the last book I read

Last Night In Twisted River by John Irving.

It's 1954, and we're in the inhospitable northern counties of New Hampshire, right up next to the Canadian border. It's a man's life up here, especially in logging season where the river drivers risk life and limb to get the logs downstream on the swollen rivers, breaking up logjams and occasionally dynamiting some sense into them. It's not all fun, though, and occasionally someone's footwork isn't nimble enough and they get crushed or drowned under several tons of moving timber.

This is where we come in, as Dominic Baciagalupo and his twelve-year-old son Daniel witness a young novice river driver slip under the logs and vanish without trace. Dominic isn't a log driver, though, he's a cook, running the cookhouse in the logging settlement of Twisted River. As you can imagine these are pretty rough-and-ready communities, populated by some robust types none too fussed about adherence to high-falutin' social norms like table manners or personal hygiene or sobriety.

Dominic has found a niche in the community, though, after settling there with his wife, Rosie, who subsequently died in a log-related accident out on the river while horsing around with Dominic and his grizzled river driver friend Ketchum. It's one of Dominic's subsequent girlfriends, Injun Jane, who provides the catalyst for most of the story that follows. She's the girlfriend of the local sheriff, Carl, a mean and ornery type who you don't want to get on the wrong side of, especially once he's got a drink or two inside him. That she is also Dominic's clandestine lover seems to have been a secret from just about everyone, including (somewhat implausibly) Danny, so that when he enters his Dad's bedroom to find a large dark-haired figure sitting on top of him in bed (she's a big unit, Injun Jane) he naturally assumes his father is being attacked by a bear and clocks the supposed assailant on the head with a cast-iron skillet with all the strength he can muster, killing Injun Jane outright. 

In a bold strategy, Dominic decides to dump Injun Jane's body at Carl's place, relying on Carl's habitual nightly drunken oblivion to make him assume that he might have offed her himself in a drunken blackout. In a much more sensible strategy, Dominic and Danny also skip town, telling only Ketchum about their intentions.

We now enter a series of sections set in various parts of the country at (very roughly) 15-year intervals, wherein Dominic and Danny move to a new location after learning (usually via Ketchum) that Carl may be onto them, occasionally assume new names, hook up with new partners and live a regular life for a while until the whole cycle begins again. Here's a very potted summary of the first few bits (the last sections cover a more compressed timeline, for reasons we'll get to later) with, for orientation purposes, Dominic and Daniel's approximate ages in each section:

• 1954, Coos County, New Hampshire: Dominic 30, Danny 12. Action largely as above plus a bit of back-story regarding Rosie.
• 1967, Boston: Dominic 43, Danny 25. Dominic hooks up with Carmella, the mother of the young river driver who dies at the start of the novel, and works as a chef at her family's Italian restaurant. Danny spends some time living in Iowa City after attending the University of Iowa and comes to Boston after the break-up of his brief marriage with his two-year-old son, Joe.
• 1983, Windham County, Vermont: Dominic 59, Danny 41. Dominic continues to work as a chef; Danny becomes a published novelist. Both live in Iowa City for a while before relocating to Vermont. Joe becomes a teenager and goes off to college.
• 2000, Toronto: Dominic 76, Danny 58. Another city, another restaurant. Danny is now a successful novelist. Joe has died in a car accident, an occurrence that ultimately costs Danny his relationship with Charlotte, a screenwriter. It is here that that Carl, still relentlessly pursuing the pair despite his advanced age (he's in his eighties) finally catches up with them, ironically through their supposed protector Ketchum's carelessness.

Once the pivotal second round of deaths has happened (SPOILER ALERT: this includes both Dominic and Carl) there are a couple of further sections: one in which Danny and Carmella (see the Boston section above) return to Coos County and the now-abandoned site of the Twisted River logging settlement to scatter (with Ketchum's help) Dominic's ashes and to allow Carmella to see the spot where her son died, and one set in 2005 where Danny is in his winter retreat on an island in Lake Huron and about to receive an unexpected visitor from his past.

The first thing to do with a John Irving novel is to tick off which of the major repeated Irving themes it includes. Irving's Wikipedia page doesn't include the summary table any more, possibly because of repeated wrangling over its contents, but I found a version in a 2011 version of the page which includes Last Night In Twisted River. As it happens I have edited the table slightly because I don't recall any significant mention of either prostitutes or wrestling.

Among the slightly more obscure repeated themes not mentioned in the table above which feature in Last Night In Twisted River are: severing of major characters' left hands (The Fourth Hand), premature deaths of major characters' children (The World According To Garp, A Widow For One Year, The Hotel New Hampshire), blowjobs in cars with unfortunate consequences (The World According To Garp), and the innocent actions of a male child resulting in the death of an adult woman with far-reaching consequences (A Prayer For Owen Meany).

The first thing to say about Last Night In Twisted River is that I enjoyed it significantly more than the only other Irving on this list, Until I Find You. Some of the stuff I didn't like so much was due to the way the novel is structured: we get the big ratcheting shifts in timeline as in the list above, but what then happens is a lot of tracking back to fill in and catch up on the events of the preceding fifteen years or so, which basically amounts to a series of framing devices for flashbacks. It's only when we get past Dominic's death that any significant amount of the action takes place in the novel's nominal "now". This is purely a matter of stylistic preference and it won't bother everyone, but I found it slightly frustrating. It goes without saying that the central plot device of Carl's relentless pursuit of Dominic and Danny isn't even slightly convincing once the immediate aftermath of Injun Jane's death has passed, but MacGuffins gotta MacGuffin, as Alfred Hitchcock used to say, probably.

This is also the most explicitly autobiographical novel of Irving's long career, many of Danny Baciagalupo's biographical details mirroring Irving's own, and it's about writing in a way that even The World According To Garp wasn't. It also includes an Author's Note at the end where Irving describes some of the details of the novel's unusually long gestation, and takes a few veiled swipes at high-falutin' literary types who disdain the sort of big, plot-driven fiction that Irving specialises in. 

A couple of links with other entries on this list: Irving was involved, along with John Updike and others, in an entertaining literary spat with Tom Wolfe around the time of the publication of A Man In Full in 1998. Finally this pretty complimentary Guardian review of Last Night In Twisted River is by Giles Foden, whose own Turbulence featured here in 2014.

on ilkley moor sans chapeau

One thing that has always intrigued me, and almost certainly no-one else in recorded history, and which I was reminded of while we were up in Yorkshire a couple of weeks ago: the prevalence in the north of England of place names which have a French bit in them, usually the word "le" embedded between two English words, sometimes spliced together with hyphens, but equally sometimes not.

I was actually reminded of this not so much by our activities during the week - we stayed at the Crow's Nest campsite up on the clifftops between Filey and Scarborough - but by reminiscing about our trip to the nearby North York Moors between attending two weddings (in Hull and Middlesbrough respectively) waaaay back in the glory glory days of 2007, before my spirit was crushed by a mortgage, three kids and male pattern baldness. While map-reading during a walk from the Spiers House campsite where we stayed during that trip I recall sniggering at there being a nearby village called Hutton-le-Hole - there is also one a couple of miles away called Appleton-le-Moors. 

In this as in all things it's worth validating your own assumptions, so in addition to the obvious question - what's this English/French mashup naming convention all about, then - I asked myself another one: is it actually the case that this type of place-name is more prevalent in the north of England?

All you need to come up with an answer to that question is a bit of persistence and a list of place-names, ideally segregated by what county they're in. Wikipedia has one of these, and there is also the Gazetteer of British Place Names which seems to have a few smaller settlements listed that Wikipedia omits. Search for any place name with "le" or "la" embedded in it, whether hyphen-spliced or not, and here's what you end up with:

County	Occurrences	Settlement(s)
Bedfordshire	1	Barton-le-Clay
Cheshire	1	Thornton-le-Moors
Derbyshire	2	Alsop en le Dale Chapel-en-le-Frith
Durham	8	Chester-le-Street Dalton-le-Dale Haughton-le-Skerne Houghton-le-Side Howden-le-Wear Preston-le-Skerne White-le-Head Witton-le-Wear
East Riding of Yorkshire	1	Thorpe le Street
Essex	4	Kirby-le-Soken Layer de la Haye Stanford-le-Hope Thorpe-le-Soken
Greater London	1	St Mary-le-Bow
Hampshire	1	Hamble-le-Rice
Kent	1	Capel-le-Ferne
Lancashire	7	Bolton-le-Sands Clayton-le-Dale Clayton-le-Moors Clayton-le-Woods Poulton-le-Fylde Walton-le-Dale Whittle-le-Woods
Leicestershire	5	Ashby-de-la-Zouch Barkestone-le-Vale Donington le Heath Normanton le Heath Stretton en le Field
Lincolnshire	23	Ashby de la Launde Barnoldby le Beck Barnetby le Wold Burgh le Marsh Burton-le-Coggles Carlton-le-Moorland Gayton le Marsh Gayton le Wold Holton le Clay Holton le Moor Kirkby la Thorpe Kirmond le Mire Maltby le Marsh Mareham le Fen Normanby le Wold Stainton le Vale Sutton le Marsh Thornton le Fen Thornton le Moor Thorpe le Fallows Thorpe le Vale Welton le Marsh Welton le Wold
Merseyside	2	Brighton le Sands Newton-le-Willows
North Yorkshire	15	Appleton-le-Moors Appleton-le-Street Barton-le-Street Barton-le-Willows Chapel-le-Dale Hutton-le-Hole Laughton-en-le-Morthen Marton-le-Moor Newton-le-Willows Norton-le-Clay Thornton-le-Beans Thornton-le-Clay Thornton-le-Moor Thornton-le-Street Wharram le Street
Northamptonshire	1	Aston le Walls
Nottinghamshire	1	Sturton le Steeple
South Yorkshire	2	Adwick le Street Brampton en le Morthen
Suffolk	1	Walsham le Willows
Tyne and Wear	2	Hetton-le-Hole Houghton-le-Spring
Wiltshire	1	Fisherton de la Mere

Counties with zero occurrences (omitted from the table to save space) are Berkshire, Bristol, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Greater Manchester, Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Northumberland, Oxfordshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Somerset, Staffordshire, Surrey, both Sussexes, Warwickshire, West Midlands, West Yorkshire and Worcestershire.

So, as you can see, Lincolnshire is the clear winner here with 23, followed by North Yorkshire, Durham, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Essex (the major statistical outlier here), Derbyshire, Merseyside, South Yorkshire and Tyne and Wear, of those that have more than one occurrence. Essex is the only one of those that could unequivocally be said to be in the South. Looking at the data on a map will probably make it clearer.

So, as you can see, if we draw an arbitrary but not unreasonable north-south dividing line from the vicinity of King's Lynn across to mid-Wales, respecting county boundaries all the way across, what we find is that the numbers above the line total 70, whereas the numbers below total just 11. Not only that, but the five counties running consecutively from Lincolnshire up to Tyne and Wear up the east coast total 50, a whopping 62% of the total.

A closer look at the results also reveals that, of the 81 items, 5 have an "en" in front of the "le", while three of the four that have "la" instead of "le" have a "de" in front of the "la". Those with "en le" can reasonably be taken to convey "in the", and most of the "de la" items correspond to an old ruling family who had that as part of their name.

It's surprisingly difficult to find any non-crackpot theories as to what the rest (i.e. the ones with the single "le") are about. The most persuasive theory I've seen (which I'm pretty convinced is correct) is that this is a variant on the archaic French word lès (or occasionally lez), often used as a conjunction in place names and just meaning "near".

That's all terrific, but one obvious question remains - why, if this is a legacy of (presumably Norman) French influence, is the concentration skewed towards the north of England, since, all other things being equal, you'd expect there to be a sort of gradient from high to low depending how far from France you were, i.e. with the highest numbers on or near the south coast.

Note also that there are other French-flavoured place names which don't conform to the le/la structure, like Buckland-Tout-Saints and Stoke Mandeville - those two just acquired the names of the powerful Norman families who owned most of the land, but other etymological routes are probably available. There's also Hartlepool, which started out as "Hart-le-Pool" but then got squashed into its current form. That would be one more for Durham, but rules are rules.

too much monkey business

Whisky round-up part two, as promised, if somewhat belatedly. Here are two whiskies very slightly (but only very slightly) more out of the ordinary than the two in the last post.

Firstly, Monkey Shoulder. This is actually an example of what's currently called a blended malt (formerly a "vatted malt"), i.e. it's a mixture of single malt whiskies from more than one distillery. These are not all that common and I think we've only featured a couple here before: the Shackleton a couple of years ago and Johnnie Walker Green Label waaaay back in 2011. The Monkey Shoulder website is heavy on visual bedazzlement and exhortations to make various tasty and exotic cocktails using their whisky, but correspondingly light on specifics about what's actually in it. I recall reading something when it first came out that said that it was a blend of whiskies from the three Dufftown distilleries owned by William Grant & Sons: Balvenie, Kininvie and Glenfiddich - apparently these days all they're prepared to commit themselves to is "various Speyside single malts". The name is a slightly cutesy reference to a sort of repetitive strain injury that malt shovellers would get.

Secondly, Allt-a-Bhainne, a relatively young distillery in Scotch whisky terms as it was opened in 1975, primarily as a supplier of whisky for the Chivas Regal blend. They also have a tremendously swooshy and colourful website, but one which fails to answer certain fundamental questions like: so what does Allt-a-Bhainne mean, then? and how are we meant to be pronouncing it? Fortunately Wikipedia and Google Translate both come to our rescue here: it means "milk-stream", and the "bh" is a "v" sound. Anyone who, like me, has tried to get their tongue round Munro names in the past will probably know this already. My original assumption that the Scots Gaelic "allt" (the bit that presumably means "milk") was related to the identically-spelt Welsh word, one of many which basically just means "hill", was evidently wrong. The "bhainne" bit also appears (in a slightly mutated form) at the end of the name of the Bunnahabhain distillery on Islay (Wikipedia says "The name Bunnahabhain is an anglicisation of Bun na h-Abhainne, Scottish Gaelic for Mouth of the River").

Anyway, Allt-a-Bhainne's USP is that, unusually for a Speysider, it is lightly peated. They've only fairly recently started marketing single malts as opposed to just piping everything into the big Chivas mixing vats. This is the basic no-age-statement version.

So, to work. The Monkey Shoulder is quite magic-marker and pear-drop-heavy when you take a sniff, but in an appealing sort of way. It is one of those whiskies where the smell promises sweetness and the taste delivers unexpected dryness, though, relatively at least. Like many of its predecessors this could pass for a perfectly quaffable Speysider largely indistinguishable from several other perfectly quaffable Speysiders.

The Allt-a-Bhainne, on the other hand, while not dissimilar to the nose, delivers just a little spike of peaty sharpness when you take a sip; not the full recently lit barbecue/unfavourable wind direction/scorched turf brick to the gizzard that you get with stuff like the Lagavulin or the Bowmore or the Laphroaig, but just enough to make it distinguishable from the aforementioned bog-standard Speysiders. I actually like this quite a lot; certainly if you want a recommendation from the four whiskies featured in the two most recent posts, this would be it.

sriracha comin' atcha

Here's a follow-up to the chilli sauce post of a few years ago and this more specific sriracha taste comparison one from a year or so later. As an adjunct to my relentless bulk purchasing of noodles I usually order a couple of other products as well, sometimes basic essentials like kimchi, for which I have developed a bit of a habit, but sometimes more outlandish stuff like the grass jelly drink from 2014 which still haunts my nightmares. A while back I ordered a couple of bottles of sriracha of a couple of brands I hadn't tried before, and I note that I have not yet opined on their merits in this forum. Furthermore, as I was running low on my regular go-to sriracha (Flying Goose brand) I instructed my wife to keep an eye out for it when she went to Sainsbury's last weekend. She returned with two bottles with a red cap/nozzle instead of the normal green, which turns out to be the extra-hot variety, and so since I now had multiple untested srirachas (srirachae? srirachata?) I decided a comparison might be in order.

Left to right in the picture below are: my regular (and, as you can see, nearly empty) green-capped Flying Goose sriracha, the newly-purchased red-capped turbo nutter Flying Goose sriracha, and a larger bottle of Chef's Choice sriracha purchased from Wing Yip with a previous noodle order some time back. A blob from each bottle is presented on the chopping board in front of them.

What I conclude from my experience here with the Chef's Choice sriracha in particular, and also from its hitherto-unblogged predecessor, the excellently-named Healthy Boy brand, is that there are at least two schools of thought when it comes to things you might decide to label "sriracha" - one is the orthodox darkish red chilli sauce of the type represented by the Flying Goose and Cock brands, as well as various other branded versions, and the other is a lighter-coloured, generally slightly milder and sweeter product of the sort represented by the Chef's Choice and Healthy Boy brands which I would describe as more a sort of hotter version of the sweet chilli sauce widely sold in supermarkets. Nothing at all wrong with it, but I wouldn't describe it as "sriracha", exactly. 

Anyway, as you can see, the red-capped version of the Flying Goose brand (one of a bewildering variety of variants available) is slightly darker than the regular version, as befits something which presumably has a higher concentration of chillies in it. I'm pleased to report that while being appreciably hotter than the green-capped variety it is not absurdly, inedibly hot and is in fact very good, maybe even better than the regular variety (caveat: I am extremely fond of spicy food and have quite a high tolerance for Scoville units).

Moving on, here are a couple of slightly different bottles: this is the more Central/South American variety of chilli sauce, specifically a smoky variety made from chipotle chilles. I encountered the Asda version pictured on a camping trip and was quite impressed: it's not particularly hot, but it is very tasty and a thoroughly excellent accompaniment to a sausage sandwich, for instance. I don't shop in Asda very often - not through snobbery or anything, just geographical convenience - so when I was in Tesco a while back I picked up a bottle of Wahaca-branded sauce of a similar description. I was quite impressed with the restaurant food when I visited their Cardiff branch a couple of years ago, but I have to say this isn't as tangy as the Asda version, so I'd recommend that one instead. As you can see I've gone to the trouble of making a trip to Asda to stock up.

headline of the day

Picture the scene: YOU, a hardworking professional helicopter pilot for hire, get the call to deliver a BOAT to a HOSPITAL, pronto. But WHY does a HOSPITAL need a BOAT, you think to yourself, but, as befits a consummate professional, you don't stop to actually ask piddling inconsequential questions like this - no, you leap into action, fire up the helicopter, attach a boat to it, presumably dangling below via some sort of rope, and set off as fast as you can (while observing all the rules of the air applicable to helicopters with boats dangling beneath them, naturally: you're a professional, albeit ruggedly unconventional and with a fine disregard for the pompous stuffed shirts at Helicopter Central) for the hospital. You're just crossing the car park heading for the rooftop helipad and the crack boat-untethering team that the hospital administrators have assembled there when disaster strikes: the rope frays and the boat plummets two hundred feet to the ground, pancaking some unfortunate bloke just gingerly returning to his car after a minor surgical procedure on some troublesome haemorrhoids. NOOOOOOOOOO, you wail to yourself in the cockpit, WHYYYYYY did I buy that cheap foreign rope instead of some stout reliable English rope? But it's too late, and you skulk morosely off back to base to cultivate a ferocious drinking habit and a vow never to fly again until disaster move cliché demands it. Tomorrow's newspaper headlines read as follows:

I'll let you into a little secret: the story above is a fabrication, devised specifically to lead the unsuspecting reader to the headline above, gleaned from the BBC News website earlier today. Needless to say this is a crash blossom, and it was in fact the man (who had been crushed by a boat) who was flown to hospital, not the boat itself. Also needless to say, or at least I would hope so, is that my intention here is to mock the careless headline-writing of the people who maintain the BBC website, rather than the plight of the man who had the argument with the boat. I wish him all the best for a speedy recovery, and hope that he SAILS through the experience without being, erm, KEELed.

Previous crash blossoms on this blog (the Language Log link above has lots more) can be found here, here, here, here, here, here and my all-time favourite one here. 

the last book I read

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín.

Let's examine the options open to young Irish womenfolk in the early 1950s: grow up, meet a nice man in the village, squeeze out a platoon of kids (Catholics, don't forget), raise and care for them largely single-handed while your husband is either off tilling the soil or knocking back the Guinness down the pub, live to an exhausted and embittered old age, die. Or possibly, not meet a nice young man, live to a ripe and embittered spinsterish old age. If you don't fancy either of those, then your remaining options can be enumerated as follows: nun. 

To be honest, Eilis Lacey isn't the especially ambitious type and is reasonably sanguine about the whole nice young man/kids route through life. But when her older sister Rose - more outgoing, more socially confident and on the face of it more likely to be the one to flee in search of a brighter future life - makes use of some of her contacts to wangle Eilis a job and some accommodation in Brooklyn, Eilis doesn't feel able to refuse.

She starts to wish she had, though, on the trip across - a rough crossing from Liverpool which Eilis mostly spends confined to the cramped third-class cabin vomiting copiously and competing for access to the shared bathroom with the people in the next cabin along. But eventually that particular ordeal is over, and the land of opportunity is reached. 

Eilis moves into the house run by Mrs. Kehoe, a mostly kindly but spiky old bird who takes a dim view of nonsense, which encompasses everything from intemperate unladylike levity at mealtimes and failure to behave with the proper decorum to the more serious stuff involving relations with Men, particularly Unsuitable Men, i.e. those who might try to tempt the girls into inappropriate behaviour like smoking, drinking and noisily penetrative sexual intercourse. Precious little time for Eilis to get involved with any of that in the short term anyway as she's busy making herself indispensable at her job in Bartocci's department store during the days and attending to her own personal betterment at bookkeeping and accountancy classes in the evenings.

But you've got to let your hair down sometimes, and eventually Eilis agrees to go to a local dance with some of the other girls from Mrs. Kehoe's, and meets a nice young man called Tony. Tony seems nice, and a series of chaste and respectful dates ensues, although Tony does get a little bit frisky in the sea at Coney Island, as men tend to do. Eilis is invited to meet his family, a typically demonstratively hand-wavey and meatball-obsessed bunch of Italian-Americans, and all seems to be proceeding in the time-honoured manner until Eilis receives a bombshell from home: Rose has died unexpectedly of a hitherto-unsuspected heart defect. Eilis dithers a bit but then decides that she needs to go home to see her mother. Tony is sympathetic to Eilis' plight, but not so trusting of her promises to return that he doesn't seek to secure their relationship status by a) sleeping with her and b) arranging a quickie registry-office marriage before her ship sails. 

Her mother, while obviously genuinely devastated at the loss of her elder daughter and primary companion, isn't above a bit of emotional blackmail to get Eilis to prolong her stay in Ireland. Obviously Eilis has to keep herself amused while she's looking after Mum, and she does so by re-inserting herself into her old life, including going on what amount to a couple of double-dates with her friend Nancy, Nancy's fiancé George, and George's friend Jim Farrell. Jim seems like a nice lad and is obviously quite keen on Eilis, which presents Eilis with something of a dilemma: stay in Ireland with Jim or return to Brooklyn and Tony. Obviously option A carries a few problems, not least the fact that she and Tony are already married to each other. Eilis is not the ruthlessly decisive type, so basically she drifts around putting off making a decision until her two worlds start to bleed into one another and the decision is effectively made for her.

Here is the opposite end of the novelistic spectrum from the absurdly showy, ostentatiously complex stuff like House Of Leaves. This, by contrast, is deceptively simple, written exclusively from Eilis' fairly naïve and innocent perspective, and with the slightly darker stuff buried where you have to look quite carefully for it: Rose's motivations for sending Eilis off across the Atlantic, Bartocci's pioneering choice to allow black customers into their store, Eilis' more senior colleague Miss Fortini's slightly too intimate interest in helping Eilis try on bathing suits for her trip to Coney Island with Tony, Tony's own seizing on Eilis' vulnerability in the wake of Rose's death to get his end away.

Some or all of the above could have been avoided if Eilis had been a less infuriatingly passive character with barely any agency of her own. That, combined with the stultifyingly oppressive social mores of 1950s Ireland (and 1950s Irish-Americans in New York), makes this in some ways a slightly frustrating read, but of course that's a reflection of the prevailing reality of the period in which the book is set, rather than a criticism of the book itself or its author. I didn't, for what it's worth, think it was quite as good as Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship (a book with a more contemporary setting). The other Tóibín on this list is The Heather Blazing. 

Brooklyn won the Costa Novel Award in 2009, as did a couple of recent featurees here (the Picture Palace review contains a full list), and was made into a film in 2015. 

celebrifry woodylikey of the day

Just looking through some photos from a couple of walks we've done in the last couple of weeks, and found this photo of a rather splendid old oak tree that we encountered by the side of the path between the car park at Llanfoist Crossing and the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal at Llanfoist Wharf. I'd been up here before as part of our ascent of the Blorenge in late 2009, but not (I think) since. I daresay the tree hasn't changed much in the intervening ten-and-a-half years.

Anyway, I snapped a photo because from one angle you can clearly see something resembling a face; I say "clearly see" but of course what I mean is see something with a sufficient number of markers in the right places for the weird wiring of the human brain to go into a pareidolia frenzy and go FAAAAACE LOOOOK IT'S A FAAAAACE. 

But whose face? Well once you've got past the usual Green Man and Ent references you notice that the nose and the prominent chin point in slightly different directions. This and the general air of benign treely wisdom immediately made me think of broadcaster, author, actor, polymath and general National Treasure Stephen Fry. Obvious, isn't it?

I don't mean to be mean, but look at your mean

I recall a question being asked on some cricket forum or other, possibly this one: who is the worst best player in Test history? In other words, who has (considering batsmen as an example) scored the most runs at the lowest average? That turns out to be an almost impossible question to answer, but one answer given was Mike Atherton, who has the lowest batting average of any player with over 6000 runs. This seems a bit harsh on Atherton, a fine and combative batsman and a key player in the not-exactly-world-beating England teams of the 1990s, but it set me off on a train of thought which resulted in the tables below.

As with the tables here, here and here, a bit of preparatory mental calibration is probably required: for each of the entries in the batting table, no-one has made more runs at a lower average.

Player	Tests	Runs	Average
RT Ponting (AUS)	168	13378	51.85
AN Cook (ENG)	161	12472	45.35
GA Gooch (ENG)	118	8900	42.58
AJ Stewart (ENG)	133	8463	39.54
MA Atherton (ENG)	115	7728	37.69
N Hussain (ENG)	96	5764	37.18
CL Hooper (WI)	102	5762	36.46
MV Boucher (ICC/SA)	147	5515	30.30
DL Vettori (ICC/NZ)	113	4531	30.00
IA Healy (AUS)	119	4356	27.39
RW Marsh (AUS)	96	3633	26.51
SCJ Broad (ENG)	138	3211	18.66
SK Warne (AUS)	145	3154	17.32
HMRKB Herath (SL)	93	1699	14.64
CEL Ambrose (WI)	98	1439	12.40
M Muralitharan (ICC/SL)	133	1261	11.67
JM Anderson (ENG)	151	1185	9.63
CA Walsh (WI)	132	936	7.54
GD McGrath (AUS)	124	641	7.36
LR Gibbs (WI)	79	488	6.97
FH Edwards (WI)	55	394	6.56
DE Malcolm (ENG)	40	236	6.05
PT Collins (WI)	32	235	5.87
MS Panesar (ENG)	50	220	4.88
ST Gabriel (WI)	45	200	4.76
BS Chandrasekhar (INDIA)	58	167	4.07
N Pradeep (SL)	28	132	4.00
CS Martin (NZ)	71	123	2.36

This seems a bit harsh on Ricky Ponting in particular, but he just happens to be second on the overall list of highest Test run-scorers and to have an average that's a couple of runs per innings lower than that of the top man on the list, Sachin Tendulkar.

It is interesting to see that there are a few distinct zones on the list: once you get past Ponting and Cook you're into the English Batsmen Of The 1990s Zone featuring Gooch, Stewart, Atherton and Hussain and providing an insight into why England didn't win a lot during that era: not enough runs. Then there is a brief Wicketkeeper-Batsmen Zone featuring Boucher, Healy and Marsh, and then a Long-Serving And Distinguished Bowler Zone in reverse order of batting competence (Broad through Gibbs, say), and then a Proper Incompetents Zone at the end. Obviously there are probably people with a Test average of zero from one or two innings, but the rule of thumb I applied was to go down as far as Chris Martin, fine bowler but famously one of the worst batsmen in history, and then stop. As it happens he has the lowest average of anyone with over 100 Test runs, so that provided a nice sensible cut-off point anyway. Martin and Bhagwat Chandrasekhar are the most distinguished members of the select club of players who have more Test wickets than runs.

Here's the bowling table - this time the qualifying criterion is: no-one has taken more wickets at a higher average.

Player	Tests	Wickets	Average
SK Warne (AUS)	145	708	25.41
A Kumble (INDIA)	132	619	29.65
Harbhajan Singh (INDIA)	103	417	32.46
DL Vettori (ICC/NZ)	113	362	34.36
Danish Kaneria (PAK)	61	261	34.79
MM Ali (ENG)	60	181	36.59
FH Edwards (WI)	55	165	37.87
RJ Shastri (INDIA)	80	151	40.96
CL Hooper (WI)	102	114	49.42
Mohammad Sami (PAK)	36	85	52.74
SR Tendulkar (INDIA)	200	46	54.17
MN Samuels (WI)	71	41	59.63
Rubel Hossain (BDESH)	27	36	76.77
IDK Salisbury (ENG)	15	20	76.95
Mohammad Sharif (BDESH)	10	14	79.00
KP Pietersen (ENG)	104	10	88.60
S Chanderpaul (WI)	164	9	98.11
EAR de Silva (SL)	10	8	129.00
MA Atherton (ENG)	115	2	151.00
CA Davis (WI)	15	2	165.00
NM Kulkarni (INDIA)	3	2	166.00
S Matsikenyeri (ZIM)	8	2	172.50
CS Nayudu (INDIA)	11	2	179.50
KLT Arthurton (WI)	33	1	183.00
RS Bopara (ENG)	13	1	290.00
Naeem Islam (BDESH)	8	1	303.00

Once again there are some distinct zones here, the Distinguished Spinners Zone at the top (Warne through Kaneria), the All-Rounders Zone (Ali, Shastri, Hooper), and then a mixture of specialist bowlers with short and unproductive careers and specialist batsmen who occasionally turned their arm over as light relief, say at the tail-end of a drawn game. Note that you don't see the long list of long-serving batsmen (Pietersen, Chanderpaul and Atherton apart) to match the bowlers in the other list; this is just a consequence of the way the game works. Even confirmed number 11 batsmen like McGrath and Walsh have to bat reasonably frequently; no-one has to bowl. For example, Alastair Cook's long and distinguished 161-Test career included a paltry three overs as a bowler, although to be fair he did take one wicket during those overs, which incidentally gives him an overall strike rate (i.e. balls per wicket) of 18.00, far superior to even the likes of Dale Steyn.

But I digress. Players who appear on both lists are Mike Atherton, Carl Hooper, Daniel Vettori, Shane Warne and Fidel Edwards. Note also that the top men from the overall batting and bowling lists (Tendulkar and Muralitharan) each appear on the opposite list here.

the last book I read

What's Bred In The Bone by Robertson Davies.

We are back in the company of most of the principal protagonists of The Rebel Angels, indeed pretty much all of those who made it to the end of that book alive: clergyman and author Simon Darcourt, exotic gypsy temptress Maria Magdalena Theotoky, or Maria Cornish as she now is, and her husband Arthur Cornish, banker and heir to most of the estate of his uncle, art critic and collector Francis Cornish.

These people, who we already know slightly from the first book, which focused on the machinations around disposing of old Francis Cornish's will, are really only here to provide a framing device for the main story, which is that of Francis' life. And, like any seemingly normal life examined in close detail, it turns out to be slightly stranger than you might imagine.

Born in a small Canadian town (Blairlogie, supposedly modelled on Davies' own real-life childhood home of Renfrew, Ontario) in the early years of the twentieth century to a French-Canadian mother and a father (also Francis Cornish) who was literally from Cornwall, Francis jr.'s early experiences were a mixture of the commonplace (awkwardness at school, in his case due to being the posh boy from the "big house") and the more unusual, specifically his discovery of his secret elder brother, also called Francis - a pin-headed, furiously masturbating imbecile - locked away in an attic room and secretly cared for by a couple of domestic servants. One of these servants, Zadok Hoyle, also works as the local undertaker and takes Francis under his wing. In particular Zadok encourages Francis to pursue his love for art and drawing, through the slightly macabre method of allowing Francis to sketch the corpses at the funeral parlour.

Francis soon leaves Blairlogie for higher education in Toronto and then subsequently at Oxford, where he makes a few key acquaintances: his cousin Ismay, who he falls in love with, Tancred Saraceni, a famous art expert and restorer of Old Masters to whom Francis becomes a sort of apprentice, and some chaps from MI5 who feel that Francis might be their sort of chap and might like to do some discreet snooping for them. It turns out that Francis' father (also Francis, if you're keeping up) spent many years doing some similarly shady work.

Ismay eventually succumbs to Francis' patient wooing, only for it to transpire, shortly after their marriage, that the child she is carrying isn't his, and that she doesn't really love him at all, and that furthermore she's going to scarper with her lover and would he mind terribly making sure the child is provided for? Chastened by this experience Francis throws himself into his work, and as it happens MI5 have plenty of that for him as World War II has just kicked off. Coincidentally the work they want him to do involves close collaboration with his old mentor Tancred Saraceni, in a complex scheme based in Germany involving restoring old artworks and shipping them out of the country only to then arrange for their acquisition by the Nazi regime in the hope of acquiring some valuable non-German artwork in exchange. 

Francis hones his own painting skills during this period and finds that he has a natural affinity with the styles of the paintings he is restoring, so much so that he produces a large triptych depicting the marriage at Cana and allows it to be passed off as a genuine work. This is the cause of some slight awkwardness during Francis' post-war involvement in the various groups redistributing artwork hoarded by the Nazis (the real-life subject on which the film The Monuments Men is loosely based) when the painting is presented for analysis by the assembled group of experts. But the subterfuge holds, and Francis doesn't feel compelled to confess.

Already with no particular need to work for a living, Francis then finds himself the sole beneficiary of Tancred Saraceni's will, the contents of which include several Swiss bank accounts where much mysteriously-acquired money has been squirrelled away. Back in Canada, Francis devotes the rest of his life to collecting art that takes his fancy, and to being a slightly cantankerous mentor and advisor to some younger Canadian artists.

So now we do the wibbly-wobbly dissolve back to the framing device, just in time to witness Arthur Cornish reluctantly give his blessing for the biography Simon Darcourt is proposing writing about Francis, on the grounds that, hey, what Bad Stuff could possibly be revealed that might tarnish Francis' - and by association the whole Cornish family's - reputation?

The first thing to say here is: I've set that last paragraph up to imply that the the last novel (The Lyre Of Orpheus) in the trilogy will feature Darcourt's biography of Francis Cornish and may feature his as-yet-undiscovered forged works in some way. Of course it may very well feature no such thing; you should note that I had a pretty confident idea of where the third Matrix movie was going to take the story after seeing the second one, and that turned out to be totally wrong as well. I still maintain, incidentally, that my idea for the third movie was better than the actual third movie, which was rather disappointing.

Anyway, back to the book. This is a book which delights in its own erudition, and Davies' evident extensive knowledge of art. It's making some sly points about art forgery as well, the most obvious one being: how to determine the inherent "value" (not necessarily, or not only, monetary) of a work of art? Should it just be from a consideration of the work on its own merits devoid of any context? Or does its provenance matter? i.e. whether it is by who it purports to be by, and is from the era that it purports to be from? Does the exact same scene painted in the exact same style using the exact same materials (and, if you like, for the sake of argument, the exact same sequence of brushstrokes) have a different intrinsic value if painted by, say, Van Dyck in the 17th century, or Eric Hebborn in the 1970s?

Francis Cornish himself is an odd character whose only fully satisfactory personal relationship appears to be be the resolutely no-strings-attached one he has with Ruth Nibsmith, the governess at the German country house where he does his wartime restoration work with Saraceni. There is just a suggestion late in the book of some previously unexpressed homosexuality in his (strictly platonic) relationship with younger art critic Aylwin Ross, though this all gets rather complicated when Ross kills himself after an ill-advised attempt to use government money to purchase a batch of artwork including, ironically, Francis' own The Marriage At Cana. 

For all the depth of research and general erudition on show here, this isn't as much fun as The Rebel Angels, partly because of the structure - a framing device set up to facilitate a dive into stuff we already broadly know the outcome of removes some of the potential suspense of a more "real-time" structure, by which I mean we already know Francis lives to a ripe and wealthy old age, so he's not going to be unexpectedly murdered by the SS during the war, or disgraced and impoverished by his forgery becoming public knowledge. And there is just a whiff of fogeyish distaste for "modern" art (which basically seems to mean anything done during the twentieth century) which I found slightly unpalatable. 

There's nothing wrong with this, though, and it was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize, a prize eventually won by Kingsley Amis' The Old Devils, a book which (as I've said before) I like very much. I can get behind The Old Devils being ahead of What's Bred In The Bone in the running; if I were being completely honest I'd have to say that the benefit of hindsight leads me to conclude that Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (the only other one I've read off that year's shortlist) probably should have won.

Off the top of my head the only other book on this list to prominently feature art forgery as a plot point is Ripley Under Ground. Ooh, no, wait, there's Chatterton as well. 

ablogblogalooblogablogbamboom

One of the things I noticed around the time of Little Richard's death a month or so ago was a proliferation of related articles in various media using as a headline some variant of the famous closing line from probably his most famous song, Tutti Frutti. I say "some variant" because there doesn't seem to be a canonical spelling of the phrase, hardly surprisingly since it doesn't feature any actual words, and I say "closing line" because the only time the phrase appears in the song is as the very last words. Whoa, there, Neddy, you may be saying, he says it after every chorus! Not so, in fact: here is a sober and scholarly analysis of what he actually says and when:

• 0:00 wop-bob-a-loo-mob-a-lob-bob-bom
• 0:15 a-wop-bob-a-loo-mob-a-lob-bob-bom
• 0:46 a-wop-bob-a-loo-mob-a-lob-bob-bom
• 1:17 wop-bob-a-loo-mob-AAAOOOOWW
• 1:48 a-wop-bob-a-loo-mob-a-lob-bob-bom
• 2:20 a-wop-bob-a-loo-mob-a-lop-bam-boom

So you can see that the bop-bom line is the standard one, with a couple of variations - specifically, dropping of the a- that precedes it at the start of the song and in the partial phrase that introduces the saxophone break about halfway through.

A related topic (in that it relates to last lines of songs) is the one which came up in a quiz I participated in over Zoom a couple of weeks ago. There was a music round which featured the following question: what do the songs Virginia Plain and Up the Junction have in common with each other, and with no other singles that have reached the UK Top 10? This is one where you'll either instantly know the answer (as I did) or won't have any idea at all. The answer is that the title of the song is the last line of the song's lyrics, and moreover appears nowhere else in the song. This second caveat is important, as for instance Let It Be by The Beatles finishes with the title of the song, but it has also previously been sung about a gazillion times during the song. The obvious other example that sprang to mind was Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival, whose regular chorus contains the phrase "I ain't no fortunate one" and which only changes to "I ain't no fortunate son" just as the song starts to fade out (at about 2:12 in the linked video). Strictly there is a "no, no, no" after that which means it's not technically the last lyric, but I think we can make a case for it being the last line. 

Finally, back to The Beatles: it is an oddity of their single output that many of their most popular songs have the song's title as the first lyric. Of the 27 songs on the definitive(ish) singles compilation 1, for instance, 10 (a whopping 37%) have the song's title as the first lyric: She Loves You, Can't Buy Me Love, Help!, Yesterday, Paperback Writer, Penny Lane, Lady Madonna, Hey Jude, Something and The Long And Winding Road. Furthermore Love Me Do and A Hard Day's Night only miss out by the narrowest of margins. This could be a coincidence, it could be a conscious songwriting policy, or it could just be that the band were exceptionally bad at coming up with names for songs and just took the approach of saying: fuck it, what's the first line? That'll do.

twas light years of time since his mission did start

You'll recall my tentative wager on it being either bulb 5 or bulb 12 that bought the farm next in the kitchen; well in a salutary lesson about the dangers of gambling it's actually bulb number 2 that has gone. Previous self-immolations of this particular spot in the lighting layout include being part of the very first pair of bulbs to expire back in May 2014, whereupon I replaced it with an IKEA LED bulb which then led an entirely uneventful existence for just over six years (2229 days, to be precise) until expiring a few days ago. 

That is, hardly surprisingly, the longest single life-span on record (on this blog, anyway) for a single light bulb. I can't remember exactly how much I paid for the original set of IKEA bulbs, but I have a feeling it was around £4 each; if so then that works out at something like 0.18 pence per day.

incidental music spot of the day

We've recently acquired both an Amazon FireStick and a subscription to Disney+ in an attempt to broaden our kiddy-entertaining horizons a bit, especially during the current lockdown. One of the things that that's enabled us to do is instigate a movie night on Saturdays where we watch a wholesome family-oriented movie with all three kids, then pack the boy off to bed and watch something very slightly (but probably not much) more challenging. At the moment we're working our way through the Toy Story and Herbie series. 

Another thing we've now got access to is a far greater range of short children's animations. The particular one that the boy is currently fixated on is Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, a pretty ghastly multicoloured CGI acid flashback nightmare featuring the eponymous rodent and his annoying pals Donald, Goofy and assorted others, having a variety of banal yet implausible adventures that involve some bullshit interactive "learning" element as a sop to parents feeling vaguely guilty about parking the kids in front of the TV at ten o'clock in the morning and skulking off to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine.

The show is, it goes without saying, augmented by some supremely earworm-y theme music at start and finish that you find yourself humming to yourself while in the kitchen long after the kids are in bed and then have to pummel your skull with a steak tenderiser to make it go away. The thing that I only became aware of later, when we attempted to get our Alexa to play the closing Hot Dog song, was that both the opening and closing songs are performed by American alternative rock funsters They Might Be Giants. These guys will be most familiar to casual UK listeners for their 1989 hit Birdhouse In Your Soul, an absurdly catchy number which it feels churlish to criticise, but I will anyway for its overly smug lyrical smart-arsery and (despite being only just over 3 minutes long) going on for about twice as long as it reasonably ought to. TMBG are, it turns out, old hands at producing music aimed at children, alongside their regular adult-oriented output. I would imagine a commission from an entity like the Disney corporation for a couple of bouncy kids' songs would be lucrative enough to finance any number of experimental jazz ear-flute explorations and I can completely see why they do it, and no criticism should be inferred, despite the general loathsomeness of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

Speaking of lyrics, on my first listen to the Hot Dog song (from the next room, so without the benefit of any visual context and perhaps with some loss of sonic fidelity) I was appalled at the thinly-veiled but unmistakable ABSOLUTE FILTH contained in the lyric "we're splitting the seam, we're full of beans". Not an expression I'd ever specifically heard before, but its penetrative connotations seemed obvious. It turns out that this line is sung as the collected company of friends troops out of the Clubhouse at the end of the show, leaving it to magically fold up on itself and disappear, and is in fact "we're splitting the scene, we're full of beans". Those of you who have now got all fired up at the thought of an engorged Mickey Mouse furiously splitting Minnie's seam can almost certainly find something to satisfy you on the internet, Rule 34 being what it is.

what a state to get yourself into

A couple of things I meant to mention at the end of the Spares book review: firstly I see I mentioned in the Never Let Me Go review the similarity of some of the plot points to the plot of the 2005 film The Island; well obviously the same goes for Spares. Since The Island and Never Let Me Go came out in the same year the film must have been well into production before the book was published, so it's on the whole unlikely that one was a rip-off of the other. The situation with Spares is a bit more interesting, though, since the film rights were purchased some time after its publication in 1996 by DreamWorks Pictures, the same company responsible for The Island. Coincidence, OR IS IT, et cetera. Michael Marshall Smith evidently felt it wasn't worth getting embroiled in a big legal battle about it, or, if he were being honest with himself, would have recognised that while the basic idea was his the film actually pursued the plot strand(s) that he toyed with in the early stages of the book but eventually abandoned in favour of exploring some different (and, arguably, less interesting) ideas.

The other thing worthy of mention about Spares is that it's set in Virginia, the same state in which House of Leaves is largely set (i.e. in that this is the state in which the Navidson house is supposed to reside). It could be argued that Mortal Causes and Lanark share some settings as well since some of Lanark (book 4, principally) appears to be set in a highly fictionalised version of Edinburgh.

Back to Virginia, though: I had occasion to consult a large-scale map of the USA while trying to set some questions for an online pub quiz some friends organised a couple of weeks ago and got to thinking about points where several states meet (or nearly meet). The famous one of these is of course at Four Corners, where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. None of this resulted in a usable quiz question (although I did cash in the one about Pierre, South Dakota from here), but it set me thinking: what is the shortest straight line you can draw on a map which crosses four states? Depending on your point of view the answer could be zero, if you consider the quadripoint at Four Corners to be simultaneously in all four states. If you don't deem that to be an acceptable answer I think a strong candidate is the north-south line joining Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia, as below. Google Maps reckons it's around 18 miles; you could walk that in a day.

Obviously you can extend that question to larger numbers of states: I haven't considered all the numbers but I'll offer you the following theoretical 5-state journey of a little over 60 miles visiting (going NE-SW) Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Needless to say others have considered this question (or very slight variants of it) and, I'm happy to say, come up with the same answer. The only comparable one I could find is the line of just under 80 miles which connects Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas.

Finally, the pièce de résistance: a 10-state journey of just over 400 miles taking in (let's go SW-NE this time) Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Again, others seem to agree that this is the right area, although note that they're asking (and answering) a subtly different question.

the last book I read

Spares by Michael Marshall Smith.

Jack Randall has got a few problems. Ex-army, with a host of memories of the Bad Stuff, an on-off addiction to designer drug Rapt, fleeing various problems in his former life in New Richmond, Virginia, not least an ongoing dispute with some local crime lords that resulted in the gruesome murder of his wife and daughter, and currently earning a crust as the caretaker of a shady facility which houses clones of notable people and keeps them alive just on the off-chance that one of these notables might ski into a snowplough and lose some limbs, at which point hello, inmate 46, time for you to have a bit of un-anaesthetised limb surgery.

Jack doesn't really have a great deal to do apart from keep the internal doors locked to prevent the clones wandering about the place and occasionally assist in rounding up the relevant ones when John Q Celebrity needs a full-body skin graft. But Jack is a man with an unerring instinct for getting into trouble, and he's soon letting the clones (or "spares", as they're known) wander the place and teaching them how to talk and read. Inevitably this results in him getting a bit attached to them, and when the next visit from the organ-harvesting squad comes around he engineers an escape with a handful of the spares.

Jack has some crazy ideas about heading off to Florida and starting a new life, but first he needs to realise some money, and the best way to do that is via a clandestine trip back to New Richmond, since that's where all Jack's contacts are. Most of the inhabitants of New Richmond live inside a giant abandoned aircraft, grounded there by mechanical problems some time after the destruction of old Richmond. Getting in and out cleanly without either getting collared by someone wanting to finish off some unfinished business or succumbing to the temptation to revisit some aspects of his former life is the key thing here, though, and needless to say Jack fails in both respects, so much so that by the time he returns to where he and the spares have been hiding out, most of them have been abducted by persons unknown who want them for their own nefarious purposes.

So Jack is obliged to return to New Richmond to try to solve the mystery and rescue the spares. This entails engaging with some unpalatable things from his past, firstly his former army colleague and now New Richmond's foremost crime boss, Johnny Vinaldi, who Jack strongly suspects may have been involved in the murder of his wife and daughter. Jack and Johnny's army days involved much time spent in the mind-warping computer-generated netherworld of The Gap, and Jack soon discovers that he will need to return there to rescue the spares and exorcise some of his own personal demons on the way, and once back in the "real" world exact some revenge on the people behind the whole scheme.

Any book seeking to relocate some sort of hard-boiled thriller plot to a futuristic milieu (where, usually, everything is simultaneously a) bafflingly hi-tech and b) a bit run-down and shit) complete with computer-generated alternate reality elements is going to have a hard time avoiding comparisons with classics of the genre like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, not to mention movies like Mad Max and Blade Runner. And, to be honest, as much fun as it is, Spares isn't really in that class, for a few reasons, notably that big chunks of the plot don't really make sense. Take Jack's relationship with Johnny Vinaldi, for example: he starts off wanting to kill him, then, an implausibly short time afterwards, they're tooling up to head into The Gap together to kick some virtual ass, then shortly afterwards Vinaldi is saving Jack's life back in the real world, then shortly after that Jack is holding a gun to his head again after it is revealed that Vinaldi in fact did kill his wife and daughter after all, then he lets him go. The netherworld of The Gap is set up in such a way as to raise a host of unanswered questions: it's clearly not a wholly virtual realm like the "matrix" in Neuromancer, and you do actually physically enter it (and presumably disappear from the "real" world while doing so) so how does the transition from one realm of reality to the other work? As described in the book it's all a bit Platform 9¾ for my liking. And the (presumed) killing at the book's end of the guy who's been trying to kill Jack and is responsible for the abduction of the spares happens a bit disappointingly "offscreen" to be properly satisfying.

The main complaint, though, is that the book's title leads you to expect something rather different from what you actually get. What you get is fine in its own way, but after the initial rescue and flight from the facility the spares play very little part in it except as a sort of plot MacGuffin, and (SPOILER ALERT) they all die, rendering the whole exercise arguably a bit futile. Which is a pity, in a way, because it's an interesting idea almost identical to the one which forms the main plot of Never Let Me Go, published 9 years after Spares in 2005. 

the last book I read

Mortal Causes by Ian Rankin.

Meet Detective Inspector John Rebus. He's a maverick cop, wha doesnae play bi the book, but, God dammit, he gets results. Let's just run through the items on our clipboard briefly, shall we: maverick, yes, troubled relationship and occasional conflict with superiors, yes (but, you know, results and that), borderline alcoholic, check, troubled relationship with various past and current women friends (but, at the same time, mysteriously irresistible to women in a rumpled yet maverick kind of way), check. And, most importantly of all, a sort of mystical ability to sniff out the truth no matter how tortuous the case (and, thereby, get results).

So when a young man is murdered down in the subterranean chambers of Mary King's Close in Edinburgh's Old Town it's Rebus who gets the call. And his suspicions of something a bit rum going on are aroused when he sees the pattern of injuries on the body: shot in both kneecaps before the final shot to the head. Punishment of this sort (with or without the final fatal coup de grace) is highly characteristic of sectarian conflicts in Northern Ireland, and Scotland has its share of that sort of stuff on a day-to-day basis as well (though usually without anyone getting kneecapped). Furthermore the victim has a rudimentary tattoo denoting his allegiance to a loyalist paramilitary group.

So Rebus is concerned about the murder being a precursor to further acts of sectarian violence, a concern heightened by the timing: it's the middle of the Edinburgh Festival and the city is heaving with tourists. Obviously the first thing to do is establish the identity of the victim, and this has a surprise in store for Rebus as well: the young man, Billy Cunningham, turns out to be the son of Big Ger Cafferty, a local crime boss put away by Rebus some time before and something of a recurring Moriarty to Rebus' Holmes in this series of novels. But does Cafferty know anything about what's been going on? After all, he has some previous involvement with crime on behalf of the UVF. 

As if that were not enough for Rebus to be worrying about, he has some problems with the ladies: his current partner Patience Aitken, a doctor, is occasionally grumbly about his being married to his job and inclined to bail out on dinner party arrangements at the last minute to go and get beaten up in a warehouse or something. Not only that but some low-level flirty activity with local lawyer Caroline Rattray has led her to go all bunny-boiler on his ass and, at one point, attack him with a can of spray paint.

With all this to worry about it's a wonder that Rebus manages to crack the case, one involving arms-running between Northern Ireland and Scotland, various bent cops including one of Rebus' immediate superiors, and Billy being involved in some computer hacking to get hold of a list of names of secret loyalists and threatening to make it public, whereupon it became apparent that he Knew Too Much and needed to be Rubbed Out. It's not quite as neat as that, though, as one local ne'er-do-well, not particularly interested in any of the niceties of sectarian disputes but well keen on the old ultraviolence, gets hold of a stash of Semtex and threatens to set it off in central Edinburgh at the height of the Festival. Will Rebus be able to chase him down in the crowd and stop him from detonating the bomb? SPOILER ALERT: yes. 

This is the first Rebus novel to appear on this list, and the first Ian Rankin novel originally published under his own name, the slightly more thick-ear thriller Blood Hunt being initially published under his Jack Harvey pseudonym. Interestingly, Mortal Causes (which is the sixth in the Rebus series which now numbers twenty-odd) and Blood Hunt were successive entries in Rankin's oeuvre, in 1994 and 1995 respectively. As I said there, Black & Blue is the only other Rebus I can swear to having read, although couldn't say for sure I might not have read one or two more. It's easy to mock the maverick cop clichés, but these are tight, efficient, enjoyable thrillers with an interesting leading character, and they evoke a strong sense of place in the same way that Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen novels do (a different place, though, obviously). If you're specifically setting out to read all of them then it'd probably be better to do it in order, but otherwise I wouldn't worry about just dipping in wherever you like. 

The only thing that bothers me a bit about Rebus is his name: it's just a bit too arch for my liking. I know there's supposed to be some sort of Polish back-story which might account for it, but, honestly, you might as well just call him Sherlock Enigma and be done with it. 

As it happens I have been to both the Edinburgh Festival (back in about 1999) and Mary King's Close, I think on this trip in 2009, although I don't seem to have any photos and the accompanying blog post doesn't mention it. I daresay if we'd encountered a mutilated corpse then that might have warranted a mention.