the last book I read

Look To Windward by Iain M. Banks.

So here we are again, back in the AI-moderated anarcho-utopia of the Culture. You'll remember from previous visits their technological advancedness and their tendency to get involved and try to massage the development of other (small-c) cultures into directions they deem desirable, with sometimes mixed results.

Well, they've been at it again here - a long-ago skirmish during the war with the Idirans (sort of giant sentient armoured tortoises, as featured in the first Culture novel Consider Phlebas) resulted in the deliberate detonation of a couple of stars, with the inevitable attendant gigadeaths, and now the light from those detonations is about to reach Masaq', one of the Culture's Orbitals. This has been turned into the excuse for a bit of a cultural jamboree, as if to (slightly smugly) acknowledge the Culture's occasional propensity for mistakes, while at the same time revelling in their ability to throw a party and the fact that, as a civilisation that has ascended to the enviable heights of permanent leisure for all and dispensed with bourgeois notions like money and possessions, no-one has to get up to go to work in the morning.

Not everyone views the Culture as an unequivocally benign and civilising influence, though: the Chelgrians have been nursing a grudge for a while after a bit of well-intentioned Culture meddling to try and persuade them to dispense with their barbaric caste system backfired. The Chelgrians are a bunch of bipedal cat/fox/marsupial types (well, apart from the vestigial extra limb in the middle of the body which I've never seen a cat have), broadly civilised but with their predatory past a bit more recent in evolutionary terms than the Culture's inhabitants and therefore more of an inclination to hang on to outmoded notions like honour and revenge.

One of the most famous Chelgrians, Mahrai Ziller, a composer, is a resident of Masaq' Orbital, having fled there from Chel during the caste wars. Another Chelgrian, Major Quilan, has been sent on a mission to Masaq', ostensibly to try to persuade Ziller to return home, but in fact on a deadly mission so secret EVEN HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT IT IS!!! Yes, it's The Chelgrian Candidate. Quilan's mission is more wide-ranging than just popping a cap in a politician's ass, though; he's planning (well, once he gets his memory back) to blow up the Hub's controlling Mind and kill about five billion people, thereby taking roughly proportionate revenge for the Chelgrians killed during the Culture's ham-fisted intervention.

This is probably the most straightforward Culture novel since The Player Of Games, all of the intervening ones - Use Of Weapons, Excession, Inversions - depicting events on the outer limits of the Culture's society in one way or another. The crazy physical geography of the Orbital is very well realised, as are the day-to-day dilemmas of its inhabitants - not the sort of mundane concerns that you and I have to put up with, but more esoteric stuff like where to go hang-gliding next, what sort of body you want to be reincarnated in should you accidentally hang-glide into a live volcano, and indeed whether it's worth even attempting any physical or artistic endeavour anyway given that with a snap of the fingers you could get an AI Mind to do it far better and quicker than you could ever hope to do.

Portraying non-humanoid aliens is always tricky, and though Banks tries to load the dice in his favour here by having Kabe Ischloear, the Homomdan, be the most rational and level-headed non-AI character in the book, a ten-foot tripedal pyramid who occasionally gets mistaken for an item of modern sculpture is a tricky sell, recalling as it does Douglas Adams' hyperintelligent shade of the colour blue. The Chelgrians are a bit more successfully realised, and he manages to make the tortured Quilan a fairly sympathetic character, despite his intention of committing planet-scale genocide. What's missing is any real suspense, though, the Culture's AI Minds being so clever as to almost eliminate even the slightest possibility that Quilan's scheme could ever succeed, though what Masaq' Hub does with the knowledge is perhaps slightly unexpected.

A couple of other quibbles: it's not entirely clear what the point of the episodes on the airsphere planet is, other than for Banks to have some fun with the gargantuan dirigible behemothaurs (giant sentient alien hot-air balloons, basically) that roam its atmosphere. And presumably the couple of teasers featuring the female Chelgrian assassin who turns out to be a cloud of nanobots from an unknown civilisation (who, we're invited to infer, have manipulated the Chelgrians for their own ends) will be revisited in future books. And the business with the "hilarious" spaceship names really isn't as funny as Banks seems to think it is.

Overall it's as rollickingly good fun as all the other Culture books, though, with the usual crafty swipes at organised religion. There's a bit of techno-geekery as well, but you can skim over those bits to get to the actual plot. Overall I'd say it's better than Excession, but not as good as Inversions.

they have websites for EVERYTHING nowadays

Here's a couple of amusing items I've snapped on my handy phone-camera recently. Firstly I strayed into Clas Ohlson in the shiny new St. David's Centre in Cardiff back before Christmas - it's a sort of low-rent IKEA with more gadgety stuff and less ridiculously-named furniture. Anyway, I found myself in front of a display of electronic gadgetry and spotted this:


Yes, that's right, it's an AsaKlitt PedoMeter. I know, I know, it's puerile schoolboy humour, but that's what you come here for. Just in case it's not clear enough, here's a zoomed-in version:


Useful to have some sort of scientific method of detection, though, as otherwise all sorts of confusion can occur. As an aside, I hadn't realised that the paediatrician who was mistaken for a paedophile by a bunch of vigilante numbskulls lived just outside Newport (not any more, though, I'm pretty sure).

Then, just last week, back in the seemingly safe and surprise-free environment of the office, I acquired a new stapler, which bore, on close inspection, a rather disturbing legend:


Again, here's the relevant bit for the hard of seeing:


Now I assume that actually Rapesco is meant to be pronounced as three syllables, with the emphasis on the second, i.e. to rhyme with UNESCO, and that they are of mid-European origin, maybe Italian (the website is a bit cagey about their country of origin). That's not how it reads at first glance to a native English speaker, though.

It would be remiss of me not to link at this point to the classic list of unintentionally funny company URLs; Rapesco would slot in quite well next to Therapist Finder (which you'll notice now redirects to a more innocuous URL).

I didn't think to snap the amusing shelf logo in front of the WD-40 display when I was in B&Q last weekend, so you'll have to take my word for it that it mirrored the online product page by saying AEROSOL LUBRICANT in big letters, at which point I was reminded of the immortal Not The Nine O'Clock News Swedish chemist sketch.

gove forth and multiply

Couple of brief items that may be of interest:

If you can't be arsed sitting through the full 158 minutes of David Fincher's adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, here's a condensed version which you can zip though in five minutes and also accurately skewers most of the ways in which the book, though a lot of fun, is in many ways pretty silly.

More school-related religious madness now: Conservative Education Secretary and Pob and Rick Moranis impersonator Michael Gove's plans to give every school in the country a copy of the King James Version of the Bible seem to have stalled a bit, more for reasons of finance restrictions than as a result of any sort of Oh For Fuck's Sake What Was I Thinking moment of clarity or anything like that.

Also, I'm sure this is probably a slight misquote, or at least taken out of context, but the Mail has him referring to the KJV as "the most important book written in the English language". Well, of course this particular version is written in the English language, but if I started saying that, say, Crime And Punishment or The Unbearable Lightness Of Being or Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter was the greatest novel ever written in the English language people would probably take issue with my reasoning, and rightly so.

Note, however, that there are undoubtedly people in the more scary bits of the USA who would probably run you out of town on a rail for pointing out that the English versions of the Bible are translations from the original Hebrew via Greek with all the attendant loss of nuance and mistranslation of idioms that you might expect. I would strongly recommend stopping short of pointing out that even the original manuscripts were just folk myth and other made-up stuff anyway if you don't fancy a hot lead sandwich.

the last book I read

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien.

Ah, bejaysus. So, anyway, our un-named narrator (a device we've seen before, here, here, here and here for instance) is a young student living with his uncle in Dublin. Like all students he's a bit too fond of going out drinking with his friends, lolling around in bed in an unhealthy manner and generally neglecting his studies, much to his uncle's chagrin.

But there's precious little time for studying with all the wild flights of literary fancy our young friend is committing to various notebooks: wild fantastical tales based on Irish mythology and featuring mad King Sweeny and Finn MacCool (the bloke who's supposed to have created the Giant's Causeway, among other things) and various other goblins and random folk dreamed up for the purposes of narrative mischief.

Things start to get out of hand when one of our narrator's literary creations, Dermot Trellis, conjurs up in turn various other characters - Furriskey, Shanahan, Lamont - who eventually rebel against the narrative purpose Trellis has for them and gather at the (also fictional) Red Swan Hotel to exact their revenge on him, assisted by Orlick, Trellis' son who has recently sprung into existence fully-formed at the age of about twenty-five and is also, handily, a writer.

The revenge takes the form of a rambling tale (written by Orlick with narrative suggestions from the others) describing Trellis' abduction by a Pooka called MacPhellimey, the various tortures and humiliations inflicted upon him and his eventual trial in front of a jury composed, strangely, of his accusers. Just as verdict and sentence are about to be passed, we are interrupted in the real world by the news that the narrator has passed his final exams; his uncle calls him into his study to congratulate him, the book-within-a-book snaps shut and the story ends.

So there you have it. Strip out the story-within-a-story-within-a-story bit and all that happens is some scuzzy student guy has a few nights out and a few long lie-ins and then passes his exams, but then again something similar could have been said for, say, Inception (levels within levels within levels again) and I thought that was pretty good. And At Swim-Two-Birds is pretty good, too, notwithstanding the opinion of some contemporary critics that it carried "a general odour of spilt Joyce" (it was published in 1939, the same year as Finnegans Wake). Since my Joycean reading starts and ends with A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, though, I wouldn't really know about that; all I can say is that the wild flights of imaginative fancy here, especially the outlandish torments visited upon Trellis in the second half of the book, are very amusing, though if you're at all allergic to metafiction and general authorial intereference and smart-arsery and prefer Proper Ruddy Stories you might want to give it a miss.

At Swim-Two-Birds is another book in this list to have also featured in the rather more prestigious list of Time magazine's 100 best English-language novels since 1923, the previous one being Snow Crash. It also fulfils one of the major criteria for being a Proper Serious Work Of Art by selling pretty much zero copies while O'Brien (whose real name was Brian O'Nolan) was alive; O'Brien supported himself by working for the Irish civil service and writing various columns for newspapers. Apparently there was a brief spike in sales of his later novel The Third Policeman after it featured fleetingly in an episode of Lost in 2006 (far too late for O'Brien who died in 1966). There's product placement for you.

Interestingly, it seems that there is a film in the works as well, the brainchild of actor (and now director) Brendan Gleeson, and with some pretty big names attached to the project. If there was ever a book that warranted the epithet "unfilmable" I would have thought this would be it, though.

you will know they are christians by their love

I dunno what the opposite of the Bad Faith Award would be - clearly Good Faith Award won't do for a number of reasons - but if there was one then I reckon the remarkable Jessica Ahlquist would be a front-runner for the 2012 version.

Just in case you missed it, this is the story of Cranston West High School in Rhode Island, which since the 1960s or thereabouts has displayed a School Prayer prominently on the wall of its auditorium, in flagrant disregard of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. That's the bit that ensures separation of church and state, and prohibits precisely the sort of officially-sanctioned religionism involved in splattering an explicitly Christian prayer across the wall of your nominally inclusive, multi-denominational school. A small thing, you might say, but Jessica Ahlquist decided that it was important to make a stand and have it removed.

Despite being caught bang to rights, the school voted to keep the banner, obliging Ahlquist, with some help from her Dad and the American Civil Liberties Union, to take the case to court, whereupon the court applied the law, as they were obliged to do, and upheld Ahlquist's complaint.

Again, this might seem trivial, but it is crucially important to keep chipping away at the foundations of the great edifice of unearned privilege that religion enjoys, and if this makes people think a bit about why they would tend to turn a blind eye to a Christian prayer on a school wall, but would object in the strongest possible terms to a Muslim one, or a Zoroastrian one, or a Wiccan one, then that is a good thing. It's important to realise how courageous a stand this is, too, particularly when you see the outpouring of Christian love and tolerance and general turn-the-other-cheek-iness ("Satan is gonna rape her") prompted by the legal action.

Our very own Daily Mail is predictably insane on the subject, right from the banner headline:


Note the weaselly quotation marks around "religious". You can see where they're going with this, and they get right onto it pretty quickly:

The banner at Cranston West was judged to promote religion because it takes the form of a prayer addressed to 'Our Heavenly Father' and concluding 'Amen'.

Apart from its opening and closing, the banner does not appear to have an overtly religious message.

And it's just telling people to be kind and nice, right? Who could possibly object to that?

Idiots.

dorries seems to be the hardest word

I'm afraid that unless you got on your bike and went and sought them out yourself you've missed the 2011 Bad Faith Awards. This, you'll no doubt remember, is the award given out by New Humanist magazine to the person who has done the most to thwart and damage the cause of reason and progress during the year, most probably via some form of religious loonery.

To be honest I'm not sure the 2011 list of nominees was as creative as in previous years - two US Republican presidential candidates (Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann) and Melanie Phillips seems like a few too many obvious targets - but the runaway winner was the richly deserving Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, Nadine Dorries.

Anyone whose clearly stated religiously-motivated views on things like sex education in schools and abortion would ensure (were they ever to be implemented, which thankfully seems unlikely) a generation grew up badly informed about sex, and therefore more likely to experience unplanned pregnancy, and then in turn would ensure that a proportion of those same people died because they were unable to get access to abortion services when they urgently needed them, seems to me eminently worthy of treatment far harsher than ridicule in a magazine.

would jubileeve it

It's Wednesday so it must be time for Pointless Pedantry Hour. Strap yourselves in.

There was a bit on the Today programme earlier in the week (or it might have been on Start The Week, I can't remember) about the dear old Queen's Diamond Jubilee this year. The presenter went on to say that this was only the second Diamond Jubilee year in British history, the other being wacky old Queen Victoria's in 1897.

Now I am not a constitutional monarchy expert, as you know, in fact I'm more of a "first up against the wall come the revolution" kind of guy, but this struck me as surely incorrect. Stay with me and I'll explain.

Here's the thing: either 2012 is a Diamond Jubilee year by virtue of being a year that, when it started, was scheduled to contain the date of the 60th anniversary of the current monarch's accession to the throne, in which case it will remain a Diamond Jubilee year even if the Queen dies before February 6th, or it isn't a Diamond Jubilee year at all yet, but it will be once we've got to February 6th without the Queen buying the farm (and I reluctantly concede that I know of no reason to think she is in any immediate danger of checking out). Or, I suppose, we could say, as a third option: it is a Diamond Jubilee year, but it could retrospectively be declared not one if the Queen should be shot by Prince Philip in a hunting accident or randomly murdered and concealed in a shallow grave on the Sandringham estate (not necessarily by Prince Philip, but who knows) in the next month or so.

Anyway, either way, by most of those definitions 1820 was a Diamond Jubilee year as well, being the year that, when it started, was scheduled to contain (on October 25th) the 60th anniversary of the accession of George III. This never actually happened, as George (who was thoroughly deaf, blind and mad by this time) died on January 29th, but the exact same radio bit could have been done on January 10th 1820, if things like radio had been invented then.

ooh 'eck it's oobleck

That last post was partially inspired by a link from Ben Goldacre's mini-blog. Here's another from the same source: the splendidly-named Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics, a mind-blowing repository of cool stuff, mainly in video form, demonstrating how fluids behave and interact in the most weird and wonderful and often counter-intuitive ways. There's the inevitable oobleck, of course, but also all manner of fascinating stuff involving what appears to be golden syrup, as well as oil, water, and assorted random explosions.


Clearly no website devoted to fluid dynamics can get away without featuring the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, either.

oh no, not again

There are a number of things which are utterly fascinating about this riveting account of the last minutes of Air France flight 447 leading up to its crash into the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, not least that it was a problem entirely caused by human error, bad team management, uncontrolled instinctive behaviour and unchecked assumptions, and not an engineering problem at all, beyond the brief (and hardly unprecedented) icing-up of the pitot tubes that sowed some of the initial seeds of the confusion which led eventually to catastrophe.

There seems to be some disagreement over how much the passengers knew about what was going on during the aircaft's uncontrolled descent. I'm quite prepared to believe that among all the intense turbulence that was going on no-one would have sensed that the aircraft was descending at 10,000 feet per minute - after all if experienced commercial pilots can be bewildered by the input of their own senses then I'm sure your average Jean-Claude can as well - but I do wonder what the in-flight information screens were showing during this time.

As I've said before I do find these irrationally reassuring as they provide some input into what's going on, the complete sensory vacuum and lack of control being one of the things that makes flying so uncomfortable. Even if things are getting a bit bumpy, the back-of-the-seat screen reading out a steady altitude and airspeed throughout is comforting. However, assuming the screens hadn't been switched off, anyone on the Air France flight would have presumably seen the airspeed slow to a crawl and the altitude figures start to scroll downwards in an increasingly rapid blur. Now I don't know about you, but I would have found this somewhat alarming, right up until the point whare I abruptly got turned into gristly strawberry jam.

The other thing that struck me about the article was this line:

At 2:02 am, the captain leaves the flight deck to take a nap. Within 15 minutes, everyone aboard the plane will be dead.

- and, later, this one:

Another of the pitot tubes begins to function once more. The cockpit's avionics are now all functioning normally. The flight crew has all the information that they need to fly safely, and all the systems are fully functional. The problems that occur from this point forward are entirely due to human error.

I was immediately reminded of the bit in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy where the protagonists are threatened by a missile attack from the automated defence system of the planet Magrathea:

The planet in question is, in fact, Magrathea. The missile attack shortly to be launched by an ancient automatic defence system will merely result in the breakage of three coffee cups and a mouse cage, the bruising of someone's upper arm and the untimely creation and demise of a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale.

- and later on:

It is, of course, more or less at this point that one of our heroes sustains a slight bruise to the upper arm. This should be emphasised because, as has already been revealed, they escape otherwise completely unharmed, and the deadly nuclear missiles do not eventually hit the ship. Our heroes' safety is absolutely assured.

Of course that one was the other way round, in that that it all ended happily. I know where I would rather have been.

that's a turn-up for the books

While we're knocking up graphs, here's some updated ones illustrating my blogging prowess throughout 2011. And a sad and sorry tale of woe it is too, with 2011 yielding just 150 posts, a decrease of some 14% even compared with the slim 175 posts I managed in 2010. Here's the monthly breakdown:


- and here's the yearly one:


There is one crumb of statistical comfort to be gleaned from all this doom and gloom, though: not only does the 33 book reviews among those 150 posts represent the highest book-related-blogging:other-stuff-related-blogging ratio ever achieved at 22% (comfortably beating 2010's 13.7%), but it's also the highest absolute number of book reviews posted in a year, beating the previous figure of 28 held jointly by 2007 and 2009. Here's the graph:

for whom the bridge tolls

Another year, another increase in the bridge tolls for the Severn bridges, to predictable outrage. I mean, I'm not crazy about it, particularly the 30p increase (a whopping five and a bit percent) after a couple of 10p ones, but what can you do?

What you can do, if you wish, is try and research the history of the toll charges for the bridges since the old one was opened in 1966, at which time you would have pulled up in your Model T jalopy or your Austin Seven and the cheery toll attendant would have taken half a crown off you before sending you on your way with a cheery "mind how you go, squire" and a robust clip round the ear.

The progression of charges post-1992 (and incorporating the addition of the second bridge in 1997) is listed here, but pre-1992 you have to dig around a bit. I eventually found this old Hansard extract which reveals that there weren't that many changes made between 1966 and 1992, the main highlights being:

• a post-decimalisation knocking off of the spare ha'penny in 1973 (two-and-six being 12½ of those nasty newfangled new pence);
• an increase to 20p in 1979;
• various up-and-down-ness in the mid-1980s as an increase to 50p was first reversed after some legal challenges and then reinstated to 50p later, presumably partly to pay all the accumulated lawyers' bills;
• up again to one whole pound in 1990.

The seemingly vicious price hike to £2.80 in 1992 is partially explained by the rearrangement of the toll system so that you only paid in one direction (going into Wales), and presumably also by the need to drum up some revenue to pay for the new bridge. Increases have been steady since, the total increase of £3.20 between 1992 and 2012 averaging out at 16 pence per year. Here's the whole story in funky graphical form.

this film is dragon on a bit

Here's a few plot spoilers to ruin the viewing experience for you should you decide to go and see the new film of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and you should, because it's really very good.

David Fincher's films, whatever their other qualities, are always visually stunning - Panic Room, Seven, Fight Club - and this is no exception. The eye-popping opening title sequence with lots of black figures and oil backed by a thunderous industrial version of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song is almost worth the admission price alone. Rooney Mara is exceptionally good as Lisbeth Salander - despite being skinnier than Noomi Rapace was in the Swedish film she's still not really physically tiny enough for the part, but there aren't many people who would be.

It's always interesting seeing a film where you've already read the book on which it's based - while this meant that the shock revelation that cuddly old Stellan Skarsgård is actually a serial killer with a hermetically-sealed porn dungeon under his house wasn't a surprise to me it did mean that I could spend some time spotting what they'd changed for the film. There's not much, to be fair, but the two main things seem to be:

• the brief relationship Mikael Blomkvist has with Cecilia Vanger is omitted, presumably as it doesn't add much to the plot and since Blomkvist is already boning both Salander and Erika Berger it wouldn't have left any time for sleuthing. They've taken the opportunity to make Cecilia (played by Geraldine James, who is 61) slightly older than in the book.
• the revelation of Harriet Vanger's identity is handled completely differently - in the book the sleuths hack into Anita Vanger's phone as she calls Harriet in Australia to tell her Martin Vanger is dead and she can come home, while in the film Anita never makes the call and Blomkvist works out that this is because she is Harriet Vanger, having assumed Anita's identity at the time Anita helped her escape from the family home all those years ago.

None of which particularly detracts from the film, and you have to cut some corners when adapting a 533-page novel, or you end up with a 6-hour film (it's still a pretty beefy 158 minutes). I look forward to seeing who they're going to get to play Ronald Niedermann in the two sequels. Maybe they'll CGI him like in the two Hulk films.

the last book I read

Old School by Tobias Wolff.

Our unnamned narrator is a student at a prestigious American public school - or, rather, what the Americans would call a private school, since their rules for naming these things follow more rational rules than ours do. Among the traditional values common to all such institutions - honour, loyalty, tradition, wearing ridiculously long scarves, belting out the school song every once in a while - this particular school has an especially strong literary tradition, and their status allows them to snare some pretty heavy literary names to visit the school and judge the writing contest that precedes each visit. The prize is a personal private audience with the writer, so competition is fierce.

As the book opens in late 1960 we're in the run-up to the visit of venerable poet Robert Frost, and the writing contest is in full swing. Our narrator, despite being one of the school's central literary clique and heavily involved with the production of the school's literary magazine, doesn't win this one, and nor does he win the one that follows it, a rather more controversial visit involving Ayn Rand. However, it is revealed that the next visit will be from none other than Ernest Hemingway, who just happens to be the narrator's literary idol.

So the stakes have been raised? But how to win? What to write? The narrator is convinced that something more soul-baring than his previous efforts is required, perhaps addressing his discomfort over his Jewish ancestry, something he has worked hard to conceal during his time at the school. Inspiration proves elusive until one day, while trawling the magazine archives in the school library, he comes across a story written for the magazine of a nearby girls' school a few years before which seems to express his feelings perfectly. Perhaps just a few tweaks, a change of narrator gender here, a change of name there.....

Things play out pretty much as you might have expected them to from this point: the narrator submits the thinly-concealed copy as his own work, it wins the contest, the meeting with Hemingway is arranged, but then at the eleventh hour the subterfuge is discovered and the narrator is expelled and sent home in disgrace. It's presumably of little consolation to him that (it now being mid-1961) Hemingway never attends the event anyway, preferring instead to shoot himself in the face with a shotgun.

And so we move on beyond the narrator's school days - bundled straight from school onto a train back to the family home he disembarks in New York and does various menial jobs there while trying to establish himself as a writer. Eventually succeeding in this, and having re-established his link with the school's alumni network, he is eventually invited by the school's new headmaster (who was a young teacher while the narrator was there) to be the visiting writer at the school's next event. Ah, the irony, the wheel, full circle, etc. etc., you get the idea.

The boarding-school coming-of-age thing is a well-used literary trope, so it's hard to read a book like this without some preconceptions; in particular it's hard to get through even the first half-dozen pages without replaying several scenes from Peter Weir's 1989 film Dead Poets Society in your head, though the book does have the considerable advantage of not featuring Robin Williams.

It's all beautifully written, and some of the set pieces are excellent - Wolff has great fun satirising Ayn Rand's loony worldview in the section recounting her visit, for instance - but it almost feels like three or four short stories (Wolff's more usual literary medium) linked together and padded out to novel length. I liked it, and the teenage boys coming of age in the hothouse environment of a boarding school is a classic literary setting (though I suspect in reality there's rather more furious wanking than portrayed here), but because of that you've got to do something pretty startling to stand out from all the other novels, films, etc. covering the same ground.

As an aside, while I hadn't read any of Tobias Wolff's work before (he's probably most famous for his autobiographical work This Boy's Life, which was made into a film in 1993), I have read The Age Of Consent by his elder brother Geoffrey Wolff, which is a different sort of beast altogether, a queasy tale of sexual abuse and suicide, but well worth reading.

the last book I read

Come Dance With Me by Russell Hoban.

Christabel Alderton, 54, is the singer with aging goth-rock stalwarts Mobile Mortuary. Elias Newman, 62, is a doctor specialising in the study and treatment of diabetes. Nothing so strange there, you might say; well, no, actually you probably wouldn't say that, but this is a Russell Hoban novel, so a certain amount of quirkiness is par for the course.

Anyway, Christabel and Elias meet at an art exhibition - Christabel has just got back from the toilets after having to go and throw up after coming over all unnecessary looking at Odilon Redon's Cyclops (which is a bit weird, to be fair). No sooner have they met and exchanged a few cryptic pleasantries than Christabel dashes off to the loo again, where Elias pursues her and thrusts his phone number under the cubicle door.

Christabel's reluctance to get involved in dealings with men is explained by her past problems with them: namely that several ex-lovers and her own four-year-old son Django have died in bizarre and/or mysterious circumstances, and she's a bit concerned that she's jinxed in some way. But eventually Elias' persistence pays off and they go on a few dates, culminating in a (chaste) night spent together at Elias' flat and then his attendance at a Mobile Mortuary gig in London, but then Christabel disappears from Elias' life as quickly as she had entered it.

A few enquiries among the other members of the band reveal that the tenth anniversary of Django's death is imminent and that Christabel has gone to Maui (where it happened) to commemorate the event. It also turns out that Django died by falling off a cliff, and, concerned about what form this commemorative activity might take, Elias hot-foots it to Maui to catch up with Christabel and persuade her that there might be things worth sticking around for.

Here's a funny thing: I bought this book in one of the numerous second-hand bookshops in Hay-On-Wye after reading Kleinzeit (my first Hoban) back in August 2010, and between then and it bubbling to the top of my pile of things to read (exactly a fortnight ago in fact) Hoban has died at the age of 86 - here are the obituaries from the Guardian and the Independent.

The general consensus from the obituaries seems to be that the mid-period stuff set away from Hoban's usual contemporary London is the pick of his work - stuff like Riddley Walker, Pilgermann and Fremder. Certainly Come Dance With Me (published in 2005) is much gentler than any of those (or than they sound, rather, since I haven't yet read any of them), and while it's still very playful and charming it's less wilfully odd than Kleinzeit was.

I suspect Hoban is one of those authors who you either "get" (in that you find the trademark quirkiness and occasional random tangents endearing) or you don't (in that you find them all a bit irritating); personally I found the two I've now read to be highly enjoyable. Come Dance With Me is as light as a feather even in comparison with Kleinzeit, which wasn't exactly War And Peace, but none the worse for that. And it's really short - 188 pages, large print, lots of chapter breaks - so you can knock it off in a few hours. Have a go.

my god: it's full of pies

I'm sure you recall with as much nostalgic affection as I do the old days of bartering, where you'd build a dry-stone wall for someone and he'd pay you in venison cutlets, or you'd shoe a horse for the priest and he'd repay you by forgiving you for all that shit you did, that sort of thing. Well, I'm pleased to report that the practice is alive and well here in South Wales - my talented and resourceful wife did a photoshoot for the good people at Mary Clark's Pies in Cardiff and in addition to paying her in actual cash they made up the shortfall with a big box of pies. Check it out:




A great big box full of pies is pretty good in itself; I'm pleased to be able to report that they are also very good pies - I know this as I've just eaten two of them in one sitting like a big fat greedy knacker. I'm off for a lie down now.

the last book I read

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing.

David and Harriet Lovatt aren't one of your groovy modern couples. They're a bit staid, a bit old-fashioned, you might even say, but after meeting at an office party and recognising each other as kindred spirits they're very much in love and have set up a nice little life for themselves in a sprawling old house, with plenty of room for the unfashionably big family they're planning to have.

Sure enough Harriet soon starts firing out offspring like bullets: Luke, Helen, Jane and Paul. Money is a bit of an issue, but David's father has a bit of spare cash knocking about between yacht purchases so he's prepared to help out, though the general consensus seems to be that David and Harriet should slow down a bit and perhaps discover the joys of effective contraception.

No such luck, however, as Harriet soon finds herself pregnant once again. This one seems different, though - painful and troublesome in the womb, and things don't improve when he finally batters his way out a month early. Ben is a strange, troll-like, Neanderthal creature quite unlike the angelic children that preceded him. But what is he really? A changeling? A throwback? It seems it's a bit more than just his generally unprepossessing appearance, as he lacks the other children's cheery disposition as well, is slow to learn and seems to have a generally malevolent streak. The other children soon learn to steer clear of him, and possibly with good reason as a couple of pets meet mysterious deaths and suspicion falls upon Ben.

Eventually Harriet and David find their home life disrupted to such an extent that they have Ben committed to an institution. The other children are delighted by this and home life returns to something approaching normality, but Harriet is racked with guilt and eventually makes the long drive north to retrieve Ben from the hellish existence he has been consigned to. Which is all very commendable, of course, but means that he's now back at home, with a good dose of post-institution trauma to add to his existing problems.

With Ben back the large family Christmas gatherings peter out, and as soon as the older children can they drift away from the house as often as they can, and eventually permanently. Ben, now approaching his teens, drifts into hanging out with a local motorcycle gang and, once he reaches secondary school, acquires a gang of followers of similarly misfit looks and behaviour. The book ends with Harriet and David seeing Ben on the TV news on the sidelines of a city centre riot, and considering selling the house and moving away (and, we're invited to infer, not telling Ben where they're going).

From my pitifully small sample of Doris Lessing's output I'd say the pattern that emerges is that the earlier ones like Briefing For A Descent Into Hell (1971) and Memoirs Of A Survivor (1974) are the weird hallucinatory ones, and the later ones like The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988) are told in a much more straightforward and linear way. I think the key to understanding The Fifth Child is to realise that the whole story is essentially told through the viewpoint of Harriet, who may or may not be completely reliable. Are we to assume that Ben is really as he's described, or is it just that Harriet can't cope with someone who diverges even slightly from her idealised notion of what a perfect child should be like (i.e. like her previous four angelic children)? Is Ben really the hideous troll-like creature of Harriet's description, or maybe just a bit slow, or maybe on the autism spectrum somewhere? So you can view it as a straight horror story of a family being menaced by a goblin-like changeling, or you can view it as a satire of nice middle-class liberal horror at having to cope with a child with mild mental impairment, who clearly isn't going to win any Olympic swimming medals or the Nobel Prize for Physics or anything like that, and their inability to come to terms with that being projected onto the (blameless) child. Clearly there are echoes of other books here, most notably We Need To Talk About Kevin, though as here I should point out that (apart from the suspicion over the pets) Ben hasn't actually killed anyone yet.

Speaking of Nobel Prizes, Doris Lessing became the oldest ever winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature when she was awarded it in 2007. As befits a sparky 88-year-old she gave no concession to the various reporters who wanted a soundbite out of her after the announcement was made. And while I think Briefing For A Descent Into Hell remains the one to read, The Fifth Child is (at only 159 pages, and large-ish print) a disturbing and thought-provoking little book and well worth a look.

at our house, nathaniel sits on a spike

And now the mystery object round. So, mother and youngest child only: what's this?


I ask because I found it in my loft while I was clearing it out the other day. Some sort of early prototype satellite dish? A funky glass-topped table with the base missing? A chair for extreme masochists? An Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator?

Well, as it happens there is some writing on the glass bit, and it turns out to be a URL which directs you here. OK...so what do they do? Well, it turns out they make mannequins; well, someone's got to I suppose. And if you snoop around a bit you end up at the "support options" page, where the mystery is finally solved - what we have here looks like the "calf-spike" option. What our predecessors were doing with one of those I have no idea. Unless....

you can prove anything with facts

You know that thing that some people have whereby they take a kind of perverse pride in not reading novels? There's a bit in Sideways where Miles is picking up Jack from his in-laws' house to go on their weekend away and the subject of Miles' novel-writing comes up, and Jack's future father-in-law says something like: meh, I never read novels; when there's all this stuff to find out about the world why would I want to read something someone made up?

Strangely such people never seem to apply the same sort of logic to other artistic media. Films? Meh, I never go to see films - I just stay home and watch documentaries about rural llama husbandry in the lower Andes. Music? Meh, I never listen to music - I just listen to somebody reading out the Oxford English Dictionary and the Periodic Table on a constant loop.

In any case, the usual argument regarding finding out stuff about the world is bogus - I mean, never mind the obvious retort about finding out things about human nature etc. from novels, even the idea that you don't learn cold hard facts is bollocks on even the most cursory examination. Why yes, since you ask, I can and will furnish you with an example: on University Challenge the other night Jeremy Paxman asked a question which basically went: the tropical diseases kwashiorkor and [some other disease I've forgotten the name of; might have been marasmus I suppose] are caused by a deficiency of what? I knew the answer was protein solely because it gets a mention in The Poisonwood Bible (on page 514, see below) and I clocked the word at the time and went and looked it up.


Incidentally it is indeed a picturesque word, and derives from the Ghanaian for "the sickness the baby gets when the new baby comes", which is rather wonderful, although not for you if you get it.

the last book I read

The Gathering by Anne Enright.

Ah, bejaysus. It's not all Guinness and hurling over in Ireland, you know - there's a dark side to all the blarney, as this earlier entry in this list made clear, or at least I think it did, but then again I may not have had the faintest idea what the feck it was all about. Arse biscuits!

Anyway, the Hegarty clan are from Ireland, and as befits a bunch of reproductively incontinent Catholics, they have brought twelve children into the world. It could have been worse, mind you - old mother Hegarty had seven miscarriages as well. Old pa Hegarty evidently wouldn't leave her alone, the dirty fecker. So when Liam Hegarty kills himself by filling his trouser pockets with rocks and walking off Brighton beach into the sea, his sister Veronica is left with the task of rounding up the remaining siblings for the funeral.

As with a few other books in this series (the last two for starters, not to mention here, here, here and here) this establishing of the narrative in some nominal "present" is just to provide a structure to dive off into much assorted flashbackery - Veronica's currently troubled marriage to husband Tom, wistful reminiscences of her youthful relationship with American student Michael Weiss, childhood memories of the various siblings (Liam in particular) and some lurid speculation about the nature of her grandmother Ada's relationship with her husband Charlie and their landlord Lambert Nugent. It eventually becomes clear that Veronica's obsessive interest in this is because of her witnessing an incident of sexual abuse involving Nugent and Liam, in Ada's house, back when Liam was about nine years old. We are invited to conclude that it was this incident (and perhaps others like it, who knows) that sowed the seed that led to Liam topping himself thirty-odd years later; Veronica certainly seems to think so, anyway.

So we emerge back into the "present" to find the siblings gathering for the funeral, and a predictably motley bunch they are too: one priest, one successful businessman, one secret alcoholic, that sort of thing. After the wake when Mammy has been packed off to bed they crack into the booze and reminisce about old times - the expectation that something similar will happen after the funeral proper, however, is derailed somewhat by the unexpected arrival of one of Liam's old girlfriends and her son. Liam's son, also, it turns out. And so the wheel of life comes full circle, yadda yadda yadda.

While this is a great deal more linear and less opaque than Winterwood, it does suffer from being one of those books that doesn't contain a single character you can really like, or even care much about. Presumably Veronica is meant to be that person, but she's almost comically glum and joyless about everything, which makes it difficult. Liam, the golden boy of everyone's reminiscences, doesn't feature enough, even in flashback, for us to learn anything much about him except that he was a fairly cruel womaniser. And it seems that we're expected to swallow the implication that the abuse at the hands of Lamb Nugent was the reason for Liam's suicide without much compelling evidence being offered - I mean, fair enough, it may have been, but we want to avoid assuming causation where there isn't any, don't we? And the family drinkathon after the wake, which we assume is going to lead to truths being discussed and old wounds reopened, all that sort of thing, peters out without any of that after Veronica buggers off home early.

The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 (making it the third Booker winner in this list after G. and Hotel Du Lac from 1972 and 1984 respectively) - the prizegiving blurb describes it as "exhilaratingly bleak" - well, I'd agree with the second half of that. I mean, it's fine, but.....hard to engage with, let's say. The one bit that's presumably meant to be uplifting, when Liam's son Rowan is wheeled out at the end, strikes a bit of a false note of tacked-on resolution after all the unremitting grimness that's preceded it. If it's a recommendation you're after here then what I would suggest you do is read Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship, which shares many of The Gathering's themes - female narrator, wayward brother, family gathering, Irish setting - but which is, for want of a better word, better.

cnoc cnoc: who's there

More whisky now, as I've acquired a couple more bottles since last time. Firstly, here's the AnCnoc 12-year old, which I bought a duty-free litre bottle of on the way back from Scotland in September. AnCnoc is the rebranded output of the Knockdhu distillery, renamed to avoid confusion with Knockando, as featured here.

AnCnoc brands itself as a Highland Single Malt, thus putting itself in the same region as such diverse stuff as Dalmore, Clynelish, Old Pulteney and Ben Nevis. However, checking out the location of the distillery, right on the eastern edge of the Speyside region, gives you a better idea of what to expect. Far from resembling the toasty marmaladey delights of the Dalmore and the Ben Nevis, this is a lot more along the lines of the Cardhu and (ironically) the Knockando - sweet vanilla fudge followed by something a bit drier and more shortbread-y, maybe even slightly citrus-y, quite light in colour and taste, perfectly pleasant and quaffable, but perhaps not quite punchy enough to be truly memorable.

Next, Glenmorangie Lasanta. This is one of a range of special finishes that also includes Quinta Ruban (port) and Nectar D'Or (Sauternes) - this one is basically your bog-standard 10-year-old bourbon-cask-matured Glenmorangie given an extra two years in sherry casks and then bottled.

Now I'm mildly suspicious of fancy-dan finishing being applied to whisky - although both the Caol Ila and the Bruichladdich were perfectly nice - but the basic Glenmorangie product is full of lovely custardy goodness, so it's not as if they're trying to put lipstick on a pig here. And, sacrilegious though it might seem to say it, I reckon this might even be better than the standard product - the basic custard cream taste is still there, just wrapped up in a lovely warm jacket of comforting cakey sherryesque insulation that takes it more towards the territory occupied by the big sherry monsters like the Dalmore and the Aberlour.

Finally, Glenfiddich. It's taken a while to get round to by far the biggest-selling single malt whisky in the world, but Asda were knocking it out for a frankly derisory 18 quid last week so it seemed rude not to. We have of course featured a Fiddy here before, the Caoran Reserve, which (just to further undermine what I was saying earlier about special finishing) was really very good indeed. Anyway - read anything about the standard 12-year-old product and you'll discover that pretty much all of the reviews (like the Dalwhinnie heather thing) say "pears". I can sort of see what they mean, as there's something slightly fruitily astringent about it, though it could just as well be apples as far as I know.

The label blurb says it's a blend of sherry casks and bourbon casks, and sure enough (see below) colour-wise it's somewhere between the sherry-tastic Lasanta (on the left) and the bourbon-only AnCnoc (in the middle). Anyway, as you might expect from a gazillion-seller, there's nothing that's going to frighten the horses here, and I reckon the Caoran Reserve is better, but that's not really a complaint.

What, you want a verdict? All right: Lasanta first, Fiddy second, AnCnoc third. Happy now? That overall whisky league table is in the pipeline, honest.

reverend evil

Here's a couple more gems from my inbox, of varying degrees of length, generosity and bewilderingness. Firstly this one:


I offer you the screenshot from my Hotmail inbox rather than just the text to illustrate the little cherry William has put on top of an otherwise rather mundane (well, apart from the 58 MILLION FREAKIN' DOLLARS) and matter-of-fact cake: he's a Reverend! No-one who holds the title Reverend could be an evil man. Surely.

It's not quite as pared-down to its bare essentials as this one, but it's pretty close. At least this one actually names a figure, rather than just saying, essentially: send money, get money, simples.

This one is a bit longer and more rambling. The opening greeting is a bit crawly bum-lick, though.

Hello dear,

I am Mrs. Sandra Collins I am a US citizen and am 68 years Old. I reside here in Denton, Texas; my residential address is as follows; 38 Wellington Oaks Cir, Denton, TX, United States. I am one of those who took part in the Compensation many years ago and I had paid over US$14,000 for the past years while in the US, trying to get my payment all to no avail.

So I decided to travel with my Son to WASHINGTON D.C with all my compensation documents, where I was directed by the (FBI) to contact Mr. Peter Okodua, who is a representative of the (FBI) and also a Human Right Activist at the COMPENSATION AWARD COMMITTEE currently in West Africa. However, he explained further in details that whosoever is contacting through emails are fake. In accordance with section 13(1)(n) of the international gambling act as adopted in 1993 and amended on 3RD July 1996 by the constitutional assembly.

Furthermore, I was re-issued a compensation sum of $600,000.00.Usd after all necessary clearance and legal documentations As directed for the claim of my Compensation payment which was released successfully.

In addition, I was fortunate to glance through the full information list of unpaid Beneficiaries in which this e-mail was addressed on that list.

In other words, you can stay in touch with Mr. Peter Okodua directly on the below details.

COMPENSATION AWARD HOUSE

Name: Mr. Peter Okodua
Email: mrpe_okodua@hotmail.com
Phone number: +234-703-767-4931

NOTE: I’ll advise you to stop all transactions whatsoever.

Thank You and Be Blessed.
Mrs. Sandra Collins

A couple of things to note: firstly that there is apparently a place called COMPENSATION AWARD HOUSE, which is pretty awesome, but, more importantly, we seem to have progressed to a sort of meta-419 scam here. The message is somewhat garbled and self-contradictory, but what I think Mrs. Sandra Collins is saying here is that she was scammed by advance-fee fraudsters, but found this great legal resource (the aforementioned COMPENSATION AWARD HOUSE, and the upstanding person of Mr. Peter Okodua in particular), who will sort everything out for you, including a generous compensation payment, for the payment of just this small and frankly insignificant fee! In advance!

Note that the sum involved is a relatively paltry 600,000 US dollars, small potatoes indeed compared to 58 million, but just remember that that one is A SCAM, and this one is TOTALLY REAL. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

headline of the day

Well, I don't know, you do your best to make your little corner of the blogosphere a brighter place, and this is the thanks you get:


Actually this is an article from today's Independent taking the piss out of giant pandas for being ridiculously fat, lazy, fussy eaters and generally useless at sex. So not like me at all, then - after all I am a relatively unfussy eater, as long as you go easy on the eggs. On the other hand, I do like a nice bamboo shoot or two.