the last book I read

Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson.

We're in the Florida Keys - ah, you'll be saying, that's nice, lots of sun, some nice seafood, maybe some trips out to the mainland to visit Miami and the Everglades. Well I've got news for you, buddy - there's been a nuclear apocalypse and Miami is a blasted charcoal wasteland and the Everglades are an irradiated hellscape populated by barely-human mutants. A small contingent of surviving humans holds out in Key West, or as it's now known, Twicetown, its new name (and the fact of its continuing existence) deriving from the landing of two nuclear warheads on it but neither exploding. The surviving missiles and the warheads they carry are now objects of quasi-religious reverence, with, you would hope, some instructions to those making a pilgrimage to see them not to go poking them with a fork or anything.

Yeah, but what about the seafood? Well, fish do still exist, and people do still go out in boats to capture them, although the percentage of many-headed Lovecraftian monstrosities among the catch is a fair bit higher than it used to be, and there is an associated risk to the fishermen. Like much in the book, this is never explained in very much detail - is it just that the rickety nature of the technology makes the whole fishing venture inherently more risky than before? Is there something lurking out in the depths, or some new weather phenomenon, that occasionally claims people? Is there some unspoken mutual agreement that a sacrifice to the sea occasionally needs to be made?

Most of our time here is spent in the company of Fiskadoro, a boy in his early teens, whose father, Jimmy Hidalgo, just happens to be a mate on a fishing boat and, moreover, just happens to go on a fishing trip roughly halfway through the book from which he never returns. 

Fiskadoro is, like most of the characters featured, too young to remember the apocalyptic events (which we are invited to infer took place a few decades earlier, maybe sixty years or so), and has grown up with the limited life in Twicetown seeming completely normal. Mr. Cheung, who leads the grandly-named Miami Symphony Orchestra - in reality a ragged assembly of musicians of various levels of ability - is just about old enough to remember the apocalypse, and his grandmother, very possibly the oldest person left on earth, definitely is, though in her mind it's all bound up with previous traumatic experiences including her escape from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. 

Life proceeds as normal - people are born and die, not only in fishing accidents but also from various aggressive cancers and by being murdered, both things that occur at significantly higher rates in the post-apocalyptic world. People amuse themselves by drinking home-made hooch, acquiring trinkets (most of them cripplingly radioactive) from various travelling traders and listening to radio broadcasts that appear to originate from nearby Cuba and allude to the Florida Keys being in some sort of quarantine zone. Fiskadoro gets clarinet lessons from Mr. Cheung and occasionally amuses himself with his mates burning radioactive kerosene on the beach - well, you've got to amuse yourself somehow, haven't you? Following his father's death Fiskadoro goes off the rails slightly and wanders into regions outside the safe(-ish) areas around Twicetown, at which point he is promptly abducted by the people the Twicetowners refer to as "swamp people" who inhabit the lower reaches of the Everglades, and spirited away there, presumably by boat, as all the interlinking bridges connecting the Florida Keys have long since been destroyed. He is eventually returned to Twicetown by one of the roving traders, but not before being drugged and subjected to some eye-watering scarring rituals (NSFW link here) by the swamp people. 

After his lengthy recuperation Fiskadoro finds himself unable to remember his former life, but perhaps as a result also granted some mystical insight denied to others. And just in the nick of time, as something seems to be happening offshore. Is it the end of the quarantine period and a rescue by the Cubans? The approaching cloud-front of some further apocalypse? Or something else?

It's entirely consistent with the strange, slightly dream-like tone of Fiskadoro that the nature of the climactic event is ambiguous at best, though the brief prologue section written in another voice and seemingly from a later time offers some clues. There is some ambiguity about the nature of the apocalyptic event as well, although it's clearly a nuclear holocaust which appears to have taken out the entire continental United States, and perhaps most of the rest of the world as well. 

So since this isn't a work of "hard" speculative fiction concerned with great detail about the nature of the apocalypse, we might ask: well, what's it about then? Well, the human spirit (stop groaning at the back there), the will to survive, fall in love, procreate, have fun, set fire to things, etc., even in the most grim and unpromising of circumstances. Like Never Let Me Go it offers up a world where death is a much more real day-to-day prospect than it is for most of us, and asks: does this actually make a difference to anything? There's also some sly stuff about religious belief and how it evolves out of the dimly-remembered remnants of previous belief systems: gods referenced here include the usual Jesus and Allah but also Quetzalcoatl and Bob Marley. 

Previous novels on this list whose narrative primarily takes place in some sort of post-apocalyptic world include:

• The Road - unspecified but probably nuclear
• I Am Legend - some sort of disease
• The Death Of Grass - plant disease
• The Pesthouse - unspecified but probably disease
• O-Zone - nuclear, earthquake
• Riddley Walker - nuclear
• Station Eleven - disease

As I am a tedious literalist I chafed slightly at Fiskadoro's lack of inclination to explain itself, but it is a strangely compelling story nonetheless. It is also, oddly, the second successive book on this list to feature the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as a significant plot point - Jim in Empire Of The Sun witnesses the distant glow of the explosions from China (or, at least, imagines that he does), and some of Mr. Cheung's associates here locate a copy of this book and are disturbed by some of its resonances with their current situation.

Other novels on this list primarily set in Florida include both of the Carl Hiaasens (Lucky You and Sick Puppy) and, more recently, Killing Mister Watson. To Have And Have Not is primarily set in Cuba but does involve illicit trips to Key West as a key (no pun intended) plot point. 

teelebrity crickylikey of the day

A sporting one for you now - here's surprise Open Championship winner Brian Harman and former Australian cricket captain Ricky Ponting. The facial resemblance is the main thing here, at least while they've both got caps on - Ponting still has a pretty full head of hair despite being about twelve years older while Harman is pretty bald - but there's a broader physical resemblance as well, both men being shorter than most of their contemporaries (Harman is 5'7" according to Wikipedia, Ponting 5'9") but with a general air of chunky pugnaciousness. 

CGIlebrity lookeylikey of the day

Over the course of the last couple of weeks I have, for various reasons and in the company of various combinations of my own children, watched both Encanto and Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban. A couple of things struck me, in particular the similarity between the characters of Bruno from Encanto and Sirius Black (as portrayed by Gary Oldman) from the Harry Potter movie. Firstly there is the similarity in appearance - long dark wavy hair, straggly facial hair, general air of manic energy - and it's primarily appearance we're interested in here, after all, but they also have broadly similar possibly-evil-to-chaotic-but-basically-good character arcs, and are of course both in possession of magical powers.

Secondly, the character of Abuela, Encanto's matriarch and guardian of the magic that keeps the house and community together, has a distinctive look that I couldn't quite put my finger on until I realised that she reminded me of Robert Mitchum.

the second-last book I read

Empire Of The Sun by JG Ballard.

It's all right, living in Shanghai - nice weather, nice house, swimming pool out the back, chauffeur, all the sesame prawn toast you can eat. At least, that's Jim's Shanghai lifestyle, thanks to being part of a well-off expatriate family - his father is a businessman of some ill-defined sort. Jim is vaguely aware that some people live less privileged lives, but at the age of eleven he's far too busy zooming around pretending to be an aeroplane to care too much about all that.

There are some tensions bubbling under even now, though, since much of China, including Shanghai, has been under Japanese occupation for a few years. The uneasy truce that has allowed Shanghai's expatriate community to go about their daily lives fairly normally during this period ends abruptly when Japan enters World War II with the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, and shortly afterwards the Japanese step up their occupation of China more aggressively and start imprisoning foreign nationals. During the chaos and confusion of this process kicking off in Shanghai Jim becomes separated from his parents. Escaping being taken away to the internment camps, Jim returns to suburban Shanghai and spends a few weeks living in various abandoned houses (including his own), living on the gradually-diminishing remains of the stored food. 

After a brief interlude with a couple of slightly shady Americans, Frank and Basie, Jim is eventually picked up by the Japanese and taken to an internment camp, or rather a series of camps, with the internees travelling between them either by being forced like cattle into uncomfortable trucks or being made to march on foot, with the gradual attrition of numbers as some of the weaker individuals die along the way and are unceremoniously hoofed into a ditch by their captors. Eventually the convoy arrives at its permanent destination, Lunghua. Jim befriends a few people - his room-mates at Lunghua Mr & Mrs Vincent, medic Dr Ransome, his old neighbour from Shanghai Mr Maxted - but basically spends a lot of his time exploring the camp, chatting with his Japanese captors, watching the planes of various nationalities go overhead and monitoring the progress of the runway that is being built using the internees as slave labour; this means occasionally working them to death, but hey, bury them in a shallow grave and replace them with someone else.

Over time (there is a wibbly-wobbly dissolve in the middle of the book where three years pass) Jim becomes aware that there is a wider conflict going on involving the British and Americans as well as the Japanese and Chinese, and that the side he really ought to be rooting for is probably going to win, though not before a lot of blood has been shed on both sides. Jim isn't too sure how he feels about this - he's fascinated by aeroplanes, but not too fussy about whose they are, and he has struck up a tentative friendship with a couple of the younger Japanese guards. As the war starts to go badly for the Japanese there is a sense that they don't really know what to do with the internees, and there are some further episodes of pointless piling onto trucks and marching around the countryside before Jim is abandoned by his captors, who presume that he is too weak to walk. Jim is actually pretty much OK, though weakened by hunger, and sets off on some further random wanderings through the blasted countryside, littered with plane wrecks and bayoneted corpses, eventually ending up in the vicinity of Lunghua, where he finds a supply drop from an American aircraft containing Spam, chocolate and copies of the Reader's Digest. Revived, he makes his way back to the camp where further supplies have been hoarded, is reunited with some of his former camp-mates (the ones who haven't died, anyway) and, eventually, his parents. 

Empire Of The Sun is famous for being something of an outlier in Ballard's oeuvre - a fictionalised retelling of his own childhood experiences as a prisoner of war in Shanghai, rather than the wild speculative and dystopian fiction he's more famous for. Outside of the actual narrative presented here one thing that is interesting is to pick out repeated themes from his later work that are foreshadowed by real-life experiences here: abandoned houses and swimming pools, aviation and space travel and in particular crashed and derelict aircraft, a generally lower level of interest in people and their emotions. 

It could certainly be argued that not a great deal actually happens here once Jim is separated from his parents (this is one part that's explicitly fictional; in real life Ballard and his parents were interned together), but that's partly the point - the great sweep of events is something that's happening elsewhere and Jim is only dimly aware of it while being shuttled around from camp to camp. Jim's general deadening of affect is a factor here as well - the people being bludgeoned to death for walking too slowly or being left to starve to death would presumably feel quite strongly that something fairly important is happening to them, but Jim is more interested in deciding whether he should support the Japanese or the Americans based on who has the cooler planes. 

Empire Of The Sun was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1984; it's hard to think of another Ballard novel, as excellent as they generally are, that could plausibly have been considered (and indeed this was his only ever nomination). Hotel Du Lac won that year and I have now read five of the six nominees, which is a record; four in both 1989 and 2001 is my best performance elsewhere. It was also famously filmed in 1987 by Steven Spielberg and featured Christian Bale as Jim in his first major film role. 

Anyway, it's very good and manages to be recognisably Ballardian while also an unusual outlier (though not completely unique as he wrote a loose sequel, The Kindness Of Women, in 1991). If you want something a bit more "out there" but still with a recognisable real-world setting, I'd recommend Empire Of The Sun's immediate successor The Day Of Creation or the later set of rich-people-going-berserk novels that includes Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. After those you may possibly wish to move on to the more piquant delights of things like High-Rise, Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, plus the short story collections. 

the unbreathable lightness of not being

Hot on the heels of Cormac McCarthy's demise comes the death of Czech novelist Milan Kundera. Long-standing consumers of my ghoulish authorial-death-related output may remember that, while I feel it's slightly beyond the pale to keep some sort of official Dead Pool list of who I think might be next, I have nevertheless speculated on the subject in the past to the extent of offering up a list of authors whose books have featured on the list, are alive, and are quite old, in a not wishing ill on anyone but Just Saying sort of way, and that Kundera's name has featured, and no wonder as I think he is (or was) the oldest living author on the list.

Kundera featured here twice, in 2008 and 2016 with The Unbearable Lightness Of Being and The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting respectively. Those are probably his two best-known books, the first being made into a film in the 1980s. The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is probably the one to go for, but he had a substantial body of other work that I haven't read.

Anyway, here's the updated list. You might remember that when Alison Lurie died a couple of years back I confidently announced that she was the oldest curse victim at the age of 95. I'm not sure why I did this, because the obituary I linked to specifically says she was 94, and so she was. I'll leave the original post as-is as a monument to my carelessness, but I've corrected her age in the table here. The reason this is relevant (other than a general desire for accuracy) is that Kundera was also 94, as was Doris Lessing when she died back in 2013. So who was oldest? Well, I can reveal that I've done the maths, or, rather, got Excel to do the maths for me, and the result is that Kundera was older than Lurie by a mere 9 days, with Lessing a comparative spring chicken at 74 days younger. 

Kundera also smashes the record for longest curse length at over fifteen years, ending Cormac McCarthy's brief posthumous ownership of the title.

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	94	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
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 265d
Milan Kundera	27th March 2008	11th July 2023	94	15y 105d

you batter you bowler you bet

During the vast aeons of time that (it seemed) Australian opener Usman Khawaja was batting during the first Test match of the current Ashes series, I had occasion to look up his player profile page on Cricinfo, the go-to resource for the stats-hungry cricket nerd. I had plenty of time to do this, as Khawaja's two innings of 141 and 65 in the match occupied 518 balls and 796 minutes and gave him 13th spot on one of cricket's more esoteric lists of batting feats: batting on all five days of a five-day Test match. As you can see from the list, it's not necessarily correlated with gargantuan feats of run-gathering, rather what you might call accidents of timing. In the most extreme example, Indian batsman Cheteshwar Pujara made just 52 and 22 in his two innings against Sri Lanka in Calcutta in 2017, but the various vagaries of the weather meant that the first innings of 52 was spread across three (very truncated) days.

If you're in the mood for more esoteric batting records, though, read on. Khawaja's five-day feat hadn't been completed at the time I looked at his profile, so the headline list of his batting records looked like this:

These are, arguably, less esoteric as they relate to actual feats of run-scoring, specifically centuries, combined with:

• another century, making one in each innings of the same match
• a score in the 90s, a sort of "near miss" companion to the first
• a duck, as a sort of contrasting tears-and-laughter, light-and-shade thing

It struck me that I didn't recall seeing all three listed under a single batsman before, and I wondered whether this was unique to Khawaja. A quick look at each of the relevant lists (and some very rudimentary sorting in Excel) soon revealed that it was not, but at the same time not especially common. Here's the full list, comprising thirteen batsmen - the date represents the date they achieved the third of the three feats (obviously different batsmen will do them in different orders).

Batsman	100/100	100/90	100/0	Qualification date
Hanif Mohammad	1	1	1	December 1964
Garry Sobers	1	1	2	March 1968
Aravinda de Silva	2	1	1	April 1997
Brian Lara	1	1	1	June 2005
Jacques Kallis	2	1	2	October 2007
Andrew Strauss	1	1	3	December 2008
Ricky Ponting	3	1	1	December 2008
Tillakaratne Dilshan	1	1	1	August 2009
Kumar Sangakkara	2	1	1	March 2013
Younis Khan	1	1	1	October 2014
Hashim Amla	1	1	1	January 2016
Virat Kohli	1	2	1	August 2018
Usman Khawaja	1	1	2	March 2022

A couple of footnotes:

• Andrew Strauss and Younis Khan are the only two batsmen on the list who combined these century-related feats with the further one of making a century in their first Test match.
• Ricky Ponting's hundred-and-a-ninety feat is unique in this list for featuring a century and an innings of 99, against South Africa in 2008. The only other batsman to make a 99 and a century in the same Test match is Geoffrey Boycott, for England against West Indies in 1974. Ponting made the century first, Boycott the 99 first.
• I haven't quite got into the gender-neutral thing of calling everyone "batters" yet, not out of any objection to the term (apart from possible pancake-related confusion), just habit. I haven't, after all, spent any part of the last 40-odd years bemoaning the use of the gender-neutral term "bowler" and insisting on "bowlsmen".

the last book I read

Last Bus To Woodstock by Colin Dexter. 

Meet Morse. He's a maverick Detective Chief Inspector with a thirst for real ale, cryptic crosswords and opera, or to put it another way, a thirst for not playing by the book - but, dammit, he gets results. 

And a result is what's required here, because there's been a murder: a young woman's body has been found in a pub car park in Woodstock - no, not that one, the one near Oxford. Her name is Sylvia Kaye, and she appears to have been dispatched, rather messily, by having her head caved in with a large tyre-iron.

Inspector Morse and his newly-assigned sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, do all the obvious stuff like questioning all the pub's customers, but since none of them does anything as convenient as breaking down and confessing, a wider enquiry seems to be called for. This enquiry revolves around certain questions: how did Sylvia get from central Oxford to the pub at Woodstock? Could she have got a lift? If so, with whom? 

Crazed flashes of inspiration brought on by intensive real ale and crossword consumption can only get you so far, though, and there comes a time when you've got to put in the legwork and do some actual police work, although there's always the option of delegating some of the more tedious stuff to Lewis. Anyway, Sylvia worked at an insurance firm in Oxford so the detectives start there: could it have been a disgruntled colleague? Her, boss, Mr. Palmer? 

Nothing especially conclusive emerges here, apart from the suspicion that the icy and enigmatic Jennifer Coleby knows more than she's letting on, so the detectives' focus moves to how Sylvia got from the bus stop where she was spotted by a member of the public to the pub car park where she was killed, and to the identity of the other young woman who was with her at the bus stop. No-one saw her subsequently take a bus, so the suspicion is that she, and possibly her companion, hitched a lift with someone. But who? Are they the murderer? And what happened to the other woman, whoever she was?

Local university academic Bernard Crowther soon emerges as the driver of the car, but claims no knowledge of the circumstances of Sylvia's murder. In any case, there's a logjam of other suspects to choose from, including Jennifer Coleby, Mr. Palmer, local porn-addicted ne'er-do-well (and Sylvia's occasional boyfriend) John Sanders, and Jennifer Coleby's flatmate Sue Widdowson, a local nurse who Morse meets when he falls off a ladder and injures his foot and promptly decides he is in love with.

Things ramp up a notch when Morse receives letters from both Bernard Crowther and his wife Margaret, both claiming to have been the murderer, a situation further complicated by Margaret turning up dead shortly afterwards, having stuck her head in the gas oven, and Bernard turning up nearly-dead shortly after that, having discovered her body and suffered a massive heart attack. Morse is convinced, however, that neither of them actually did it, despite each having evidently been convinced that the other did. Morse is convinced that the identity of the other young woman at the bus stop holds the key to the mystery, and he is, eventually, and after a few wrong turnings, correct.

The Morse series of novels (Last Bus To Woodstock is the first, published in 1975) is probably most famous these days as the source material for the Inspector Morse TV series starring John Thaw as Morse. While many of the 2-hour episodes were directly adapted from the novels (Last Bus To Woodtsock being one of them, though the episodes are in a different order from the books), some are not - there were 33 episodes and there are only 13 novels.

Morse as portrayed here is pretty close to how John Thaw portrayed him in the TV series - intellectual, irascible, thwarted from higher promotion by his attitude and personal habits but perhaps uninterested in promotion anyway, a bit too keen on the ale and whisky but capable of flashes of insight denied to most, though this doesn't stop him from being wrong about the answer several times before eventually being right. He is also apparently irrepressibly horny, and very much inclined to ill-advised liaisons with female suspects who turn out (*cough* SPOILER ALERT) to be the murderer. 

I enjoyed this, as much for the re-acquaintance with a familiar character as for the resolution of the plot, which (like many detective novels) favours the aha-you-never-saw-that-coming revelation over sense-making and plausibility. This being the mid-70s, the revelation that Sylvia may have been raped as well as murdered (it eventually turns out to have been consensual) prompts some light-hearted BANTZ about it from various characters that might be seen as a bit, hem hem, problematic these days:

what the hell am I doing golfing in LA

The recently-concluded US Open at the Los Angeles Country Club followed, in some ways, a familiar pattern for recent major golf championships: hey, Rory's in contention, can he hold it together on the last day, push on and finally win a first major since 2014 - erm, no.

One way in which it didn't conform to the typical pattern for US Opens was the low scoring, particularly on day one. In particular, there were two leaders who posted a score of eight under par, which given the typically miserly US Open par score of 70 means that they posted rounds of 62, which, as I'm sure you'll know, equals the major championship scoring record. As I'm sure you'll also recall there was a period of 44 years where the major championship scoring record stood at 63, a score first achieved by Johnny Miller at the US Open in 1973 and equalled no fewer than 30 times subsequently before finally being beaten by Branden Grace at the Open in 2017. That round collapsed the record list to a single entry before this year's US Open; the rounds of Rickie Fowler and Xander Schauffele on day one here increase that list to three entries. Note also that just as the old list had a 24-7 split in favour of a round of 63 not winning you the tournament, none of the three 62s posted so far got its owner over the winning line either.

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Branden Grace	Open	2017	third	tied 6th	Jordan Spieth
Rickie Fowler	US Open	2023	first	tied 5th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	US Open	2023	first	tied 10th	Wyndham Clark

Both 62s here were of the standard two-putt-par-on-the-18th variety, which means that both men had a putt for a 61, quite long ones in both cases.

All major rounds of 63 continue to be an irrelevance for the purposes of this list, so Tommy Fleetwood's second major championship round of 63 merits barely a raised eyebrow, both of them having been subsequent to Grace's 62. Even Brooks Koepka's two 63s in successive PGA Championships in 2018 and 2019 only get a shrug and a "so what", even though they both contributed to tournament wins. Rules are rules I'm afraid. Greg Norman and Vijay Singh are the only two men to make multiple 63s while the list was "live".

the last book I read

Temples Of Delight by Barbara Trapido.

Alice Pilling's life is pretty good by most people's standards - comfortably-off parents, albeit a bit on the slightly vulgar nouveau riche side prone to occasionally pronouncing French words incorrectly, a nice place at a nice private school for nice girls - but she craves a bit of, I dunno, excitement, even danger. This promptly arrives in the person of Veronica McCrail, known to all her friends as Jem, a tall and confident girl much given to snarky back-sassery to teachers, enthusiasm for works of subversive art and literature and hilarious stories of her hilarious family and their adventures - all pretty transparently bogus, but Alice is a sweet and trusting and gullible type, so it's all good. The two strike up a close, if somewhat mismatched, friendship, which is abruptly terminated when Jem fails to secure a scholarship to continue her studies in the Upper School (the sixth form, basically, or, erm, year thirteen or so in the crazy modern system). 

Alice's continuing academic excellence has her lined up for a place at Oxford, and it's there that she meets with Roland Dent, a local schoolteacher, and they strike up a relationship. While Alice seems quite content to drift along having nice day trips and occasionally hanging out with Roland's schoolboys who are slightly breathlessly intimidated by an Actual Woman, Roland already has some major plans for Alice which culminate in his making her Mrs. Dent. On a trip to the north of England with some of the boys Alice and Roland take some time out for a drive in the countryside, whereupon he makes it clear that they will shortly be parking in a secluded woodland spot so that he can deflower her, whereupon she makes it clear that this will be happening over her dead body and as if to prove the point drives the car off a bridge and into a river.

In the wake of this unsuccessful relationship, and while recuperating from the crash, Alice then enters, perhaps rather rashly, into another relationship with Matthew Riley, the young man who helped to rescue her and Roland from their drowned car. Then, after five years of silence, a letter arrives from Jem with some news: firstly she is in a Catholic hospital in Hampshire dying from cancer, secondly that she is pregnant and due to give birth imminently, and thirdly that she has come into possession of some information about a novel shortly to be published by an American publisher which she believes plagiarises some of her own teenage writings, and wants Alice to deal with it after she's gone.

Dealing with the novel situation involves engaging with Giovanni Angeletti, the American publisher in question, who happens to be in the country and accompanies Alice on a lengthy search for Jem's original manuscript. Once this is found Giovanni takes it upon himself to track down Jem and, having done so just too late to allow Alice to see her again before she dies, drops the bombshell that Jem's dying wish was that Alice be the legal guardian of her (safely delivered) child. 

So Giovanni will now jet off back to America and out of Alice's life, right? Well, no, actually, as in addition to there being a few novel-related (not to mention baby-related) loose ends to tie up, it turns out Giovanni has a non-academic interest in Alice, even after she reveals that she herself is pregnant, presumably as a result of her brief (and now ended) relationship with Matthew. Will Jem's writings ever see the light of day (now under her own name rather than that of the plagiarist)? Will Giovanni still want to make Alice the third Mrs. Angeletti? Will Alice want to become the third Mrs. Angeletti, especially after discovering that both the previous holders of that title died in slightly mysterious circumstances?

Those of you with absurdly long memories will recall that I read Juggling, which is a loose sequel to Temples Of Delight, back in early 2007 (it was the 12th book review on this list, this one being the 370th). Back in those days the reviews were a bit less verbose so I see that I didn't include much in the way of plot detail, but basically it involves Alice's two daughters and their adventures. I don't remember much about it (I mean, it was 16 years ago) but I remember enjoying it greatly, as I have every Barbara Trapido book that I've read (with the possible exception of Frankie & Stankie which I did have some reservations about). Temples Of Delight is no exception, despite the implausibilities of plot - partly this is because some parts of it, and some of the characters, are supposed to mirror the plot and characters of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. You've got to be a bit careful with this to avoid your readers concluding that you're just manoeuvring your characters into situations according to some pre-conceived formula, rather than just letting things happen, but of course if your readers are smart enough to worry about this stuff they'll presumably be smart enough to realise that this is actually how most novels get written anyway, just less transparently. Another similar example on this list is A Thousand Acres which mirrors the structure of Shakespeare's King Lear, and just as there I was not troubled by any particular familiarity with the source material here, which in many ways is probably a good thing.

Anyway, Temples Of Delight is itself a delight to read; I suppose what I would say is if you have the choice it would probably be better to read it and Juggling in the "right" order in order to have the shared narrative flow a bit better. Doesn't really matter, though. 

all the pretty hearses

You'll recall how I, even now only dimly aware of the awesome and terrible power I wield via this blog, joked about how the recent death of Martin Amis wasn't my fault, since I'd never posted a review of any of his books here. Well, just to redress the balance, here's one that definitely is my fault: Cormac McCarthy, who died today aged 89. I did speculate here back in 2013 that given his relatively un-prolific rate of output it was unclear whether we'd get any more novels before the inevitable happened - well, evidently mindful of this, and perhaps conscious that he was pushing his luck time-wise since my review of Blood Meridian appeared here all the way back in July 2009, he had a clearing of the decks in 2022 and knocked out two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. 

But the Curse Of Electric Halibut will not be denied, and when it finally took effect McCarthy had clocked up a survival span of just under fourteen years, wresting the previous record from the cold dead hands of Alison Lurie. McCarthy's demise adjusts the average age and curse length values to just over 82 and just under six years respectively.

The Road and No Country For Old Men are the other two novels that appear here, and all three are excellent in their own way. The Road would be The One, though. 

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
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 347d

the last book I read

Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill.

There is a woman. A woman with no name. Well, presumably she has a name in her actual life (yes, yes, all right, fictional life) but we're never told what it is. She meets a man, also nameless, and they start up a relationship which eventually leads to marriage and the arrival of a daughter. 

Having children changes the dynamic of the relationship, as it always does, and both parents' concerns shift towards keeping a small person alive and entertained rather than indulging themselves and each other. Moreover, while both have jobs it's the wife ("the wife" is how she's referred to pretty much exclusively for most of the book) who has to make most of the sacrifices to accommodate childcare needs - hey, because patriarchy, amirite, ladies?

So the husband (again, this is how he is referred to, although the story is told exclusively from the wife's point of view) is off at work while the wife is at home watching CBeebies in her slippers. She is a writer and teacher of writing so there is at least the possibility of doing some work during this time, and she does a couple of writing projects, notably a sort of general history of space exploration in collaboration with an ex-astronaut, though she struggles to find a fresh angle on the well-known material. 

Meanwhile hubby is out and about in the office, just hanging out, having lunch with colleagues without a care in the world, and, eventually, having an affair with an attractive young redheaded colleague. I mean I don't want to imply that this is inevitable behaviour; many men (including, just to be clear, me) manage to return to work while their wives are still on maternity leave without feeling the need to put it about relentlessly. The part that probably is inevitable is the part where the wife finds out and is, understandably, not pleased. After an awkward confrontation and a bit of A Scene between the three points of the love triangle outside the husband's office, it is agreed that wife, husband and daughter will uproot from urban New York and try to patch things up in a more rural environment with trees and grass and squirrels and shit.

So far, so meh, you might say: why, this is a perfectly commonplace tale told a thousand times before. There's a couple of answers to that: firstly every tale of conflict and woe has some properties that are uniquely its own, and secondly if you're not going to write a plot-driven heart-pounding arse-quaking thrillathon about sending an army of zombie Hitler clones to reboot the Sun then you might consider doing something interesting and unusual with novel style and structure instead. In this particular case that means the whole novel is written as a series of short paragraphs, many conveying something mostly tangential to the plot but hopefully coalescing into some deeper meaning. 

Ironically this works best in the first half of the book where the tone is much more meandering and discursive; about halfway through the viewpoint shifts from first- to third-person (though still with the wife as the focus) and adopts much more of a linear narrative to describe the marital breakdown. I think this second part is less effective, partly from just being a more orthodox narrative cut up and mucked around with a bit. 

This New York Times review asks the following question about the wife's unwritten second novel, referred to a couple of times in the book:

What is this novel? Why hasn’t it been written?

There is a sense in which one might ask the same question of Dept. Of Speculation itself. It's a very delicate balancing act writing a novel as trimmed of extraneous fat as this: you have to be careful not to trim away so much that you lose a sense of what's actually going on. I should add that this doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it; the structure works pretty well and some of the stuff about childbirth and early-years parenthood is very insightful, and, heck, it's 177 pages of widely-spaced narrow paragraphs so it's very quick to read. 

the best (and worst) of blondie

Literature and sport are all very well, you'll be saying, but what I really want is to stuff my big fat stupid face with some delicious cakey goodness until I fart. Well, Electric Halibut is here for you. It was my wife's birthday last week and, as is (intermittently) traditional, I concocted some goodies to celebrate. A few highlights from previous years include 2020's chocolate brownie cake, a triumph taste-wise but on an unfeasibly massive scale given that we were occupying at that time a moment in human history where it was uniquely difficult to share any of it with anyone outside the house. We did eventually work our way through all of it but it was quite an epic struggle.

And then there was 2021, where I hatched the idea of making some raspberry and white chocolate blondies instead, but in my hurry to get things in the oven (as it was rather late in the evening) made the elementary mistake of omitting all of the flour from the recipe, resulting in the ungodly oily lumpy (and needless to say inedible) goop pictured here. 

Then in 2022 we were in the throes of just having moved house and having to do quite a bit of unexpected junk clearance before getting our stuff organised how we wanted it, so I granted myself a cake amnesty and went and bought one from the shop instead. It was very nice, but to my taste a bit too sweet; then again I can't even remember to put flour in a cake so what the fuck do I know.

H's birthday today so bought this interesting cake. Huwie came with me and was very intent on reading the label. Served it up and he leaned over to H and whispered "Mum, it's a SUSPICIOUS CAKE". Actually very nice and not at all suspicious pic.twitter.com/EgSyJEPmuq

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) May 26, 2022

Anyway, I wasn't about to let 2021's failure define me as a man, a husband, and a cook, so I decided that 2023 was the year that we would finally crack the definitive blondie recipe. And I firmly believe that this is it. Note that it is largely derived from this recipe, with a bit of scaling-up of amounts to fit my 9" by 13" brownie tin and a bit of adjustment of proportions to accommodate the raspberries (which the original recipe doesn't have) and ensure it's not too absurdly sweet.

• 250 g unsalted butter
• 250 g white chocolate
• 125 g white granulated sugar
• 125 g light brown soft sugar
• 4 medium eggs
• 250 g plain flour
• 200 g white chocolate chips
• 50g fresh raspberries, chopped

Melt the butter and chocolate together (I used the microwave; a bowl over a pan of water would work just as well) mix it all up, add the sugar and eggs, mix some more, stir in the flour (if you're using an electric mixer, do this bit with a spoon first to avoid being engulfed in a mushroom cloud) and then the raspberries and chocolate chips (don't use the electric mixer at all here or you will end up with a uniformly pink cake with no raspberry bits in it).

That should give you a thick but still pourable batter which you can pour into a paper-lined brownie/traybake tin and put in an oven at around 180C/gas mark 4 for about 20-25 minutes. As with the brownies you want a slight wobble in the middle when you take them out. Let them cool and then put them in the fridge (overnight is good), then cut into smallish squares (they're pretty rich). You'll find the edge squares are a bit more cakey while the ones from the middle have a denser, rawer texture.

Anyway, they were exceptionally well-received and disappeared pretty quickly, helped by us being away for the weekend with another family of five. Where were those guys back in 2020 to help with the monster brownie cake? Well, locked in their house, obviously, but you take my point.

maps and gaps

A couple of updates on topics of regular interest (yes, all right, of interest to me anyway): firstly, following the review of Killing Mister Watson, I should note that the book is another for the list of books with maps in, in this case a couple of maps of the south-western Florida area where the story takes place. It's just a general map of the area, no attempt made to highlight particular locations relevant to the story except The Watson Place, which as we saw is actually marked on general modern-day maps of the area anyway.

Secondly, a cricket-related update in recognition of the start of the home Test match season tomorrow: an update to a couple of occasional lists last visited here and here respectively. Firstly the list of batsmen with multiple innings scores of over 250 needs a couple of additions: David Warner of Australia and Tom Latham of New Zealand. The full current list with each joiner's date (i.e. the date on which they made their second and qualifying score) is below:

• Don Bradman (1930)
• Walter Hammond (1933)
• Javed Miandad (1987)
• Brian Lara (1994)
• Graeme Smith (2003)
• Sanath Jayasuriya (2004)
• Virender Sehwag (2006)
• Stephen Fleming (2006)
• Kumar Sangakkara (2006)
• Younis Khan (2009)
• Ramnaresh Sarwan (2009)
• Mahela Jayawardene (2009)
• Chris Gayle (2010)
• Hashim Amla (2012)
• Michael Clarke (2012)
• Alistair Cook (2015)
• David Warner (2019)
• Tom Latham (2022)

Both Warner and Latham are recent featurees on the other list, as well, which is the list of lowest never-made scores in men's Test matches. The lowest entry on that list, as it has been since Herschelle Gibbs made 228 in early 2003, is 229. Interestingly the next five gaps above it in the list as of 2015 (238, 245, 252, 263, 264) have now all been filled, and the next gap is now at 265. The most recent bit of gap-plugging was by Latham himself when he made 252 against Bangladesh in early 2022. 

the last book I read

Killing Mister Watson by Peter Matthiessen.

Welcome to the south-west Florida coast. A constantly-shifting landscape of sandbars, mangrove swamps, shallow rivers and islands. The sort of place that's hard to travel around without a suitable boat and extensive local knowledge, and even then one good cathartic hurricane can change everything. That river mouth you wanted to make use of to get to the sea? Yeah, that's way over yonder now. The island you wanted to visit? Gone. And the people on it? They're gone too.

So, as you might imagine, any ideas of property rights over any of the bits of low-lying land here are elastic at best, and even if they were agreed upon, who's going to enforce them? As a consequence, as you might also imagine, this is an ideal place for anyone who wants to discreetly lose themselves somewhere beyond the usual range of law enforcement. It's not a holiday camp, though: you've still got to be prepared to put the work in to build yourself a shelter and scratch some sort of a living out of the soil. But you may find that when it comes, as it inevitably will, to enforcing your own claim to the bit of land you lay claim to in the event of disputes, and maybe to extending your claims to other pieces of land already claimed by others, that a certain elasticity of morals is actually quite helpful, and that it may just come down to being prepared to do what the other guy wouldn't. 

Into this environment comes Edgar Watson, a man - in common with quite a few of his co-residents of the area - with a slightly murky past that he doesn't necessarily welcome close questioning about. He's acquired the claim on a decent-sized patch of land down at Chatham Bend and has some ambitious ideas about building a house, clearing the land, growing sugar cane and selling the syrup. All of which is just dandy with the neighbours, who don't object to one of their number showing a bit of zest for private enterprise; after all, a successful business brings job opportunities and the lure of making a bit of money off the back of others' initiative. I mean, some of the rumours about EJ Watson's previous life and exploits, some of which might have contributed to his decision to occupy this remote backwater, are a bit hair-raising, but who knows what the real story is. Watson himself sure isn't telling, and despite being a man of considerable personal charm has a quick way with a knife or a gun brandished in the direction of anyone asking questions which probe too deeply.

But Mr. Watson hasn't done anything untoward since he's been at Chatham Bend, pays his bills on time, and has even brought his wife and children down to join him. True, there have been certain rumours about some of the workers he's had on the island cutting down the sugar cane, including that rather than pay some of them for their labour Watson has arranged for them to meet with some sort of "accident". But the appetite to investigate the disappearance of a few itinerant (and mostly black) cane-cutters is pretty low. The brutal murder inflicted upon Wally and Bet Tucker in a claim dispute over a neighbouring island is less easy to shrug off, especially as Bet was pregnant at the time and some pretty reliable witnesses say Watson's boat was seen in the area, but there's just enough plausible deniability to dissuade the locals from pressing things. Part of the reluctance, of course, derives from the knowledge that any retribution would almost certainly have to be organised by the locals themselves, official law enforcement being located many miles away and almost certainly reluctant to get involved.

But what proof is enough proof? What level of violence against other claim-holders would convince people that they might be next and that some sort of collective action should be taken? Things come to a head when Leslie Cox, a figure from Watson's previous life who seems to exert some sort of hold over him, arrives in the area and is taken on by Watson as a sort of foreman. It's not long before the body count starts to ramp up dramatically, and in the wake of the Florida hurricane of 1910 the locals gather among the devastation only to hear the put-put-put of Mr. Watson's boat, and a terrible and irrevocable decision is arrived at.

In terms of the narrative structure of Killing Mister Watson, this is where we came in: the novel's prologue features the ritual execution of Watson by his former friends and neighbours and what follows is a lengthy flashback. So there's no doubt over what's going to happen at the end (as if the novel's title itself were not enough of a giveaway); what the rest of the novel explores is the gradual realisation by the locals that only their own actions are going to save them. It's also about the terrible glamour of the ruthless psychopath, and the furtive regard that law-abiding people who understand the social contract have for those who choose to ride roughshod over it. It is, it must be said, quite slow to build up to the point where the pivotal violence erupts, and features a varied cast of characters who it's sometimes hard to keep track of. But the evocation of the watery Florida landscape is excellent and Watson's deadly charm rendered in a way that makes it easy to understand how things happened they way they did. The intensely real evocation of a landscape and the characters that fit into it is somewhat reminiscent of The Road Home; as with Jim Harrison, Peter Matthiessen is best known for a film made from one of his earlier works, At Play In The Fields Of The Lord. 

The main point to make about the events portrayed here is that they did, in some form at least, actually happen, EJ Watson being a real person whose home was substantial enough (and its former owner notorious enough) to warrant inclusion on maps of the area even now. Many of the minor characters were also real people, including storekeeper Ted Smallwood whose premises still exist in Chokoloskee.

Killing Mister Watson is the first book in a trilogy, still available as three separate books but also as a condensed and re-worked single volume, Shadow Country, which won the National Book Award in 2008. As part of the promotional activity for that book here's an interview with Matthiessen from 2008 where he explores some of the book's themes.