Friday, October 25, 2024

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Special recently deceased sporting celebrity slash dreadful 1980s music throwback edition today, as we see recently deceased former Olympic shot putter, World's Strongest Man and budgie enthusiast Geoff Capes face off against Joe Fagin, singer of various songs soundtracking the hit TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (a show I should say I have never seen even a single minute of) one of which, That's Livin' Alright, gave him his solitary chart hit in early 1984. 

Despite the one-off nature of this brush with the charts, Fagin had the barefaced chutzpah to entitle his 1996 compilation album All The Hits Plus More. The cover images available on the internet for his earlier album Time Is A Thief reveal an amusing typo in the title of the song Love Hangs By A Thread which puts a whole new Berlin leather bar spin on it:


Thursday, October 24, 2024

all right, smart alec

You might recall that when I reviewed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy here a while ago I mentioned that I'd seen the highly-regarded 2011 film (starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley) in the cinema when it came out, and furthermore that I'd never seen the 1979 TV series, which famously starred Alec Guinness as Smiley. 

Well I'm just checking in here to tell you not only that the full seven-part series is now available on BBC iPlayer, but that I have spent a few days, as I believe the kids say, binge-watching it. I mean, a proper binge-watch would have done the full thing in a single five-hour sitting breaking only to occasionally go for a wee and buy more Pringles, whereas I managed about an episode a day for a week.

Anyway, you'll be wanting a verdict, I imagine. It's worth making the point first that order is important here, and mine is: 2011 film, book, 1979 TV series. Obviously the TV series, occupying over twice the screen time of the film, has a bit more space to stretch out and luxuriate in the detail, and even include some stuff from the book that the film didn't have time for. As far as the actors go I'd say Mark Strong is a better fit for Jim Prideaux, Ian Bannen being a bit too old and not physically imposing enough, and Colin Firth's Bill Haydon has a slightly more brittle and less reptilian charm than Ian Richardson's. Yes, yes, but what about Smiley? Well, Alec Guinness is slightly more twinkly and charming than Gary Oldman, and you get more of a sense of his penetrating intelligence. Oldman's Smiley is grey and cold almost to the point of anonymity, which of course is what makes him such a dangerous adversary. That said, and with the caveat that Smiley's age in the various books he appears in is a bit elastic, Guinness was probably a bit older than the book's version of Smiley. Of course both versions can exist without either detracting from the other, or there having to be a definitive verdict about which one is better. On the other hand, this is the internet, so people will of course get all aerated about it. 

The other Alec Guinness series, 1982's Smiley's People, is also available on iPlayer. They missed out the second book in the loose trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy, apparently for cost reasons, presumably because it features some exotic overseas locations that they couldn't afford to film in. I have some tentative aspirations to read all three books so I may defer watching that series until I've done so. 

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

MP for Ashton-under-Lyne and our current deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and, hem hem, adult entertainment performer Lauren Phillips (that link is safe, search for anything else and you're on your own). I mean, obviously it's mainly the hair. Anyway, one of them has regular encounters with Black Rod, and the other is a British politician; I expect you can make up your own jokes.

Leaving aside the knob jokes for a moment, I suspect Ashton-under-Lyne is one of the most commonly mis-spelt British place names, in that many people will assume it mirrors the form of the slightly better-known Newcastle-under-Lyme and therefore put an "m" in it. Ironically both suffixes seem to derive from words meaning "elm", in this case presumably elms on a hill, since the "under" conjunction usually (as you might expect) denotes that the thing after it is either the name of a nearby hill or a prominent thing on a nearby hill. 

There are quite a few place names of this type in Britain, some hyphenated, some not, including the splendidly named Weston-under-Lizard, which, like Newcastle-under-Lyme, is in Staffordshire, and not, as you might imagine, Cornwall

Anyway, other easily mis-rendered place names include Mevagissey (which is in Cornwall this time) which I genuinely spent a good chunk of my life assuming was called Megavissey, which not only rolls off the tongue more easily but also allows me to adapt the joke I made here and here and suggest that you get there by going through Millivissey and Kilovissey; if you get as far as Gigavissey you've gone too far. There is also the strange case of the Scottish town of Dumbarton (with an "m") being in the county of Dunbartonshire (with an "n") which can only be a cruel joke designed to catch people out. 

Monday, October 14, 2024

the last book I read

Candide by Voltaire. 

So there's this chap, erm ... *checks notes* ... Candide. A minor relative of the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, living happily as a minor member of the household at their castle in Westphalia until he contrives to piss on his Spätzle by getting a little too friendly with the Baron's winsome daughter Cunégonde. Before she can get fully acquainted with his Bratwurst the Baron rumbles them and banishes Candide from the castle. 

Candide immediately falls into the first of a series of adventures when he is press-ganged into army service, flogged and forced to fight. Escaping amid the carnage of battle, he makes his way to Holland where he encounters his old philosophical mentor Pangloss who tells him of the terrible fate that has befallen Thunder-ten-Tronckh (destroyed) and Cunégonde (raped and murdered) at the hands of the same people Candide has just been fighting for. 

Pangloss and Candide then head for Lisbon, where they are immediately shipwrecked and caught up in the aftermath of an earthquake, but manage to meet up with Cunégonde and her elderly lady-in-waiting, who are, it turns out, not dead after all. Pangloss, a little too free with the old philosophical discourse, is hanged for heresy and Candide and the ladies decide that a sharp exit is called for and board a ship for Buenos Aires. Unfortunately when they get there the local governor takes a fancy to Cunégonde and Candide is forced to flee when he is pursued by the local rozzers in relation to a couple of wholly regrettable but necessary killings he did back in Lisbon. 

Candide and his new sidekick Cacambo head off via Paraguay to El Dorado, a paradise of peace and tranquility where the streets are paved with precious stones, but rather than kicking back for a bit Candide decides that he is missing Cunégonde and they head off northwards towards Surinam with nothing more than a colossal stash of priceless diamonds to sustain them and pay for their passage back to Europe. 

After further adventures in England, Paris and Venice, during which he is reunited with Cacambo, and, more surprisingly, Pangloss (also not dead after all), Candide makes his way to Constantinople where Cacambo has located Cunégonde, sadly no longer the fresh-faced girl she once was but worn down by being raped and almost-murdered at the castle and then rented out to a series of men in Lisbon and Buenos Aires before being enslaved by a Transylvanian prince. Candide purchases everyone's freedom with the last of his diamonds, marries Cunégonde and they all set up home on a farm outside Constantinople and devote themselves to the simple life. 

There's a lot going on here, especially in a novel amounting to only about 95 pages (the various notes and appendices in my Penguin Classics edition mean the whole thing is about 190 pages), and just as with Gulliver's Travels (a novel Candide resembles quite closely) there's a sense that a lot of barbed satirical points are being made about specific people and that a full appreciation of them is probably lost on the modern reader 250+ years later. Probably the main thing being satirised here is the notion, espoused by Gottfried Leibniz in real life and by Pangloss in the novel, that the world in which we live is the best of all possible worlds. The extraordinary abuse and indignity Voltaire visits upon his characters is an attempt to refute this idea - where this involves the repeated rape of the principal female character it's quite reminiscent of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Pilgermann.

Candide is the second book in this series to be the work of an author who went by just a single name - the first such author to feature here was Trevanian, only a few months ago. Needless to say Voltaire wasn't his real name; that was François-Marie Arouet, and while Candide is his most famous work he was a prolific writer and campaigner for civil liberties, freedom of religion and speech, and lots of other good and commendable stuff. 

Anyway, this is all highly enjoyable and very short, though if you keep a finger in the footnotes section at the end and consult it as you go you will find this slows you down a bit even as it keeps you in the know.

Monday, September 30, 2024

happy quadricentennial to me

So as I coyly alluded to in the previous post, the appearance of an Anita Shreve book in this list often marks a key moment in its history, an anitaversary if you will, and this one is no exception, being the 400th book to appear in this list since The Weight Of Water almost exactly 18 years ago. I see that last time (Sea Glass was the 300th book) I provided some stats, so I'll update them here:

Milestone Date Days Pages Pages/Day
100 15th September 2010 1474 28361 19.24
200 2nd February 2015 1601 30761 19.21
300 16th September 2020 2053 31782 15.48
400 30th September 2024 1474 33460 22.70

  • Note that this was the joint-quickest century on record, oddly occupying the exact same number of elapsed days as the first one. Note also, however, that each century has involved longer and longer books, on average anyway, and so the last hundred were read at the highest pages-per-day rate of all. Note also that the first ever book review was in a September (2006), and then three of the subsequent milestones (all the ones involving an Anita Shreve book, as it happens) also took place in September (2010, 2020 and 2024). Coincidence? OR IS IT??!!
  • Longest book in the fourth hundred was The Pope's Rhinoceros at 753 pages; shortest was The Thirty-Nine Steps at 119 pages. 
  • Number of distinct authors for each hundred in chronological order: 93, 88, 92, 93.
  • Number of authors who were new to me (generally, not just among books reviewed here) for each hundred in chronological order: 40, 36, 42, 55. The fourth hundred was therefore by a comfortable margin the most adventurous in terms of trying new stuff, which is interesting, but which I'm not aware of having been a conscious decision.
  • Male/female split for each hundred in chronological order: 75:25, 72:28, 80:20, 71:29. So the fourth hundred was the most female-author-heavy yet, but only by one and still with a male to female ratio of well over two to one.

The "most read authors" chart now looks like this:

Number of books Author(s)
11 Iain (M) Banks
7 TC Boyle
6 Ian McEwan
Russell Hoban
William Boyd
5 William Gibson
Jim Crace
John le Carré
4 Lawrence Durrell
Anita Shreve
Beryl Bainbridge
Robertson Davies
Patricia Highsmith
3 Cormac McCarthy
Stieg Larsson
Hilary Mantel
Alison Lurie
Graham Swift
Paul Theroux
Anne Tyler
Barbara Trapido
Marilynne Robinson

the last book I read

Strange Fits Of Passion by Anita Shreve.

Mary Amesbury has just moved into a rented house up on the Maine coast with her baby daughter Caroline. Except she hasn't, because Mary Amesbury doesn't exist, and actually the woman who's rented the house is Maureen English, a journalist from New York, on the run from her alcoholic and physically abusive husband, Harrold.

Arriving after a hasty departure from the couple's New York apartment, Maureen/Mary has only her car, some baby stuff, and a limited supply of cash. She also has some very obvious facial bruising which prompts sympathy but also attention that she doesn't really want, and her attempts to pass it off as the result of a car accident don't really fool anyone.

Mary settles into her new home, a seaside cottage in the small community of St. Hilaire, where the main business is fishing and indeed the cottage (rented to her at minimal cost by a sympathetic local widow, Julia Strout) is right next to the main mooring-place for the local fishing boats. Inevitably a young and apparently single woman attracts some curiosity and attention and fairly soon Mary is having regular clandestine meetings with Jack Strout (a cousin of Julia's late husband) who pops in in the early hours of the morning on his way to his fishing boat to tickle her clam, pop his tackle in her box, and so on and so forth. Jack is married, though fairly unhappily, to a wife, Rebecca, crippled by some sort of depressive illness. But he has no thought of leaving her and soon isn't going to have an excuse to visit any more as he'll be mooring his boat up for the winter.

Jack and Mary's secret is partly revealed when Caroline contracts a sudden fever and they have to take her to the local hospital. More seriously, the visit also entails the doctor phoning the family doctor in New York to get details of which antibiotic Caroline is allergic to (Mary can't remember). Mary is frantic that this will provide a way for Harrold to track her down, and sure enough it's only a matter of days later that a stranger is seen in town asking questions - questions like: has anyone seen a young woman with a baby? Most people are wise to what's going on and remain tight-lipped on the subject but inevitably someone blabs and in no time at all Mary is awoken near dawn not by her expected visit from Jack but by Harrold, who gets her to come downstairs with the promise of a reasonable discussion about things but then attacks her with a fork, rapes her and passes out in a chair in a drunken stupor. Mary considers stabbing him but decides that she can't bring herself to do it, and so heads out to Jack's boat where she knows there is a gun. She arrives back just as Harrold is starting to stir and shoots him dead just as Jack arrives.

This is where the main section of the story (set in 1970 and 1971) ends, and we zoom back out to the framing device, which is this: twenty years or so later, fellow journalist Helen Scofield seeks out Caroline, now a college student, to hand over the various interview transcripts that she used to write a magazine article on the case not long after it happened and while the lengthy murder trial process was still in progress. The article attracted some considerable publicity and gave Helen a career boost that went on to make her a wealthy author of true-crime books, but she has come to feel some guilt for how she portrayed Maureen/Mary in the article and thinks that it may have swayed the judge into giving her a more punitive sentence than he might otherwise have done. 

Framing devices of this sort are tricky - too long and people get frustrated wanting to get through the wibbly-wobbly dissolve to the actual story, too short and it feels tacked-on and perfunctory. I can see why it was presented in this way; it allows the author to examine changing attitudes to domestic violence over a couple of decades, the original article playing up the angle of: maybe she asked for it, maybe it was just a bit of rough sex gone too far, maybe she and Jack cooked up the murder between them so they could continue their illicit relationship, etc. The device of having the main narrative be presented as a series of interview transcripts is slightly problematic as well: most of it is in Mary's voice and inevitably some of the more flowery descriptive passages read very much as something a novelist would write, but not necessarily something someone would say in an interview. 

So the structural scaffolding is a bit too visible to the reader, but the story being told here is compelling and plausible, and doesn't fall into the trap of making its protagonist too saintly. It's one of the earliest novels of Anita Shreve's long career (published in 1991; the other three Shreves on this list are from 1997, 2002 and 2004) and maybe that explains the tendency to structural tricksiness. It must also be noted that the central plot resembles a sort of gender-swapped version of The Shipping News, and resembles even more closely the plot of the 1991 Julia Roberts film Sleeping With The Enemy, itself based on a 1987 novel of the same name. There is also a reference towards the end of the novel (in the section that reproduces the notorious magazine article) to some aspects of Mary's life resembling Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; that previous work is referenced much more explicitly in When She Woke

Seasoned blog-watchers will know that the appearance of an Anita Shreve novel often marks a milestone of some sort; more on this in a later post.

Sunday, September 22, 2024

the last book I read

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M Banks.

Ah, Earth. You can keep all your exotic worlds populated by giant sentient slugs and super-intelligent shades of the colour blue, and your Dyson spheres and your infinitely-long quantum singularities, you can't beat good old Earth. Having said that, this earth is a bit different from the one you and I are familiar with. For a start, there's no Swindon, and furthermore there seems to have been some non-specific apocalypse that's left a lot of high-tech megastructures, nay, indeed, gigastructures around that no-one knows how to use any more. 

That's not to say people are just sitting around, though: there are things to be done. Gadfium is the Chief Scientist of the ruling class and is tasked with interpreting some weird goings on on the Plain of Sliding Stones, some sort of equivalent of Racetrack Playa with much mystical divination applied to the movements of the stones. Gadfium determines that the recent highly unusual movement of the stones is some sort of coded message from the upper levels of the gargantuan Serehfa Fastness, a kilometres-wide, kilometres-high castle parts of which no human has visited in decades. 

Bascule is a Teller, one practised in communication with the Crypt, a sort of virtual cyberspace realm where much information is stored, sentient programs roam freely and dead people's mind-states are uploaded so that they can live on, in some sense at least, after their deaths. "Death" isn't as final as we might imagine as some uploading of mind-states into new physical bodies goes on, but there is a limit after which you only get to live on in virtual form. 

As if to illustrate this, Sessine, a high-ranking government official, is unexpectedly assassinated by one of his bodyguards. This being his last physical life he then awakes in the Crypt's reality and is then rapidly killed another half-a-dozen or so times in quick succession, just to emphasise that someone really wants him properly dead. Eventually he awakens in a location that turns out to be a secure space that someone set up for him many years before in highly-prescient preparation for just this sort of series of events. That someone turns out to be himself, or at least a previously-uploaded copy of his former mind-state. So now all Sessine has to do is work out who multiply-murdered him and see what he can do about it. Time is on his side, though, as each second in the "real" world corresponds to many days in Crypt time.

Speaking of real-world reincarnation, while all this is going on a young woman awakens in a mysterious building, wanders around a bit and encounters some kind and helpful people who clothe her and accommodate her while she tries to remember who and/or what she is. What she is, it turns out, is some sort of sentient program from within the Crypt, sent into the "real" world to facilitate the passing of some knowledge to those that need it, knowledge of this kind having been suppressed for many generations by the ruling class. This is as a result of some upheaval involving a significant chunk of humanity (the Diaspora) leaving the planet to spread themselves out across the galaxy and beyond, and those left behind instituting some sort of science-denying regime to further their own ends at the cost of being able to avoid a planetary-scale catastrophe should it occur. And well whaddaya know here is exactly such a catastrophe, the solar system's slow drift into a huge dust cloud, a process known as the Encroachment whose end result is likely to be the extinguishing of all life on Earth.

Sounds bad, right? Well, yeah, and it will require some co-operation between the various protagonists to get out of this tight spot. Firstly, Gadfium, with some virtual-realm help from Sessine, has to help the real-world Asura survive long enough to deliver her message to those that need it, not straightforward given that most of the ruling elite want her rubbed out, and then Bascule has to physically gain access to the upper reaches of the Fastness to make contact with whoever has been sending the cryptic messages and facilitate them and Asura making contact with each other to unlock the mechanism for averting disaster.

That mechanism, the "feersum endjinn" of the book's title, is never very clearly explained, but appears to be some system of propulsion powerful enough to shift the entire solar system out of the way of the Encroachment. Which is nice

But why the krayzee spelling, you'll be asking. Well, that's because all of the sections told from Bascule's perspective are rendered in this way. Something that, if you're a tedious literalist like me, might make you ask: since this only works with written text, does that mean this is some sort of journal that Bascule is keeping? 


You might also say: just a minute there, this is a very similar device to the one used throughout Riddley Walker, and in fact there are some other similarities as well, notably the whole thing about remnants of an ancient civilisation ill-understood by a technologically-regressed population. I mean, there are differences: the guys in Riddley Walker were properly back at the bashing rocks together stage whereas here they've still got machines and computers and stuff. 

Now that we've cracked the seal of comparing bits of Feersum Endjinn to other things, let's do a few more: the whole separate virtual realm that the living can port into in some way is familiar from William Gibson's Neuromancer and its sequels, not to mention countless other books, and the thing about stepping down levels of reality and finding time slowing down relative to the "real" world will be familiar to anyone who's seen Inception. And the thing with Asura as human bearer of some piece of corrective computer code which has to be re-inserted into the virtual realm in some way to fix things is not unlike the function of Keanu Reeves' character in the Matrix movies. The business of digging into the substrate of the Fastness that some of the military engineers have been tasked with doing to try and unearth something is a bit like the similar operation that's going on in one of the sections of Banks' own Culture novel Matter, and, lastly, the adventurous go-getting segment of the population of a planet finding a way of separating itself from their less-adventurous fellow-planet-occupants is similar to what happened to the Golgafrinchans in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, only in reverse (i.e. there it was the useless segment, telephone sanitisers and all, who jetted off in the spaceships).

That's not a blanket accusation of plagiarism, by the way; for one thing both Inception and The Matrix post-date Feersum Endjinn (published in 1994) by several years, and many of these tropes are widely-used across the world of speculative fiction. I do think it's almost impossible, though, that Banks wasn't influenced by Riddley Walker (published in 1980). 

Anyway, I enjoyed this more than the other non-Culture (but still with the "M") Banks, Against A Dark Background, even though there a few things that don't really add up: the purpose of the weird gibbering flayed skulls that pop up occasionally in the in-Crypt sections isn't very clear, unless it's just a general indication of the descent of certain parts of the virtual world into chaos, and, more fundamentally, the idea that the leftover engineering on Earth could include something able to invoke the movement of an entire freakin' solar system in such a smooth and non-disruptive way as to not throw any of the planets off into deep space is a bit, well, implausible, even with the slightly different plausibility parameters that reading a science fiction novel requires. It's lots of fun, though, and at 279 pages fairly short by Banks' usual chunky standards. 

Feersum Endjinn won the British Science Fiction Association award for best novel in 1994; other winners on this list include Inverted World (1974), Banks' own Excession (1996), The City & The City (2009) and Ancillary Justice (2013). 

Thursday, September 19, 2024

celebrity deathylikey of the day

The large number of photographs of Italian footballer Salvatore "Toto" Schillaci on the internet this week, in the aftermath of his death aged 59, prompted me to notice that he looked a bit (to me, as always, just to pre-empt any "no he doesn't" nonsense) like comedian Geoff Norcott.


Schillaci was one of those sportspeople who, rather than having a long and glorious career, flowered briefly and gloriously and then didn't do much else - Bob Massie rather than Glenn McGrath, say, or Vinod Kambli rather than Sachin Tendulkar. Seven of his sixteen international caps, and six of his seven international goals, came during the 1990 World Cup where he won the Golden Boot, although, oddly, it was known as the Golden Shoe at the time. 

Geoff Norcott's USP seems to be that he is a rare "right-wing" comedian in a profession dominated by instinctively left-leaning people. Personally I'm not convinced these terms have a great deal of meaning, and certainly if you watch Norcott's stand-up routines he comes across as a fairly engaging blokey sort of bloke, rather than, say, Hitler.