the last book I read

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley.

Larry Cook is an Iowa farmer, who's built up and expanded the farm he inherited from his father and grandfather by some shrewd acquisitions of neighbouring farmland from those who didn't share his work ethic or his nose for business.

Needless to say keeping on top of this sort of operation requires day-to-day dedication, and moreover a supporting team who will take care of the administrative duties like washing clothes, keeping the house clean, cooking dinner, looking after the kids, helping out with the harvest when necessary. This duty falls first on the wife and thereafter on the children and their spouses, those who choose to stay in the vicinity anyway.

In Larry's case his wife died 20-odd years ago, nominally of cancer but presumably at least partly of exhaustion. Since then the burden of domestic tasks has fallen mostly to Larry's two oldest daughters Ginny and Rose, and the burden of helping out with farm activities to their respective spouses Ty and Pete, the youngest daughter, Caroline, having escaped to a career as a lawyer in nearby Des Moines.

At a party thrown by a neighbouring farmer, Larry springs a bit of a surprise - he's effectively retiring, and has had legal documents drawn up to transfer ownership of the farm and all its assets jointly to the three sisters. Ginny and Rose, after a bit of thought, accept, while Caroline, possibly suspicious of her father's motives, possibly just reluctant to be drawn back into day-to-day farm business, is a bit more hesitant. At this point Larry impulsively cuts her out of the deal and splits the assets equally between Ginny and Rose instead.

From this point things start to unravel fairly quickly. Larry finds himself a bit aimless without the day-to-day concerns of keeping the farm afloat and quickly enters a spiral of increasingly drunken and eccentric behaviour. Meanwhile Jess Clark, the son of Harold Clark, the farmer next door, returns from a long exile which began when he was drafted into the Vietnam War, and soon embarks on a brief affair with Ginny. Ty, who has shouldered most of the responsibility for the running of the farm, takes out a large and risky loan to finance setting up a pig-breeding operation and doing all the necessary construction.

Things get worse. Larry has a change of mind about the handover, and, with some help from Caroline (with whom he has quickly effected a reconciliation) brings a legal action to try and have the handover annulled. Rose has a heart-to-heart with Ginny wherein she reveals that Larry abused her sexually when she was younger, and she strongly suspects that he abused Ginny as well, though Ginny claims to have no recollection of it. Ginny's involvement with Jess having petered out, Rose starts sleeping with Jess, and Pete, having been clued in by Rose both to the childhood abuse and the present-day affair, drunkenly drives his truck into a lake and drowns. Larry, increasingly mentally unstable, has a very public meltdown at another community gathering, and eventually moves out to go and stay with the Clarks up the road. On returning to her childhood bedroom to do some tidying up after his departure, Ginny experiences a rush of repressed memories and realises that Rose was right and Larry had been abusing her, too.

Ginny finds living with Ty's constant absences on the farm and Rose's relationship with Jess increasingly intolerable, and eventually tensions rise to a point where Ginny decides that she has to get away. She takes a job as a waitress in a nearby town and lives in happy ignorance of events at the farm for a couple of years, until eventually both Ty and Rose call on her, Ty to tell her he's selling up and moving to Texas to start a new life and wants a divorce, and Rose to tell her that her breast cancer has returned and that she's in hospital. By this point Larry has also died of a heart attack.

So Ginny returns to the farm to look after Rose's two daughters while Rose is in hospital, where she eventually dies. The farm and all the buildings and their contents are to be sold to pay off debts, so Caroline and Ginny meet at the farmhouse to attempt to divvy up some family possessions, immediately have an argument and go their separate ways, Caroline back to Des Moines and Ginny back to her waitressing job, this time with Rose's two daughters in tow.

And that's it. Reading that back it all sounds like it's set in Grimsville, Iowa, and I suppose it is in that a whole relentless load of trouble is shovelled onto the central characters, and everyone is left in a state of either death, divorce or exile at the end. That it doesn't feel as depressing as it ought to is a testament to Smiley's skill as a writer - the details of the vastness of the Iowan landscape, the intricate details of family relationships and the interaction with the tight-knit local community where everyone knows everyone else's business are so fascinating that the fact that everyone's lives are going to shit around their ears is almost incidental.

The other thing about A Thousand Acres is that it's clearly based on the King Lear story (as in, you know, Shakespeare and that). As this New York Times review says, that poses a difficulty in that you want to acknowledge it, while at the same time not getting into some trainspottery listing of similarities and differences at the expense of just enjoying the novel. As it happens I was in the fairly happy position of not being especially familiar with the play (I don't think I've ever seen it on either stage or screen), so beyond the obvious parallels of the principal characters' names (Larry, Ginny, Rose, Caroline versus Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia) and the knowledge that it's a tragedy (and so things were unlikely to end well for all concerned) I didn't have the background knowledge to do the comparisons and was able to just immerse myself in the story.

A Thousand Acres won two of the heavyweight American fiction awards when it was published in 1991, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. My brief lists for these go: 1953, 1961, 1981, 1985, 1992, 1996, 2003, 2007 and 1991, 2000, 2002 respectively. For what it's worth I thought it was exceptionally good and - just a thought - if you're looking for your Great American Novel you could do worse than start here.

incidental music spot of the day

More Sigur Rós, this time during the opening moments of The Living Mountain: A Cairngorms Journey on BBC Four earlier this evening. Remarkably I was able to pinpoint this one rather more exactly than here, as it's one of their most memorable tunes. I still can't tell you what it's called, as it doesn't officially have a title (unofficially it's called Njósnavélin), but it's the fourth track on their 2002 "brackets" album.

The program itself was an interesting celebration (by travel writer Robert Macfarlane) of the little-known book The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. Not a book I was previously familiar with, but it sounds fascinating from the snippets available to read at the Amazon link. That's not to say I agree unreservedly with all the sentiments expressed in the programme - as much as I advocate and encourage a bit of wandering about, smelling the flowers and looking at the scenery I can't really get behind an approach that "abandons the summit as the organising principle of a mountain". If I'm going up a mountain then the focal point of the day is standing on top of it, whatever other delights might be experienced on the way up and down. No doubt this is reflective of some patriarchal notions of conquest in my irredeemable male psyche, and makes me some sort of nature rapist. Oh well.

So on the one hand some of it sounds a bit hello clouds hello sky for my taste; on the other hand nobody who loves mountains would deny that there's a sort of transcendent thing going on when you're standing on a lofty peak on a clear day with no-one else for miles around. This in turn is probably reflective of some profound misanthropy on my part, something I'll cop to without any protest at all.

headline of the day

Not much to add to this, really:

- except to commend the nice deadpan tone of the article in Wigan Today describing the original incident, especially this bit:

He then began performing a sex act and walked over to the postbox and “started to make sexual advances towards it.”

See, you can't just leap onto a postbox and start humping it, you've got to start by making some "sexual advances" - you know, looking away all bashfully before casting coquettish glances back over your shoulder, that sort of thing. Not an easy thing to do with the required dignity and panache while sitting on a bench with your trousers around your ankles.

A statement read by the prosecution described the defendant as drunk.

Since the police are treating the death as "non-suspicious" I assume that Mr. Bennett failed to be sufficiently chastened by his experiences (or possibly just didn't remember them) to make the lifestyle changes that he needed to make. Or maybe he spoke out of turn in the Chinese restaurant and someone slipped him a tainted spring roll. I do have a recollection of sitting in Mr. Kong's Chinese restaurant off Leicester Square with my friend Tony and some others back in the late 1990s having a competition to see who could say TRIADS the loudest before someone emerged from the kitchen and attacked us with a meat cleaver. Luckily the staff failed to conform to racist stereotype and just ignored us.

Bennett was also obliged to sign the Sex Offenders register as a result of the postbox incident, which seems fair enough for an incident in a public place bookended by a lot of other trousers-down public exposing behaviour. The 2007 case of the Scottish man who attempted to have sex with a bicycle seems a bit less clear-cut to me, since he was in the relative privacy of his room at the time. This follow-up article mentions another man who was nicked for two separate incidents involving a shoe and a traffic cone. There's really no accounting for taste.

knocked out in the semi-vinyls

Tonight's randomly-inspired music list of the day goes a little bit like this: the CD format gives recording companies a nice round blank canvas to work with, which you can fill in a whole variety of different ways. Back in the early days nobody really made the effort, since the little silver disc with just a bald track listing on it was novelty enough, but lately people have started trying to fill the space with something a bit more interesting.

So here's a couple of entries for a sub-genre of the CD decoration genre: CDs mocked up to look like LPs, or vinyl records more generally. I'm not going to claim that I've exhaustively scoured my own collection for every single example I own, but these three presented themselves, so they'll do for starters:

Ashes & Fire by Ryan Adams:

Superunknown by Soundgarden:

Deep Fried Fanclub by Teenage Fanclub:

I think, strictly speaking, judging by the size at which the central labels are rendered, the first and last are meant to be 7" singles and the middle one is meant to be an LP. You're probably not going to shell out for an album just because the CD looks like a vinyl record, so the potted reviews are, respectively: one of his best recent albums, one of the great rock albums of the 1990s, a fairly inessential B-sides and odds & sods collection.

I invite further nominations (with photographic proof, of course).

the last book I read

The Redeemer by Jo Nesbø.

Stop me if you've heard this one before, but: Harry Hole is an uncompromising maverick Norwegian cop. Han spiller ikke etter boka, men av Gud han får resultater.

So, the checklist. Recovering (and occasionally relapsing) alcoholic? Check. Broken marriage and strained relationship with ex-spouse and child? Check. Succession of police partners getting offed messily in the course of investigations? Check. Vexed relationship with more "orthodox" police superiors? Check. But, dammit, results, etc.? You betcha.

So when Robert Karlsen, a senior Salvation Army officer and pillar of the Oslo community, is executed in a very public way by a mysterious assassin at a pre-Christmas carol singalong and heroin addict soup handout, it's Harry Hole who gets the job of investigating. One of the first things he discovers is that despite the gunman having been in the plain view of several people, no-one seems to be able to remember or agree what his face looks like.

Things soon get a lot more complicated: it soon transpires that a) the actual target of the hit was Robert's brother Jon Karlsen and b) the killer has worked out he's shot the wrong man and is sticking around to try to finish the job. So Harry has to simultaneously protect Jon from being bumped off and find out who the killer is and why he's got it in for the Karlsen brothers, on the face of it both paragons of religiously-inspired moral rectitude and charitable selflessness.

Oh, come off it, you'll be saying at this point: we all know that religious sects, even one as apparently upstanding as the Sally Army, are hotbeds of repressed (and not-so-repressed) sexual perversity and operate an internal code of silence to keep their nasty little secrets from ever seeing the light of day. So it's only a matter of time before some unspeakable shit comes floating to the surface. And, to be fair, we already know this, as there was a sort of flashback prologue featuring an un-named 14-year-old girl at a Salvation Army retreat being raped in an outside toilet by an un-named man, but, we're invited to infer, someone who we've probably already met in the "present day" part of the narrative.

Harry tracks down the hitman's boss (who also turns out to be his mother) to Zagreb, where she reveals that the person she was engaged by to organise the hit was (drum roll) Robert Karlsen himself. But why would Robert want to have Jon killed? Cherchez la femme, perhaps? Is it something to do with Jon's girlfriend Thea? Or fellow Salvation Army officer (and possible love interest for Harry) Martine? Or is it something to do with Sofia, the young Croatian girl who lives in the block of flats that's the subject of a complex (and quite possibly crooked) property deal involving Jon Karlsen?

Well, I won't lay out the full plot details here, not least because I'm not entirely sure I understood them myself. The very basic version is: Jon Karlsen posed as Robert Karlsen in order to go to Zagreb to take out a hit on Jon Karlsen (i.e. himself) in order to then swap soup-ladling shifts with Robert and engineer his killing in his (Jon's) place. It turns out being a high-ranking Salvation Army officer doesn't stop you from being a psychopathic serial rapist and cop-murderer with an interesting sideline in sucking people's eyes out with a hoover attachment. Needless to say our elusive Croatian friend is a multiple killer as well, but given the choice of sparing his life or Jon's at Oslo airport Harry decides to let him go.

The Redeemer is the sixth novel to feature detective Harry Hole, but there's no particular need to have read its predecessors (I certainly haven't) to "get" this one. It's very much in the Scandi-noir genre which also features Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson in the book genre and things like The Killing on TV, and is still clearly big business judging by the amount of hype and the stellar cast lavished on the current Sky Atlantic offering Fortitude. Concentrating on the books, since I haven't seen any of the TV stuff, I think The Redeemer is probably more exciting than Faceless Killers, and better-written and less silly than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and its successors. That said, it's 562 pages long, and some of the sub-plot about Jon's property dealings could probably have been left out without detracting from the overall effect very much (a bit like all that stuff about toilets in The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest). It's good, though: I'm not about to rush out and buy all of them, but I wouldn't rule out dipping in again in future. The bottom line is that I wanted to find out what was going to happen next, which is the highest compliment available in the thriller genre.

language, timothy

I'm a sucker for a book list, as you know, so when I came across this list of foreign novels YOU MUST READ in the Independent this week (I have read one, Norwegian Wood, and own another, Foucault's Pendulum) and spotted a link to a story about a woman who'd set herself the task of reading a book from every country in the world, I was intrigued. Needless to say this was a stunt itself designed to generate a book (and here it is) but it's quite interesting nonetheless.

Slightly frustratingly, there isn't just a list of what she read, but you can get it from here since the relevant book from each country is the hyperlinked one. There aren't many places where the list coincides with stuff I've read, but it does happen occasionally, specifically for Australia, Norway and Russia.

A quick and very unscientific scan of my bookshelves for novels originally written in foreign yields the following list of authors, in no particular order:

• Italian: Alessandro Baricco, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Primo Levi
• French: Alain-Fournier, Michel Houellebecq, Françoise Sagan
• Norwegian: Knut Hamsun, Jostein Gaarder
• Russian: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Danish: Peter Høeg
• German: Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll, Patrick Süskind
• Czech: Milan Kundera
• Swedish: Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell
• Hungarian: Sándor Márai
• Spanish: Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa
• Japanese: Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Kenzaburō Ōe
• Hebrew: Amos Oz
• Portuguese: José Saramago

Plenty of gaps to be filled in there, even just in Europe: Polish, Greek, Finnish, Dutch. There are a couple of authors who you assume might generate some entries on this list, but who turn out to have actually written most of their novels in English, like Chinua Achebe and Vladimir Nabokov.

capital gains

As anyone who knows me will be tired of hearing by now, my daughter is utterly amazing and captivating and a joy to spend time with, not to mention being a frickin' genius. Nonetheless it is true that the freedom for Hazel and me to just take off and go away somewhere for the weekend is a bit constrained these days, partly because we just can't afford it any more, but partly because of the logistical challenges of finding somewhere to deposit the bairn.

So it was a pleasant change to be able to make a couple of trips up to London in late January and early February, one a flying visit just for a few hours and one for a couple of child-free days. The flying visit a couple of weeks ago was to pick up a new car, one of the perks of Hazel's "other" job as a distributor for Utility Warehouse. You might have seen the odd UW Mini around the place; well, distributors of a certain level of seniority are eligible to have one - not for free, but as part of a leasing package whose rates are quite good, and since we wanted to get rid of the old Focus the timing was pretty much ideal. Here's Hazel getting the official ceremonial key handover from Network Director Wayne Coupland outside UW Network HQ on the Edgware Road.

Another UW jolly a couple of weeks later, this one being the equivalent of the Paris trip last year. In theory this was supposed to be a trip to another European destination, but since Hazel's now 7 months pregnant and would have been ineligible to fly at the time of the trip we persuaded the company to give us a personal jaunt to London instead, which they kindly agreed to.

Our last proper trip to London was in June 2011, a few weeks before we got married, and we replicated part of that trip by having a jaunt on the London Eye. It was worth the repeat trip because the London skyline has been changing a bit lately, what with the appearance of the Shard, the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie.

We also took a trip to the theatre to see The Book Of Mormon, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's satirical musical. I have a bit of a problem with musicals in general, and it's a fundamental structural problem: we're meant to suspend disbelief in the usual way and engage with the drama in the non-musical bits, accepting that these are real people doing real-people stuff, but then also somehow accept that some of the principal people are going to occasionally burst into song with full orchestral/rock band (delete as applicable) backing, in a way that real people, in my experience at least, just don't tend to do. And then, worse still, drop straight back into the drama without any of the other protagonists going: erm, wait a minute, what was all that singing about just then? The more po-faced and gritty the drama (think Les Miserables, for instance) the more grating and ridiculous the effect.

So the only sort of musical that works (in my head, anyway) is one that subverts the ludicrous campery of the musical genre by being ludicrously camp and knowing throughout, not just in the musical bits. In other words, what I suppose I'm saying is that it's really only comedy that works in musicals, but, paradoxically, it only works because it's got a long history of serious drama being delivered in the same format to satirise. Book Of Mormon certainly delivers on the comedy front, as well as delivering, as you'd expect, some general mockery of religion in general and Mormonism in particular. Basically if you liked the South Park movie, which was, despite all the Saddam-Hussein-bumming-Satan stuff, itself basically a musical, you'll like this.

Just as an aside, there's an argument that Mormonism is just Scientology plus nearly 200 years of normalising, the underlying space-based nonsense being very nearly as wacky as Scientology. It's just gained a thin veneer of respectability because the loony that made the whole thing up in his head died in 1844, not 1986.

Anyway, back to London: we had originally intended to go and have a look round the Natural History Museum, but as you might (in hindsight) have expected on a rather wet Saturday afternoon there was a queue a gazillion miles long and an apparent wait time of about an hour and a half, so we decided to go to the pub instead and have a rethink. What we ended up doing was going to the much more sparsely attended Hunterian Museum just round the corner from Holborn tube station in Lincoln's Inn Fields (the largest public square in London: FACT) - the "secret London" article we looked up on the internet that recommended this described it as "The Museum Of Body Parts", which is a bit lurid, but, as it turns out, pretty accurate. As long as you aren't squeamish about seeing cocks in jars then this is a fascinating place.

Things I have seen in jars today: a rabbit's vagina, a horse's nipple, several foetuses, and the diseased rectum of the Bishop of Durham.
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 31, 2015

That's the FORMER Bishop of Durham, obviously.
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 31, 2015

One of the most celebrated exhibits is of the startling skeleton of the Irish giant Charles Byrne, whose corpse John Hunter allegedly acquired in slightly dubious circumstances and then boiled the flesh off. No word on what he did with the resulting meaty soup, but, you know, it would have been a shame to waste it. A loosely fictionalised version of Byrne features in Hilary Mantel's 1998 novel The Giant, O'Brien.

After a hilarious failure of research resulted in our attempting to visit Borough Market on the Sunday only to find it's closed on Sundays, we instead did some rather more touristy stuff, including walking across Tower Bridge, which I don't think I'd done before. We also passed the Monument, which I was unable to resist the temptation to climb (311 steps!) to the top of, just so I could say I'd done it.

One of the great joys of London is just wandering around and occasionally nipping off down a side-street and encountering an interesting pub or restaurant. Here's a couple we popped into:

• Shaws Booksellers, just round the corner from St. Paul's Cathedral. Nice little pub, draught London Pride, bish bosh, sorted. It turns out it's also just round the corner from the London HQ of the Church of Scientology.
• The Hoop & Toy, round the back of South Kensington tube station. This is the pub we adjourned to after the abortive attempt to get into the Natural History Museum. London Pride again. 
• Beirut Express just a couple of minutes away down Old Brompton Road, where we went for a Lebanese lunch. Nice lamb-y bread-y things, free olives, vast bowl of houmous. 
• Cabana just a few minutes from Tottenham Court Road tube station. Great Brazilian grub including possibly the rarest steak I've ever eaten. Not quite as epic, I'd have to say, as the Brazilian food we had at Bem Brasil when we were up in Liverpool back in July (and which I seem to have forgotten to mention at the time), but pretty good. 
• We did attempt a nostalgic re-visit to Ye Olde Mitre in Holborn after visiting the Hunterian Museum, just to sluice away the memory of the Bishop of Durham's diseased rectum, but unfortunately (and slightly bizarrely) it's closed at weekends.

got tweets if you want it; don't sound like no sonnet

How many of you have browsed my Twitter timeline and thought to yourselves: hey, this is a bit like bloody poetry or something? That's right, none of you. But rest assured that isn't going to stop me from making use of the new Poetweet facility to turn random lines from recent-ish tweets into poetry. Here are three examples, entitled, respectively, Get out, June 2001 and Was open. Note that you're not constrained to generating poems from your own Twitter feed, you can use any Twitter handle you like.

pages through the ages

A couple of follow-up notes about that last book review: firstly I should point out the odd coincidence whereby the narratives of both Birdsong and its predecessor The Birthday Boys begin in the same year, 1910. The business of tunneling towards the enemy from your First World War trench to plant explosives was also touched upon, more briefly, in Waiting For Sunrise.

Secondly, and more importantly, Birdsong is the 200th book to appear in this list since it started in September 2006. This review in September 2010 marked book number 100, and included a few selected statistical delights, so let's see how the second hundred compares:

• 28 of the second 100 were by women, compared with 25 of the first 100;
• 100 novels in 1580 days is a slightly slower pace than 1475 days for the first 100, but to be fair I didn't have any children back then. Split the 200 into four blocks of 50 and the first three blocks occupy 780, 683 and 564 days respectively, and the fourth, which starts almost exactly at the time Nia was born in April 2012, occupies 1002 days;
• Another explanation for the delay is that the second 100 books comprise 30,761 pages, compared with 28,398 for the first 100. If you do the maths you'll find that that actually works out at 19.47 pages per day, fractionally faster than the first 100 at 19.25;
• The greater page count is partly explained by the presence of Until I Find You, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest and Infinite Jest, which at 924, 746 and 1079 pages respectively are all longer than the 653 pages of The Corrections, the longest book in the first 100;
• The only authors to appear more than once in the second 100 books are: Beryl Bainbridge, Iain Banks (once with the M, once without), Ian McEwan, Lawrence Durrell, Patricia Highsmith, Russell Hoban, Stieg Larsson and William Boyd. Highsmith, Hoban and Boyd feature three times each, all the others twice. So that means the 100 books featured 89 different authors, a slightly less diverse bunch than the first 100 which featured 93;
• Conversely, 44 of the 100 were by authors who were new to me, compared with 42 last time.

It's going terribly well, so let's press on. See you again some time in 2019.

the last book I read

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks.

Stephen Wraysford is a bit of a typical English cold fish, but he's been given an ideal opportunity to loosen up and broaden his horizons a bit, as he's been sent on an industrial fact-finding mission to France (Amiens in particular) by his employers at the textile company he works for in England. Not a bad gig for a 20-year-old, as he's being accommodated by the owner of the French textile company, René Azaire, in his own house.

Stephen's loosening-up process extends way beyond learning to quaff red wine at lunchtimes and shrug Gallicly, though, as he's soon (page 57 in my version) getting better acquainted with Mrs. Azaire by going down on her comme une tonne de briques while René is out of the house. The affair gets serious enough for Stephen and Isabelle (aka Mrs. Azaire) to run away to start a new life together, but Isabelle is wracked by guilt and eventually returns to seek forgiveness from René, leaving Stephen bereft. She also neglects to inform him that, after many years of failed attempts to conceive with René, she is pregnant.

That initial scene-setting action takes place in 1910, so you can probably guess roughly what's going to happen next. Sure enough, we leap forward to 1916 and the horrific realities of trench warfare: shrapnel, gas gangrene, people's faces getting blown off and landing on your shoes, that sort of thing. Stephen is now an army officer commanding a trench-full of men, including some whose job is to tunnel into the face of the trench towards the enemy - a horrendously dangerous undertaking, to be sure, what with the constant danger of the whole thing falling in on your head, in addition to the possibility of the enemy tunneling under you and blowing you up. Nonetheless in strict percentage terms it's still probably a better bet than climbing out and going over the top. Just to prove the point, Stephen's company are required to take part in the barely-believable slaughter of the Battle of the Somme, which Stephen somehow manages to survive despite going over the top and seeing most of his men blown into tiny fragments around him.

During brief periods of leave from the relentless bombardment and dismemberment at the Somme and, later, at the Battle of Messines (or the "Battle of Messiness" as I would have called it if I'd been there, hahaha), Stephen makes a nostalgic return to Amiens and has a chance meeting with Jeanne, Isabelle's sister. Jeanne is initially reluctant to divulge any information, but eventually relents and tells him that Isabelle is alive and shortly to leave town to be with her German fiancé, Max, but would like to see Stephen before she leaves. When Stephen and Isabelle meet (chaperoned by Jeanne) it is revealed that Isabelle has been quite severely injured in a shell blast and has suffered injuries and scarring to her arm and face. Stephen and Isabelle part on affectionate terms, although she does once again forget to mention the pregnancy and subsequent birth of their child, now about five years old. Well, it's easy for things to slip your mind.

So far, so linear. But come on, this is a work of 1990s literary fiction, so bring on the fractured timeline shit already. Wait, here it is: interwoven with all the World War I stuff is a jump forward to 1978, where Stephen's grand-daughter Elizabeth Benson is doing a bit of research into her grandfather's old diaries, while simultaneously running her own clothing company and also conducting a clandestine affair with a bloke called Robert who works in Europe and makes regular unfulfilled promises to leave his wife during his brief trysts with Elizabeth. Elizabeth has come across some of Stephen's old diaries and starts to decode them, with the help of the husband of a colleague who has some code-breaking expertise. As she reads Elizabeth starts to gradually take more of an interest in the project, to the extent of making a trip to France (with the added ulterior motive of dropping in on Robert for a quick bunk-up) to look at the battlefield and the Thiepval Memorial.

We return to France for Stephen's final wartime moments, and it looks as if his luck has finally run out as he is trapped underground after a German mine explodes and collapses the tunnels behind him. With the help of Jack Firebrace, one of the British tunnelers, he manages to unearth a cache of explosives and rig it up to blow a hole in the earth above them. Obviously the problem with this is that it's as likely to bury them as it is to free them, but they've got no other options. Sure enough Stephen and Jack are buried, but some German soldiers from a nearby trench dig them out - too late for Jack, but Stephen survives, and without having to engage in any hand-to-hand combat with any Germans, as the war is pretty much over and no-one wants to fight any more.

Back in the "present", Elizabeth has discovered that she is pregnant with Robert's child, and, slightly irrationally, decides that the two of them should slope off to a nice cottage in the middle of nowhere for the last week or so before the due date. Needless to say the inevitable happens, and Robert finds himself doing the old hot-water-and-towels routine while he waits for the local doctor to arrive. By the time the doctor turns up Elizabeth has popped out a healthy baby boy, which she names John after Jack Firebrace's dead son in accordance with Stephen's promise while the two of them were entombed.

My Vintage Future Classics edition of Birdsong has - in addition to some rather bossy "reading notes" at the end - an introduction by the author in which he reveals that the book was written at what sounds like breakneck speed between June 1992 and January 1993. He admits to the speed of composition resulting in a few loose ends, and there are a couple which just grate slightly: the appearance of Stuart as a possible suitor for Elizabeth and rival to Robert is presented as building up to something important, and indeed he ends up proposing to her, in a roundabout sort of way. Once he's left Elizabeth thinking about it and sloped off into the night, we never hear from him again, though, nor is he or his proposal even mentioned, which is a bit odd. The other more glaring omission is any explanation for Stephen's slightly odd phobia about birds. Since it's relevant to a couple of key passages in the book, and was important enough to be alluded to in the book's title, for goodness' sake, it might have been nice to have had some insight into what was going on.

These are minor quibbles about a book I enjoyed greatly, far more than I was expecting to in fact. The grim realities of trench warfare aren't perhaps the most promising raw ingredients for entertainment, but the accounts of the grinding tedium mixed with occasional unimaginable horror and (in the moments before going over the top to attack) the opportunity to contemplate your own almost certain painful death are riveting. It's clearly a struggle not to have the sections featuring Elizabeth seem a bit drab in comparison, and the framing device teeters on the edge of being a drag on the plot rather than augmenting it, but it just about works, even though all the new life/new beginnings stuff at the end is laying the symbolism on a bit thick. I'd have been sure to mention these concerns to Sebastian Faulks when I met him, but unfortunately he hadn't yet written Birdsong at the time, so I couldn't.

choccy, skills and ganache

As I've said before, I'm not big on desserts, but this was recommended to me by the wife of a good friend of mine who makes cakes for a living, and it looked both a) delicious and b) pretty simple, so I thought I'd give it a go. Now I could just direct you to the original recipe, but it does that American thing of giving all the quantities in incomprehensible American units (cups, for fuck's sake), so I thought a bit of translation might be helpful.

So what you'll need is as follows:

• 30-40 Oreos - available in the UK in packets of 14 or so, so three packets will probably do you. Alternatively you could assert your Britishness and use Bourbons or something instead;
• one standard 250g pack of butter;
• 120g brown sugar;
• one 300ml carton of double cream;
• 350g dark chocolate.

What you do is basically in three stages with an hour or so in between, during which time you can dig the garden, do your tax return, read some improving literature, make sweet sweet love to your lady friend, or all of the above if you're quick.

Step one is to make a biscuit base., much the same as if you were making cheesecake, by blitzing the Oreos, filling and all, in a food processor and then stirring in half the butter, melted. Then press this into a flan tin and put it in the fridge for an hour or so.

Step two is to make some caramel. This sounds like the sort of scary baking chemistry that requires jam thermometers and the like, but actually it couldn't be easier. Throw equal 120g quantities of butter and brown sugar into a saucepan, stir till the sugar has dissolved and the whole thing is bubbling (no more than five minutes or so), then take the whole thing off the heat and stir in 60ml of the double cream. Set this aside for 10-15 minutes to cool, then pour it into the crust - you shouldn't have to do any spreading as it should still be liquid enough to find its own level. Stick it back in the fridge for half an hour or so.

Step three is to make some chocolate ganache. Again, this all sounds a bit like a job for Lindt's master chocolatiers, but it's actually pretty easy. Smash up some dark chocolate into small pieces, heat up the rest (240ml) of the cream in a small saucepan, and pour it over the chocolate in a bowl. Now in theory the heat of the cream should melt the chocolate, but you may find that you have to apply some extra heat to get it to mix smoothly, particularly if you've used (as I did) a very high-cocoa content chocolate. Then pour the whole shebang into the flan tin on top of the caramel and put it back in a the fridge for an hour or two. You may find that some of the fat in the chocolate separates into a buttery deposit on top of the tart as it solidifies; you can just scrape this off with a knife and discard it.

This makes a phenomenally rich chocolatey tart that the original recipe recommends garnishing with some sea salt. I think this is an excellent idea, but it perhaps won't be for everyone. If you find the whole thing a bit overpowering then you could increase the proportion of cream in the ganache or use a lower-cocoa-content chocolate. Also, cut smaller slices than you think you'll need, it's really rich.

In a way it's a sort of upside-down version of this earlier largely improvised creation.

some Bond film titles; yes these are some Bond film titles

Here's a little insight into what I'm shortly to present to the Nobel committee as supporting evidence for my bid for the Nobel Prize For Inconsequential Deranged Film-Related Ravings: a detailed analysis of Bond film titles by number of syllables.

The results are startling, I'm sure you'll agree. The runaway winner, with nine out of the twenty-four titles (including the yet-to-be-released Spectre) is five syllables. The films in question are:

• From Russia With Love
• You Only Live Twice
• The Spy Who Loved Me
• For Your Eyes Only
• A View To A Kill
• The Living Daylights
• Die Another Day
• Casino Royale
• Quantum Of Solace

The beauty of this, as I mentioned around the time of the release of Quantum Of Solace, is that 5-syllable titles lend themselves perfectly to being sung to the tune of Guantanamera. You'll have to slot three extra syllables into the second line, but that's easy enough. Here's some suggestions to get you going:

From Russia With Love
Yes it came From Russia With Love

You Only Live Twice
It's true that You Only Live Twice

The Spy Who Loved Me
Yes she was The Spy Who Loved Me

For Your Eyes Only
It can be For Your Eyes Only

A View To A Kill
We're taking A View To A Kill

The Living Daylights
I'll give you The Living Daylights

Die Another Day
No we can Die Another Day

Casino Royale
We're at the Casino Royale

Quantum Of Solace
I need a Quantum Of Solace

I'm the lyrical gangsta

Here's a list in similar vein to a couple of previous ones: basically a list of some interesting stuff that popped up during a random shuffle sequence on my iPod. The rules change a bit every time I do this: the background here is that I had the big iPod (which has over 9000 songs on it) on shuffle while I was doing some pre-Christmas catering preparation and started tweeting a few interesting lyrical snippets under the hashtag #randomipodlyrics, just to amuse myself.

I re-found the series of tweets while trawling back looking for something else earlier, so I thought it'd be interesting to blog the playlist and also see how many of the songs I could identify from the lyrics after nearly four weeks. I've Storified the list and embedded it below so you can play along at home. Answers afterwards.

So here's the list, with YouTube links where I could find them, and a confessional note if I had to resort to Google to identify them:

1. is from Honey Are You Straight Or Are You Blind by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, from their bracingly bilious 1986 album Blood & Chocolate;
2. is from Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead;
3. is from You Cause As Much Sorrow by Sinéad O'Connor;
4. is from U Got The Look by Prince;
5. is from Lazarus by the Boo Radleys - that video features various Creation Records luminaries including label boss Alan McGee (the ginger one) and the divine Toni Halliday of Curve (at about 2:35 with the shaving foam);
6. is from Sweet Little Mystery by the late great John Martyn;
7. is from Hey Willy by The Hollies (had to Google this one);
8. isn't really a lyric at all, just an acknowledgement that if you let the noise wash over you then, by some weird pareidolia effect, words start to suggest themselves. All I can tell you is that it's a song from their 2002 "brackets" album;
9. is from Family Portrait by Pink;
10. is from Pyjamarama by Roxy Music;
11. is from Touch, Feel & Lose by Ryan Adams;
12. is from A Song For The Deaf by Queens Of The Stone Age;
13. is from Monty Got A Raw Deal by REM;
14. is from Now Be Thankful by Fairport Convention;
15. is from Heaven And Hell by Black Sabbath, from their Ronnie James Dio period (had to Google this one);
16. is from Hobo Chang Ba by Captain Beefheart, from the legendarily "difficult" 1969 album Trout Mask Replica (I had to Google the song here).

the last book I read

The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge.

I say, you fellows, here's a ripping idea I've just had: let's go and conquer the South Pole! I hear those shifty Scandinavians are thinking of having a crack at it, so I say let's go and give them a good spanking and bag the bally thing for King and country, what? Yes, of course it'll be bally cold, but we're British, for goodness sake. No need to worry about the stiff upper lip: bally thing'll be frozen solid anyway! Drop more port? Splendid.

Just a little insight there into the exact transcript of the planning meeting for Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated polar expedition of 1910-1913. And it's that expedition that's the subject of this novel, although, Bainbridge being Bainbridge, it's not an exact linear narrative of the events. Instead what we get is five separate sections, each covering a different period of time (in chronological order), one written by each of the final party of five who made it to the Pole: Evans, Wilson, Scott, Bowers and Oates.

As with Every Man For Himself, describing the broad thrust of the plot is a bit pointless, as everyone knows what happens anyway. Instead the interest is provided by a bit of back-story for each character, and by the interaction between them. This is what Bainbridge was good at: if you want a rollicking wintry adventure story that teaches you how to whittle a knife out of a walrus tusk then you're probably better off with Jack London or someone like that.

One of the fascinating subjects that historians have argued over for the century or so since the events depicted here is: why did the Scott expedition fail so disastrously while the rival Amundsen expedition scooted in, knocked off the Pole and scooted back again with relatively little fuss or drama? Plenty of reasons have been offered, the usual ones being the Amundsen expedition's use of dogs rather than Scott's bizarre insistence on using ponies, Amundsen's ruthless focus on Pole-bagging at the expense of scientific research, and Scott's fatal indecisiveness at various key moments, not least in deciding to take an extra man on the final push to the Pole, further stretching their already thin resources, and finally Scott's running into a window of horrific weather which made progress all but impossible, even for men whose extremities weren't useless gangrenous frostbitten lumps.

The other reason for failure is hinted at in the novel, and it's tied up with the British class system - naturally it was taken as read that the leader of the expedition would be a high-ranking military officer from the upper classes, and that there would be little room for dissent or discussion from his men once the expedition had kicked off. This sort of rigid hierarchical command structure, where there's no channel for criticism or questioning of decisions taken by those in authority, has been shown to be problematic - indeed it was implicated in so many commercial airline disasters that the industry came up with a whole new set of procedures called crew resource management to deal with it.

I remember saying in the review of Every Man For Himself that it was fairly clear that the narrator survived the sinking of the Titanic, because the novel was written in the first person and the past tense. Well, all five sections of The Birthday Boys are written in the same way, and we know that none of the five who reached the Pole survived. The usual way round this is to present the reminiscences as diary entries, but these are not presented that way, indeed Oates' section couldn't possibly be a diary entry since it describes the well-documented circumstances of his exit from the tent and subsequent death. This is really only a problem for a tedious literalist like me, who wants to know: well, in the suspended-disbelief fictional world we're in, how and from where are these words being transmitted onto the page? Are the expedition members all sitting around, in whatever Valhalla dead explorers go to, reminiscing about old times? Remember when Evans' hand fell off? Remember when you LITERALLY DIED? Ah, great days.

A minor quibble, though, really - this is a typically sly and sideways look at a familiar subject. The interactions between the men are fascinating, and the sketched portraits of each man are very convincing (and they are only sketches, as this is a short book at only 181 pages). The Birthday Boys (published in 1991) marked the start of what you might call phase two of Bainbridge's career, which featured a series of novels based on real historical events. Phase one featured novels in more domestic (and purely fictional) settings, including the slightly baffling Winter Garden and also Injury Time, probably still the best book of hers that I've read. Bainbridge herself was universally described as "eccentric" and "chaotic" and "a likable and amusing woman famed for falling over at parties", which I take to be affectionate obituary-ese euphemisms for "constantly pissed".

intershitty 125

I caught a bit on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning about the possible health dangers posed by the quaint habit train companies have of flinging raw faecal solids onto the tracks. You'll recall I did a blog post about this a while back, expressing some surprise that this was still legal - well, it turns out that something in the region of 10% of train carriages (the ones built prior to 1990) still adhere to the just-chuck-it-on-the-tracks approach. This has been the cause of some concern, not least in Diss in Norfolk and Rochford in Essex where a luxuriant crop of tomato plants has apparently sprung up along the tracks, from seeds (we're presumably meant to infer) pooped out by passengers. Not sure whether any station staff have nipped down onto the tracks to harvest them for the buffet trolley - if so they might want to give them a rinse first.

And consider this - here we are, fifty-odd years after Dr. Beeching closed a third of the British railway network, at which time ALL trains would have just been fitted with the standard poop chute.

So if we assume, since Beeching cut the network mileage by roughly a third, that there'd have been roughly 1.5 times as many carriages about, that means that there'd have been 15 times the volume of raw sewage being flung about as there is today. And bear in mind that's probably an underestimate, because trains were a lot more popular then. So back in the 1940s and 1950s people would have been merrily trooping off on the train in their thousands:

• to the seaside
• to work
• to war to be senselessly slaughtered in huge numbers

- all the while being relentlessly spattered with a fusillade of their own shit. And, remember, this is in times of post-war austerity, powdered egg, no bananas - you can imagine the likely consistency of the results. Not like those shifty French and Italian types with their oily Mediterranean diet and their loose untrustworthy stools - Johnny Britain would have been producing motions with the consistency of obsidian which probably shattered when they hit the tracks, sending foul-smelling shards of shrapnel hurtling towards bystanders. No wonder everyone wore hats back then, and smoked relentlessly to hide the smell.

incidental music spot of the day

Jefferson Airplane's 1967 single White Rabbit, one of the most perfect little psychedelic pop/rock nuggets ever recorded, advertising the slightly peculiar new Citroen C4 Cactus, half chunky mini-SUV, half lavishly upholstered leather sofa.

I'm never sure quite how much my great love for Jefferson Airplane is influenced by my great love (of a slightly different kind) for the fabulously sexy Grace Slick, just as I'm never sure how much my great love for Grace Slick is influenced by her being thrown into sharp relief by her bandmates, a really exceptionally ugly bunch even by 1960s hippy standards. That didn't stop her from sleeping with just about all of them, though, bless her. Here's White Rabbit as performed at Woodstock in 1969.

Secondly, I'd have put a modest sum of money on the backing to the new HSBC "Pink Ladies" advert being by Sigur Rós. I certainly wouldn't have staked any money on being able to identify the song, as with a very few exceptions they all merge into one - no recognisable words to memorise being half the problem. Even being as cagey as that I still would have lost that money, though, since it turns out that the song is called Grow Till Tall by Jónsi, aka Jón Þór Birgisson, the singer with Sigur Rós, from his 2010 solo album Go. So I claim half a point.

well I wish it could be a week and a half after Christmas every week and a half

This is a bit late, but, well, it's been Christmas and New Year and I've been a bit busy with various festive shenanigans, as I expect you have too. But I've had this clogging up my brain like a giant impacted cranial turd for the last couple of weeks, so I've got to get it out there. Wait 50 weeks and read it just before next Christmas, if you like.

Anyway: I trust we're at a point in human history where we don't need to have the tedious discussion prompted by questions like: well, you're an atheist, what are you doing celebrating Christmas? Because we all know about how 95% of the trappings of the festival: the date, the tree, the whole Santa Claus thing, et tediously cetera, are all a mish-mash of old traditions from a whole host of other places, most of them religions that your vanilla Christian would run a mile rather than admit to believing in. So let's all just chill out and have a mince pie. In any case, try making a principled stand and schlepping in to the office on Christmas Day to get some work done and see where that gets you.

[Apologies to whoever I nicked that little montage from, but I did it before Christmas and now I've forgotten where it was.]

No, my purpose here is to do with a particular aspect of Christmas: the music. I was inspired to think about it by this post on Greta Christina's blog, listing 10 Christmas carols acceptable to atheists. To be honest I tend to think that with Christmas carols you should in general get over yourself, accept that we've all mostly grown up in the same culture and that there will be some inevitable Goddery, and just like the ones you're naturally inclined to like, i.e. those that are most familiar from your childhood and have the best tunes. For me that means The Sussex Carol and O Come All Ye Faithful, cracking tunes that build in volume towards the end and incorporate a bit of scope for the organist to go all frenziedly In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida towards the end. If you've ever attended Christmas carol services, there's a reason they leave O Come All Ye Faithful to the end: it's because it's the best tune and really allows the congregation to get some air in the lungs and have a bit of a bellow.

O Come All Ye Faithful does illustrate a bit of a problem with certain carols, though: the jarring weirdness of the lyrics. The second verse contains probably the strangest Christmas lyric ever written: "Lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb". I mean, firstly, why bring wombs into it at all, but secondly, what's with the not abhorring bit? Why would he abhor it? I mean, it's probably a bit dark, but it's a womb. And don't even get me started on the Christian virginity fetish. It's not just O Come All Ye Faithful, though: Hark The Herald Angels Sing is at it as well with "Offspring of a virgin's womb", as is the slightly more obscure Cherry Tree Carol with "up spoke Lord Jesus from in his mother's womb".

And it's not just the relentless wombery: that second verse of O Come All Ye Faithful is a masterpiece of non-obvious scansion. Most people manage to muddle their way through "God of God; Light of Light" without there really being enough syllables to fit the tune, but come spectacularly unstuck two lines further on, possibly as a result of shell-shock after all the womb stuff, but more likely at having to smear "Very God; Begotten not created" across a tune that they were happily cramming "Come and adore him; Born the king of angels" into only a verse ago. The secret is to realise that despite the apparent lack of syllables what you actually have to do is put the "be" of "begotten" at the end of the first line, and then you find that the "gotten not created" flows OK afterwards.

This is actually only the second most impossible Christmas lyric in terms of fitting it into the tune, though, the hands-down winner being the last verse of We Three Kings, which requires you to fit "Heaven sings Alleluia; Alleluia the earth replies" into the space you'd previously fitted "Field and fountain, moor and mountain; Following yonder star" into. I think part of the problem here is a visual one - it just doesn't look as if there are enough syllables here, and so people tend to panic. Actually there are exactly the same number as in the earlier verse, thanks to "alleluia" having four, and if you just start, treat each syllable equally, fit them into the same pattern, and don't panic, you'll be fine, although you will find that, as for O Come All Ye Faithful, you will have to tack the first two syllables of the second "alleluia" on to the end of the first line.

We Three Kings has its share of lyrical weirdness as well - obviously there's that jolly verse about the myrrh, you know, the one that goes "Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying; Sealed in the stone-cold tomb". Yeah, and a Merry Christmas to you too. But go back to the very first line: "We three kings of orient are". What's with the shunting of the verb to the end? What are you, Yoda? Still, at least they lay off the wombs.

Secular and popular music has its share of lyrical oddities as well, not least Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. Biological implausibility aside, it's a bizarre little story of whatever's the cervine equivalent of racism and/or ableism and just plain old bullying, and then one of those "hey, kid, you're all right" moments based on little more than a nod from the resident authority figure, Santa. To be fair the original book seems to make it clearer that the acceptance was based on Rudolph proving himself as a sleigh-pulling beacon, whereas in the song it sounds as if they perked up pretty much as soon as Santa nominated him. It's a bit weird either way, though.

Incidentally the "official" list of Santa's reindeer (the one that goes: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen) is from the 1823 poem A Visit From St. Nicholas, more commonly known as The Night Before Christmas. This is still knocking about in print, and indeed we had a copy out of the library over Christmas. Rudolph usually gets tacked on to the list as well these days, but he's a latecomer, as the book came out in 1939 and the song in 1949.

Finally, as I usually do at this time of year, I must just register a vote for Jethro Tull's Ring Out Solstice Bells as the atheist's Christmas pop song of choice, partly because it isn't really about Christmas at all. On the other hand, it does feature a gurning beardy snaggle-toothed bloke in tights standing on one leg playing the flute, which I think we can all agree is the true meaning of Christmas.

fuck you and the winged horse you rode in on

Just a quick ugly ill-thought-out splurge to express my revulsion and outrage at the Charlie Hebdo massacre earlier today. I really just have two thoughts:

Firstly: humour is the key marker of a properly civilised society. If your culture is relaxed and self-confident enough to tolerate people taking the piss relentlessly then you're probably on the right track. Conversely, any regime which is hyper-sensitive to criticism, and mockery in particular, just betrays its own lack of confidence in its own rightness. Islam is the canonical example of this: look at the grinding humourless, sexless, life-denying, ritualised childishness of it all. That's my first reaction on hearing of an atrocity like this: oh, you fucking BABIES. You stupid, brainwashed, pathetic, petulant, humourless BABIES.

Secondly: this is what you get when you are too lily-livered to publicly criticise religious lunacy, Islamic or otherwise. You cannot simultaneously hold up freedom of expression as an absolute and then dance around the subject of "blasphemy", as the current UK government has repeatedly done, by saying, yeah, freedom of expression and all, but we should respect others' beliefs and just generally avoid saying anything that might offend. No, fuck that: you either have freedom of expression or you don't, and that includes the right to say things like: fuck the fictional prophet Mohammed, fuck his flying horse and fuck all his followers.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Two things occurred to me on reading this Independent article about French novelist Michel Houellebecq's latest successful trolling of the literary world: firstly, wherever he's been for the last few years he's either been quite ill, putting away a phenomenal quantity of vin rouge and Gauloises and possibly crystal meth, or both, because he looks terrible. I don't know the vintage of the first photo here but I would guess it's no more than 15 years old.

Secondly, on closer examination who he actually looks like is the imaginary unholy bastard lovechild of Will Self and Arthur Scargill, or, to put it more prosaically, Will Self with Arthur Scargill's hair.

tell me Michel Houellebecq does not look EXACTLY like the bastard lovechild of Will Self & Arthur Scargill http://t.co/lTuOciFBq0
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 6, 2015

Having tossed off a quick tweet on the subject earlier I thought I'd turn it into a proper blog post just so I could have a pop at making the Self/Scargill hybrid a reality. My image-mashup skills are rudimentary at best, but I've had a go, just for a laugh. See what you think.

the last book I read

Inverted World by Christopher Priest.

Helward Mann, is, well, a man. A man who lives in a city. Nothing so very unusual about that, you might say (well, except that the city's inhabitants call it "Earth"), and Helward would probably agree with you, at least until he comes of age, is initiated into the city's complex guild system and begins to understand some of the city's secrets.

Big Secret #1 is revealed when he is permitted to venture outside the city. Well, actually I suppose Big Secret #1 is that there even is such a thing as "outside the city", and Big Secret #2 is that the city moves, not exactly constantly, but in fits and starts, averaging about a tenth of a mile a day, across what appears to be mainly semi-desert scrubland. Most of the guilds are devoted to keeping this process going, so they have names like Track, Bridge-Building, Traction and Navigation. Basically the process is that the city moves on a constantly rebuilt set of four parallel railway tracks a few miles long, which are taken up after the city has passed over them and then re-laid ahead of it. The surrounding land looks broadly "normal", but the sun, instead of being the glowing circle that everyone's been taught about, is a sort of flattened saucer-shape with two great spikes protruding out of it above and below.

The city can't just wander about anywhere, though - it's engaged in a constant pursuit of something called "the optimum", the epicentre of some weird spatial and gravitational anomaly. If the city ever gets too far behind this point then it gradually starts to become subject to some very undesirable effects, which new guild inductees are invited to experience at first hand by being sent on a mission "down past", i.e. in the direction the city has come from (the opposite direction being referred to as "up future"). Helward embarks on his own quest in this direction and experiences both some weird spatial distortion (everything seeming to be flattened and widened the further from the city you go) and an inexorable gravitational pull to what he calls "the south" (i.e. away from the city). He makes it back to the city OK, though we are invited to infer that some who make the trip never return. He finds on his return that there is some weird time dilation happening as well; while he perceives that he's been away for three or four days, a couple of years seem to have passed in the city.

Part of Helward's purpose in making the trip "down past" was to deliver three native women back to their village. By no means everyone on this world lives in the city, and those who don't (variously known as "natives" or "tooks" by the city-dwellers) don't seem to be affected by the gravitational anomaly. One of the other ways in which the city-dwellers are different is that they disproportionately have male children, which inevitably results in a dwindling population. So via a bartering system goods are given to the natives in exchange for local women to live in the city temporarily and bear children, in the hope that some of them will be female.

While this bartering system makes raw economic sense, it inevitably causes tension and resentment among the natives, and the city is increasingly beset by attacks, some of which cause considerable damage to the city's superstructure and necessitate a rethink of the policy of keeping the plebs ignorant of the outside world (since there are now great big holes in the outside walls that people can look out through).

Helward's trips "down past" and "up future" lead him to draw some conclusions about the world the city travels on, principally its shape: it and its sun are hyperboloids (imagine the graph of y = 1/x rotated about the y-axis) and the city's endless pursuit of the "optimum" is just a desperate attempt to avoid sliding off along the x-axis to infinity and destruction.

There's not much time for theorising, though: problems are afoot. Firstly, the new availability of information to the city-dwellers leads to a protest movement developing within the city which demands that the people-trafficking should stop and the city be brought to a halt. This actually turns out to be what has to happen in the short term anyway, as the tracks arrive at a vast expanse of water seemingly far too wide to be traversed by the usual method of building a bridge.

Secondly, an external factor has intervened: Elizabeth Khan, an English-speaking aid worker in one of the nearby villages, has taken an interest in the city and done some historical research, and has disguised herself as a local woman to be bartered in order to get access to the city. At a public meeting to discuss the city's future she makes a speech wherein she reveals the truth (so, obviously, SPOILER ALERT): the mysterious planet on which the city of Earth travels is Earth, the same old spherical Earth it's always been. The city itself is the repository for an experimental power source, invented a couple of hundred years before in the aftermath of a world energy crisis caused by the final exhaustion of the world's fossil fuel supply, which works by hooking up a man-made reactor to a focus point of some newly-discovered electromagnetic phenomenon. This is the "optimum" they've been following, along a great circle that just happens, luckily for them, to have described a route following one of the longest routes of unbroken land on the planet (though not quite as long as this one), from its starting point in China to the Atlantic coast of Portugal, where they are now.

One of the side-effects of the prototype technology they're using (since perfected elsewhere in the world) is that it permanently skews the perception of people exposed to it, resulting in exactly the strange inverted distorted view of the world (and the sun) that Helward has been trying to make sense of. So now the city-dwellers have no choice but to switch their reactor off, wait for the "optimum" to drift off into the ocean away from them and the city, and see what happens.

Christopher Priest is most famous as the author of The Prestige, winner of the venerable James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1995 (this blog features the winners from 1972, 1981, 2002 and 2006), and subsequently made into a pretty good film by Christopher Nolan. I can't speak for the book since I haven't read it, but the film doesn't reveal itself as having any science fiction elements until right at the end, by which time I have to say I felt obscurely cheated by them, the rest of the movie having been a fascinating story of deceit and misdirection. To have the biggest illusion of them all explained by essentially saying "yeah, that bit actually was magic" was a bit of a dampener.

Anyway, Inverted World (which dates from much earlier, in 1974) is clearly a science fiction novel from the outset, and makes use of a number of speculative fiction tropes, most obviously the one of having the protagonist inhabit a strange confined world with arbitrary rules and gradually arrive at an understanding of how his little world fits into the larger one. There are plenty of other examples of this, most obviously THX1138, Logan's Run, Zardoz and Brian Aldiss' first novel Non-Stop, but also several JG Ballard short stories like Thirteen To Centaurus and The Concentration City. Like most novels featuring a population held in check by a knowledge-denying elite it can be read as a satire on organised religion. The other trope of switching from an internal, subjective, first-person voice for most of the book to an external, objective, third-person voice at the end to provide a jarring shift of perspective is familiar from both I Am Legend and also William Golding's The Inheritors.

I don't read a lot of "hard" science fiction these days; the only books on this list which would unambiguously fall into that category would be the ones by Iain M Banks plus possibly The Sirens Of Titan, Snow Crash and Roadside Picnic, with lots of others existing in a sort of ill-defined netherworld between there and "proper" fiction. That category would include Riddley Walker, Virtual Light, The Memoirs of a Survivor and O-Zone. So it's nice to dip back in occasionally, and I enjoyed Inverted World very much. For all the engineering detail and dizzying mathematical concepts there's a strong human story here, and in many ways the central message is the same as the one in Never Let Me Go (another maybe-it's-science-fiction-maybe-not sort of book): you never know what's going to happen next, so you just do your best to survive from day to day and enjoy the moments when they present themselves, however bizarre your day-to-day situation might seem. It's a nice touch to have the two most sensible characters in the book - Elizabeth Khan and Helward's wife (and subsequently ex-wife) Victoria - be women, science fiction being a pretty male-dominated area generally.