the last book I read

Love Is Blind by William Boyd.

Meet Brodie Moncur. He's a tuner. What, a large pelagic fish of the mackerel family? Well, no. This guy tunes pianos for a living and is already building quite a reputation for himself in Edinburgh as the go-to guy in the piano-tuning game (hardest game in the world, the old piano-tuning game). Octaves all stretchy and flabby? E-flat a little too flat? Perfect fifths sound like diminished sixths? Brodie's your man.

Brodie works for the established Edinburgh piano-making firm of Channon's and has already proven himself a useful and resourceful employee, not just for his technical skill but also for some innovative and profitable business and sales ideas. So when the company decides to expand and start up a new showroom in Paris, Brodie is given the job of assistant manager, the top job obviously going to a member of the Channon family, regardless of their level of crookedness and incompetence.

Anyway, Brodie relocates to Paris and immediately comes up with a couple of profile-raising and money-making ruses for Channon's: firstly setting up a tuning and repair business in the local area, rather than having to ship something literally the size of a piano all the way to Edinburgh, and secondly acquiring the services of some high-profile pianists to play Channon pianos in some sort of prototypical product placement/sponsorship type of deal. Their main catch turns out to be John Kilbarron, a fiery Irish pianist, probably slightly past his sell-by date and these days a bit keen on the old sauce and occasionally unreliable, but still a big crowd-puller. Brodie is given personal responsibility for ensuring Kilbarron's pianos are tuned exactly to his specifications, including lightening the keys to accommodate some increasing weakness in Kilbarron's right hand (almost certainly connected to the epic booze consumption). 

During the course of his duties for Kilbarron (actually the Kilbarrons, plural, as John's brother Malachi acts as a manager for his brother) Brodie meets John Kilbarron's girlfriend and companion Lydia ("Lika") Bloom, an aspiring (but, we are invited to infer, slightly rubbish) opera singer. Brodie's interest immediately perks up: I wouldn't mind lifting her lid and adjusting her G-string, showing her my classical fingering technique, etc., and as it turns out the feeling seems to be mutual and they soon embark on a clandestine affair.

Several other things then happen at once: a dispute between the Kilbarrons and Channon's results in their contractual relationship being terminated, Brodie coughs up a gallon of blood, is diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to the south of France to convalesce and on his return is sacked by Channon's after a series of financial irregularities is discovered. It is made clear to Brodie that non-one seriously suspects him, but the alternative (and, as it happens, correct) explanation is that the younger Channon is responsible, and blood is thicker than water, old chap, I'm sure you understand.

Brodie is therefore free to resume his employment with the Kilbarrons, directly this time, and accompany them to Russia for a lucrative concert tour. All the to-ing and fro-ing between St. Petersburg and the country dacha that their Russian benefactor has laid on provides some limited opportunities for Brodie and Lika to do some discreet boning, but evidently they're not discreet enough and they are discovered by Malachi. Malachi is shrewd enough to know that telling John would send him into an alcoholic spiral and endanger the concerts, but uses the knowledge as leverage to have Brodie and Lika do his bidding (item one: no more boning). Gradually the whole professional relationship deteriorates and eventually Brodie quits. This might not be so bad but he also takes the opportunity to subtly sabotage Kilbarron's piano so that that night's concert is a fiasco. The combined knowledge that Brodie has fucked his concert and his girlfriend is too much for John Kilbarron and he challenges Brodie to a duel. In turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg these are generally stylised affairs where both protagonists fire into the air, honour is seen to have been done (by virtue simply of turning up, presumably) and everyone goes home. Not so in this case as it soon becomes clear that John Kilbarron very much intends to kill Brodie in a very real and non-stylised sense, and Brodie only manages to escape his fate by wielding Lika's pistol that he has concealed about his person and shooting Kilbarron through the chest with it.

Apparently there are some legal consequences to shooting someone through the heart in a field, and bearing in mind these, as well as Malachi's likely lust for revenge, Brodie and Lika flee St. Petersburg and make a circuitous way through various European cities in an attempt to escape. But Malachi is relentlessly determined, and after their travels take them to southern France, then Edinburgh (incorporating a brief reunion with Brodie's family including dreadful old patriarch Malky Moncur) and then back to France again, they discover that Malachi is still on their trail. Eventually Brodie awakens in a hotel room in Nice to discover that Lika has left him and gone to present herself to Malachi, it being her he really wants. Brodie struggles to make sense of this and tracks her down to Paris where she reveals that she has been married to Malachi since she was eighteen and transferred her affections to John with his approval for the collective good of their business arrangements, but that a similar arrangement with Brodie was intolerable to him. 

Brodie mooches around Switzerland for a while making a living from piano-tuning but still has suspicions that Malachi has agents on his tail, and so decides in a more radical course of action: fuck right off round the world to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a destination he selects by literally sticking a pin in a map. Precious few pianos here but he finds work as an assistant to Page Arbogast, an anthropologist studying the local tribes. He is happy enough in his work but still experiences occasional paranoia about Malachi - will he pursue him even here? Will one of his tubercular attacks finish him off first? Will Lika free herself from Malachi and come to him?

Wikipedia tells me that this is Boyd's fifteenth novel; by my calculations I have read twelve of these fifteen, the only omissions being the early novel An Ice-Cream War, the faux-biography Nat Tate and the James Bond story Solo. By this stage you pretty much know what you're going to get and it's hard to avoid comparisons with other Boyd works - the obvious one is the broad similarities between the love story here and the one in The Blue Afternoon; lovers carrying on an affair despite the female protagonist being inextricably attached to someone else and planning to escape to grow old together but never quite managing to land the happy ending. Like Sweet Caress it's also something of a return to the biographical style of earlier novels like The New Confessions and Any Human Heart after a period of producing more plot-driven thrillers like Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms. One thing that you know you're going to get with a Boyd is a Ruddy Good Story - I'm suspicious of any attempt to group writers into "novelists" and "storytellers", usually because the latter category is used as an excuse for, or a badge-of-honour inverted-snobbery revelling in, horrible clunky prose, not something you could ever accuse Boyd of. 

That said, there are a few quibbles: the nature of the hold that Malachi has over Lika is never very well explained, and nor is the relentlessness with which he pursues Brodie (though to be fair I suppose he did kill his brother), and some of the ventures into music theory to explain the emotional impact of a particular piece of music have a whiff of authorial insistence in displaying the depth of his research. Brodie also seems to be irresistibly attractive to women: in addition to Lika there's a whiff of something with Brodie's Russian doctor, the young daughter of the Kilbarrons' Russian benefactor throws herself at him and at the end of the novel Page Arbogast makes it fairly clear that she is Well Up For It as well. 

But it's very good and tremendously readable, as Boyd's novels always are (this is the sixth to appear on this blog, which brings Boyd level with Ian McEwan in joint second place behind Iain Banks). I would say it's definitely better than its immediate predecessor Sweet Caress, and you'd probably have to go all the way back to 2002's Any Human Heart to find one that's better. The early-1990s pair of Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon remain my favourites, though. 

loched and loaded

It's been something like eighteen months so here's another whisky post. The main items of interest among a very gratifying selection of whisky delights at Christmas and my birthday were a pair of bottlings from the Loch Lomond distillery, something I'd never tried before and something you never used to see in the major outlets like supermarkets or Amazon. But evidently they've had a bit of a rebrand and a sales push of late and well, here we are.

The two bottles I have are the standard no-age-statement entry-level single malt which they have decided to call Loch Lomond Classic, and the 10-year-old expression (which interestingly doesn't seem to be listed on their website). The distillery itself is right on the Lowland/Highland region boundary in the same way as Glengoyne is; in fact Loch Lomond is slightly further south (and a few miles further west) than Glengoyne. Nonetheless it's classed as a Highland whisky.

What you'd broadly expect here is that the older whisky would be slightly darker and deeper and richer than the younger one, and that's pretty much what you get, The younger one has the slight magic-marker smell that young whisky has, but also just a hint of something fruity, maybe apples or pears. The older one is slightly sweeter, and, as you can see from the photo - it's the one on the right - darker, and also has just a hint of that parsnip/Marmite/leather-topped writing desk savouriness that slightly older whisky sometimes has. It seems kind of obvious to say that the older one is better, but, well, it is. Both are pretty polite, smoke-free whiskies of the sort you would expect from the Highland/Speyside region; as I've said before my preference is for something a bit more rough and ready but there's absolutely nothing wrong with either of these.

As I've said elsewhere, most distilleries manage to concoct some claim of being the oldest, highest, biggest, based on some slightly weaselly definition of the word in question. Loch Lomond doesn't exactly do this, but its bottles do carry a legend that says "since 1814" (you can see it in the picture above), which even the most charitable observer would have to say is a big fat lie of the sort that you would surely think would be legally actionable. Presumably just enough smoke can be blown up the impartial observer's ass by the fact that there was a short-lived distillery on the banks of Loch Lomond from 1814, even though it only existed for a handful of years and the new distillery, which opened in 1965, has no connection to it and is in a completely different location.

The other thing people know, or rather think they know, about Loch Lomond is that it's the whisky that Tintin's adventuring buddy Captain Haddock used to drink. Well, what's the problem with that, you might say - it's right there in the books, see?

Well, the problem is related to both the date-related slipperiness above and the multiple re-workings of the Tintin books over the years, something I previously mentioned here. In fact the panel from The Black Island featuring the train was originally drawn as containing Johnnie Walker whisky and only re-drawn to say Loch Lomond in the early 1960s when the early books were re-issued in colour. The re-issue dates and the date of the re-opening of the distillery are pretty close together, but it seems highly likely that the re-drawing work commenced before the new Loch Lomond distillery was even open, and it seems unlikely that Hergé was following upcoming developments in Scotch whisky so avidly as to have been aware of it. The most likely explanation is that he just chose a nicely generic Scottish-sounding name (perhaps with some help from his English translators) without any particular intention that it mirror the name of a real-life entity and the fact that it subsequently did is just a coincidence. OR IS IT, etc. etc.

killebrity lookylikey of the day

My elder daughter, as befits a massive Harry Potter fan who has read the entire novel sequence about nine times and has many assorted items of Potterobilia in her possession, has a Harry Potter-themed duvet and pillow set, which features among other cartoonish renderings of the principal characters Harry's pet snowy owl, Hedwig (yeah, I know, owls again). This is all well and good but to me the owl as rendered has more than a touch of the Jason Voorhees about him, don't you think?

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Let's do another one, this time involving actual people rather than delicious items of breakfast pastry and birds of prey. Here's Robert Z'Dar, your go-to man in the 1980s and 1990s for scary-faced psychotic villains in various movies of varying quality including Maniac Cop and (as pictured here) 1989's Tango & Cash, which I recall paying actual money to go and see in the cinema at the time of its release. Z'Dar's USP was, and there's no nice way of saying this, an absolutely freakin' massive lower jaw (due to a genetic condition called cherubism). Pictured alongside him is another man with a similar (though admittedly slightly less startling) chin: 2022 Masters champion Scottie Scheffler. 

As I said before this year's Masters tournament started, the 2023 version was the first one in eleven years to finish on Easter Sunday, usually a trigger for an outpouring of religious nonsense from the winner. 

#themasters Sunday is Easter Sunday for the first time since 2012. looking forward to some tedious God-bothering from the winner. Bernhard Langer, Zach Johnson and Bubba Watson memorable recent-ish culprits

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) April 6, 2023

As it happens this year's winner, Jon Rahm, was a bit more understated about the whole thing (I mean, he could be a Satanist for all I know), but to counteract that here's Scheffler's own post-victory interview from last year, with much glorifying of God and similar horseshit.

owlebrity pastrylikey of the day

It was Alys's birthday a couple of weeks ago, and Alys is a big fan of cute wildlife of all kinds, and owls in particular, so one of the things we did to celebrate was take her to this owl sanctuary up at Festival Park in Ebbw Vale. It's a funny little place, to be honest, but to be fair it does what it says on the tin in that they have lots of owls, including a couple that they got out and allowed the kids to interact with. As an aside, you will recall that we visited another owl sanctuary (one with what I deduce to be a higher budget for general site maintenance and presentational stuff) in the vicinity of Kington in Herefordshire in 2015; Alys probably doesn't remember that one, though, as she was only about three months old at the time.

A week or so later as part of general birthday celebrations for both girls (Nia's birthday is a week after Alys's) we went to Center Parcs for the weekend, and had some treats for breakfast including some pains au chocolat as everyone loves them, including me. It was only when I chanced to look at one of them end-on that I was struck by its uncanny resemblance to the barn owl we'd interacted with a week or so earlier. See for yourself:

That picture is obviously cropped to just the relevant bit; the small item of prey that the owl's baleful gaze is fixed upon is in fact Huwie, as you can see here. I'm happy to be able to report that he was able to make good his escape without being torn apart by razor-sharp beak and talons, eaten and then burped up again as an owl pellet a short time later.

the last book I read

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler.

Meet Philip Marlowe: he's a maverick private investigator, who doesn't play by the book, but - dammit - he gets results. Actually, results - and the paychecks that come with them - have been a bit thin on the ground lately, so when he spots a suspicious-looking giant white guy entering a primarily black Los Angeles nightclub called Florian's, his finely-tuned detectival instincts tell him he should follow and take a look. 

Sure enough the guy, who turns out to be called Moose Malloy, also turns out to be fresh out of prison and looking for his pre-prison girlfriend, Velma (no, not that one). When the club's owner explains that the club has changed ownership since Velma's day and he can't help, Moose expresses his disappointment by snapping his neck like a stick of celery. After the police express minimal interest in the resulting case (the murder of a black man not really being the sort of thing to get them off their fat cop asses) Marlowe decides to investigate Moose's motive by seeing if he can locate Velma.

In quick succession Marlowe finds Jessie Florian, the ex-wife of the nightclub's former owner, who claims that Velma is dead, and gets a seemingly unrelated call from a man called Lindsay Marriott, who wants Marlowe to act as a sort of bodyguard for a trip to a nearby canyon for a rendezvous - something to do with delivering a ransom payment for a stolen jade necklace. And not without good reason, it tuns out, for no sooner have they turned up at the rendezvous point than Marlowe is coshed unconscious, and - the cosh-wielder having presumably got their eye in properly by this point - Marriott is coshed to death.

Some further lines of enquiry are opened up by Mrs. Grayle, the owner of the ransomed jade necklace, and by Jules Amthor, a supposed psychic whose name Marlowe finds secreted in the filters of some of Marriott's marijuana cigarettes. Mrs. Grayle is something of a minx - bored rich wife, older husband probably not cutting the mustard in the bedroom department - and makes it known to Marlowe that she is Well Up For It. Marlowe's encounter with Amthor is somewhat stranger - on being questioned by Marlowe about supplying the drugs to Marriott he has Marlowe escorted off the premises by some corrupt cops and entrusted to the care of a Dr. Sonderborg, who keeps him in a drugged stupor for a few days before Marlowe is able to escape. 

Using Mrs. Grayle's name as leverage, Marlowe manages to extract the information that Malloy may be hiding out in a boat moored just offshore outside of the city's jurisdiction and used for gambling activity. Malloy turns out not to be on board but Marlowe meets with the boat's owner, local bigwig Laird Brunette, who agree to make some enquiries within the LA underworld.

Marlowe arranges a date with Mrs. Grayle and when she turns up lands her with a surprise: he knows that she is Velma, and married her current elderly husband, the poor sap, under a false name. Moreover, he has her old boyfriend Moose, who she fingered to the cops for the crime that got him (falsely) put away, right here in the hotel bathroom and he'd really like a word. Mrs, Grayle is not having any of it, though, and shoots Malloy before making good her escape, only to be caught up with by the cops some time later and shooting herself rather than be taken in. 

The main things to say about Farewell, My Lovely are that a) it's very entertaining b) substantial parts of the plot don't really make any sense and c) that doesn't really matter. What I'm thinking of for b) are things like the bizarre interlude with Jules Amthor and Dr. Sonderborg, which read as if parachuted in from a completely separate novel. Oddly, this isn't far from the truth, as Farewell, My Lovely was a reworking of a few originally separate short stories. The point of it, though, isn't the seamless interlocking of all the plot elements but the overall style, some elements of which seem hackneyed now - rumpled cynical wisecracking private eye, chaotic domestic arrangements, complex and generally disastrous personal life, unconventional methods - but which Chandler and some of his contemporaries such as James M Cain and Dashiell Hammett were early exponents of.

Needless to say this stuff was and is tremendously popular material for films, and Farewell, My Lovely has been filmed a few times, though oddly only once under its original title. Most of the other Marlowe novels, including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye have been filmed (often multiple times) as well. 

you don't know dick

So you might have seen news of the death of Dick Fosbury a week or so ago, and you'll have been hanging out in the pub with your mates going oh, yeah, Dick Fosbury, the Fosbury flop, you know, revolutionised the high jump - *slurps pint* - revolutionised it. You know, before Fosbury - Mexico, 1968 it was - people could jump about, oh, I dunno, this high *gestures at about knee height*, and then along comes this lanky Fosbury bloke and only goes and leaps clean out of the stadium! Backwards! Revolutionary. Course *colossal belch*, everyone does it now, innit. 

Well, I'm here to be the annoying guy at the next table who acts as a sort of human QI klaxon and goes WELL ACTUALLY it's not quite as simple as that. Thinking about it, this is a bit like the post I did after the demise of Arnold Palmer, with a similar disclaimer that it's not in any way having a pop at Fosbury, just making a couple of observations about how actual events get massaged into a sort of glorious mythic version which irons out some of the inconvenient messy complexities of actual reality.

A brief tangent: it was actually this tweet which prompted me to actually do a bit of research here:

Sports nerds: are there any other examples like Dick Fosbury: mid-level athletes who reached the pinnacle of their sport, just once, due to a brilliant innovation?

— Ian Leslie (@mrianleslie) March 21, 2023

There are some interesting responses in the comments, including the only other example which occurred to me - the switch in ski-jumping from an in-flight posture with the skis extended in parallel to one where they're in a sort of V-shape, which turns out to be considerably more aerodynamic for reasons I can't begin to fathom. I recall seeing (probably on Ski Sunday) a Finnish jumper called Matti Nykänen doing it in the 1980s and it eventually became the standard, just as the Fosbury flop did (with some caveats, see below). 

Anyway, Ian Leslie's tweet was evidently a bit of research in advance of this interesting article about Fosbury. I mean there is a bit of life-coach bollocks in there as well - "seize the adjacent possible", if you please - but even in that exact section there is an interesting point: Fosbury's innovation was only feasible, or safely feasible anyway, because of advances in landing mat technology.

The physics of the Fosbury flop are fascinating and stem from a realisation (Fosbury had a background in engineering) that it wasn't necessary for the whole body to be above the level of the bar at the same time (as, broadly, it was for the variety of previous techniques); indeed in a perfectly executed flop the centre of mass of the athlete passes under the bar. Think of it as exchanging the energy required to lift an entire bucket of water over the bar for the much lower energy required to use a hose to siphon the water over bit by bit. This video shows the progression through the years from the basic scissors (essentially just hurdling the bar; I'm sure you can make up your own jokes about furious scissoring in the women's event) of the early years to some variation of the Western roll in the 1920s and a gradual transition to the full straddle by the 1950s, and then Fosbury and his successors. Note also the equivalent video showing the progression of the ski-jumping world record with the switch to the modest V-shape in the early 1990s and the gradual exaggeration of the posture to the full spatchcock of modern jumpers. 

Here's the mildly contrarian HOT TAKE bit: you would think, from watching that video, which shows only floppers post-1968, that Fosbury's innovation prompted an immediate switch, by everyone, to the new technique, with a bit of embarrassed coughing all round at not having thought of it themselves. Not so, actually, as there was quite a lengthy transitional period where straddlers persisted and in fact claimed the men's high jump gold at the very next Olympics, in Munich in 1972 (for which Fosbury failed to qualify) and the women's high jump gold at the one after that, in Montreal in 1976. The men's world record was only claimed by a flopper in 1973 - Fosbury's Olympic-winning (and, to be fair, Olympic record-setting) height of 2.24 metres in 1968 was four centimetres short of the world record at the time. Moreover, the world record was reclaimed by a straddler, Vladimir Yashchenko, in 1977 and only relinquished finally to a flopper in 1980. As I see I said here, the world records for the two styles are still only ten centimetres apart, despite no-one having seriously competed with the straddle since about 1980. It's interesting to speculate how things might have panned out if Yashchenko's career hadn't been ended by a knee injury when he was only 20, and if his illustrious predecessor Valeriy Brumel, who raised the world record six times in about two years in the early 1960s, and was still the world record holder at the time of Fosbury's Olympic triumph, hadn't had his career ended by a motorcycle accident when he was only 25.

Furthermore, it's interesting to note that Fosbury may well not even have been the pioneer of this style; Canadian jumper Debbie Brill was also doing it in the mid-1960s and it's not clear who thought of it first or to what extent the two pioneers knew about each other. This article is the only one I can find which quotes Fosbury referring to Brill, but it's a bit vague. 

Lastly, it's also interesting to note the progression of the world records for the main jumping events (high jump, long jump and triple jump) and theorise that human progress in this area has stagnated. These are some of the longest-standing records in athletics:

• Men's high jump: Javier Sotomayor, 1993 (30 years)
• Women's high jump: Stefka Kostadinova, 1987 (36 years)
• Men's long jump: Mike Powell, 1991 (32 years)
• Women's long jump: Galina Chistyakova, 1988 (35 years)
• Men's triple jump: Jonathan Edwards, 1995 (28 years)
• Women's triple jump: there was a 26-year gap between 1995 and 2021 but subsequently the record has been raised twice by Yulimar Rojas. Still, you know, exceptions, rules, etc.

Maybe another similar technical revolution is needed. Or maybe we've just cracked jumping, as a species, and that's it, barring evolving some extra limbs or something.

four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three

don't want to trample on the Book Of The Year blog idea this has just given me, but of the ones featured on the blog it'd be either The City & The City or The Road Home #books https://t.co/MGpfcM78hy

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) December 27, 2022

Inspired by this tweet a month or two back to give the subject a bit of thought, I present to you now my collected Books Of The Year list wherein I nominate three from each of the years of this blog's existence (well, I only did one from 2006 as there were only a handful). Three seemed the right number to make the decision-making tricky from an average yearly sample of twenty or so. No particular rules except I tried to avoid picking two by the same author (not generally a problem) and tried not to agonise about it too much or spend too much time on it. 

The table below presents the list; I've spiced it up a little by including a piece of text (strictly unedited) from the original review which will hopefully either give a flavour of the book, ruin a key aspect of the plot, or just amuse. I may make this A Thing in future as part of the annual book round-up I try to do in January.

Year	Author	Title	Comment
2006	Anita Shreve	The Weight Of Water	two parallel intertwined stories kind of story
2007	William Boyd	Restless	inevitable betrayals and double-crossings
	TC Boyle	Riven Rock	traumatic formative sexual experiences
	Joyce Carol Oates	The Falls	small fly in the ointment of her marital bliss
2008	Robertson Davies	The Cunning Man	all manner of throwaway literary and cultural anecdotes
	F Scott Fitzgerald	The Great Gatsby	driving off gaily in your Hispano-Suiza, getting your scarf caught in the wire wheels and strangling yourself
	Anne Tyler	A Patchwork Planet	all you've got left to hold the reader's attention is your actual skill at writing believable characters
2009	Iain M Banks	Inversions	knife missile which she uses to escape, with impressively bloody results
	Cormac McCarthy	The Road	what will you do when you meet people who will do those things, and more
	Isabel Colegate	The Shooting Party	ruthlessly enforced social structures and strictures preventing you from ever saying what you really think
2010	Peter Ackroyd	Chatterton	only employed as a model because he was working up to running off with his wife
	Joyce Carol Oates	We Were The Mulvaneys	periodically fleeing to the next one when anyone starts to rely on her too much or show her any personal affection
	Stieg Larsson	The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo	the obligatory secret subterranean porn dungeon for the hero to be rescued from in the nick of time as he is about to be buggered to death
2011	Kazuo Ishiguro	Never Let Me Go	hopefully we might carry on a bit longer, and avoid the organ-harvesting death squads
	Tim Winton	Cloudstreet	much roistering and raging and rollicking, not to mention rucking and rogering
	Patricia Highsmith	The Talented Mr Ripley	various psychological issues, like, you know, murdering people
2012	Iain M Banks	Look To Windward	but in fact on a deadly mission so secret EVEN HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT IT IS!!!
	William Boyd	Ordinary Thunderstorms	a man hiding in a hedge isn't really going to drive the narrative along, so we need more plot
	Arkady & Boris Strugatsky	Roadside Picnic	the constant danger of getting arrested or shot or stumbling into a gravitational anomaly and getting turned inside-out
2013	TC Boyle	Drop City	a guy who can render his own bear-fat, make moose sausages and knock together a dog-sled with just a few bits of discarded porcupine guts and some whittling
	Alison Lurie	Foreign Affairs	what sympathetic people might call "flighty", "free-spirited", "eccentric", etc., but the rest of us would just call "mental"
	Ian McEwan	The Innocent	Progress down the tunnel towards the Russian sector continues, as does Leonard's progress down Maria's "tunnel", hem hem
2014	GB Edwards	The Book Of Ebenezer Le Page	all of whom disappoint him in some way with their laziness, stupidity, and embrace of modern ideas like the motor car, feminism or the television set
	Russell Hoban	Riddley Walker	any notion of standard rules for spelling and grammar have gone out of the window, not that anyone has windows any more
	Walter Tevis	The Queen's Gambit	eating properly, heading down the gym and, most importantly, cutting out the pints of white wine for breakfast
2015	Sebastian Faulks	Birdsong	getting better acquainted with Mrs. Azaire by going down on her comme une tonne de briques while René is out of the house
	Richard Yates	Revolutionary Road	otherwise intelligent young people waking up one morning in their sterile little suburban box and realising that they don't know each other at all
	Christopher Priest	Inverted World	necessitate a rethink of the policy of keeping the plebs ignorant of the outside world
2016	Marilynne Robinson	Home	before either his father dies or Jack's desire to disappear and be away from responsibility and scrutiny gets the better of him
	Daniel Woodrell	Winter's Bone	everyone has too many guns, drinks too much hooch and is cooking up crank
	EL Doctorow	Ragtime	falls out of a wardrobe while having a furtive wank
2017	Robertson Davies	The Rebel Angels	the circumstances in which he subsequently murdered McVarish during the course of an elaborate sex game
	Yann Queffelec	The Savage Wedding	the persuasive suggestion that with Ludo gone things might get a bit spicier in the boudoir department
	Kurt Vonnegut	Cat's Cradle	causes the sea, as well as all rivers, streams and groundwater on the planet, to solidify into ice-nine, instantly ending almost all life
2018	Russell Banks	The Sweet Hereafter	attach an actual face to the child in the back of the bus disappearing off a ravine into the cold murky water
	LP Hartley	The Go-Between	they interrupt Ted giving Marian a practical farming tutorial, in particular a demonstration of some vigorous ploughing
	Tom Wolfe	A Man In Full	a bit of a problematic Mary Sue in an otherwise unmitigated sea of arseholes
2019	Kazuo Ishiguro	The Remains Of The Day	Miss Kenton is wearing a sign that says AVAILABLE, or possibly RIDE ME LIKE ONE OF LORD DARLINGTON'S PRIZE MARES
	Marilynne Robinson	Gilead	what's a respectable Reverend doing having a son in his late sixties, the randy old goat?
	Iain Banks	Transition	one person's disastrous turn of events about which Something Must Be Done is someone else's wholly necessary and exciting developments
2020	Jim Crace	Harvest	ill-equipped to adapt to quickly-changing circumstances, and WAIT A MINUTE here are some circumstances quickly changing
	Mark Z Danielewski	House Of Leaves	the fact that a corridor has just poofed into appearance out of freakin' nowhere
	Alasdair Gray	Lanark	only if you're some sort of hopelessly gauche naïve ingénue who expects fictional narratives to follow a linear pattern, hahahaha
2021	John Christopher	The Death Of Grass	so a few people's lawns die, you might say, no biggie
	Hilary Mantel	Bring Up The Bodies	actual public bloody dismemberment rather than discreet shuffling off to a nunnery
	Arturo Perez-Reverte	The Flanders Panel	the pristine "original" work? What does that even mean? What do words, in general, even mean?
2022	China Miéville	The City & The City	a city (takes drag on cigarette) .... OF THE MIND. Though, erm, also totally real (coughs)
	Jim Harrison	The Road Home	a fierce and independent girl not prepared to take any shit from anybody, including her grandfather
	Tim Winton	Breath	all good things must come to an end, even bracingly transgressive and dangerous under-age sex

the last book I read

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

Cora's life seems pretty sweet, on the face of it*, if by sweet you mean relentlessly shitty and brutal. Born into slavery on the Randall plantation in Georgia, as was her mother Mabel before her, after her grandmother Ajarry was kidnapped and transported from Africa to America, Cora lives with a group of other slaves and works in the cotton fields. The slaves are kept fed and sheltered, after a fashion, but woe betide you if you fail to harvest your allotted amount of cotton, talk back to the white masters or try to escape.

Escape certainly seems like a pretty appealing option given the unrelenting hardship of day-to-day life, but the risks are appalling - a crack team of slave-catchers is just waiting to be unleashed and if you are caught you will be brought back to the plantation and executed in an appallingly protracted and public fashion pour encourager les autres. 

As it happens Cora's mother, Mabel, escaped from the plantation ten years or so previously and, despite the best efforts of elite slave-catcher Ridgeway and his men, was never caught. When her fellow slave Caesar comes to her and suggests an escape bid she is initially resistant but eventually agrees, and they set out across the swamps in the dead of night.

Caesar has been in touch with agents of the Underground Railroad, in real 19th-century America a network of safe routes for escaping slaves, but as depicted here an actual physical railroad with trains and tunnels and people maintaining secret stations in slave states. Cora and Caesar hook up with a sympathetic farmer who has access to an underground station and ride the rails up to South Carolina. 

Meanwhile, back at the plantation, Cora and Caesar's absence is swiftly noted and the slave-catchers sent after them, a team led by Ridgeway who is taking a personal interest in retrieving Cora after a rare failure in the pursuit of her mother. Cora and Caesar have found refuge in South Carolina, though, which operates a much more liberal regime, former slaves being provided with housing and gainful employment while, yes, technically still being owned by the state, but, hey, who's counting? And it's better than being back in Georgia swinging from a rope, right? Pay no attention to the medical staff taking blood samples for no apparent reason and the strong encouragement for black women to consent to being sterilised. I mean, it's for your own convenience - the state doing you a favour, when you think about it. 

Cora is starting to smell a rat when the decision to move on is taken for her - she gets wind of slave-catchers making enquiries and flees to the house of the local station agent for the Underground Railroad. And not before time as they are hot on her tail and burn the house down, leaving her to board the next available train and get off at the next available stop, which happens to be a partly-abandoned station in North Carolina. Well, North Carolina will be pretty much like South Carolina, right? Only, you know, further north and all. Well, not a bit of it as they have decided the whole slavery thing is just too much trouble and decided on a policy of just exterminating black people wholesale and instead shipping in Irish and Italians to do the menial jobs the slaves formerly did. Having been rescued by the station agent, Martin, a rather unlikely and reluctant hero, having inherited the job from his father, Cora is obliged to endure a miserable few months hiding in the attic of his house while awaiting an opportunity to escape. Eventually the inevitable happens and one of the neighbours denounces Martin and his wife Ethel to the authorities, Ridgeway and his henchmen turn up at the house, throw Cora in the back of the cart to be returned to Georgia and cart Martin and Ethel off to be summarily hanged. 

In some ways the fact that it was Ridgeway who was on hand to make the arrest is a good thing for Cora, as if it had been one of the local goons she would probably have been strung up and set on fire there and then. On the other hand now she has to endure a long and uncomfortable cross-country slog back to her old plantation with the likelihood of a more protracted and public death at the end of it. Fate intervenes, though, when, after they have crossed into Tennessee, the cart is held up by a group of black men who rescue Cora and leave Ridgeway and his men tethered with their own chains.

Cora, the group leader, Royal, and the others make their way (via the Underground Railroad) to Indiana, another (ostensibly at least) more liberal state, and take refuge at the farm of John Valentine, along with a host of other waifs and strays and runaways. Useful work is provided, there is an extensive library, Cora and Royal begin a tentative romance, all seems calm. But even here there is discontent, not so much internally to the farm but among their predominantly white neighbours. This big black community is all very well, you know, but all that fancy book-learnin' might give them ideas. And the next thing you know they'll be round here cutting our throats and defiling our daughters. Maybe it'd be better on the whole to have a bit of regrettable but necessary unpleasantness and rid ourselves of them. 

And so a mob descends on the Valentine farm, bent on general mayhem and destruction, except for the persistent Mr. Ridgeway who only has eyes for Cora, and, once he has captured her, the location of the Underground Railroad. Cora takes him to the nearest station she knows, under a remote barn rumoured to be the terminus of a long-abandoned branch line to who knows where. With the last of her strength she grapples Ridgeway off the rickety stairway down to the platform and, as he lies wounded on the ground, limps off down the tunnel. After an unknowable amount of time in the darkness she emerges near a road and hitches a ride on a wagon headed for Missouri and then west to California.

The history of slavery in the United States has, unsurprisingly, been a rich subject for various forms of art. Notable similarities with The Underground Railroad can be found in parts of Beloved, for instance, and some of it will seem familiar to anyone who's seen 12 Years A Slave. The principal difference is the conceit of having the railroad be an actual physical thing, rather than a metaphor. This provides an odd juxtaposition with the gritty realism of what's going on generally, since a) it's not an actual thing that ever existed and b) a moment's thought will make the whole thing fall apart. Leave aside that it's inconceivable that the stations would not have been found and the rails made impassable, where did all the metal come from? Didn't someone notice entire locomotives going missing? How did they stop the tunnels from falling in? What about ventilation? Wouldn't it be literally impossible to cope with the changes in elevation for an underground railway on a bigger scale than, say, a single city? Clearly all of these things are trivially true, but the idea presumably is that you hold one part of the book (the gritty realist bits) in one part of your mind and the other (the bits featuring the railroad) in another, and apply slightly different rules to each. Whether you can do that or find that the two parts rub together in an uncomfortable way is probably just a matter of taste, and of how much of a tedious literalist you are. It should be noted that quite a few of Colson Whitehead's earlier works have a fantastical and/or speculative element to them as well. My personal feeling is that while I did find the friction between the two elements occasionally troublesome, it didn't detract from the overall effect, which, I should make clear, was tremendously impressive. 

Other people who were tremendously impressed included the Pulitzer Prize committee for 2017, which makes The Underground Railroad the second novel I've read in 2023 to have received it, the other being The Overstory. Perhaps it's time for a recap of my Pulitzer list, which goes as follows: 1928, 1940, 1953, 1961, 1981, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1992, 1994, 1996, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2017, 2019. It also won the National Book Award the previous year; my updated list here goes: 1958, 1962, 1965, 1980 (paperback), 1988, 1993, 2001, 2016.

* I promise this is the last time I will do this

the last book I read

Tomorrow by Graham Swift.

Paula Hook's life seems pretty sweet, on the face of it: beloved husband Mike, nice dual income (she is an art dealer, he is the editor of a successful science magazine), nice house, two lovely kids (twins, Kate and Nick). And yet here she is, in the early hours of the morning, her husband snoring post-coitally beside her, fretting over the impending revelation of a family secret to the children, something she fears will change their lives irrevocably. It's a fully planned-for revelation. Paula and Mike having agreed long ago to do it shortly after the twins' sixteenth birthday, but it's still a daunting prospect.

So what is it? Come on, you know how this works: that would make for a very short novel, for one thing. No, we need to circle our way round to the central subject by adding in some explanatory context first, specifically a potted history of how Paula and Mike met (at Sussex University in the mid-1960s) and fell in love, awkward early meetings with in-laws (especially Paula's father Dougie who is, rather intimidatingly, a High Court judge), early married life, money worries (it is Paula who is the main breadwinner in their early years), and, as the years roll on, just a hint of a suspicion of a raised eyebrow from the in-laws about the lack of any kids being produced.

In fact Paula and Mike have done some reflecting on this situation already and have had some tests done which revealed that Mike has a very low sperm count. No worries, they conclude, we'll just tip the odds in our favour by throwing lots of sex at the problem. Some more years go by and it's clear this isn't working, though. It's only the slightly random acquisition of a cat, Otis, that prompts some reflection on this situation, as when Paula takes Otis to the vet he nods, sagely and says: ah, a child substitute. Do Mike and Paula want to just be cat people, or do they want to do something about it?

It's about here that the reader starts to get a glimpse of roughly where this is heading: something about Kate and Nick's parentage, or the circumstances of their early lives. A whole host of options here, from the sort of baby-abduction described in Swift's earlier novel Waterland to the more lurid stuff featured in The Midwich Cuckoos or The Boys From Brazil. The trouble with the (seemingly) endless deferral of the revelation, as demanded by the novel's own architecture, is that anything short of alien zombie Hitler is going to seem like a bit of an anti-climax. That said, the actual revelation here [PLOT SPOILER ALERT], which is that Paula and Mike were some of the earliest recipients of IVF (in 1978, the same year Louise Brown was born), probably would have seemed like a bit of a let-down on page one of a one-page novel. There is a little bit of extra spice, to be fair, in that Mike's rancid old jism being utterly useless for conception purposes even in a lab-assisted environment meant that donor sperm had to be used, and that therefore Mike is not the biological father of his own children. Even then, though, it's fairly thin gruel after 150-odd pages of Paula's tortured build-up.

Even though Tomorrow is fairly short at about 250 pages, there do seem to be a few episodes whose narrative purpose isn't particularly clear, unless it's just to bump up the page count. The whole business with Otis the cat is clearly meant to foreshadow the challenges and anxieties of having kids in some way, but really mainly serves to contrive a series of meetings between Paula and vet Alan Fraser, meetings which culminate in a stolen weekend together in a hotel when she's meant to be in Paris on an art-acquisition trip. The excuse Paula presents for this - she's preparing herself in some way for carrying another man's child - doesn't really make any sense. Similarly the episode shoehorned in near the end where Paula recounts Mike's rescuing both of the twins from drowning in the sea when they were younger doesn't seem to have any point other than to illustrate that Mike is a good swimmer and really loves his kids. 

There's plenty of good stuff here about how love and marriage evolves from the early carefree days of spending all day naked in bed together drinking champagne to the constraints imposed by having kids and how these radical transformations aren't better or worse, necessarily, just different. It's just that all that good stuff is hitched to a structure and a central revelation that seems to invite a shrug and an "is that it?". 

Quite a few of the reviews of Tomorrow made similar criticisms; I particularly enjoyed this Irish Times article which recounts an especially grumpy interview with Swift in the aftermath of a lukewarm review of Tomorrow. One thing that none of the ones I've read mention, as far as I can see anyway, is the structural similarity between Tomorrow and Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy. Unless I'm remembering it completely wrongly, that novel also features one half of a couple, up late while their family sleeps,  contemplating a life-changing announcement that they're going to make the following morning, though the nature of the announcement is quite different. The long-deferred revelation of something from a family's past is a common feature of Barbara Vine's novels as well, though generally the central revelation is of something a bit more juicy. 

Anyway, Swift is a fine writer but this is probably the weakest of the half-dozen or so of his novels that I've read; both of its predecessors here - The Light Of Day and Shuttlecock - are more satisfying. John Crace nails some of its flaws in this Digested Reads column. Waterland remains the one to read, anyway. 

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.