paris in the the spring

We've been on a couple of trips lately that have generated some photos, so this is mainly just somewhere to hang the links from. A few explanatory notes, though:

• 
  Hazel and I went to Paris on the Eurostar at the beginning of May, a quick 48-hour jaunt organised (and, more importantly, paid for) by Utility Warehouse, who Hazel does some work as a distributor for in addition to her photography activities. I can't give you the promotional spiel for UW, but if you want to have a look at what they have to offer, start here. Anyway, the point is we got a free trip to Paris out of it, staying at the very nice Hyatt Regency Paris Étoile out at Porte Maillot on the north-eastern corner of the Bois de Boulogne. Not much time to do anything out of the ordinary run of touristy stuff, but we did take a twilight river cruise on the Bateaux-Mouches on Friday night, and took advantage of a glorious sunny day on the Saturday to do a walking tour of Paris, starting at the Eiffel Tower and heading out to Montmartre and Sacré-Cœur. Photos can be found here. 
• A couple of weeks later we went off on a family trip (i.e. with Nia this time) to Bluestone in Pembrokeshire. This is a self-contained family holiday village complete with shops, pub (featuring excellent Doom Bar), swimming pool and various sporting activities. The best description I can give you is that it's a little bit like a cross between CenterParcs and The Prisoner, but without all that unpleasantness with the giant beach balls if one should stray beyond the boundaries of the complex. We verified this by venturing out a couple of times, once to cycle around Canaston Woods and once to go to the seaside at Freshwater East, which is lovely and - largely because it's not right next to a town with shops and toilets and amusement arcades and the like - very quiet. We also called into Tenby on the way back home, which is much more in the stereotypical British seaside town vein, but still very nice, and features the Pembrokeshire Pasty & Pie Co.'s excellent shop just a couple of minutes' walk from the beach. Photos can be found here.

filamentary, my dear Watts on

More exciting developments with the kitchen lighting, so I hope you've got your Bulbsplosion Bingo cards handy. First to expire was bulb number 12, one of the surviving 40W incandescent bulbs of indeterminate age (but given the general instability it's probably a few months at most), which gave out on May 24th. No pence per day calculation for this one, for obvious reasons.

Then, on May 27th, two more - firstly bulb number 7, another of the valiant surviving incandescent 40W brigade.

Also, bulb number 1, the first of the 28W halogen bulbs to expire. This one clocked up 28 days, which at an initial cost of £4.28 works out at an eye-watering 15.3p per day.

You'll notice that I'm lagging behind a bit on replacing the blown bulbs. I should get on and do this as I may as well use up the remaining ones in the cupboard, plus it'll also make it easier to track which ones go phut. I'm not intending to purchase any more until I've got some more conclusive evidence of which ones I should be buying. I suspect it'll end up being the LED ones, but I don't want to jump the gun. It's also important to be self-aware enough to recognise my natural inclination towards believing it's the IKEA bulbs that are the best, just because a bulb-buying trip to IKEA will also afford me the opportunity to stock up on meatballs and bizarre fish products.

the last book I read

The Blood Doctor by Barbara Vine.

Martin Nanther is a writer and, as Lord Nanther, a hereditary peer entitled to sit in the House of Lords. This right derives from his inheriting the peerage bestowed on his great-grandfather Henry Nanther by Queen Victoria - Henry Nanther having served as one of the Queen's senior physicians for many years.

Martin plans to write a biography of his great-grandfather, his interest having been piqued by some old documents which came into his possession after his mother's death which reveal some interesting titbits from Henry's personal life: he kept a mistress in London for many years, and married his wife Edith only after having previously been engaged to her younger sister Eleanor, that engagement ending when Eleanor was brutally murdered and her body thrown from a train.

Henry's medical speciality was diseases of the blood, and so he was invited to be Queen Victoria's resident expert on the so-called "royal disease" of haemophilia, from which her son Leopold suffered and of which her daughter Alice was a known carrier, Alice being responsible for infecting the Russian royal family as well.

Martin's suspicions are aroused when he starts researching his family tree for the biography, since several branches of it seem to feature sons who died very young, including Henry's own son George. This has a particular resonance for Martin as he and his second wife Jude are trying to conceive a child, but Jude has suffered a series of traumatic miscarriages. Is there some similar "bad blood" in the Nanther line?

Martin's family research leads him to various family members he had never even known existed, and to Switzerland, where pioneering studies of haemophilia were done in various isolated mountain communities, and where Henry was known to have been on several walking holidays in the mid-19th century. Is there a link between this and the mysterious early deaths of some of the male Nanthers? And who killed Eleanor? Was Henry involved? And if so, why?

You'll recall from the other Vine in this list that there are various themes that run through a lot of the books, and many of them are present here - the events that form the book's central puzzle (there is no "crime" in any meaningful legal sense) are over 100 years in the past and have to be uncovered by careful research involving lots of poring through letters and diaries, and there's a bit of homosexual subtext in that it's suggested Henry chose to do the things he's eventually revealed to have done after the death of his, hem hem, "close friend" Richard Hamilton in the Tay Bridge disaster in 1879.

The Vine books don't stand and fall on the quality of the central mystery, and just as well - I couldn't at this point tell you what it was in any of Asta's Book, The House Of Stairs or The Brimstone Wedding, though I read and enjoyed them all. The Chimney Sweeper's Boy's central protagonist having to flee and assume a new identity after accidentally giving his brother a blowjob in a sauna sticks in the mind, for some reason. The revelation of what Henry has done here is neither especially surprising nor at all plausible, but in a way it doesn't matter.

This is the most recent of all the Vines I've read, and they do seem to have gradually bulked up over the course of her career - the early ones are all around 300 pages, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy and Asta's Book are over 400 and The Blood Doctor is a beefy 466 pages. To be honest rather too much of this is taken up with meticulous family tree reconstruction that has the reader constantly diving back to the explanatory chart at the front, and none of which is as exciting as all the (literally) gory detail about haemophilia and its transmission. There's a lot here about "blood" in all its literal and colloquial senses - haemophilia, Martin and Jude's struggle to conceive (which turns out to be due to an unrelated genetic disorder), the House of Lords and the abolition of hereditary peers.

It's very good and very readable, but if you want some Vines I would suggest you try some of the earlier ones - A Fatal Inversion, The Brimstone Wedding, King Solomon's Carpet and No Night Is Too Long would do for starters.

bulbous developments #2

We've been away for a week, and it appears that another few bulbs took this as their opportunity to say "goodbye, cruel world" and "hasta la vista, baby" and furiously incandesce themselves into oblivion. Actually, one couldn't wait and gave up the ghost before we'd even left, but we found two more had committed filamentary seppuku on our return. You'll be wanting to tick these off on your Bulb Bingo card, so here they are:

Firstly, bulb number 10, which went on May 9th - this was an incandescent 25W job, which at 99p for 10 days works out at, let's say, 10p per day.

Then on our return today, two more. Firstly bulb number 4, one of the new batch of incandescent 40W ones, which at £1.49 for 18 days works out at a smidgen under 8.3p per day.

Then, later, bulb number 5, another incandescent 25W one, which at 99p for 18 days works out at 5.5p per day.

So by the rule I've just invented (but which seems reasonable enough) that says the expensive bulbs need to perform at least as well as the longest-lasting incandescent bulb, the required minimum expiry dates for the 4 quid LED bulbs and the £7.98 energy-saver are now 73 days and 145 days from their respective installation dates, or, to put it another way, July 19th and September 21st. Watch this space.

bulbous developments #1

Great things are afoot - the first two bulbs from the sample group as featured in this post have gone phut and, indeed, kablooie. And already the results are interesting - it was two of the high-powered incandescent 40W bulbs that went (at roughly the same time, on Monday 5th), as you might expect, but it was two of the new ones rather than two of the old ones that had already been cycled on and off an indeterminate number of times.

If you care to refer to the original bulb layout diagram, it was bulbs 2 and 3 that expired. This is actually quite opportune, in a way, as I just happen to have in my possession two new IKEA LED bulbs which I can now slot into the two gaps that have just opened up.

At first glance they are less blue than I was led (see what I did there?) to believe they might be - they are broadly the same sort of yellowish hue as the incandescent bulbs. Their "colour temperature" rating is 2700K, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Anyway, now the science bit: the two dead bulbs both lasted a pitiful 6 days each, at a cost of a smidgen under 25p per day. At that rate of attrition the LED bulbs only need to last 16 days to be better value, but I'd hope they might manage a bit longer than that. Time will tell.

didn't they do whale

Those of you who have been keeping an eye on developments with the possible imminent exploding whale situation in Newfoundland should be advised that it now looks as if the whale has taken the less exciting course of action and sprung a slow leak, making it now very unlikely that it's going to go pop or, indeed, kablooie. I know this because I've been keeping up with the latest news at hasthewhaleexplodedyet.com which has all the information you need, and the latest picture shows the whale all deflated and wrinkly, like a week-old party balloon.

Which is a pity, in many ways - though I expect the residents of the small Newfoundland town where this latest blubbery behemoth washed up are fairly relieved not to have their houses festooned in rotting whale entrails - because exploding whales are awesome, as I seem to remember saying towards the end of this earlier post. One should never miss an opportunity to link to the video of the Oregon whale-dynamiting in 1970, for instance, so here it is. No video exists, as far as I know, of the actual moment the Taiwanese sperm whale went off, though there is plenty of the gory aftermath.

There are a couple of other notable incidents, though - this one from the Faroe Islands where a sperm whale explodes while a marine biologist is trying to cut it open, and this one from Uruguay where the same thing happens (in a slightly less spectacular way, it must be said) while a whale carcass is being loaded onto a truck for disposal. I think the best of the rest is probably this one from somewhere in the Netherlands - what really makes it is the unflappable yellow-coated guy just phlegmatically sucking on his pipe as the malodorous tentacly Lovecraftian horror unfolds all around him.

the last book I read

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis.

Elizabeth Harmon is just eight years old when both her parents are messily killed in a car crash and she becomes an orphan and, as orphans do, gets packed off to an orphanage in Kentucky. This place likes to keep its potentially trouble-making youngsters nice and placid and compliant, and achieves this with some questionable drug-dispensing practices, basically involving keeping the kids dosed up with enough downers to pacify a rhinoceros.

So far, so One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, you might say, and, well, perhaps. But Beth's escape comes not from getting lobotomised and then asphyxiated by a seven-foot Native American, still less from hurling a stone washstand through a window and then jogging off into the night. No, Beth discovers that she has a freakish aptitude for chess after a chance encounter with the school janitor, Mr. Shaibel, while running a menial errand for a teacher. Mr. Shaibel is a keen player and grudgingly agrees to show her the rules. Needless to say she is soon running rings round him, and soon becomes something of a local curiosity, being periodically wheeled out to perform exhibitions against local school teams, whom she slaughters mercilessly despite playing twenty of them at the same time.

It's only when Beth is adopted by odd couple Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley that her chess career really takes off. Once Mr. Wheatley has disappeared on an endless "business trip" that it soon becomes clear he isn't coming back from, Beth decides to enter a local chess competition (having "borrowed" the entry fee) and wins. Mrs. Wheatley, previously a bit dismissive of Beth's chess obsession, now starts to sit up and take notice, and the two of them develop a nice little routine - Mrs. Wheatley organises the travel to chess tournaments, arranges the hotel and various other administrative stuff and then spends the rest of the time mooching round the hotel getting discreetly sloshed, and Beth takes care of the chess - the prize money from the tournaments pays all the bills.

The only downside of this arrangement is that Mrs. Wheatley has a bit of a tranquiliser habit, not to mention a bit of a booze habit, and some of these habits start to rub off on Beth, who was already a pretty regular consumer of the little green pills that they used to give out at the orphanage. Mostly she can keep it under control, but when Mrs. Wheatley expires after a bout of hepatitis on a chess-playing trip to Mexico, Beth is left to look after herself, and soon embarks on a gruelling dawn-to-dusk schedule of wine and gin consumption that leaves her fearful of having fried the precious brain cells that are the source of her freakish aptitude for chess.

Beth decides to invoke some help from her former dorm-mate at the orphanage, Jolene, the sort of sassy, no-nonsense black sidekick we're all familiar with from the movies. Soon enough Jolene has Beth eating properly, heading down the gym and, most importantly, cutting out the pints of white wine for breakfast. Beth's chess is soon restored to its former potency, and after a hard-fought win in the US championships she enters a couple of international tournaments, where she will inevitably come face-to-face with the Russians, and their intimidating world champion, Borgov.

Chess isn't an obvious subject for a novel, and it's a testament to Tevis's skill that the descriptions of chess games that occupy a fair chunk of the narrative of the novel are as exciting as they are. I used to play occasionally, so I know the basic rules (though I never played enough to be any good), and I recall a bit of the hoopla around the hilariously paranoid antics at the Karpov-Korchnoi world championship showdown in 1978, and the brief flurry of prime-time British TV chess coverage during the Kasparov-Short championship match in 1993. So I do have a bit of an interest, which raises the question of how interesting the novel would be to someone completely unfamiliar with the game. I suppose if you ignore the title and the picture on the front you've only got yourself to blame.

Anyway, Beth Harmon is an interesting, though not especially sympathetic character - we're presumably meant to draw some conclusions about the parallels between the sort of personality that is well-suited to endless poring over chess theory and the sort of personality that can't stop itself shovelling in the gin and pills. Harmon's being a woman is also interesting; at the time of the novel's publication (1983) no woman had ever made any serious impact at the highest level of chess, although seven-year-old Judit Polgár had no doubt already played her first games. There are some elements of heavily-disguised autobiography here as well  - Beth's early promise, brief going off the rails and triumphant return echoing Tevis's own early successes with The Hustler and The Man Who Fell To Earth (both famously filmed), a couple of decades of alcoholism and then a late flurry of novels (including this one) before his death in 1984.

I'd say this is as much of a little forgotten gem of late-20th century American fiction as Stoner, even though it's less self-consciously literary. A couple of further coincidental parallels: the action in The Queen's Gambit starts just as Stoner's ends, in the mid-1950s, and both books have forewords by other authors who feature in this list - John McGahern there, Lionel Shriver here.

here's something bulbous you may be interested in

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

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

A quick run-through from left to right:

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

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

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

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

chronicle of a death forgotten

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

So the definitive list now reads:

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

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

the last book I read

Stoner by John Williams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chronicle of a death foretold

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

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

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

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

celebrity lookeylikey of the day; special non-celebrity edition

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

incidental music spot of the day

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

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

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

the last book I read

O-Zone by Paul Theroux.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

headlines of the day

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

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

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

gladiator? i hardly noah

Couple of footnotes to the rather long Noah post:

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

No wonder it was listed as ‘fiction.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

croah's ark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

throw grammar from the train

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

100 blogs of solitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the last book I read

Free Fall by William Golding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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