the path of righteousness

A quick follow-up to the previous post which also serves as an opportunity to plug the fantastic map-related service provided by the National Library of Scotland. My particular favourite thing is the facility they provide to view old and new maps side-by-side on the screen. Here's the Gaer hillfort area in a contemporary aerial photo and (on the left) a map which purports to be from around 1900. I've reproduced the map bit below:

What you will notice (in the red circle) is that there used to be a tunnel under the railway, carrying some sort of path. If you zoom in on the contemporary map you will see that there are still some markings on the ground that suggest it might be still there, and sure enough if you drop the little yellow StreetView man at the end of Golden Mile View you can see it. The footbridge just south of the tunnel that goes over the river is still there, as it happens, and having been closed for a number of years was recently re-opened to provide access between the park and the new housing developments north of the river. 

Well, hurrah, you might say, problem solved. Yes, the inter-park access would be better situated at the bottom end of the park, but at least it exists. Trouble is it doesn't, for two reasons: firstly it looks from the StreetView picture as if the tunnel may be fenced off (though it's hard to see), secondly even if you could get there from Golden Mile View the M4 is now in the way of getting there from the Gaer hillfort area. 

Golden Mile View, by the way, is so named because of the section of railway which ran through Tredegar Park and was subject to tolls payable to Lord Tredegar, whose land it was, the name being an allusion to the substantial sums his lordship was trousering each time a train ran over the route. 

dum dum de dum dum de dum dum de PARK STRIFE

More non-book-related posts, for the love of God, you say? Electric Halibut hears your anguished cries and rides to the rescue on his wingèd steed, entirely naked except for a pair of rather splendid patent-leather riding boots and a dab of Blue Stratos behind the ears.

So, as I mentioned a while back, we moved house during 2022, and of course one of the things that does (unless you've literally moved to the house next door, anyway, which sounds literally insane but which some of our friends literally did a few years back) is put you in the vicinity of some different parts of the city, in particular interesting green areas which might be worthy of exploration.

So what the aerial photograph and map above show is some near-contiguous areas of green parkland in the general west Newport area, Newport being essentially divided into western and eastern halves by the River Usk as it makes its meandery way north-south through it. Those areas are, broadly speaking:

• The little wooded area and park adjoining the northern edge of the mahoosive St Woolos Cemetery and accessible at its northern end from the roundabout on Risca Road; it is allegedly called Coed Melyn Park, which my rudimentary Welsh skills tell me just means "Yellow Tree Park". I can confirm that outside of certain times in autumn the trees are, in fact, predominantly green;
• the parkland area containing the Gaer hillfort;
• Tredegar Park (not to be confused with Tredegar House, below);
• Tredegar House and its surrounding park (not to be confused with Tredegar Park, above).

I have marked those four areas on both images above as yellow, red, blue and a sort of pale mauve, respectively (going from north to south). As you can see they are all very much adjacent to each other, but the connections between them aren't as simple as you might expect. This, in a nutshell, is the point of this post. Let's have a look at them in turn, starting from the top. 

The first one is the connection between the bottom of Coed Melyn Park and the top of the Gaer hillfort; nothing fancy here but you can take a short walk from where the footpath emerges onto Western Avenue, cross Bassaleg Road via the traffic island and enter the park via its main entrance (there are several others along the park's eastern edge). So far, so good.

Take a walk in a broadly southerly direction through the park, maybe via a detour to the top of the hillfort (lots of trees so the location of the actual top is not particularly clear) along the recently-upgraded path and you will find yourself quite near, as the crow flies anyway, to Tredegar Park. So you'll be wanting, I would imagine, to continue your pleasant walk in that direction. Well, I've got some bad news for you, bucko, because there are some insurmountable obstacles in your way, specifically the River Ebbw and a railway line. If you want to continue to Tredegar Park then you'll have to follow the path round to where it ends at the gate at the end of Wells Close, find your way to the footbridge over the railway and then follow the roads round through the main car park and into the park. That's the green line on the map; the two red lines show imaginary crossings which would obviously be much better but would require some quite substantial engineering to bridge both railway and river. The only saving grace with the railway is that it isn't the South Wales main line (that takes a more southerly route to get to Cardiff and points west) but the more minor branch line to Ebbw Vale, calling at (among other places) Pye Corner as mentioned here. 

Let's assume you've now made the long trek round and have enjoyed all the various delights Tredegar Park has to offer - some outdoor gym equipment, football pitches, a playground, some pleasant riverbank areas - and fancy completing your journey by visiting Tredegar House and its pleasant grounds. Well, strap yourself in for a connecting journey of even more unimaginable complexity and inconvenience, as you'll need to exit via the car park and take one of two possible on-road routes to get round to the only available access points on the south side of the house. How much more convenient it would be, you might think, if one could simply traverse the busy lower reaches of the A48 as it approaches junction 28, where the two parks are probably a hundred yards apart, at most. I mean, you would need a footbridge to avoid being messily dispatched by an HGV, or possibly an underpass to avoid having to thread a footbridge around the ornate (and now unused) pair of gates that face the road at this point.

How utterly marvellous to be able to get on your bike up around Risca Road (in the vicinity of our new house, for instance) and cycle in traffic-free bliss all the way down to Tredegar House; yes, maybe a couple of points where you might have to dismount to traverse a bridge but, really, tish and pshaw to that, certainly in comparison with the current situation. So come on, Newport City Council, how about a bit of joined-up thinking?

if there's a russell in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now

After a period of relative inactivity comprising only one authorial death in a little over eighteen months, the Curse of Electric Halibut is back in business properly now, the latest victim being the third in a little over three months. This time it's American author Russell Banks, the title of whose 1991 novel The Sweet Hereafter eventually became too much of a temptation, the curse evidently having a keen sense of irony.

That book, the only one of his I've read, featured here in December 2018, which gives a curse length of just over four years. Banks was 82 which I suspect (and I should point out I haven't done the detailed calculations) shifts the average age hardly at all.

Banks is the second Russell to feature on the list, after Russell Hoban. That's not unique, as there are a couple of Williams and a couple of Johns on the list (and two people called James if you unpack JP Donleavy's initials), but his sharing a surname with another featuree (Iain Banks) is.

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	95	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d

the last book I read

Count Zero by William Gibson.

Turner is a man who Gets Shit Done. Usually the messy kind of shit the big corporate overlords don't want to get their hands messy with as it involves activity on the borderline of legality, or well on the other side of it, like stealing stuff,  shooting people in the face, that sort of thing. Only one thing hampering Turner's acceptance of further work in that line at the moment: he hasn't got a body! Well, he has, or most of one, but it's in a a preservation vat in more separate pieces than he would ideally like at the moment. 

The benefit of being extremely useful to lots of rich and powerful organisations, though, is that they have an interest in seeing you get grafted back together after being messily exploded, and Turner's body (or all the bits of it that could be scraped off the street in New Delhi where he was dispatched, anyway) is soon rebuilt, his memories gradually re-enabled, and soon he finds himself recuperating in Mexico with a lady sharing his bed. You can't trust anyone, though, and it turns out she's just been testing him out to ensure he's fully recovered in every department, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Having reported back to her superiors that Turner seems fine, he is quickly picked up for a new assignment: arrange the pick-up and recovery of a guy called Mitchell who wants to defect from one slightly shady bio-software mega-corporation to another. This involves Turner and his team hiding out in the Arizona desert with a team of medics who will scan Mitchell for any bio-booby traps (his brain is wired to explode, his hair has the plague, his entire leg is a missile, etc. etc.) before he is jetted off to his new employers to do all the new joiner stuff like being shown where the coffee machine and toilets are.

Needless to say, things don't go entirely according to plan and the person that arrives at the desert location in a rickety ultralight is Angie, Mitchell's daughter. Realising something dodgy is afoot Turner grabs Angie and scarpers in a high-powered jet, just in the nick of time as the hideout and everyone and everything in it is vaporised in an explosion.

Let's park what we might call Plot Strand #1 for a moment and pick up the next: Bobby Newmark is a fledgling hacker and cyber-jockey, surfing the collective virtual reality of the matrix under the moniker Count Zero, which would be a lot cooler if it were not self-applied. Pretty much the first actual cyber-job he takes on, testing out some security-penetrating software for a contact, nearly ends in his death as he encounters some black ICE which attempts to liquidise his frontal cortex, and he is only saved by the intervention of a mysterious entity with a female voice. After this close encounter Bobby has become known to certain powerful entities and has to make use of some of his (not entirely trustworthy) contacts to facilitate escaping and staying hidden.

Meanwhile, Marly Krushkova, former art gallery owner currently in disgrace in the art world for inadvertently passing off a forgery as real (thanks to the shady activities of her no-good ex-boyfriend) is contacted by the agents of a mega-rich art enthusiast called Josef Virek with an assignment: find the artist responsible for the real artworks that her fake was modelled on. Budget effectively limitless, no particular set method, just follow your instincts.

Bobby's attempts to find out where his dodgy software came from take him to the Sprawl, the partly-derelict, mostly-lawless mega-conurbation that occupies most of the east coast of North America from Boston to Atlanta. Turner and Angie eventually make their way there, too, via a brief stop-off to hole up with Rudy's brother, a brilliant engineer and chronic alcoholic, and "borrow" his armoured hovercraft for the trip, something that immediately comes in handy as they are attacked by a couple of guys in a helicopter and Turner is able to use the hovercraft (and a great big gun) to shoot the 'copter down and ram it, killing the occupants, who turn out to have been sent by the people who hired Turner in the first place to tidy up some loose ends.

Turner and Angie end up holed up in the same apartment as Bobby and his friends, whereupon it turns out that Angie is the female voice who saved Bobby earlier, and that moreover she has some bio-implants that enable her to jack into the matrix without having to engage with any computer hardware. Furthermore both she and Bobby have had cyber-encounters with mysterious beings of seemingly limitless power who seem to adopt the personas of voodoo gods when interacting with humans. 

Marly, meanwhile, has travelled all the way into low-earth orbit to discover the creator of the artworks, which turns out to be an AI entity inhabiting an old mainframe satellite. It further transpires that Virek doesn't have much interest in art for art's sake but instead has detected some AI/bio-software elements in the artworks and wants to make use of that stuff to get him out of his vat and give him effective immortality. The various protagonists of the various strands of the story have to come together to stop him.

Count Zero is a sort of loose sequel to Neuromancer, one of the seminal works of 20th-century speculative fiction (as I have banged on about tediously here before). It doesn't share any major characters with the earlier book but is clearly set in the same fictional universe, a small number of years later (its relationship with Neuromancer is similar to Idoru's with Virtual Light, if you like). There is just a tangential mention, easy to miss in passing, of a couple of people who are clearly meant to be Molly and Case, Neuromancer's principal protagonists, and Turner's physical disintegration and rebuilding here is very similar to Case's neurological destruction and rebuilding at the start of Neuromancer. The mysterious AI entities who control much of the plot (the squishy puny humans merely scuttling round enacting their plans in the physical world) are presumably meant to be fragmented versions of Wintermute and Neuromancer, the earlier book's twin AIs.

Purely as a rollicking adventure story Count Zero probably works better than Neuromancer; just as with Bring Up The Bodies and Eternity part of this is down to being a sequel and therefore being able to skip a lot of world-building exposition and just crack straight on with the plot. If you're only going to read one it should probably still be Neuromancer, though, just for its genre-redefining cultural significance. There is a third book, Mona Lisa Overdrive, in what's generally called the "Sprawl trilogy", although if you can read the green text at the top of the accompanying image here you'll see my edition renders it as the "Neuromancer trilogy". Anyway, Count Zero is tremendously good fun and still startlingly prescient about the internet, rampant commercialism, societal decay and the dangers of AI given that it'll be 37 years old this year. 

A couple of cultural echoes of other stuff: firstly the "slamhound" that catches up with Turner in the novel's first paragraph is very reminiscent of the Mechanical Hound from Fahrenheit 451 which was used for a pretty similar purpose, although it was all about the stealthy lethal injections rather than the more messy exploding. Finally the voodoo entities crop up elsewhere as well, Baron Samedi featuring heavily in Live and Let Die, and Papa Legba in the late-period Talking Heads song of the same name. 

the year of blogging dangerously infrequently

Here's the annual blog stats roundup, including graphs, if you like that sort of thing. The main headline news here is that this year (well, last year now) squeaked past 2017 by a single post to avoid being the joint-least-blog-post-y year on record at a paltry 45 posts. However, since 2017 included an all-time-low of 13 book reviews, while 2022 included a pretty healthy 23, that means that 2022 featured a measly 22 non-book-review posts while 2017 featured 31. There being more book posts than non-book posts is also a first for a calendar year. I can't really put my finger on a specific reason apart from the one I've already mentioned a few times which is that a lot of things that might have once ended up being blog posts end up on Twitter instead; to put it another way now that I have three kids I no longer have the free time or energy for extended blog ranting about a topic that piques my interest and might just do a short but sweary quote tweet or something instead.

Anyway, graphs follow. Note that following my realisation that I'd done the sex balance graph in a really stupid way last year I've recalibrated the scale to just show the percentage of books that were by female authors.

A few statistical highlights: although I read fewer books and fewer aggregate pages in 2022 than in either 2020 or 2021 (maybe increased opportunity for non-housebound activity after two years of intermittent lockdowns?) each of those three years featured higher book and page counts than any year since the all-time high of 2011. Longest book of the year was The Hydrogen Sonata at 605 pages, shortest was The Thirty-Nine Steps at 119 pages. The average book length in 2022 was around 323 pages, down from the 2020 high of 384 but just above the overall historical average of around 309. The percentage of books by female authors was down a little on last year at a fraction over 26%; this is nonetheless still a little higher than the overall average of just under 25%.

One other book-related matter: I took the plunge and registered with Goodreads for reasons that are slightly opaque to me right now, but I am taking the trouble to keep the book list updated in parallel with the blog list. If anyone is thinking of doing the same thing themselves, the most important thing to be aware of is that there is a bulk import facility that saves you having to type the details for 300 books in one-by-one, assuming that you have some sort of personal database somewhere (yes, of course I do) that permits exporting to some sort of Excel file for subsequent massaging into the appropriate import format.

the last book I read

The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble.

Jane Gray - no, not that one - is having a mixed time of it. A published poet - hooray! - but not writing much these days - boo! - and about to give birth to her second child with husband Malcolm - hooray! - who has just moved out of the family home after an irretrievable breakdown of their marriage - boo!

Luckily she has a bit of help managing this emotional rollercoaster from her cousin Lucy and her husband James, not to mention some more practical assistance with giving birth at home (to a daughter, Bianca, to go with son Laurie who is about three) and subsequent basics like getting to the toilet and acquiring shopping. 

We get a bit of back-story now: Malcolm is a guitarist and singer, quite highly-regarded in the particular musical circles he moves in (vaguely folky, maybe even a bit classical, as far as we can gather). The exact circumstances of his and Jane's split aren't made completely clear, but there seems to be an implication that Jane suspects he might secretly be gay - nonetheless it seems that post-split he has managed to shack up with another woman, so who knows. James, on the other hand, is a slightly shady car-dealer and occasional amateur racing driver.

Anyway, any doubts about the irrevocability of the split are soon, as it were, put to bed, as James' extreme attentiveness to Jane's welfare extends to his volunteering for helping-out duties without Lucy in tow and, during one of these, ending up in Jane's bed for a bit of light and cautious post-partum firkytoodling. The relationship continues as James' "business commitments" allow him a plausible smokescreen to be away from Lucy for days at a time, time he spends popping over and being jovial Uncle James for the kids for a while before taking Jane upstairs for a good seeing-to.

Eventually a "business trip" presents itself that offers an opportunity for James and Jane to get properly away, in this case to Norway where he is personally delivering an Aston Martin to a customer - inevitably in some shady way involving dodging tax, duty and/or insurance. The trip involves catching a ferry from Newcastle and so James and Jane and the kids head off there in the Aston Martin. All goes well until the car hits a brick dropped from a lorry ahead, flips over the central reservation, gets hit by an oncoming car and ends up ploughing into a tree on the opposite verge. By some miracle Jane and the kids are unhurt, but the driver of the oncoming car is dead and James is severely injured. All a bit awkward for Jane - James was scheduled to be away for two weeks, so as long as he recovers within that time they can get away without being rumbled. But James' injuries are more serious than that, and, in any case, what if he dies? Don't Lucy and his parents have a right to know? Jane bimbles around uselessly for several days until the decision is taken out of her hands by Lucy phoning her at her hotel - Malcolm has rumbled them and told her and she has made the necessary enquiries and found out what's happened.

Thankfully it turns out that James will make pretty much a full recovery - after Lucy arrives and takes charge of his convalescence it becomes clear to Jane that their affair will be over, though once he's recovered they do manage to meet up for a bit of valedictory fucking. Jane finds herself OK with this and moreover finds that the experience has rekindled some of her poetic inspiration. 

So what to make of this? I recall in my short but rambling review of Drabble's A Natural Curiosity back in the very very early late-2006 days of this blog I bemoaned not quite grasping what the book was meant to be about or what its purpose was. I think I have similar feelings here, although I guess I do see some of the purpose: The Waterfall was written much earlier in Drabble's career (1969) and embodies some proto-feminist themes like female independence, female control over sexuality and fertility, not having to settle for a man just because he is the major breadwinner and father of your children, getting sexually involved with men just because you want to rather than for any ulterior motive involving marriage or support. That said, and despite the back cover blurb describing the novel as "a bitter-sweet song of sexual love", there's never much insight into what attracted Jane to James in the first place. We don't get any clear sense of unstoppable lust from either participant, especially not Jane who is a strangely inert and passive central character. James' motivations are similarly opaque, and even allowing for his business trips it's unclear how he's able to conceal the affair from Lucy. 

Those considerations aside this is perceptive in its observations about 1960s sexual politics and the messiness of love and childbirth, without any of the central characters being engaging enough to really make you care very much about what happens to them. I'm not sure I really buy its being described here as "experimental", unless that refers to the occasional shifts between first-person and third-person narrative voices; this seems like a very low bar to clear for "experimental" status, though. I think Margaret Drabble probably suffers a bit from her surname being ripe for cheap puns on the word "drab" as well as other related puns. Of the three novels I've read from her lengthy career The Radiant Way is probably the best. 

here's summit I prepared earlier

A bit of an end-of-year tidy-up of unblogged stuff here, in particular this photo which I came across when looking at some stuff on Google Photos with the kids. You'll be aware that I've posted a few mountain summit and trig point shots here over the years, but I am pretty confident that this is the one which features the largest group of living individuals (I don't say "people" for reasons that will become obvious shortly).

So this is the culmination of a walk we organised with the members of the NCT group we were part of while in the last stages of expecting Nia in early 2012. Members of the group have been the subject of previous expeditions featured here in the past, but those were mainly Dad-centric expeditions leaving the wives and kids, bless 'em, at home. This time we decided we wanted to do a more inclusive thing and take everyone (or everyone who wanted to come and was available, anyway, which in our household meant me and Nia); that meant some careful planning so as not to go hog-wild and devise some terrifying 15-mile ridge scramble that would take all day and probably result in some deaths. 

Having been given responsibility for route planning, what I came up with was a walk featuring as its centrepiece and highest point Pen Cerrig-calch, the mountain that overlooks Crickhowell, and which also takes in on the way up the Iron Age fort of Crug Hywel which gives the town its name. Route map and altitude profile are below.

It's a fairly simple straight-up-and-down sort of route, and at about six and a half miles probably about right for a group including six adults, five kids (aged between eight and ten) and two dogs - all of whom, if you look carefully, are included in the summit photo at the top of this post.

By my reckoning I'd been up here twice before, once with Huw and his dog Baxter in December 2013 when we did a similar walk which also took in the neighbouring (and slightly higher) peak of Pen Allt-mawr, and once as the first part of my epic 19-mile solo Black Mountains horseshoe walk in April 2010. The one thing almost all walks starting from Crickhowell have in common is that you pop into The Bear for a pint afterwards, something we made sure we adhered to here.

the last book I read

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. 

Our unnamed narrator is a woman in her early twenties, carrying out a menial and pretty unrewarding job as personal assistant, companion and general dogsbody to the dreadful Mrs Van Hopper, who is rich, brash, American and generally frightful. Into their orbit in the Monte Carlo hotel where they are currently staying comes Maxim de Winter, fortysomething, slim, handsome, but troubled in a moody and - hey - slightly sexy way. Once Mrs Van Hopper has been conveniently removed from the field of play for a couple of weeks by a well-timed bout of illness our narrator and Mr de Winter find themselves mutually at a loose end and end up spending some time together. He is twenty years older than her and a bit prone to mysterious periods of enigmatic silence, but he evidently finds her company refreshing and ends up asking her to marry him (and ditch Mrs Van Hopper into the bargain).

After a low-key wedding the new couple return to England. But where will they live? Well, it just happens that Maxim has a mahoosive country house called Manderley in south-west England (probably Cornwall but never explicitly identified as such). So the new Mr and Mrs de Winter rock up there in their fancy motor car and move in. Gargantuan house, hot and cold running servants, all the pâté you can eat, plus extensive grounds and access to a private cove and harbour - what's not to like? Well, a few things, actually: most significantly the lingering influence of Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, who drowned off the coast nearby a year or so earlier and the remnants of whose presence can still be felt around the house, in things like the decor and menu choices but more directly in the form of Mrs Danvers, Manderley's housekeeper and dominating presence among the staff, and who (it soon becomes clear) had a very close relationship with Rebecca and was utterly devoted to her. 

A more assertive character might take a new broom to all this stuff and put their own stamp on the place, but the new Mrs de Winter is a slightly shy young woman and is a bit intimidated by the whole affair, and by Mrs Danvers in particular. Indeed it soon becomes apparent that Mrs Danvers' devotion to her former mistress may have made the short but significant journey from devotion to obsession - having set up home in Manderley's east wing, Mrs de Winter discovers that Maxim and Rebecca's former rooms in the west wing have been kept by Mrs Danvers in pristine condition exactly as Rebecca left them on the day she died: dust-free, clothes in the wardrobe, fresh flowers, nightdress laid out on the bed.

Rebecca's continuing influence seems to extend to Maxim as well, though, who is occasionally remote and uncommunicative. As a consequence the subject of Rebecca is never raised around the house, and tension and mutual misunderstanding continue. Is Maxim still in love with Rebecca? Does he regret his hasty second marriage? Will anyone actually talk to each other and find out? Things come to a head when the de Winters agree to host a fancy-dress ball at Manderley and Mrs de Winter is manipulated by Mrs Danvers into commissioning a costume resembling one of the de Winter ancestors, only to find that it is an exact replica of something Rebecca wore shortly before she died and that her husband now refuses to speak to her for the remainder of the evening. 

More important real-world considerations intervene the following day when a large ship runs aground on the rocks near Manderley. That of itself doesn't directly affect the inhabitants of the house, but when a diver goes down to assess the damage to the ship's hull he discovers Rebecca's boat, the one she went out in on the night she drowned, on the sea-bed nearby; not only that but the remains of a body are in the cabin. 

The de Winters (their disagreement of the previous night seemingly forgotten) discuss this new development: who could the body be? Rebecca was supposedly alone on the night she died and her body was washed up, battered by the sea and rocks, months previously, identified by Maxim and interred in the family crypt. Yeah, well, about that, says Maxim: actually [MULTIPLE PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD] I lied - the body in the boat will be found to be Rebecca's. But how do you know, dear? Well, because I shot and killed her and then put it there. 

The full story of Maxim and Rebecca's marriage then emerges: enraptured by her beauty and charisma and (I like to imagine) eye-watering sexual proclivities Maxim married her without getting to know her very well, just as he had with the second Mrs de Winter, but unlike the second Mrs de Winter Rebecca turned out to be a borderline psychopath: controlling, violent and pathologically unfaithful to Maxim including having a long-running affair with her own first cousin, Jack Favell. 

While Mrs de Winter is still giddy from the revelation that Rebecca is not, in death, a rival for her husband's affections, and that in fact he detested her, it soon becomes clear that there will be an inquest into her death and that Maxim will be required to testify and answer some awkward questions. These don't include having to explain why she was shot, as luckily his bullet passed straight through her without smashing into any bones, but do include having to account for the fact that the boat appeared to have been deliberately scuttled. The inquest eventually reaches a verdict of suicide, but back at Manderley Jack Favell turns up wanting some answers about a note she sent him on the day of her death and a mysterious visit to a London doctor a few days earlier. The de Winters, Favell and one of the officials from the inquest hotfoot it to London (no mean feat in the days before the M5 and M4) to track down the doctor and determine the purpose of her visit. Was she pregnant? If so, who by? And does that make it more or less likely that she subsequently killed herself?

The doctor retrieves his notes and reveals that no, she wasn't pregnant, but instead had some sort of inoperable tumour that probably would have killed her within a year. We are invited to conclude that she then goaded Maxim into killing her by claiming to be pregnant with someone else's child, thus avoiding a lingering and painful demise. Released from the prospect of Maxim getting put away for murder they speed back towards Manderley, learning on the way that Mrs Danvers has done a flit, presumably tipped off by Favell. Maxim has a Bad Feeling and wants to get back to Manderley as soon as possible, driving right through the night to do it, only to arrive back to a dark and moonless night but with an odd crimson glow on the horizon. Yes, you know what they say: red sky at night, Manderley's alight.

Just as with Pride And Prejudice and probably a few other titles on this list, my expressing an opinion is unlikely to change the accumulated weight of critical opinion about Rebecca, so embedded is it in literary culture from its famous first line onwards. As it happens, I enjoyed it greatly, building from its mundane opening May-to-December romance via the various plot revelations to increasing levels of weirdness and borderline hysteria, with the accompanying (but skilfully avoided) risk of ridiculousness. It seems to me as much a novel about the ridiculousness of arbitrary social structures based around class and sex as it is one about manipulation, betrayal and murder, but there is of course no problem with it being both things. Both of the principal protagonists have traits that will irritate modern readers: Maxim is remote, emotionally distant and generally a bit of a pompous and insensitive arse, and the second Mrs de Winter is frustratingly pliant and unassertive, although she does grow a pair somewhat in the second half of the book. Mrs Danvers' motivations remain slightly opaque: while it was evidently narratively OK to strongly imply that Rebecca was a cock-hungry man-eater and that the little seaside cabin she used to use for assignations was regularly liberally festooned with jism, giving anything more than the faintest nod towards the notion that Mrs Danvers loved Rebecca in that way would probably have been unacceptable in the 1930s. 

On a similar subject, when the famous Hitchcock adaptation was made in 1940 they were obliged to alter the circumstances of Rebecca's death so that it was accidental (slipping on the wet quay and hitting her head), as the accepted moral code in force at the time for films would not allow a spouse to get away with murder. I have never seen that film, nor, perhaps surprisingly, have I acquired any knowledge of the plot of the second half of the book over the last several decades, so all the various twistiness was pleasingly fresh and surprising to me. Daphne du Maurier's books were a rich source of material for films, notable examples being The Birds and Don't Look Now (both based on short stories). 

Lastly, our protagonist is never named during the book (apart from being the second Mrs de Winter, of course) but does let slip on one occasion that people regularly mis-spell her name, so I like to imagine it being Paraphernalia or Emphysema or Chlamydia or something. Other books featured on this blog whose principal protagonists are never given a name include Rogue Male, The Road, Blood Meridian, Surfacing and The Memoirs Of A Survivor.

let's polish up this list, me old dutch

Obviously I can't leave that link at the bottom of the last book post hanging, so here's an updated version of the list in that 2015 post about novels originally written in other languages, and read, by me, just to be absolutely clear, in English translations. I think the only novel I've read any substantial amount of in another language was Le Grand Meaulnes which I was required to have a crack at in about 1986 as part of the AO Level French syllabus (and as you can see below I cheated a bit by having an English copy to hand as well). As an aside, even if your spoken/written French is reasonably good, as mine was, the bar to reading novels in French is fairly high owing to the sudden lobbing-in of a whole new tense (almost never used in colloquial French) and associated verb forms that you have to get to grips with. 

Anyway, the main thing to note here is that the two most prominent European languages that were missing (and which I specifically mentioned in the previous post) are now ticked off: Polish by Solaris and Dutch by The Dinner. There are still a few more obscure European languages omitted, most notably Finnish, Romanian and Bulgarian, but there is a lower probability of coming across one of those on a random browse through a second-hand bookshop. I'm taking the view here that my reading of some of the Moomin books with Alys doesn't count, especially since the bare minimum of research after writing the first half of this sentence reveals that while Tove Jansson was Finnish the Moomin books were actually written in Swedish.

• Italian: Alessandro Baricco, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Italo Svevo
• French: Alain-Fournier, Michel Houellebecq, Françoise Sagan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Yann Queffelec
• Norwegian: Knut Hamsun, Jostein Gaarder, Jo Nesbø
• Russian: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Danish: Peter Høeg
• German: Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll, Patrick Süskind, Elfriede Jelinek, Elias Canetti
• Czech: Milan Kundera
• Swedish: Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell
• Hungarian: Sándor Márai
• Spanish: Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Isabel Allende
• Japanese: Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Kenzaburō Ōe, Yukio Mishima
• Hebrew: Amos Oz
• Portuguese: José Saramago
• Dutch: Herman Koch
• Polish: Stanisław Lem

the last book I read

The Dinner by Herman Koch.

Well, you know what they say - you can choose your friends, but you can't choose your relatives. So when Paul Lohman gets a call from his brother Serge inviting him to dinner at a swanky Amsterdam restaurant he is not immediately filled with joy. But, nonetheless, turning Serge down isn't really an option for a number of reasons - firstly, Serge is a man of some power and influence, a successful politician and a possible candidate for Prime Minister at the next election, and so generally what Serge wants Serge gets. 

But there is another reason as well, and that has to do with their respective children: Paul and his wife Claire's son Michel, and Serge and his wife Babette's two sons, Rick and Beau. Something has happened, and the families need to discuss it in order to decide what to do about it. But broaching this sort of subject is a bit awkward, as Paul isn't sure how much (if anything) Claire knows already, and it's generally the sort of distasteful subject you want to knock back a couple of bottles of wine before discussing.

Eventually (via a series of flashbacks) the point of this particular meeting in this particular restaurant emerges: Rick and Michel have committed a crime. Not just any old crime, though: murder, or manslaughter at the very least. On a night out a few weeks previously they went to withdraw some cash from an ATM and found access blocked by a homeless woman in a sleeping bag. During the course of some light recreational putting the boot in things got out of hand, some of the debris in the ATM enclosure proved unexpectedly flammable and, well, one thing led to another and she died. I mean, we've all done it, right? Learn a lesson, don't set fire to any more homeless people and we'll say no more about it. Trouble is, it's not quite that simple any more. Some grainy footage of the incident has been uploaded to YouTube and been picked up by the news networks. No-one's obviously identifiable, but the parents know who is who. But who uploaded the video? Not Michel or Rick, it seems. But it seems that Beau, Serge and Babette's adopted son from Burkina Faso, may have played a part and moreover may be blackmailing the other two boys.

We now get some back-story, partly to establish the kids' characters a bit, but mainly to focus on Paul. Formerly a history teacher, his teaching career came to an abrupt end after what he makes sound like a minor series of infringements - an unnecessarily aggressive review of a female student's work, some mildly contrarian in-lesson discussions about the holocaust - but which we soon realise are filtered through a pretty dense Unreliable Narrator filter. It's not just that, though - later on while Paul is being a house-husband his wife Claire gets ill and spends quite a bit of time in hospital, and it's clear (though Paul doesn't describe it this way) that he (left in sole charge of Michel) doesn't cope very well, and when Serge and Babette come round to suggest that they look after Michel for a while he belts Serge in the kisser with a hot saucepan.

Later on, when one of Michel's school essays is deemed to contain some unacceptable thoughts on the subject of capital punishment, Paul is summoned to the school for a discussion with the headmaster, a discussion which culminates in Paul beating the headmaster up. 

So we are invited to be mildly suspicious about Paul's motivations, and about how many of his slightly worrying personality traits he might have passed on to Michel (generally regarded by both sets of parents as the ringleader in any cousinly activity). Serge, on the other hand, seems to want some sort of public confession and proposes holding a public press conference to simultaneously reveal his own son and nephew as the perpetrators and announce the end to his own candidacy for Prime Minister. Paul and Claire quickly agree that this cannot be allowed to happen and hatch a scheme to stop him.

The book this reminded me of most strongly was We Need To Talk About Kevin with its basic theme of Middle-Class People Fucking Up Their Kids And Generally Being Awful. I haven't read it but The Slap seems to cover similar territory. As a reader your main feeling is that you're being goaded into taking up positions of general intolerant awfulness: yeah, OK, homeless people should make an effort not to be so malodorous or it's no wonder people set fire to them; yes, of course the general bleeding-heart sensitivity of modern students makes you want to punch them square in the face; yes, those who adopt children from African countries only do it for some sort of Madonna-esque virtue-signalling; yes, of course the kids adopted via this route will betray you, their saintly white benefactors, at the drop of a hat. The other thing I was put in mind of was the work of Michel Houellebecq, though to be fair The Dinner is less overtly racist and bonkers. 

So it's enjoyable reading, though bracingly cynical and with no attempt to make you warm to any of the characters. I haven't checked exhaustively but I think it may also be the first novel on this list originally written in Dutch - certainly this list from 2015 reckons that there hadn't been any yet.

[POSTSCRIPT] I meant to add for completeness that The Dinner has been filmed three times, once in Dutch, once in Italian and once in English. I suppose it's obvious material for filming - spicy subject matter, but most of the action happening to four characters sitting round a restaurant table, so presumably fairly cheap to film. Anyway, the English version starred Richard Gere and Steve Coogan as the brothers and Laura Linney, Rebecca Hall and Chloë Sevigny in supporting roles - three women, incidentally, because the film-makers chose to give Serge (Gere) a wife and an ex-wife for some reason.

grim (reaper) and bear it

No sooner has a respectable period of mourning and scythe-sharpening elapsed after the death of Hilary Mantel than the Grim Blogger strikes again. And once again it's someone who, while not seventeen or anything, was perhaps not at the top of the list of expected next victims. And that person is science fiction author Greg Bear, who died at the weekend after heart surgery complications at the age of 71. 

The inordinate length of time it took me to get round to reading Eternity means that the "curse length" value for Bear in the table is one of the lowest at only just over a year - only Michael Dibdin, José Saramago and Philip Roth's deaths had a shorter gestation period. This feels a bit odd, though, as it's been at least 30 years, probably a bit more, since I read Eon. But, hey, I don't make the rules. Oh, hang on ..... I'm getting a message in my earpiece that says I literally do make the rules, in their entirety. But, whatever, here is the full list of all thirty-two authors who have met their demise during the lifetime of this blog.

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	95	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d

the last book I read

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry.

Tom McNulty is just a simple Irish country boy in the mid-19th century American west. And what is there for a simple Irish country boy to do in the mid-19th century American west? Well, there's always showbiz. Tom and his friend John Cole, wandering teenage wastrels both, happen into a saloon in rural Missouri where the landlord is on the lookout for an act. I mean, ideally some girls to entertain the punters, but girls being in short supply he has the idea of putting these two pretty young teenage boys into some flouncy dresses and having them cavort around the stage.

And a very fine job the boys make of it as well, and they're quite the sensation in the local area. But eventually the bloom of youth wears off them and they're a bit too burly and stubbly to convince any more, not to mention having trouble fitting into the frocks. so it's a regretful farewell to the stage and off to enlist in the army, this being the obvious other thing for young men without much of that fancy book-learnin' to do.

Plenty for army boys to do in these exciting times, not least persuading those pesky native tribes to vacate the land so that the American Dream can be enacted upon it. During the course of a particularly brutal purge of some Sioux, Tom and John find themselves entrusted with the care of Winona, a young Sioux girl whose family have been massacred. During a break from fighting they set up home together as a little family group.

It should probably be made clear at this point that Tom and John Cole are more than just good pals, topping chums, brothers in arms, etc. This is hinted slightly coyly in the early part of the book and then driven home, as it were, with this short paragraph:

Righto, then. During this period of tranquility Tom resumes his habit of wearing women's clothing, sometimes for showbiz purposes, sometimes just casually round the house.

All good things must some to an end, though, and this time it's not the natives that need quelling (though there's always a bit of that going on in the background); no, this time it's white man against white man in the American Civil War. If anything this requires wading through even more brutal slaughter than before, not to mention a period of being captured by Confederate troops, imprisoned, and barely avoiding starving to death. After finally being released they collect Winona and make their way down to Tennessee where an old army friend is running a tobacco farm and needs help. 

Once again there is a brief period of tranquility and domestic bliss, and once again it's short-lived - first some dubious characters that they met on the road on the way to Tennessee and exchanged gunfire with track them down and require further gunfire and close-range slaughtering to get rid of, and secondly word comes from Tom and John's old commanders in their Sioux-quelling days that a bargain has been struck for the return of some white hostages, but that it involves giving Winona back to what remains of her family. 

Tom re-enlists in the army and delivers Winona back to reluctantly oversee her handover. As it happens after someone looks at someone in a funny way or coughs at the wrong moment the handover descends into a hail of hot lead and arrows in both directions and Tom and Winona are just about able to escape and make their way back to Tennessee, though not without Tom having to dispatch an old colleague of his who is intent on killing Winona.

And so domestic bliss descends again. There is, however, the small matter of Tom's desertion from the army and that small and isolated incident of murder, and sure enough eventually the authorities come for him. Rather than have everyone on the farm dispatched in a climactic gun battle Tom consents to be taken away to trial. Is this finally it, or will there be a last-minute reprieve?

Well, more in that in a minute. This is variously a story of war and conflict, a love story and an empowering LGBTQ+ story - in that while obviously the central couple of Tom and John are gay there's also the element of what you might call, if you were so inclined, Tom's genderfluidity, or, if you preferred, Tom's penchant for wearing dresses. There's an oddly dreamlike quality to the whole thing that means that while some of the descriptions of people being decapitated by cannonballs are quite graphic, there's never much of a sense of immediate peril to the main protagonists (contrast, for instance, with something like Blood Meridian which is set at a similar time). The first-person viewpoint contributes, of course: unless you're doing something slightly experimental or you're going to switch viewpoints dramatically your I-guy isn't going to die halfway through the book. The whole business with Winona is slightly odd, too: she pretty much instantly switches to regarding Tom and John as surrogate parents, despite them being implicated in the wholesale slaughter of her actual family before (to their credit, obviously) saving her. And finally (PLOT SPOILER ALERT) while the temptation to give Tom a last-minute reprieve and a happy ending was evidently overwhelming, I couldn't honestly say the resulting plot swerve was very plausible.

So it was fine, but I can't say I was knocked sideways by it in quite the same way as the judges for the 2016 Costa Book Award evidently were. My list (i.e. ones I've read) for the novel award here goes: 1976, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1987, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2016, 2019. Days Without End also won the 2017 Walter Scott Prize, a relatively new award specifically dedicated to historical fiction; Wolf Hall is the only other winner I've read.