to pen y fan, and dam the consequences

As previously advertised here, I had plans to do a walk up Pen y Fan with Nia on Friday. There were only two things which could have stood in our way: firstly disastrous ankle consequences from my walk on Monday, and secondly some sort of disastrous weather forecast which suggested that we would be imperilling our lives by even stepping outside the front door. Well, while the ankle was more painful than I'd hoped it would be, that certainly wasn't going to be allowed to stand in the way, and while the weather forecast wasn't great - persistent rain, intermittent low cloud and brisk winds - I'd describe it as fairly typical October Beacons weather, so off we went. 

It was immediately apparent that whatever the weather on the day, there had been a lot of rain recently, as there were a couple of spots where the minor road that leads up the side of Pontsticill Reservoir was completely covered in water. It looked (and mercifully was) pretty shallow in both spots, but the prospect of stranding myself and Nia in the middle of nowhere with pretty patchy mobile phone coverage and a broken-down car like, say, one of these idiots was not an appealing one. Anyway, we got through to the car park we were aiming for, just down the road from the Neuadd reservoirs. 

My plan was to go across the lower reservoir dam and straight up the steep ascent onto the Graig Fan Ddu ridge, thus getting the difficult bit of the day knocked off early doors, and then walk along to Corn Du and Pen y Fan and come back down the major path that runs from Bwlch ar y Fan back down to the dam. While we were getting booted and coated a man in a high-vis jacket with a National Park logo came up and engaged us in some chat about what our plans were for the day. He was evidently doing commendable humanitarian work ensuring that people weren't just about to swan off to the top in flip-flops and vests with carrier bags full of Stella, but I confess I bristled slightly at his gentle questioning and had to suppress an urge to say I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING THANK YOU VERY MUCH GOOD DAY TO YOU SIR. He did, to be fair, make the suggestion that given the weather forecast it might be more prudent to do the walk in reverse and take the more gradual route on the way up, thereby making it easier to abandon and come back down if the weather proved too horrible. I stubbornly declined to commit myself to any particular route during our conversation but privately conceded shortly afterwards that he was probably right.

So the upshot of all that was that the route we ended up taking was almost the same one as I'd done with Hazel and Robin way back in early 2009 (photos here) - the differences being that on the earlier walk we parked in the lower car park about half a mile back down the road at Pont Cwmyfedwen and also took in the extra peak of Cribyn on the way round. Route map and summit shot from Friday's walk are below.

Anyway, the main two things to say about the walk are firstly that in complete defiance of the weather forecast it was almost completely dry throughout (aside from some brief light drizzle on the way up and a brief but intense and stinging sleet/hail shower during the final descent) and for our lunch stop on the lower slopes of Cribyn and the ascent and summit of Pen y Fan itself it was positively sunny. Secondly, despite it being a fairly robust 8.7 mile round trip Nia gave every indication of thoroughly enjoying herself and certainly didn't seem to be nearing the limits of her physical capabilities. As for the limits of my physical capabilities the pain from my ankle was noticeable but not disabling, though there is as always a price to pay for the next 48 hours or so. 

One interesting thing that you can see from the small set of photos I took is the current state of the two Neuadd reservoirs. The pair of images below are from 2008 and 2021 and show that both upper and lower reservoirs are currently empty. In the case of the upper one that's because it's been drained because of concerns about the integrity of the dam. As I understand it the intention is that the reservoir be refilled once some sort of remedial action has been taken, but that there isn't currently a timescale for that. 

The situation with the lower reservoir is somewhat different, in that it's been conclusively decommissioned - the way they've done this is to take a big shallow V-shaped wedge out of the dam (unlike the rather ornate stone dam on the upper reservoir the lower one is/was just a big earth bank) to lower the water level and create a new spillway. To retain public access across the dam (which you used to be able to just walk across the top of) they've also built a footbridge across the new spillway. It's all been very nicely landscaped, as you can see from the pictures below - the older picture showing the intact dam is from that 2009 walk.

A final note while we're talking about reservoirs - the larger Pontsticill reservoir has a glory hole spillway which featured in the opening scenes of the BBC drama The Pact, which I cannot offer an opinion on one way or the other except to commend the splendid drone shot of the spillway featured about two minutes into the first episode and captured below.

the last book I read

Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel.

So, our protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, has achieved what his illustrious mentor Cardinal Wolsey could not and contrived an end to Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, mainly by virtue of Cromwell's having the will to do what the other guy wouldn't, in this case separating the Church of England from the Catholic Church and telling the Pope to go fuck himself. 

No time to rest on one's laurels, though: Henry's pursuit of Anne (and marriage to her in 1533) was only partly predicated on her being a younger, more nubile model - it was partly inspired by the thought that she might be able to do what Catherine had not and provide him with a male heir to the throne. But here we are in the autumn of 1535 and no son has been forthcoming - Anne has produced a daughter, Elizabeth, and endured a couple of miscarriages, but that's it. And Henry is not a patient man. Anne, furthermore, is a bit spiky and opinionated and Henry's eye has begun to alight on Jane Seymour, an altogether meeker and more pliant type, and hey, who knows, maybe just waiting to rattle out a fusillade of male heirs, given the opportunity.

But the queen is not inclined to stand aside and make way for a younger successor by just conveniently retiring to a nunnery, nor would it be constitutionally acceptable for her to do so. So another way must be found: either her marriage to Henry was never valid in the first place for some reason (the same sort of ruse that was used on Catherine) or a reason must be found for her to be found guilty of some crime against the king (i.e. treason) and, hem hem, "removed" from the throne. The penalty for women found guilty of treason would be either burning or beheading, depending on the whim of the king, but, hey, omelettes, eggs, etc.

Naturally, as the go-to man for fixing all sorts of awkward problems, it falls to Thomas Cromwell to make what Henry desires to happen happen. He soon decides that a charge of adultery will be the best way to achieve this, and as it happens there are a few rumours flying around relating to a few younger members (fnarr) of the royal court. Henry is in his mid-forties by this time, increasingly overweight and increasingly incapacitated by gout and leg ulcers, and there is a suggestion that he may not be able to, perform the, hem hem, spousal duties in quite the way that Anne would like, making her inclined to look elsewhere. More surprisingly the list of potential suitors includes her own brother, George Boleyn, adding a bit of spicy incest action to the standard adultery charges.

In a sense it doesn't really matter whether any of the accusations is actually true (Wikipedia says, with splendid understatement: "Modern historians view the charges against her [...] as unconvincing"); their reading out in court and the clear knowledge of all concerned that it is the king's will to be released from his marriage to Anne and that this is the way that has been chosen for it to be done drives the whole process through to its inevitable conclusion pretty quickly. And so we arrive at a May day in 1536 as Anne ascends the scaffold to meet the French swordsman specially hired for the occasion and, shortly afterwards, her maker. 

This is, of course, the sequel to Wolf Hall which I read three years ago and I recall mildly criticising for taking a long time to describe the events of around six years. Well, Bring Up The Bodies is a shorter book (about 480 pages) but covers the events of a much shorter period (about nine months between autumn 1535 and summer 1536). Nonetheless it seems a much more compelling story than Wolf Hall and I would say I enjoyed it more. Maybe this is because less time is spent on Cromwell's home life (his wife and daughters having died during the first book) and therefore more time is spent in the orbit of Henry, a charismatic but terrifyingly impulsive and unpredictable character with the power of life and/or fairly immediate death over anyone in his vicinity. Maybe it's also because the bringing about of the end of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn is inherently more dramatic and bloody than the end of his previous marriage to Catherine of Aragon, involving as it does actual public bloody dismemberment rather than discreet shuffling off to a nunnery.

What the books are really about, of course, is Cromwell's ability to navigate Henry's moods, deliver the outcomes he wants, and avoid getting his own head cut off, something he is intelligent enough to know could come at any time. Cromwell is what Stephen King calls the "I-guy" here, the principal protagonist of a novel not written in the first person but constrained to being seen through the eyes of its main character. This does lead to some odd constructions where being able to say "I" would have made the meaning (i.e. in terms of who was being referred to) clearer:

Mantel makes this as unobtrusive as possible but once you start to notice it it becomes, well, noticeable. Cromwell is, in his own gruff and impenetrable way, starting to become a bit of a Mary Sue (or possibly Marty Stu) by the end of the second book, not because he is portrayed as being morally unimpeachable (he is ruthlessly pragmatic in all things) but because Mantel's affection for him (or at least her fictionalised version of him) is so obvious. She's going to have to let him go, though, because I assume that the third book, The Mirror And The Light, concludes with his inevitable fall from favour and execution. 

I enjoyed this more than Wolf Hall, for the reasons stated above: it just seems tighter and more focused. The portrayal of Cromwell and indeed all the major characters here shouldn't be taken as historically accurate or definitive, of course, and less sympathetic portrayals of Cromwell are available, notably in Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons. Like Wolf Hall, and several other books featured on this blog, most recently The God Of Small Things and The Siege Of Krishnapur, Bring Up The Bodies was awarded the Booker Prize in 2012. It also won the Costa Book Award in the same year; recent winners featured here include Brooklyn and Middle England. 

bog standard

So obviously with ankle rehabilitation progressing well and new boots ready to be tested it only remained to find an opportunity to go and test ankle and boots out by going for a long walk. It's currently school half-term and Nia and I have been trying to tee up a crack at Pen y Fan, which she's very keen to do. That's pencilled in for the end of this week but I managed to wangle a free day yesterday as well so I took myself off for a walk after dropping the kids off at their grandparents' in Abergavenny. Now I've done a lot of walking in the vicinity of Abergavenny over the years: there's the Sugar Loaf, the Blorenge, the Black Mountain, Table Mountain above Crickhowell, Coity Mountain near Blaenavon and various Skirrids. So a lot of the obvious boxes have been ticked, and I fancied doing something new rather than re-doing something I'd already done.

The obvious area in the vicinity that I'd never set foot on was the big plateau to the south-west of Crickhowell, cut roughly in half by the B4560 running north-south across it, with the eastern half being Mynydd Llangatwg and the western half being Mynydd Llangynidr. So I planned a circular route, found a car park and set off. 

The first thing to say here is that this isn't a mountain walk in the classical sense: firstly because the car park is at about 440 metres and the high-altitude point of the day is at 541 metres, so there isn't a lot of ascent involved. Furthermore while the two areas either side of the road are each called "mountain" (that being what the Welsh word "mynydd" means) they are actually just one vast plateau with no obvious summits. The focal points of the day are the two trig points, the first one barely a mile and a half into the walk at 541 metres and the second at 529 metres atop a slightly more impressive pile of bits of shattered limestone about four miles to the east. The important thing to say about the first one is that this isn't even technically the summit of Mynydd Llangynidr - that is at 557 metres about a mile and a half to the west, but I couldn't see a way of including it in the walk without increasing the amount of exhausting slogging across trackless wastes to beyond the limits of even my sanity.

Getting from the first trig point to the second is the main challenge of the day - as you can probably imagine a vast flat area of mountain upland in South Wales is going to attract and retain quite a bit of water. The section from the first trig point to the road is basically OK, as is the section from the road to the intermediate high point here. Looking east from there across the slightly lower-lying area between you and the higher ground of Mynydd Llangatwg (the knobbly bit in the centre of the picture) is, I imagine, an experience not unlike gazing across the blasted trackless wastes of Mordor towards Mount Doom.

It's important to take an attitude of Zen-like calm and fatalism here: there's really no way of knowing in advance which is the best (which basically means driest) route, and so the thing to do is pick out a rough route by eye and then just go for it. In hindsight, though, it might have been better to go to the south (right in the photo above) of the two ponds rather than trying to pick a route between them. Around halfway through trying to do that I encountered a very wet section and no amount of hasty high-stepping over tussocks could prevent a certain amount of water from entering over the tops of my boots, instantly invalidating my intended testing of their waterproofing. The advantage of being in such an unfrequented spot is that you can bellow CUUUUNNNT as loud as you like and no-one will mind. 

Once you've gained the high ground of Mynydd Llangatwg, bagged its trig point and dropped off to the north to get out of the wind and eat a pork pie and a Granny Smith, you can quickly drop off the northern edge of the escarpment and down onto a path which hugs the contours along the bottom of the cliffs back towards the car park. I had expected this to be a longish and slightly tedious tail to the walk, but it's actually not quite as simple as that: the first section takes you through some interesting old limestone quarry workings and into the Craig-y-cilau nature reserve, part of the path through which follows the route of an old quarry tramway along a terrace halfway up the cliff. This is an absolute delight to walk after the tedious squelching that's gone before, and once that ends you drop down into some wooded valleys that are equally delightful, if a bit muddy and slippery in the wet. The path then leads past the raised bog at Waun Ddu - apparently very unusual and ecologically significant, though to be honest not much to look at. 

Apparently the area beyond the stream to the right here is an unusual "raised bog". I bet you thought that's just what happened when you left the toilet seat up, guys, amirite? pic.twitter.com/xX81KlOjcj

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 25, 2021

That's your lot for excitement, though, the tedious tail to the walk then materialises, just slightly later than expected, and you have to slog the last two slightly uphill miles along a road.

I can't honestly say I'd recommend this route to anyone but tedious hill-bagging completists and those of an obsessively misanthropic nature - after leaving the car park where there were a couple of guys in an army Land Rover doing mysterious army shit involving shouting into a radio a lot the next time I saw a human being was at around six miles in when I caught a glimpse of the top half of a farmer from about fifty yards away. I then passed within hello-ing distance of a young couple and an elderly lady and her dog while walking through the woods, but that was about it. I enjoyed myself, but I am aware that I find enjoyment in a whole variety of perverse activities that many would find unpalatable.

As an exercise in assessing boot comfort and ankle recovery it was pretty effective, though: marshy tussocky terrain like this is murder on the ankles even when they aren't injured. Twenty-four hours later I would describe my ankle as a bit sore, but not cripplingly so. We'll see what a shorter but steeper (and hopefully drier) walk on Friday does to it.

Route map (start at the green flag thingy in the top left corner and proceed anticlockwise) and altitude profile are below: the altitude profile illustrates how this is very much a walk of two contrasting halves. Note that the starting altitude (calculated by my phone's GPS) and, as a consequence, all the other altitudes, are about fifty metres too high.

I also took a few photos, which can be found here. 

maybe a reboot will fix it

One thing you can certainly say about me, in addition to all the less palatable stuff about being fat, bald and malodorous, is that I am not some sort of fickle fly-by-night flibbertigibbet when it comes to owning walking boots. This is partly because I am as tight as a gnat's chuff: walking boots are expensive and I want to be sure that when I purchase a pair they're going to last a while. Obviously I want them to be comfortable as well and that generally requires some outlay of cash, since in general you broadly get what you pay for, so there's a middle ground to be found between super-comfortable boots of solid gold that cost a gazillion quid and dirt-cheap boots that grind your toes off and leak like a sieve.

Leaking like a sieve, as it happens, is the thing that usually indicates that it's time to buy a new pair of boots, rather than anything absurdly dramatic like the soles falling off. And, just as the early-2007 Dartmoor trip finished off the old Berghauses, so it was for my 14-year-old pair of Salomon boots, under suspicion for a while for no longer being everything one might wish for in the waterproofing department and finally caught bang to rights during our soggy trip up the Blorenge in February, the second half of which was a fairly miserable cold squelchy experience.

As those of you who keep up with my insane ramblings on Twitter will know (it's mentioned in the Blorenge post as well), I've been suffering from quite painful ankle tendinitis for most of 2021 which has restricted my activities in the walking and running departments. Now that a proper full recovery finally seems to be in sight and I am under strict orders from the podiatrist and physiotherapist to go out and challenge myself with some exercise, my mind has turned to walking activity (I've already got back to the parkrun with Nia a couple of times) and I don't really want wet feet again. So we went over to Go Outdoors in Cardiff and I bought a new pair of boots. I've gone back to old-school leather Berghaus boots, partly because they were exceptionally comfortable and partly because this pair were on sale for 60 quid off.

As I said when I bought the last pair, the old Berghauses were probably the best part of 20 years old, and the Salomons lasted 14 years, so I have basically had two pairs of boots for the entirety of my adult life. Will the new pair see me into my grave, or at least into the twilight of my mountain walking career? We shall see.

cushlebrity woofylikey of the day

Come with me, if you will, as we continue our magical journey into the ever more esoteric realms of Things That Sort Of Look A Bit Like Each Other. We've done people, obviously, but also trees, religious buildings, cuddly toys, large Arctic islands, cartoon rabbits and tubes of tablets. In that vein, here's a cushion my wife bought the other day. It's fun and funky as an ornament but not actually very comfortable to lean on as it's rather tickly. Furthermore I was immediately struck by its resemblance to one of those dreadlocked Hungarian Puli dogs that look like some sort of high-maintenance grooming nightmare. I suspect if you took one of those, ripped its head and legs off (you might want to put an old sheet or some newspaper down first), disembowelled it and then stuffed it you would arrive at something that was a) more comfortable to lean on, b) cheaper to feed and c) quieter. 

On the other hand the RSPCA might be popping round for a word.

the last book I read

The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Hardest game in the world, the old art restoration game. I mean, you want to avoid the obvious atrocities like this, but there are more subtle and tricky considerations to grapple with. Can we get the layer of dirty and darkened varnish off, and maybe replace it with a new protective layer, without damaging the paint? If the artist himself made repairs at a later date, are they to be preserved, or removed in search of the pristine "original" work? What does that even mean? What do words, in general, even mean? Does anybody really love anybody anyway? 

Fortunately experienced and competent art restorers exist, like for instance Julia, who, as we meet her here in Madrid, has just acquired an interesting work to spruce up: The Game of Chess, a 15th-century work by Flemish artist Pieter Van Huys. Not just interesting in its subject matter - two Flemish gentlemen playing chess, based on real people, one of whom, intriguingly, had been dead for two years at the time the painting was done - but also because of what Julia finds when she gets the painting X-rayed (presumably part of the standard pre-restoration assessment process) and receives the results. Those results show that near the bottom of the painting, concealed by a subsequent layer of paint, are some words. Those words are "Quis necavit equitem?", or "Who killed the knight?".

You'll be ahead of me here, so: obviously a knight is a chess piece, and indeed one of the players has a white knight in his hand which he has evidently just taken from the board. But there is more, as there always is, in books longer than about half-a-dozen pages anyway: the player using the black pieces, Roger de Arras, is also "a knight" (the other guy is a nobleman of some sort) and, as we already know, had died a couple of years before the painting was created, after a brief but unpleasant argument with a crossbow bolt on a castle battlement. So does the inscription provide a clue to finding Roger's killer?

Julia and her old friend and art collector César engage the services of a local chess prodigy, Muñoz, to try and retrace the course of the chess game up to the climactic point captured in the painting, and of art historian (and, just to complicate things slightly, her ex-lover) Álvaro to dig into the painting's history and that of the people portrayed within it (the two men already mentioned plus the nobleman's wife, sitting demurely at a window watching the progress of the chess match). No sooner have they done this than Álvaro turns up dead in his shower, apparently having slipped and accidentally viciously bashed the back of his head in on the edge of the bath. Shortly afterwards Julia receives a small card, left by the entrance to her apartment, which contains some possible chess moves for extending the game portrayed in the painting. Is this some sort of coded warning to Julia? Is Álvaro's death connected? Is some chess-obsessed serial killer about to go on a rampage? But who? And why?

One possible motive might be to establish some public notoriety around the painting and thereby push up its value, in which case there are a few possible suspects: the painting's owner, Don Manuel Belmonte, his daughter Lola, Julia's friend and art dealer Menchu, her toy-boy lover Max, and oily auctioneer Paco Montegrifo. Menchu takes herself out of the running early doors by being murdered, and further cards containing further chess moves continue to arrive, with Muñoz keeping track of the current game position and developing a healthy respect for his adversary's chess skills (though not so much his penchant for actual murder). Hardest game in the world, the old chess game. 

Eventually Muñoz manages to work out the identity of the serial-killing chess enthusiast, and it turns out to be someone we already know, who unexpectedly turns out to have a chess-playing past, ended by the chastening experience of losing to a lesser player. Lying dormant for many years, the chess-playing bug (and associated killing frenzy) was rekindled by exposure to The Game of Chess. 

None of this really makes any sense, of course, but the same can be said for most detective novels. And while the unravelling of the mystery here is a lot of fun (even if, as usual with these things, the revelation doesn't really live up to the build-up), the main enjoyment comes from the associated detail about art and the analysis of the chess moves, both leading up to and following the capture of the white knight portrayed in the painting. It's the second book in this series to feature chess as a major plot point, The Queen's Gambit being the other. Art and painting also feature prominently, and I'd have had to look up some of the technical terms like craquelure if I hadn't already encountered them in What's Bred In The Bone. 

The Flanders Panel was made into a film called Uncovered in 1994, starring the lovely Kate Beckinsale as Julia. The linked trailer provides just the suggestion of some sexy sexy times that were absent from the book (it also seems to have relocated it to Barcelona). Despite the disappointingly low sexy sexy times quotient in the book I enjoyed it greatly; like The Queen's Gambit it's perhaps debatable how enjoyable you would find it if you had no chess background whatsoever. I'm trying to imagine how enjoyable I would find a book whose plot revolved around, I dunno, go or halma or something. 

the last book I read

Eternity by Greg Bear.

Strap yourselves into your ergonomically-moulded space-chair-o-pod, take a slurp of your rehydrated Soylent Green and let's recap at near-relativistic speed the events of Eon, to which Eternity is a sequel: at some point in the early 21st century, Russia and the USA are on the brink of nuclear war. As if to distract everyone's attention, a huge asteroid suddenly materialises in orbit around Earth and everyone falls over each other to get an expedition out to it. When they arrive they discover that it is hollow, clearly previously inhabited but now empty, and that the last of its seven internal chambers contains a gateway to a long, tubular mini-universe that appears to be of infinite length. Eventually it becomes clear that this object is from the future of our universe, or maybe just one of many possible futures. But where has everyone gone?

Down the tube, it turns out, via some conveniently hand-wavey science that allows large city-sized craft to travel at enormous speed down it with minimal energy expenditure, while the laws of thermodynamics light up a cigar and look the other way. Gateways can also be opened along what people come to call the Way, leading to other parts of the universe, or maybe other universes, or maybe just varied possible future versions of the same universe. But gateways are two-way things and a ruthless alien force, the Jarts, gain entry to the Way and really go to town fucking everyone's shit up, including opening a gateway into the heart of a star. To avoid everyone being incinerated by a nasty miasma of incandescent plasma, one party of current and future humans fires off down the tube at gargantuan speed to who knows where while the rest retreat back to the asteroid and sever the connection with the Way. 

And so here we are. As Eternity starts several plot strands featuring major characters from the previous book are picked up, including maverick physics whiz-kid Patricia Vasquez, escaping from the Way through a gateway to what she hoped was Earth but turned out to be a diverged future Earth where Alexander the Great lived to a ripe old age and his Macedonian culture continued to dominate. With no way (or indeed Way) back to her own world she lives to a ripely irascible old age, passing on some previously-unknown technology to the inhabitants and in particular a love of science and general feistiness to her granddaughter Rhita.

Meanwhile administrator and general voice of reason Garry Lanier is down on the real Earth overseeing aspects of its recovery after the continent-scouring nuclear war that occurred in the first book. Lots of this takes place in New Zealand, presumably because this escaped being a fiery radioactive hellscape, unlike the northern hemisphere continents. On taking a break from the old administering and going for a nature hike one day Lanier is somewhat startled to meet Pavel Mirsky, a former colleague who had been in the party that scooted off down the Way in the opposite direction at the end of the first book and whose presence here is therefore Literally Impossible. So, Pavel, where have you been? Well, Garry, I'm glad you asked - I've been to the End Of Time Itself and I have now returned to tell you about it. I may have to summarise some sections.

Meanwhile Olmy, agent of the Hexamon (the future-human civilisation that the current humans encountered down the Way) is on the asteroid (generally known as Thistledown) doing some strictly unauthorised research into a captured Jart whose body and backed-up mental state are stored in a top-secret vault in one of the chambers (backing up mental states to external storage for reconstitution into other bodies being a totally commonplace thing). Since everyone who had plugged themselves into the downloaded Jart mind-state so far has died, Olmy constructs an elaborate series of failsafes before downloading it into an implant in his own brain. But, you know, we can all see what's going to happen there.

Rhita Vaskayza (according to the spelling of Gaia, her alternative future Earth) has grown up into an inquisitive young woman to whom her now-deceased grandmother has bequeathed a lot of mysterious science-y artefacts. Rhita uses these to locate an active gateway into the Way at a distant location in "Nordic Rhus" (probably Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan) and gets permission to get an expedition together to try and find it. But, again, gateways allow entry and exit, and no sooner has Rhita located the gateway and opened it than a swarm of Jarts appears. Nice planet: we'll take it! Rhita and her expedition are taken through the gateway, extensively probed and hooked up to the Jart mind-grid for further observation.

Meanwhile, Pavel Mirsky has a message from [echoey voice] Beyond Time for the humans on Earth and on Thistledown: the Way must be destroyed. As magnificent a testament to human ingenuity as it is, it turns out to be like a tapeworm in the belly of the universe which will prevent some mysterious transcendent end-of-2001 shit from happening gazillions of years into the future. There are factions who have been campaigning for the re-opening of the Way anyway so this bit is agreed to, but once this is done and a hostile (presumably Jart) energy beam zaps out and kills a few people the second part (i.e. initiating the Way's destruction) is quickly agreed to as well.

Olmy's Jart, who has, wholly predictably, taken over all his key brain functions and is basically driving him around like a freakin' go-kart, proves an unexpected ally here, fashioning a hey-don't-shoot message for transmission down the Way to prevent further unpleasantness. Eventually the protagonists have to make the same sort of choices as at the end of the first book: retreat to Earth to live out their lives, take a gateway to another world, or try to outrun the wave of destruction down the Way to the end of time itself.

There are some books, including a few on this list (The Ionian Mission would be an obvious example, as I suppose would Tears Of The Giraffe and Mortal Causes), which are strictly part of a series but where it's not essential to have read all a particular book's predecessors before picking it up. Not so here, as I can't see how any of this would be comprehensible without having first read Eon. I did that in the late-1980s and bought this book immediately afterwards, before unexpectedly then leaving it over 30 years before reading it. To be honest a slightly shorter gap between the books might be better, just to have the events of Eon a bit fresher in the mind. 

One obvious advantage of a sequel to a gnarly hard sci-fi book is that you can skip some of the more substantial chunks of world-building exposition that bogged down some of Eon and just launch straight into the story in an already-built universe. In that sense Eternity is a more exciting, event-filled book than Eon, each of the several parallel strands having plenty to keep the reader interested.

One of the odd things about Eternity is how similar some aspects of it are to the work of Iain M Banks - there's the enthusiasm for planetary-scale engineering, but also some of the concepts around longevity-enhancement by constantly backing-up your mind-state and re-loading it into a series of youthful physical substrates. This also provides a means of ensuring your continued survival should you unexpectedly be killed falling off an asteroid or being cut in half by a space laser. The concept of "subliming" that features in some of the Culture novels sounds quite close to what Pavel Mirsky undergoes here as well. And the series of occasionally nightmarish simulations that Rhita's uploaded consciousness is subjected to by the Jarts is not dissimilar to the Hells from Surface Detail. The Jarts themselves are a bit like the Borg, existing only to joylessly assimilate other planets and secure their knowledge for some ill-defined perfected future version of themselves. Jart for Jart's sake, you might say.

The obvious other point of comparison is with Olaf Stapledon for attempting to encompass the entirety of space and time in a single book. Bear does at least slow down enough to feature some named characters and even make us care about them, a bit. On that subject, what purpose is served by having the Way's principal engineer, Konrad Korzenowski, carry the same name as Joseph Conrad I am not sure, but it can't be a coincidence. It's doubly hard to know whether the omission of the "i" from "Korzeniowski" was intentional, because my copy of Eternity is one of the most poorly-proofread books (from an actual non-vanity publisher, anyway) I've ever read. Subsequent editions may have ironed out some of the wrinkles but there are lot of mistakes and misspellings here (examples below). I recall mentioning the same thing with The Falls back in the early days of this blog; the situation here is, if anything, worse. 

Despite that, and despite lukewarm reviews in some quarters I really enjoyed this; my ongoing quest to read all the Culture novels aside, hard sci-fi is a genre I rarely dabble with so it's fun to dip a toe in occasionally. There is a third book in the series, Legacy, but this appears to be a loosely-linked prequel (to the extent that these terms have any meaning with all the looping time-travel going on) so I suspect this is where I'll leave it.

another gutsy performance

In some ways it's hard to remember what "normal", pre-pandemic life was like, but if you concentrate hard enough I'm sure you can recall some aspects of it. Remember how we used to gambol in a carefree manner through grassy meadows? Remember how we used to - without really giving it a second thought - touch other people? I mean, not in that way, or not in Tesco anyway. Also, you remember how whales used to explode? It's a shame they don't do that any more, isn't it? 

Well, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that nature is healing, things are returning to normal and once again if you pop your head out of the window, in addition to the melodious sound of birdsong and the raucous guttural whooping of howler monkeys throwing bananas at each other, you may also hear the distant dull wet crump of an exploding whale. 

Here's one, for instance - apparently off the coast of California, and the type of whale isn't specified but I think it may be a gray whale. The original tweet which I quote-tweeted (see below) doesn't have any sound but this one does. It's not the hilarious series of colossal burping and farting noises that you're probably hoping for, though, just a couple of Californians going WHOOOOOAAAHHH DUUUUDE and WHAT THE FUUUUUUUCK.

I myself recall experiencing something similar after a surfeit of creamy shellfish and beer at Belgo in the late 1990s https://t.co/ncXNDvGne3

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 29, 2021

One thing that seems odd on first watch (I mean apart from seeing a dead whale vomit up its own intestines) is the recollection that blue whales (and therefore, I rashly extrapolate, baleen whales in general) have quite narrow throats, only about big enough to swallow a football. So it seems odd that they could cram, for instance, an entire pair of lungs up through there. On reflection, though, this might actually be crucial as presumably it's this narrow aperture which enables the build-up of gas pressure which propels the internal organs outward. I think if you were to try and blow your own lungs out of your mouth (and I'm not suggesting you do) you would find quite a lot of pressure was required.

rhino what you mean

A couple of further notes following the last three book posts: firstly while I'd had The Pope's Rhinoceros knocking around on my shelves for a decade or so (I don't specifically remember where I got hold of it but it may well have been on one of my strictly rationed trips to Hay-on-Wye), I first became aware of its existence some years earlier, during my participation in a truck safari in southern Africa in early 2000, something I see I mentioned towards the end of this 2008 post and even made reference to my travelling companions' selected reading matter. Well, while I'm pretty sure I recall working through several, the only book I specifically remember reading during the trip was John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy Of Dunces, something that earned me some hipster points with the two young American guys who were also on the truck.

There was also a compartment on the truck containing quite a few other paperback books, presumably partly populated by discarded offerings from previous travellers and offered up for the entertainment of current ones, on the understanding that you'd put your chosen book back when you'd finished with it. One of the books in here was an imposing tome called The Pope's Rhinoceros (the same paperback edition that I have) and I recall a conversation ensued about whether anyone had read it and whether someone might have a crack at it during the trip. Since it is literally impossible that I would embark on a trip such as this and fail to bring enough books, I passed at the time.

Back to the two young American guys, who were called Mike and Andy (no surnames for reasons which will become apparent in a minute) - during the last phase of our three-week trip which comprised a few nights in Victoria Falls they decided to cap the trip off by purchasing a load of assorted drugs. They'd managed to get hold of some LSD, and deeming just dropping it in the truck or while gazing on the thunderous watery magnificence of Victoria Falls from the usual viewing platforms to be a bit tame, decided to drop it so that it kicked in just as they were doing a bungee jump off the Victoria Falls Bridge which connects Zimbabwe and Zambia. I recall being in a local restaurant for a communal meal that evening and Andy, still evidently experiencing some after-effects, spending most of the meal under the table having a whispered conversation with a small carved wooden hippopotamus. 

They also managed to get hold of some weed, and since they had a plane to catch a day before ours, and since we'd partaken of some the night before, the stash ended up in the side pocket of my day-pack in order for us to make use of it round the campfire the following night. It was only on arrival at Victoria Falls airport to catch a plane to Harare that I remembered I still had the remains in my rucksack, whereupon I did a frantic dash for a secluded dustbin to empty it out and blow into the pocket to try and clear any last few telltale seeds and leaf fragments. There is of course a Sliding Doors-style alternate version of my subsequent life where I forgot to do this, got nabbed by the sniffer dogs once we encountered the less lax security regime at Harare airport, and was either summarily shot or spent the next 21 years in a Zimbabwean prison.

Secondly. an odd occurrence relating to the next book on the list, No Great Mischief. In a seemingly unrelated sequence of events, I first became aware of the existence of Canadian comic Norm MacDonald only about six months ago after following some random series of YouTube links. He was one of those guys who was extremely well-regarded by his peers, the sort of guy who'd be described as "the comedian's comedian" or something like that, which basically translates as: not as rich and famous as many of his contemporaries. Many of the YouTube clips (and there are a lot) feature him either being comically disruptive or spinning lengthy shaggy-dog stories on various late-night US talk shows, this being a loosely-structured format that seemed to suit him pretty well, a bit like his UK contemporary Sean Lock. Another thing MacDonald and Lock have in common is that they died this year, both relatively young (Lock was 58, MacDonald 61).

Needless to say after his five minutes of fond remembrance Norm MacDonald has subsequently been Milkshake Duck-ed. I'm certainly not dismissing the allegations, but I guess (just as with To Have And Have Not) you have to find a way of acknowledging that stuff without tipping someone's entire oeuvre down the memory hole. You would certainly have to say, for instance, that he seems to have taken a consistently dim view of female comedians and comedy writers. But, and I don't want to lay a heavy CANCEL CULTURE trip on you here, people contain multitudes, and it would be a shame to only admit to the public sphere those who have never expressed a single thought that deviated from current acceptable cultural norms (pun sort of intended). 

Anyway, back to the book link: in the course of the Jacques de Gautier/Jacques de Gatineau/baby dolphin story MacDonald mentioned his fluidly-named protagonist being from "Timiskaming, Quebec". His rambling, off-the-cuff style of delivery makes it sound as if that was a name he'd just made up on the spot, but not only is it a real place, it coincidentally features in a passage towards the end of No Great Mischief that I read no more than a day or two after first seeing the clip. 

here you go. coincidence? OR IS IT?!!???! the answer, as always, is yes pic.twitter.com/NHWu5EpE4T

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 15, 2021

the last book I read

To Have And Have Not by Ernest Hemingway.

Harry Morgan is a man. A man with a boat. A boat with many uses. The use that Harry wants to put it to is taking rich paying customers out on fishing trips between Havana and Key West. The use that quite a few people would like him to put it to is running various forms of contraband between those two locations: rum, guns, people, you name it.

Harry mostly resists the shady stuff, and wisely so as right at the start of the book we encounter him turning down a lucrative offer to transport some men to Florida and the men in question are promptly mown down by gunfire on leaving the bar. So it's dangerous work and best steered clear of. The trouble is, Harry's latest fishing customer, having been granted some fairly generous credit terms by Harry, chooses this moment to jump on the next plane out of Havana without paying, leaving Harry several hundred dollars out of pocket.

Harry has a wife and kids to feed, and times are hard generally as we're in the middle of the Great Depression, so what does he do? It seems he has little choice but to dip a toe into the murky waters of criminal activity. Despite his initial reluctance Harry seems like a natural for this kind of stuff, agreeing to transport some Chinese men from Cuba to Florida but then killing the money man (after the money has been handed over, of course) and putting the men ashore back in Cuba. Some further transporting of various illicit cargo enables Harry to keep his head above water, so to speak, but it's dangerous work and there's always the chance of a mission going tits up and ending in a hail of bullets. Sure enough on a booze-running trip Harry catches a bullet in the arm, makes it back to Key West (after dumping the booze overboard) but has his boat impounded by the US customs and ends up having his arm amputated above the elbow.

Life is tough for Harry, and it's not getting any easier. There are those who are living the high life in the bars of Havana and the marinas of Key West, though, hanging out on their luxury yachts swilling champagne. These people have worries of their own, of course: the progress of their latest love affair, fretting about the possibility of the wife having her own love affair(s), drinking too much, unwelcome scrutiny by the taxman, that sort of thing. Not quite as fundamental to actual day-to-day existence as Harry's, but it keeps them busy nevertheless. 

Harry, meanwhile, is still trying to make a living, a thing made more difficult by not having access to his boat (and by, you know, only having one arm). He borrows a boat from Havana bar-owner Freddy, and agrees to take some Cubans to Key West. It turns out the Cubans are intending to use the boat as a getaway vehicle after robbing a local bank, and they arrive on the boat toting some large guns and in a bit of a hurry, something they emphasise to Harry by shooting his crewman Albert dead. 

As they speed off across the Caribbean, Harry realises that they probably aren't going to pay him for the trip out of their profits from the bank job, and that it's far more likely that on successfully delivering them to their destination he will be the recipient of a hot lead sandwich. Fortunately Harry is a forward-thinking kind of guy and has stashed a Tommy gun in the boat's cabin. Once the boat is ot of sight and earshot of the shore and the Cubans have started to relax and knock back the rum, Harry whips out the Tommy gun and starts blazing away. Unfortunately it's a bit dark and while he successfully ventilates most of the Cubans he only wings the last one, enabling him to shoot Harry in the belly. Having properly dispatched the last Cuban, Harry hauls himself into a chair, points the boat back towards shore and prepares for either a long slow drift back to shore (the gun battle having ruptured the fuel tank) or a long slow bleed to death. 

One of the obvious things to say about To Have And Have Not is what an oddly-structured book it is. Harry's last acts as described above provide a good example: the climactic gun battle with the Cubans is done and dusted by page 130 (of 191); the remainder of the book is principally devoted to the Gordons and the Bradleys and their various inter-marital entanglements, which only intersect with the main narrative (i.e. Harry's story) right at the end, as the coastguard brings the bullet-riddled boat back into harbour (PLOT SPOILER: Harry is just about still alive, but dies). There is an odd disparity of tone between the exciting, desperate life-and-death stuff going on on Harry's boat and the relatively inconsequential rich-people-being-drunken-shits stuff going on elsewhere. No doubt part of that is deliberate (the Gordons et al are the "haves" to Harry's "have not") but the stories don't mesh together in quite the way it seems like they ought to. This makes a bit more sense when you find out it was created by combining a couple of originally separate short stories. One of the reasons that Howard Hawks wanted to change the plot quite a bit when he filmed it in 1944 (see below) was apparently that he thought it was Hemingway's worst novel. I haven't read enough of them to have an opinion, but it's certainly not in the same league as For Whom The Bell Tolls (the only other one I've read is The Old Man And The Sea, which is really an extended short story at best).

I saw the Bogart/Bacall film a long time ago and I can confirm that it bears very little resemblance to the book beyond featuring a guy called Harry (though he spends a lot of the film being called Steve) who has a boat. There were a couple of further film adaptations in the 1950s: The Breaking Point and The Gun Runners, of varying degrees of faithfulness to the book. 

One thing that will certainly have a jarring effect on the 21st-century reader is some of the language used to describe non-white people. A couple of examples below of stuff that would certainly be considered, erm, "problematic" today:

As you can see these sections are in the part of the book that's written in Harry's voice (some sections later are in the third person), so you could say: well, that's just how unreconstructed rufty-tufty 1930s guys would have talked, and you may very well be right. It is hard to see what could be done about it, assuming anyone thought anything should be done. Pulp all remaining copies and never speak of it again? That seems a bit excessive. A trigger warning in the acknowledgements at the front? Eh, maybe. 

the last book I read

No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod.

It's the 1970s (or possibly the early 1980s) and Alexander MacDonald is driving from his home in rural Ontario to Toronto to visit his older brother Calum. His brother Calum, it transpires, is living in some fairly dispiriting circumstances in a tiny apartment and nursing a ferocious alcohol habit. While Alexander makes a trip to the local liquor store to find something to relieve Calum's suffering he reflects on the events of their shared past, events which of course explain (at least partly) how things have ended up the way they have. Yes, that rumbling sound you hear is the approach of the express service from Framing Device Parkway to Flashback Central.

And so we arrive back in a time period that flits around between the 1950s and 1960s. The MacDonald family live in Cape Breton, right at the north-eastern tip of Nova Scotia. As well as Calum (the oldest) there are three other brothers before Alexander and his twin sister. Their parents run and maintain the lighthouse which sits just off the coast, and can be walked out to over the ice at certain times of year. The family (as the name suggests) are of Scottish descent and remain tightly-knit, with all three remaining grandparents also living no more than a stone's throw away and various other relations dotted about the local area, recognisable as part of the wider clan by their distinctive dark eyes and red hair. 

Anyway, as I'm sure I don't need to tell you, it's a hard life tending an intermittently ice-bound lighthouse in the wilds of northern Canada. And sure enough when Alexander is still a wee bairn of no more than three (and Calum is a teenager) both parents and one of their sons, Colin, have a mishap while traversing the ice in the dark, go through it into the icy and fast-moving waters and are never seen again. And so it falls to the grandparents to bring up the kids, which mainly means Alexander and his sister, the older boys soon being independent enough to get their own place, cars, jobs, etc.

At this point there are some further flashbacks, mainly describing the circumstances of the MacDonald family's arrival in Canada in 1779 in the wake of the Highland clearances, and further back to the Jacobite rising and the Battle of Culloden.

Alexander, as befits the youngest sibling with less pressure upon him to immediately go out and be the chief breadwinner, decides he'd like to be a dentist. But, before he can really get to grips with the business of pulling teeth, his family loyalty is tested. The older brothers are all doing lucrative work as miners at a uranium mine in Ontario (presumably meant to be Elliot Lake) and they're a man short; the reason they're a man short is that Alexander's cousin (also called Alexander MacDonald) has been messily killed by a falling mine bucket. So Alexander agrees to do a season or two at the mine drilling uranium instead of teeth.

The shifts at the mine are long and hard and the atmosphere at the mining camp intermittently tense. Another more distant clan member (yes, also Alexander MacDonald) arrives from the USA in an attempt to dodge the draft, and his arrival (and penchant for petty theft) accelerates the simmering tensions between the Scots and the French Canadian crew from neighbouring Quebec. When, during an enforced period of mining inactivity (the main winch is broken) these tensions boil over into a major rumble in the car park and Calum bashes the Quebecois ringleader fatally over the head with a wrench.

And so we see why Calum's present circumstances are as they are: a lengthy spell in prison, and on release finding it difficult to find work: a bit old for the manual work he used to specialise in, not much in the way of skills for anything else, plus that whole convicted murderer thing which is a bit of a turn-off for prospective employers. In the olden days he would have returned to the bosom of his extended family at the old family homestead and found a way of making himself useful, but times have changed and the grandparents are dead and the surviving siblings scattered across the continent doing their own thing.

The novel ends with Alexander returning to Toronto a few months after the original visit to collect Calum, now in a state of declining health, and deliver him to Cape Breton, from where we assume he is not intending to return. It's now winter and we are invited to speculate what form Calum's final acts will take. Will he set off across the ice to the old lighthouse and park himself there facing out to sea? 

This is Alistair MacLeod's only novel of a long and varied writing career (he was much more prolific as a writer of short stories) and adheres very much to the principle of writing about what you know - he was of Scottish heritage and grew up in Cape Breton. While the story being told here is obviously closely tied to Scottish clan loyalty it's also about family in a more general sense and how, while we still have families that we care about, certain things - the close family ties and the associated ties to particular geographical areas, houses being passed down from generation to generation, grandparents, parents and children plus the odd chicken all living under one roof - no longer really exist, at least in the supposedly sophisticated western world, anyway. And while this is liberating for some, it means that people like Calum are cast adrift to fend for themselves when once they might not have been. It's quite possible there's a calculation that could be done, if you only knew what numbers to put in, that would say that overall this is a good thing, but that doesn't help people like Calum much.

It's a fairly quick read and quite a nice bracing contrast to the absurdly baroque excesses of its predecessor, The Pope's Rhinoceros. This book is spare, stark and devoid of frills, but also features characters who are rooted in the real world enough for the reader to care about them. Unlike its predecessor which I'd had on my shelves for at least ten years and some previous books which had been sitting unread for several decades, I acquired this one only a couple of months ago in the little second-hand bookshop attached to the National Trust property at Killerton in Devon. 

No Great Mischief won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2000. Previous winners featured on this blog are Harvest (2015) and Remembering Babylon (1996). The previous novel featured on this blog, The Pope's Rhinoceros, was shortlisted in 1998, as were, in various other years, Paradise, The Corrections, Bel Canto, The Good Doctor, Havoc, In Its Third Year, Slow Man, No Country For Old Men, Winterwood, Home, The Lacuna and Brooklyn.

the last book I read

The Pope's Rhinoceros by Lawrence Norfolk.

It's not easy being Pope. Never mind getting paintings done properly, there is the boredom. I mean, once you've said Mass a couple of times and performed a couple of other incomprehensible rituals in St. Peter's Square you've got the whole rest of the day to fill, and even hearing the petitions of a few malodorous peasants and reading through the gossip section of Heat a few times probably leaves a few dead hours. And you can't goof off on the internet for a bit because it's the early 16th century and it hasn't been invented yet.

So why not come up with some absurd whim for some desperate sycophant to move heaven and earth to try to fulfil? I mean, in the unlikely event that they succeed you'll probably have forgotten all about it, but it provides a bit of amusement. What about one of these new rhinoceroses that we've been hearing about? I mean, nobody really knows what they look like, but they're big and they're exotic and might provide some amusement. 

Let us now head away from Rome to somewhere slightly less hospitable: the island of Usedom, off the northern coast of mainland Europe on what is now the border between Germany and Poland. Two men are engaged in an odd ritual, the larger man repeatedly lowering the smaller man into the sea in a barrel. When - inevitably - it turns out that the makeshift tar-and-leather waterproofing isn't quite as effective as they'd hoped, they are rescued by some members of an odd order of monks who it turns out live in a crumbling monastery on a nearby clifftop, bits of which keep sliding off into the sea. It further turns out that the two men were doing something related to the remains of the lost city of Vineta, which supposedly previously occupied the clifftop now precariously occupied by the monastery and at some point in the past slid beneath the waves. 

But there's no time to dwell on that, as it is decided that the monks must make a pilgrimage to Rome and petition the Pope (this particular one is a lightly fictionalised Leo X) for something or other (presumably a new and better church). That's no mean feat from the shores of the Baltic, and the party (comprising the monks and Salvestro and Bernardo, the Little and Large team) has a series of crazy adventures traversing Europe before they reach Rome.

But there's no time to dwell on that either, as we're in Rome, the greatest city on Earth. You don't just wander up to the Pope and strike up a conversation, though, there is a whole series of preliminary approaches to be made and a lot of waiting around to do for the right moment to present itself. Meanwhile Salvestro and Bernardo, less inclined to silent contemplation and asceticism, need to find some paying work, and as luck would have it a crew is being sought for a sea voyage to Africa to locate a rhinoceros for the Pope, because, you know, apparently he wants one. 

Certain factions in Rome don't really want the mission to succeed, though, which is partly why Salvestro and Bernardo have been chosen, having precisely zero nautical experience. Moreover the ship is barely seaworthy and the captain is a hopeless drunk. But, against all the odds, they arrive in West Africa. A few problems arise, though: firstly there is a rival expedition also out to secure the prize of the rhinoceros (and, more importantly, the gratitude and favour of the Pope), secondly the land is already inhabited by some native tribes that aren't necessarily inclined to be either welcoming or helpful, and thirdly there isn't a convenient queue of rhinoceroses docilely waiting to be herded into the cage that's been prepared. 

Salvestro's expedition is fortunate to have with them a young woman from the area, previously kidnapped and enslaved in Rome, who can at least converse with the natives. And it turns out that there is some sort of quest-within-a-quest that the expedition members who have made it ashore need to do, involving, as all jungle-based quests do, a mysterious and forbidden lost city that they must enter, but which some of them may not leave. 

Even at the end of that they don't just get a handshake and a "right, here's your rhinoceros"; instead they are lashed to a raft and set adrift down a large river (presumably the Niger) towards the sea. At some point subsequent to this they are intercepted by the rival expedition and brought aboard (along with the caged rhinoceros which was also on the raft). Next minute, we're on some Italian shoreline as various bodies and fragments of wreckage wash up, including Salvestro, who is the only survivor.

And so we return to Rome, as the Pope's entourage prepare to deliver a great spectacle, the climax of which will reveal the legendary rhinoceros, which, thanks to Salvestro, has been delivered as promised. I mean, admittedly, it's not as fresh, nor indeed alive, as one might perhaps hope, and its innards have been scooped out and replaced with a couple of hundredweight of surplus bread rolls, but it's definitely there. Following this slightly farcical end to the spectacle Salvestro finds himself sitting next to the Pope at the subsequent feast, and therefore in a position to witness the Pope finally confronting some consequences for his involvement (as plain old Lorenzo de Medici) in the brutal sack of Prato some years earlier.

Farewell, previous slim volume, hello MASSIVE READING PROJECT #books pic.twitter.com/VjNaijSaYb

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) July 7, 2021

The first and most obvious thing about The Pope's Rhinoceros is its formidable size: 753 pages, 39 lines per page, general resemblance to a house-brick. And when you finally gird up to launch into reading it, the first chapter starts at the very beginning with a partial geological history of Northern Europe, which is a bit daunting, although it doesn't go on as long as you fear it might. Once Salvestro and Bernardo get involved in the story things pick up quite a bit, and they provide the hook of actual human interest that carries the reader through the great sweep of history that follows, the monks' motivations being a bit difficult to fathom. There is a strong echo of Of Mice And Men's George and Lennie in Salvestro and Bernardo, with some dark allusions to Bernardo doing Bad Things (possibly accidentally, possibly not) to children in the past.

quick list of current Projects goes something like this: Nostromo, House Of Leaves, Foucault's Pendulum, Lanark, Ulysses, Moby-Dick, The Pope's Rhinoceros, Swann's Way, Gravity's Rainbow, Tristram Shandy, The Goldfinch, Anna Karenina, Germinal. #books any recommendations?

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 15, 2020

This is another book from my Projects list, where it got filed because of its length and perceived density and demandingness. I've actually done pretty well with knocking off items from this list during lockdown, The Pope's Rhinoceros being the fourth after House Of Leaves, Lanark and Moby-Dick. Like all three of its predecessors it's actually a good deal easier to read than you might imagine; that said it is also absurdly long and features an absurd amount of digression on a wide range of topics which is clearly the result of an absurd and impressive amount of research. Whether all of it is strictly necessary is another matter. And while the story being told here is more easily followed than in the shorter In The Shape Of A Boar (the only other Norfolk I've read, and mentioned briefly in the Lanark review) certain things still aren't very clear even at the end, after 753 pages: what specifically was Salvestro hoping to achieve with the barrel-on-a-rope routine? what exactly happened at Prato, and what was the Pope's role? is little Amalia some sort of avenging angel sent to claim the Pope's mortal soul, or just a slightly odd little girl? 

Usedom, Leo X, the sack of Prato, the legend of Vineta and some of the other historical stuff mentioned in the novel are (or were) real things - slightly more surprisingly the rhinoceros stuff is based on a real story as well, that of a real ship carrying a real rhinoceros (though that one was supposedly from India) which sank off the Italian coast in 1516. This was the rhinoceros that was supposedly the inspiration for Albrecht Dürer's famous (and famously anatomically inaccurate) woodcut. 

it's just another mondegreen

Just to continue the theme of misheard or garbled lyrics, I found myself humming a tune to myself in the kitchen the other day which turned out to be a song from Michael Jackson's Bad album, not something normally in my day-to-day listening habits but an album that my younger sister owned and played repeatedly when we were teenagers. The song contains an odd line which I'd always mentally rendered as follows:

You're just another Quatermain

That line in the original song is followed by a trademark "eeh-hee", which in itself illustrates part of the problem; Bad is the album where Jackson's (no, the other one) vocal tics became oddly intrusive and his pronunciation of certain words became, let's say, idiosyncratic and ripe for parody. Shamone, motherfuckers! 

Anyway, my assumption on hearing what I perceived to be the original lyrics was that Jackson was alluding to Allan Quatermain, protagonist of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, a book which I should point out I have never read but which is embedded in popular culture and has been filmed several times. I have a vague recollection of seeing Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone being boiled (not to death, obviously) in a giant cauldron in the 1985 film version, a film clearly designed to hoover up some of the Romancing The Stone and Indiana Jones megabucks, even down to featuring Stone as the sort of annoying shrieking blonde sidekick as Kate Capshaw portrayed in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. At least they didn't attempt to replicate Short Round. Anyway, the idea, I assumed, was to allude to the woman Jackson was presumably addressing (though in hindsight it may in reality have been a small boy, or a chimp) as being some sort of gold-digger, that being almost literally what Quatermain was in the book. 

Note also that the protagonist's name is spelt Quatermain rather than (as you might imagine) Quartermain. "Quarter-main" is how everyone pronounces it, though, rather than, say, "kway-ter-main", which would seem a bit ridiculous.

Needless to say the actual lyric is a good deal more mundane, it being just the title of the song, which is called Another Part Of Me. I should add that I haven't literally just worked this out, I took the trouble to check back in the late 1980s. Even when you know this Jackson's rendering of it is pretty extraordinary, though - listen to around 1:01 and 1:48 in the linked clip and you'll hear, at best, "another pwart o' me". Also needless to say is that others have heard different things (and also the same thing, as "Quatermain" does feature here), including "porno queen", "porter man" and "quart of paint".