feel the freeze down in my knees

been in a tent for quite a bit of the last week so seem to have missed that #RobbieRobertson has died. this is a nice version of his most famous song https://t.co/Oampfee74p

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) August 14, 2023

A few thoughts on the recent death of Robbie Robertson, principal songwriter and guitarist with The Band and occasional previous featuree on this blog. Just as with Arnold Palmer there's a contrarian HOT TAKE that one might offer among all the people queueing up to offer praise and adulation, so let's put that out there first and then we can poke it around a bit.

So The Band's principal claim to fame is by association, specifically by association with Bob Dylan, whose backing band they were for a year or two around 1965/1966, just when he was at his peak of popularity and notoriety. Once they were a band in their own right (and their name, The Band, has a bit of faux-humble arrogance about it) their recording career as a group of significance lasted, at a push, a little over two years and three albums. Always a tight and compelling live band, they were mainly a touring entity for the remainder of their career until their farewell concert in San Francisco in December 1976, which, in a colossal act of cocaine-fuelled vanity and hubris, Robertson got his new showbiz chum Martin Scorsese to film and release as The Last Waltz. Having, as a consequence of his friendship with Scorsese, some control over the edit, Robertson made sure he came out of the film in the best light and got enough camera time on stage to ensure the rest of the band came across as his sidemen, even the vocalists, and buffed up some of his own performances (in particular the famous guitar duel with Eric Clapton) with judicious overdubbing. A shrewd businessman and a man of more ruthless self-control regarding drink and drug intake than most of his bandmates, Robertson also took a stranglehold on the songwriting credits, ensuring he came out of The Band's career considerably richer than all the others. A few solo projects and some lucrative film scoring work (much of it in collaboration with Scorsese) aside Robertson has spent much of the intervening 45 years or so buffing and re-telling his own legend, studiously ignoring his erstwhile bandmates' reformation without him, a venture only curtailed by their various premature demises. 

Whoa, you might say, that's a bit harsh, to which I would say: yes, of course it is, that was the whole point. My personal and slightly dimly-remembered experience with Robertson and The Band's music goes something like this: at some point during the late 1980s, almost certainly as a result of reading an article in Q magazine around the time of Robertson's debut solo album (which came out in 1987) I checked out a VHS copy of The Last Waltz from our local video shop and watched it. Around the same time I started at Bristol University and acquired a copy of The Band's 1968 debut album Music From Big Pink from the Fry Haldane record library (mentioned in relation to REM here). That remains a fabulously strange and unique work, largely out of step with the prevailing direction of rock music in 1968, and is, in my opinion, the best thing they ever did. One of the reasons for that is that Robertson's own songs - including The Weight, probably their most famous song - were augmented with some songs by, or co-written with, their erstwhile collaborator Bob Dylan, but also several by pianist and vocalist Richard Manuel (Tears Of Rage, In A Station, We Can Talk, and the admittedly dreary Lonesome Suzie). Arguably, it was the drop-off in Manuel's songwriting contributions hereafter that enabled Robertson to take control of things - Manuel was a more diffident character and a ferocious drug addict and alcoholic, none of which would have helped. His near-invisibility in the film of The Last Waltz is apparently largely a consequence of his pitiful drunkenness for the entirety of the concert. 

I retain something of a soft spot for Robertson's eponymous 1987 solo album - one of the first CDs I ever bought - but a clear-eyed re-assessment must point out two glaring flaws: firstly Robertson's own vocals, which AllMusic describe as "dry" and "reedy", which is probably fair, and secondly the quintessentially late-1980s feel of Daniel Lanois' production. This album came out within a year or so of Lanois' other two big late-80s albums, Peter Gabriel's So and U2's The Joshua Tree, and HOO BOY you can hear it. Robertson's vocal limitations probably explain why the album's best-known track and unexpected hit single is Somewhere Down The Crazy River, which is largely spoken rather than sung.

The point here is that Robertson and The Band, along with REM, Dylan, Beefheart and others, played a key role in my formative mind-expanding years in terms of music, which basically means listening to stuff that neither my Dad nor my school contemporaries were into. 

Anyway, you want the first two Band albums, definitely, and probably the third, Stage Fright. If you want a live album, 1972's Rock Of Ages is the one, much better than The Last Waltz - alternatively you might go for 1974's Before The Flood which documents The Band's American tour with Dylan that year and gives a high-energy shouty kicking to their collective back catalogue. The Last Waltz movie is well worth a watch as a historical document, though, although its portentous self-regard is a bit grating at times. Oddly, Robertson's death means that the Band's oldest member, Garth Hudson, is now its sole survivor.

the last book I read

Time And Again by Jack Finney.

Simon ("Si") Morley is in a bit of a rut. Dissatisfied with his job as a commercial artist (mostly for advertising agencies) in 1960s New York, plenty of interest from the ladies (hey, he's a good-looking guy) but trouble locating that special lady, you know, The One, he's ripe for a bit of a change and the whiff of adventure.

So when he's approached at his office by Ruben Prien, a similarly young-ish man with a shared US Army background, who tells Si that he really has to speak to him about something really really important - he can't tell him the details yet but, honestly, it may just be the most exciting thing ever - Si is inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and turn up a couple of days later at one of those ostentatiously grey warehouses housing a suspiciously un-busy removals business that's clearly a front for a massive secret government project if you just slip the right secret access code to the receptionist.

Inside the seemingly endless series of office rooms and giant plywood reconstructions of various real-world locations Si meets the architects of the project, including Ruben, Dr. Danziger, the project's instigator and director, and Oscar Rossoff, a medical doctor who tests Si's susceptibility to, and reaction to, hypnosis. It's only after Si has passed this test with flying colours that the nature of the project is revealed: Danziger's research suggests that those particularly adept at a particular form of self-hypnosis can actually travel through time. The best subjects are those who have a particularly acute visual sense, something Si's artistic background is ideal for, as the government well knows - Ruben didn't just come knocking on his door at random.

Various selected operatives are being sent to various locations at various times to test out the limits of the technique - one seems to be that the specific location where the time-slipping person does their thing must be substantially the same in both times. Si's assignment is in New York in the early 1880s, and it just so happens that the Dakota building exists in both timelines and the government can pull a few strings to rent an apartment that was also known to have been empty in early 1882.

Si has chosen this date specifically because his sort-of-girlfriend, Kate, has a family mystery to solve involving a man called Andrew Carmody, whose son was her adoptive father. He was in possession of some mysterious letters including Andrew Carmody's suicide note, itself written at the bottom of an earlier letter apparently from someone else and arranging a meeting in City Hall Park on a specific date in early 1882. Why not, says Si, add a bit of focus to the jaunt back in time by solving this mystery?

Si takes up residence in the Dakota and, after a bit of living as an 1880s gent would - getting the feel of the clothing, growing a beard, giving up watching the TV and making phone calls - he is ready to enter the trance-like state required to transcend the apparent laws of the universe and slip back to 1882. After a couple of brief-ish early jaunts to test the water he finds that he can make the transition without too much difficulty and pops down to City Hall Park on the night in question to hide behind a convenient pillar and eavesdrop. Sure enough Carmody turns up, and the man he meets with turns out to have blackmail on his mind, Carmody having done some shady property dealings in the past. The blackmailer turns out to be a man called Jake Pickering, and Si, determined to get to the bottom of things, tails him to his lodgings and, on finding a free room available for rent in the house, takes it.

The family running the house includes a young woman, Julia Charbonneau, who catches Si's eye; she also turns out to be Jake Pickering's girlfriend. Si convinces her that he is a private detective and takes her along to stake out the office where Carmody and Pickering have arranged to meet to agree the handover of the cash. They hide in a boarded-up room next door (where a lift-shaft is being constructed) and await the outcome of the rendezvous. It turns out Carmody has no intention of handing over the sum Pickering demanded, ONE MILLION DOLLARS, and instead intends to fob Pickering off with ten grand. Needless to say Pickering isn't having this and an altercation occurs, during the course of which Carmody, in a panic, attempts to set fire to Pickering's filing cabinet where various incriminating documents are stored. Aaaaanyhoo, one thing leads to another, the whole freakin' building catches fire, Si and Julia are obliged to reveal themselves and flee to safety, and the whole building burns down with some loss of life.

No biggie, Si thinks, the loss of life aside - but, if you think about it, all those people were already dead anyway as far as Si was concerned, from his 1960s perspective anyway. So it's something of a surprise when he and Julia are arrested by New York's police chief, Byrnes, and charged with murder. Even more of a surprise when he then lets them both go, but it turns out he just wants to save on the inconvenience of a trial and shoot them while "escaping". Si and Julia avoid this immediate fate, but the net is closing in, and the only way Si can see for them to avoid being caught is to jump forward in time to Si's "present".They do this, which buys them enough time for Julia to be amazed at the brazenness of 1960s womenswear and for her and Si to realise that they're in love with each other, but Julia decides, as intriguing as this future is, she can't stay - besides, she's figured out what has happened with Pickering and Carmody and can fix things if she goes back. 

Si reluctantly says goodbye and heads off to report to Ruben and Danziger for a debrief. It turns out that Danziger is no longer in charge, though - haunted, throughout the project, by the thought of one of the operatives doing something in the past which affects the future, from stepping on a bug to, I dunno, facilitating the destruction by fire of an entire building. Even Si's clumsy interventions don't seem to have had much effect, however, and in any case there is now a different school of thought, led by Ruben, which says: hell yeah, if we can change some shit, we should totally do it. but only by making bad stuff good, right, because that can never ever backfire. 

Si agrees to go back and do his best to make the changes that Ruben suggests, but, having spoken to Danziger first, in fact goes back and makes a small but crucial intervention that ensures that Danziger's parents never meet, and therefore that the project will never get started. His conscience clear, he then strolls off into 1882 New York to locate Julia and start a new life with her.

I can't remember where I saw a recommendation for Time And Again, but I think it was in some "forgotten classics" list, and indeed the edition I own is in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series, a sort of companion to the SF Masterworks series that has featured here a few times before - a non-exhaustive and non-chronological list goes: Roadside Picnic, I Am Legend, Last And First Men, The Sirens Of Titan, The Affirmation, The Dispossessed. An interesting contrast, and one revealing of my reading habits and genre preferences, is that Time And Again is the only novel on that Fantasy Masterworks page that I've ever read, though there are a couple of authors (M John Harrison, Ray Bradbury) who I have read other novels by. The fantasy genre in its most stereotypical form (castles, swords, quests, Things of Power, prophecies) has never really appealed to me, but of course there are boundaries where fantasy bleeds into other genres, most obviously science fiction. I'd say Time And Again straddles that boundary - it is mercifully free of dragons and goblins, and the central premise, i.e. time travel, is a science fiction trope, though it's described in exceptionally woolly terms here - you just have to really want to and think really hard and poof, apparently. None of the associated questions are really grappled with - what happens when you transition from the 1960s to 1882? Do you just pop into existence? What if someone else is standing in that spot? Given that the poofing from one timeline to another doesn't seem to involve any special equipment, why has it taken until now, and a multi-million-dollar government project, to work out how to do it? In fact, how come people aren't doing it accidentally all the time?

That doesn't really matter, though - even though we don't land properly in 1882 for any length of time until page 115 of a 400-page book, the bit in the "present" feels like a flimsy framing device to a lovingly-detailed historical description of late-19th-century New York. And a fascinatingly realised picture it is too - lots of stuff not in existence yet (the Empire State Building, most of the major bridges apart from the in-progress Brooklyn Bridge), a few things in unfamiliar situations (the Statue of Liberty's arm, temporarily housed in Madison Square Park, plays a key role) and a few things jarringly present that no longer are.

So it's loosely science fiction, arguably fantasy, certainly a historical mystery with a dash of romance thrown in. Its main fault is its main character's love for the historical period in which he finds himself. This sounds like an odd criticism, so stay with me: Si Morley makes no secret for his preference for the 1880s over the 1960s; well, fair enough, each to their own, but the main thrust of his criticism of the modern era seems to be that yes, OK, sanitation, medicine, the roads, but there are an awful lot of uppity black people and unattractively assertive women around, and he is deeply unimpressed with modern achievements like landing on the moon and inconsequential shit like that. In short, though he is a resourceful protagonist, he seems to basically be a bit of a jerk.

It hardly seems fair to criticise a book about time travel for some plot implausibilities, so I'll restrict myself to a couple: it seems unlikely that Julia could pop back into existence in 1882, even though she's seen through the fiendish plot that got them arrested, and have time to explain to the relevant people that she's onto them before being delivered a hot lead sandwich from Byrnes' boys. And even in pre-electronic-records 1882 it seems like Si Morley might have some explaining to do, before taking up his place in society, marrying Julia and all the happy-ever-after stuff, at his having apparently not existed anywhere before five minutes ago.

The other thing to mention about Time And Again is that it has illustrations: some purportedly Si Morley's own artwork, some photographs, mainly the supposed handiwork of one of the other tenants of the Gramercy Park boarding-house. Like Sweet Caress, which made use of a similar device, there is an occasional suspicion that some portions of the narrative only exist to allow the inclusion of an arresting image, like the one of the Brooklyn Bridge on page 258 - I know we're in pre-health-and-safety-assessment times, but it seems unlikely that a random member of the public could just swan up and walk out onto the main cables.

Anyway, for all that, Time And Again is great fun, and ties up its time-travel loose ends in a fairly satisfying way, as long as you don't think about it too much. Jack Finney's best-known work is probably his 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, mostly through its several film adaptations, as previously mentioned here.

the last book I read

Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

teelebrity crickylikey of the day

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

CGIlebrity lookeylikey of the day

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

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

the second-last book I read

Empire Of The Sun by JG Ballard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the unbreathable lightness of not being

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

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

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

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

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	94	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 265d
Milan Kundera	27th March 2008	11th July 2023	94	15y 105d

you batter you bowler you bet

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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple of footnotes:

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

the last book I read

Last Bus To Woodstock by Colin Dexter. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what the hell am I doing golfing in LA

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

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

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

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

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

the last book I read

Temples Of Delight by Barbara Trapido.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

all the pretty hearses

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

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

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

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	95	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 347d