-building exposition and just crack straight on with the plot. If you're only going to read one it should probably still be Neuromancer, though, just for its genre-redefining cultural significance. There is a third book, Mona Lisa Overdrive, in what's generally called the "Sprawl trilogy", although if you can read the green text at the top of the accompanying image here you'll see my edition renders it as the "Neuromancer trilogy". Anyway, Count Zero is tremendously good fun and still startlingly prescient about the internet, rampant commercialism, societal decay and the dangers of AI given that it'll be 37 years old this year. 

A couple of cultural echoes of other stuff: firstly the "slamhound" that catches up with Turner in the novel's first paragraph is very reminiscent of the Mechanical Hound from Fahrenheit 451 which was used for a pretty similar purpose, although it was all about the stealthy lethal injections rather than the more messy exploding. Finally the voodoo entities crop up elsewhere as well, Baron Samedi featuring heavily in Live and Let Die, and Papa Legba in the late-period Talking Heads song of the same name. 

the year of blogging dangerously infrequently

Here's the annual blog stats roundup, including graphs, if you like that sort of thing. The main headline news here is that this year (well, last year now) squeaked past 2017 by a single post to avoid being the joint-least-blog-post-y year on record at a paltry 45 posts. However, since 2017 included an all-time-low of 13 book reviews, while 2022 included a pretty healthy 23, that means that 2022 featured a measly 22 non-book-review posts while 2017 featured 31. There being more book posts than non-book posts is also a first for a calendar year. I can't really put my finger on a specific reason apart from the one I've already mentioned a few times which is that a lot of things that might have once ended up being blog posts end up on Twitter instead; to put it another way now that I have three kids I no longer have the free time or energy for extended blog ranting about a topic that piques my interest and might just do a short but sweary quote tweet or something instead.

Anyway, graphs follow. Note that following my realisation that I'd done the sex balance graph in a really stupid way last year I've recalibrated the scale to just show the percentage of books that were by female authors.

A few statistical highlights: although I read fewer books and fewer aggregate pages in 2022 than in either 2020 or 2021 (maybe increased opportunity for non-housebound activity after two years of intermittent lockdowns?) each of those three years featured higher book and page counts than any year since the all-time high of 2011. Longest book of the year was The Hydrogen Sonata at 605 pages, shortest was The Thirty-Nine Steps at 119 pages. The average book length in 2022 was around 323 pages, down from the 2020 high of 384 but just above the overall historical average of around 309. The percentage of books by female authors was down a little on last year at a fraction over 26%; this is nonetheless still a little higher than the overall average of just under 25%.

One other book-related matter: I took the plunge and registered with Goodreads for reasons that are slightly opaque to me right now, but I am taking the trouble to keep the book list updated in parallel with the blog list. If anyone is thinking of doing the same thing themselves, the most important thing to be aware of is that there is a bulk import facility that saves you having to type the details for 300 books in one-by-one, assuming that you have some sort of personal database somewhere (yes, of course I do) that permits exporting to some sort of Excel file for subsequent massaging into the appropriate import format.

the last book I read

The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

here's summit I prepared earlier

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

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

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

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

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