back once again with the hill behaviour

We went for a walk up the Blorenge a couple of weeks ago; broadly similar in route and distance to the two previous walks we'd done - the slightly ill-fated (in terms of the health of my ankle and boots) lockdown one in 2021 and the one with some work colleagues all the way back in 2009. So we're not breaking any new ground here but as always there are some points of interest that are worth mentioning, and it serves as an intro to some other more significant walk stuff that we did earlier in the summer and which I'll get to in another post.

So, anyway, I don't want to rehash the content of earlier posts here but you'll recall that the Blorenge is a smallish mountain (or a largish hill, whatever you like, I'm not getting into an argument about categorisation) just outside Abergavenny, really just the steep end of the largest lobe of a sort of cloverleaf-shaped area of high ground centred just north of Blaenavon. Any walk that wants to qualify as an "ascent" in any meaningful way pretty much has to start somewhere in the vicinity of Llanfoist, and it just so happens that there's a car park at Llanfoist Crossing, at the start point of the cycle path that follows the old railway line from Llanfoist to Merthyr Tydfil along some of the bits that haven't been subsumed by the Heads Of The Valleys Road. The only drawback is that the car park is quite small and heavily used by dog walkers so it can be a bit of a bunfight finding a space. I'm not going to be That Guy and suggest you provide minor botheration to the locals by parking on a residential street as an alternative, but clearly that is a thing you could do if so inclined. 

Anyway, you're an adult, sort your own parking out. Having done that you walk up the path that goes under the old Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal and then smashes straight up the hill through the woods directly towards the summit of the Blorenge. On emerging into the open you can, if you so wish, carry on straight up, but a more scenic and less lung-busting option is to take a left turn and head for the pleasant spot of the Devil's Punchbowl, a small pond in what is presumably some sort of glacial cwm. It's apparently man-made, and surprisingly recent (circa 1960s) - it was previously just a low-lying marshy area. Apparently quite a popular wild swimming spot, although when we were there the water level was quite low and it all looked a bit green and murky.

After the brief respite of the fairly flat (even slightly downhill) walk to the Devil's Punchbowl and maybe a brief respite to take in the scenery and have a drink and a KitKat (other chocolate bars are available) you turn south-west and start uphill again, briefly meeting a minor road before turning north for the proper assault on the hill. You'll notice that the path takes a slightly indirect hook-y route before approaching the summit trig point from the north-east and you might be tempted to say: hell, I'm going to cut that corner off. To that I would say: go for it if you want, but I have done it (partly by accident) and generally found it to be a bit of an arse. I mean, you won't die, but the energy and irritation expended in pathless floundering about probably means taking the main path is a better option. You do you, though.

The summit trig point is by a big pile of rocks (which obscure it until the last second coming from the north-east) and, having bagged it and dropped off the top (we went south as this happened to be the direction that got us out of the wind) for a pork pie and a Granny Smith, the walk then drops off the summit ridge to the north-west and eventually joins up with the route of Hill's Tramroad, which includes an exciting tunnel which the kids had some fun exploring and where they shot a video for Huwie's YouTube channel. That path follows the contours round the hillside until it links back with the path up through the woods which takes you back down to where you started.

I think this is the best of the three slightly different routes: the 2009 walk included an extension to loop round the Foxhunter car park and Keeper's Pond (another popular wild swimming spot), which is all very nice but doesn't really add much apart from some lateral distance, and I think the ascent via the Devil's Punchbowl is better than the route along the canal towpath and then an uphill slog along some roads. The 2021 walk took a similar route up (with a bit of inadvertent pathless floundering as described above) but then a much more direct route down, which is fine if you're in a hurry but less interesting than the route incorporating the tramroad and tunnel.

Overall route distance was just over ten kilometres, or about six-and-a-half miles. Details below: latest in the long and varied series of altitude-graph-generating tools is Strava which my Garmin running watch is linked to: this seems not to have the random starting height discrepancy that the old phone app had, which is nice. 

the last book I read

From A Buick 8 by Stephen King.

So here's Troop D of the Pennsylvania State Police - just a bunch of regular guys trying to keep the peace and uphold the law. We're out in the sticks here so it's not any of yer high-falutin' fancy big-city crime, just the usual drunk driving and domestic violence. 

Speaking of drunk driving, one of Troop D's number, Curtis Wilcox, has recently been rubbed out while on a routine traffic stop - not by the driver of the HGV he'd pulled over but by another guy, Bradley Roach, whose addled inattention led to Curtis being smeared along the side of the HGV by his car.

Following this incident Troop D pulls together to look after Curtis' family, in particular his teenage son, Ned, understandably hit hard by his father's death. Ned starts hanging out at the police barracks, doing odd jobs, even occasionally manning the radio, and develops a curiosity about how the whole operation works and what the various rooms at the barracks contain. In particular, Ned is curious about the outbuilding known as Shed B, which appears to contain a near-mint-condition 1950s Buick Roadmaster, just sitting there in the dark. The current commanding officer, Sandy Dearborn, decides that since Ned is pretty much one of the team these days, and given his father's connection to the place (and, it later turns out, his particular connection to the Buick), Ned is entitled to hear the story.

And so we do a wibbly-wobbly dissolve to twenty-odd years previously when most of the current force, Sandy included, were fresh-faced youngsters responding to a call from, coincidentally (OR IS IT, etc.), the very same Bradley Roach, at this time running a petrol station, about a fancy-looking Buick that some mysterious long-coated dude has just abandoned on the forecourt - the dude himself slunk off round the back of the site, ostensibly to use the bathroom, and has now disappeared without trace. The guys on patrol turn up with a tow-truck and take the vehicle back to the barracks, and almost immediately clock that there is something deeply wrong with it, most obviously that the engine is a motley selection of plausibly mechanical-looking bits that don't actually connect with each other, still less function, the dashboard dials are fake, and the exhaust system appears to be made of glass. Moreover the car seems to repel dust and dirt, and even heal itself if the paintwork is scratched. [This isn't a thought that could have occurred to King in 2002 when the book was published, but it's a bit like one of those AI simulations that look a bit like people but on closer inspection have twenty-three fingers, an anus for an eye, etc.] The tow-truck deposits the Buick in Shed B and there it stays, partly because the owner is definitely not putting in a re-appearance, and partly because it's not like anyone can start it up and drive it out of there. And partly for other reasons, too.

There are early hints - beyond the car not actually being a car, I mean - that rum doings are afoot, most notably the disappearance of Curtis Wilcox's patrol partner Ennis Rafferty, who most people on the force believe disappeared while inside Shed B. This leads to some unpalatable thoughts, like: did the car eat him in some way? A pragmatic sort of omertà develops within Troop D: no blabbing of any kind about Shed B to anyone outside of the troop, family, friends, senior police, and most of all the press.

Curtis Wilcox takes a particular interest in the Buick and its behaviour, which comprises occasional spectacular shows of light and electrical interference which stops police radios from working, but also the occasional vomiting up of living or recently-living creatures definitely Not Of This Earth, including a weird insecty-bat-type-thing which Curtis does some gruesome amateur dissection on, and some plant and fish things which decompose too quickly to yield much information other that that they are weird and they stink. These are pretty grim, but at least pose no threat to humans other than putting them off their dinner. The human-sized creature that subsequently comes through does, though, since it is not only not dead but also not especially keen on becoming dead and possessed of enough intelligence, not to mention tentacles, to do something about it. The members of Troop D who happen to be on duty persuade it otherwise by messily murdering it to death with a shovel, with a bit of help from the barracks dog, who subsequently dies of a spectacular case of heartburn.

So what is going on here? The best theory Curtis and his colleagues can come up with is that the Buick is actually some sort of portal between worlds, and that whatever hellish Lovecraftian netherworld the tentacly horrors that periodically appear in Shed B came from, that's where Ennis, and subsequently an escaped prisoner who strays into the shed and whose disappearance no-one particularly mourns, have gone, very probably to be messily murdered in their turn by a host of shovel-wielding space lobsters.

No satisfyingly conclusive information about any of this has ever been forthcoming - definitive news about the car's original driver's whereabouts, how it got onto the garage forecourt in the first place given that it can't be driven, how the exchange of biological material between worlds actually works and what prompts it and the periodic light-shows - which adhere to no particular schedule and outside of which the Buick just sits there refusing to get dirty - to happen. There is a general feeling among the troop that the intensity and frequency of the episodes has reduced somewhat over the years, but the car has definitely not stopped being periodically active even twenty-plus years later.

And so Sandy and his colleagues present this to Ned and say: here, you're up to date. Bit weird, no? Ned, it turns out, is young enough and naïve enough to have been hoping for some neat tying-up of loose ends that would have explained what was going on and perhaps even offered some sort of closure to his father's premature death, and isn't especially pleased to be met with Sandy basically saying: sorry son, life isn't like that. So dissatisfied is he with this, in fact, that he decides upon a dramatic course of action: douse the Buick in gasoline and destroy it, with himself inside if necessary, thereby sealing off the conduit between worlds in some final way and perhaps heroically preventing a future Earth invasion by radioactive space shrimp or something similar.

Sandy sees a number of problems with this course of action, most obviously the prospect of Mrs. Wilcox losing a son shortly after losing a husband, but also something with wider impact: what if the Buick acts as some sort of regulator valve that keeps something in balance between worlds, maybe even between universes, nay indeed multiverses, and whose unexpected removal would have unforeseen and perhaps catastrophic consequences? 

And so Sandy and a couple of the other troopers have to thwart Ned's ill-conceived plan; unfortunately by the time they get to Ned he is already sitting in the Buick's driver's seat with an open can of gasoline. Moreover all this excitement has "woken" the Buick and it starts to become active. And so not only does Sandy have to rescue Ned from his own self-destructive actions, he also has to do so before the portal fully opens and they all get sucked over to an airless alien planet where they will die.

You'll recall from the review of Cell in 2012 and a couple of other posts that Stephen King used to be my main man book-wise, but that Cell was only the second book of his (re-reads aside) I'd read in about 15 years. Well you can make that three in over 25 years now as I haven't read one since Cell (you would after all have heard about it here if I had). For a writer as prolific over such a long period as King it's inevitable that various connections to other books present themselves - here's a few:

• Most obviously, before starting the book at least, the fact of the central plot device being a car, moreover a car to which there's more than meets the eye, is highly reminiscent of Christine, one of the clunkier novels from King's classic 1975-1990 period. 
• Once you actually start reading, though, From A Buick 8 is clearly more in the slightly science-fiction genre occupied by The Tommyknockers, another book where critical opinion is, at best, divided. That book has weird tentacly aliens and also a portal between planets via which a small boy gets teleported to an alien planet only to be rescued at the end of the book. The other thing the two books have in common is a relentless darkness and nihilism - weird shit happens, there's no satisfying explanation, we probably wouldn't understand anyway, the best we can hope for is just to endure as best we can and hope that the bad things eventually run down like an old battery. In the case of The Tommyknockers the obvious cod-psychology explanation for the tone is that it was written in the depths of one of King's periods of drug addiction, with From A Buick 8 it was published after King's recovery from being run down by a van in rural Maine in 1999, a collision that nearly killed him. Aside from the general tone, the death of Curtis Wilcox at the hands of an inattentive driver is a pretty close fictional rendering of what happened to King.
• Those thoughts lead tangentially to a non-King book, Roadside Picnic; the Buick here is a bit like the artefacts that are strewn across The Zones there: utterly opaque to our attempts to understand them, mysterious in function and occasionally randomly deadly to humans.
• Back to King - the brief episode where the troopers have to subdue the half-tree/half-squid alien creature, and in particular the bit where we are briefly offered a glimpse out of its multiple eyes at its hideous human murderers coming at it with a selection of blunt implements, is reminiscent both of the brief switch to Craig Toomy's viewpoint (more like Craig Loony, amirite) in The Langoliers, and also of the creepy short story I Am The Doorway from 1978's excellent Night Shift collection. 
• Finally, Ned's inability to accept the inexplicable and arbitrary nature of what the Buick does and his desire to probe into the mystery himself, is similar to what happened to the narrator's son in another excellent King short story, The Jaunt, from 1985's Skeleton Crew collection. I won't spoil it for you, but it does not end particularly well for anyone, least of all the boy.

A bit like Cell, this is probably a fairly minor work in King's gargantuan oeuvre, but it's good fun nonetheless. There is just a sense of the various occurrences of weird freaky shit getting vomited up out of the car's trunk getting a bit repetitive in the book's mid-section, and the switch from the car being - seemingly at least - a dumb conduit for stuff to a sentient entity capable of malign actions like bolting doors to prevent Sandy getting to Ned at the book's climax felt like it slightly undermined the book's logic just to serve a convenient narrative purpose (i.e. adding some tension and peril). Like pretty much anything King's ever written it is relentlessly gripping, though, and I raced through its 400+ pages in only a handful of days, helped by going on a camping trip which provided more reading time than usual.

the last book I read

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox.

Otto and Sophie Bentwood are a couple of forty-ish middle-class New Yorkers, living in a nice apartment in Brooklyn full of nice stuff, eating nice food and generally having a nice life, albeit a bit removed from what coarse earthy proletarian types like you and me might call the "real" world.

Reality intervenes, though, as it always does - Charlie, Otto's partner in his legal practice, wants to dissolve their partnership and this (hardly surprisingly) has made their personal relationship a bit frosty, especially with all the inevitable jockeying for who gets to keep which lucrative clients.

Around the same time, Sophie is feeding one of the various stray cats that roam the local area and is unexpectedly bitten quite severely on the hand. Rather than do what normal non-neurotic people do and go to a doctor for treatment and perhaps a rabies jab, Sophie instead binds the wound up and does her best to ignore the swelling and constant ache. 

So we can see a theme developing here: the Bentwoods' nice cosy middle-class life being invaded and disrupted by external "real-world" factors. Sure enough more weird shit starts to happen: a wordless late-night phone call, which turns out to be from Charlie (and which prompts a slightly bizarre late-night meet-up between him and Sophie while Otto is asleep), a rock being thrown through a window while the Bentwoods are at a party at a friend's house, a tense episode where a black man calls at the apartment and requests the use of the Bentwood's phone and eventually some money, and finally their discovery on visiting their holiday house on Long Island that it's been burgled and vandalised and the perpetrators have taken a nice big shit on the lounge carpet.

Eventually all of this starts to take its toll on the Bentwoods' equilibrium: Sophie has a shouty exchange with her friend Tanya who's phoned up for a gossip about her (Tanya's) latest love affair, and Otto angrily throws a bottle of ink at the wall after Charlie phones him up wanting to sort out some details of the dissolution of their business partnership.

So what are we to make of this? Has the disruption to their hermetically-sealed lives allowed the Bentwoods to get back in touch with their actual feelings? Or have they just been pushed over the edge and GONE MENTAL (and possibly, in Sophie's case, RABID)?

You won't get a definitive answer on any of that from me, as it happens, as this is one of those books I felt must have some significance that just eluded my grasp. It'd probably be too harsh to describe it as just a book about annoying privileged people being privileged and annoying, but I couldn't help but admit to a pang of sympathy with whoever it was took a colossal dump on their living room carpet. To put it another way, it's a very skilled writer who can make a novel work that contains pretty much no likeable characters whatsoever, and for all that Paula Fox clearly was (she died in 2017) a very skilled writer I'm not sure she quite manages it here. It's very clever and perceptive in its own way, though, and I can see the sense of the comparisons to John Updike; I guess I just found it a bit cold and uninvolving.

One of the things the Guardian obituary linked above doesn't mention, incidentally, is that via her daughter Linda, whom she gave up for adoption, Paula Fox is Courtney Love's grandmother. Moreover, if certain lurid but plausible showbiz rumours are true, Marlon Brando may have been Courtney Love's grandfather. 

Desperate Characters was filmed in 1971, starring Shirley Maclaine as Sophie and Kenneth Mars as Otto. This seems odd to me as the only two things I've seen Kenneth Mars in were the two Mel Brooks films The Producers and Young Frankenstein, in both of which he does a scenery-chewing turn as a comical nutter. I'm sure he was an actor of range and subtlety if the part demanded it, though. My Flamingo paperback copy contains an introduction by Jonathan Franzen, whose advocacy of Fox and of Desperate Characters in particular was instrumental in its being reissued after many years out of print. This provides another instance of a book on this list carrying a foreword by another author who appears on the same list; a non-exhaustive list of the handful of previous instances appears at the end of the 2018 review of True Grit.

the last book I read

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

Cayce Pollard, an American woman in her early thirties, is a sort of "coolhunter" for hire by various companies, mostly advertising agencies. But why would they want to hire her? Well, she has some sort of spidey-sense, somewhat akin to an allergic reaction, to advertising material (mainly the graphical sort, logos etc.) that "works" or doesn't, which makes her highly useful. It's a bit like the thing that Colin Laney has in Gibson's earlier novel Idoru, but more obviously commercially applicable. 

Cayce has been hired by an achingly hip advertising agency called Blue Ant to vet some logo ideas - basically they get a nod of approval or an outbreak of hives and then have to go away and re-think accordingly. While she's in London she's staying in the apartment of her friend Damien, a documentary film-maker, who's off working abroad somewhere. She's also keeping up with one of her hobbies - monitoring updates to a series of viral online short films known among the cognoscenti as "the footage" whose origin is completely mysterious but around which a whole internet subculture has sprung up speculating about the identity of the maker and What It All Means.

Cayce has a couple of meetings at Blue Ant to do her original job, including a couple of odd encounters with a woman called Dorotea who seems weirdly ill-disposed towards her for reasons she can't fathom, since they've never met before. Having met Blue Ant's head honcho, who goes by the tremendous name of Hubertus Bigend, Cayce finds that he's also quite interested in the footage, wants to get to the bottom of its mysteries, and wants someone appropriately hip and groovy and in-the-know (i.e. Cayce) to make use of his effectively unlimited budget to investigate.

Cayce is slightly dubious about the involvement of The Man sullying the purity of the footage-makers' art, and about whether discovery of the mechanism of its production will ruin it for everyone and preclude further footage being created and distributed, but her curiosity and the lure of Bigend's unlimited budget eventually get the better of her. She starts trawling the chat archives for clues, and, in an apparently unrelated event, has a random encounter on the street with some shady characters who collect old artifacts related to computing: one is constructing an industrial sculpture out of scaffolding and old ZX81s, one is collecting Curta calculating machines. 

Cayce's technical contacts peruse the footage closely and determine that there is some sort of digital watermark in some of it that may conceal a message or some other form of information. At the same time one of her contacts from the random street meeting comes up with an e-mail address which she uses to contact someone in Russia - are they the maker of the footage? Cayce is invited to fly out to Moscow to meet her e-mail contact, who turns out to be one of a pair of twin sisters, this one mainly concerned with distribution and promotion of the footage, the other - largely non-verbal after being injured by an explosive device in the terrorist attack that dispatched her parents some years earlier - does the actual video-editing, with the help of a whole warehouse full of assistants, who massage the original footage (most of it just found from security cameras and the like rather than purposefully shot) into the grainily enigmatic forms posted to the internet, as well as handling all the embedding of the hidden digital watermarks and similar techno-nerdery.

Having had a fairly cordial session with Stella, the more chatty of the two sisters, Cayce then has an unexpected encounter with Dorotea back at her hotel and agrees to a chat over a drink - foolishly as it turns out, as Dorotea slips her a Mickey Finn and the next thing Cayce knows she's waking up in some unknown building in the middle of nowhere. Making good her escape, only to then find herself traversing some sort of desert wasteland, she is the rescued by some of her fellow footage-hunters, including Bigend and some shady-looking guys who turn out to have connections to the Russian mafia and also have an interest in the footage, for largely incomprehensible reasons. Cayce is invited not to worry herself too much about these reasons and is rewarded with a large sum of money, most of which she gives away to good causes, like the financing of a really enormous structure made of of scaffolding and ZX81s.

In fact, largely incomprehensible reasons feature quite prominently in the blizzard of exposition that occupies the last few chapters, just as they did at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive. What Dorotea's motivations are for doing any of the things she does throughout the course of the book, for instance, are entirely opaque to me, apart from that she seems to switch sides multiple times. This isn't hugely important after the fun and excitement of what's gone before, but it chafed me slightly more at the end of this book, set in a largely recognisable contemporary world without sci-fi attachments, than it did in a world featuring fully immersive virtual reality, infinitely prolongable life-spans and space elevators, I suppose because that latter world is one I would expect to find baffling in many respects anyway.

The whole idea of mysterious grainy video footage of unknown origin suddenly emerging into popular culture is highly reminiscent of David Cronenberg's Videodrome, though the footage here is generally benign in its effects, in contrast to Videodrome's nastiness. There's certainly no suggestion of the sort of weird effects induced by the video footage in Ring or Infinite Jest. As always Gibson has an effortless grasp of popular culture and the fascination of ineffable concepts like coolness, as well as a nerdy fascination with technology and its design. Cayce Pollard continues Gibson's line of cool, enigmatic, slightly dangerous female protagonists, following on from Molly Millions from the Neuromancer series (aka the Sprawl trilogy) and Chevette Washington from the Bridge trilogy.

Overall this probably isn't as good as some of his earlier stuff, but it's still pretty good. Neuromancer and Virtual Light (each a gateway into a trilogy, as is Pattern Recognition) are still the best places to start. 

the corpse protocol

Just catching up with a couple of authorial deaths that I'd missed during the second quarter of 2025. You can't afford to take your eye off the ball here; a moment's inattention and Electric Halibut will have dispatched another novelist with ruthless efficiency. This time both of the victims were named in my informal Dead Pool of a few months back and both were in the second half of their 80s: Frederick Forsyth was 86 and Mario Vargas Llosa 89. I'd read Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter as long ago as 2007, so he effortlessly grabs the curse length award from David Lodge. That was only the fourteenth book featured here so candidates for a longer curse length in the near-ish future would have to come from its predecessors on the list, of whose authors Alison Lurie, Michael Dibdin, Lawrence Durrell, Iain Banks and Anita Shreve are already dead. Most likely candidates are probably Alan Garner (90), Michael Ondaatje (81) and Margaret Drabble (86). 

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	94	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d
Isabel Colegate	24th October 2009	12th March 2023	91	13y 140d
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 265d
Milan Kundera	27th March 2008	11th July 2023	94	15y 105d
Christopher Priest	6th January 2015	4th February 2024	80	9y 26d
Paul Auster	22nd April 2012	30th April 2024	77	12y 8d
Kinky Friedman	19th December 2007	27th June 2024	79	16y 191d
David Lodge	4th March 2008	1st January 2025	89	16y 301d
Jennifer Johnston	23rd July 2012	25th February 2025	95	12y 215d
Mario Vargas Llosa	12th April 2007	13th April 2025	89	18y 1d
Frederick Forsyth	8th November 2021	9th June 2025	86	3y 214d

the last book I read

The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner.

Joe Allston is a mostly-retired literary agent, settling slightly cantankerously into old age in rural California with his wife, Ruth, and some neighbours in a similar or more advanced state of decrepitude. Clearly (i.e. as evidenced by living a fairly comfortable retirement in nice west-coast surroundings) Joe has made a reasonably successful go of being a literary agent, but still seems to be afflicted by some vague dissatisfaction with life. Part of this might be the stereotypical literary agent's frustrated wistfulness at not being a writer, part of it is clearly frustration with the gradual crumbling of the body (Joe suffers from some sort of arthritic joint problem which requires regular medication), but there is also some residual Unresolved Shit following the death of his and Ruth's only child, Curtis, some decades previously in a surfing accident at La Jolla.

Some time after Curtis' death Joe and Ruth took a trip to Denmark. But why? Well, it's nice and all, but there was the additional factor of that being where Joe's mother came from before emigrating to America as a teenager and marrying a nice corn-fed American called, presumably, Mr. Allston. Joe and Ruth end up staying with a Danish countess, Astrid, in her town-house.

Yes, but this was years ago, you'll be saying, so why is it interrupting this nice story of old people doing old people stuff? Well, Joe has just received a postcard from Astrid - not with any terribly exciting news, just saying hello after what we are invited to infer is a gap of several years - and it sets off a thought process which results in Joe digging out the journal which he kept at the time and agreeing to read it aloud to Ruth.

So you'll observe how our story has bifurcated here: Joe and Ruth living out their creaky-jointed old age and at the end of each day retiring to bed to read some more journal entries and relive their (relative) youth. It turns out, upon finding Astrid's apartment and agreeing the terms of their stay, that her extended aristocratic family own a substantial number of castles and the like in the general Denmark area and, in particular, that she grew up on the estate that included the humble cottage where Joe's mother lived. I know, what are the chances, right?

Joe and Ruth get to know the countess and observe that while she seems very nice she seems to be treated with extreme coolness by the local community. This, it transpires, is because her now-estranged husband was a Nazi collaborator, a Quisling, during the war. Maybe getting out of town will help, and it just so happens that Astrid can facilitate a visit to her childhood home to meet the remnants of her aristocratic family and at the same time enable Joe to check out his mother's (slightly more modest) childhood home.

So everyone heads off, stopping only for a quick meet-up with Karen Blixen who Astrid happens to be good mates with, rocks up at the old castle and meets some eccentric relatives, in particular Astrid's grandmother who makes an appearance at dinner before being wheeled off upstairs again, and Astrid's brother Eigil who takes a bit of a shine to Joe, drags him off for a gruelling game of tennis and subjects him to a rambling anecdote about his father's scientific theories, all of which sound a bit eugenics-adjacent. On returning to the big house Joe discovers that grandmother has died and that their jolly holiday is going to be cut short while all the requisite mourning and funeralling takes place. And so they return to town while Astrid sticks around to help.

Joe's curiosity has been piqued, though, by his conversation with Eigil, and, hampered slightly by the non-existence of the internet he takes himself off down the local library to leaf through some encyclopaedias. And it's a lurid tale of weirdness, eugenics and incest that he discovers, with Astrid and Eigil's father, eminent scientist though he may have been, ending up shunned by the community and eventually taking his own life after the public revelation that he'd impregnated his own daughter. This raises a number of questions for Joe, most pertinently a) does this mean that Astrid bore her own father's child? and b) what implications does this have for Joe's mother, who lived on the same estate? Is Joe, in some weird turn of events, going to turn out to be Astrid's brother?

Well, no, and no, it turns out - Astrid eventually returns to the house and offers some clarification: her father actually had another child by a local woman (not Joe's mother, however) and then, in pursuit of his own genetic theories, impregnated that child once she was old enough, and, as if that were not enough, passed the baton to his own son, Eigil, who not only fathered children by the same woman but fathered another child by one of those children in some insane backcrossing experiment.

The diaries peter out somewhat after this, and so Ruth is left still uncertain about one question that's always bothered her - did Astrid and Joe, once they'd established that they definitely weren't related, have a brief romance of some sort? Well, not to speak of, is the slightly spoiler-y answer, and so Joe and Ruth settle back into their comfortable existence. 

I enjoyed The Spectator Bird very much, and there are some observations about the aging process which are uncomfortably pertinent, and Joe is clearly still haunted by the death of his son in a way that he doesn't quite know how to deal with. That subject (i.e. Curtis' watery death) is also dealt with in Stegner's earlier book All The Little Live Things which features a younger Joe and Ruth and to which The Spectator Bird is a sort-of sequel, though just like with The Road Home it doesn't seem to matter much if you skip the first book. All of that stuff is very perceptive in a gentle sort of way, which just provides a slightly uncomfortable contrast with the extreme luridness of all the multi-generational Scandinavian incest-y stuff. That just extends a rich literary tradition that includes former featurees here such as The War Zone, Picture Palace, The God Of Small Things, Not That Sort Of Girl, Invisible, Statues In A Garden, Clea and probably a few others. The addition of a bit of Scandi-Nazism and eugenics into the mix has some strong similarities with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, as well.

The Spectator Bird won the National Book Award for fiction in 1977 (other featurees here are The Wapshot Chronicle, The Moviegoer, So Long, See You Tomorrow, The Shipping News, Cold Mountain, The Corrections and The Underground Railroad); Stegner's earlier novel Angle Of Repose won the Pulitzer in 1972, though not without some controversy. 

we are family; here's a list arranged in a tree

One thing I did find myself occasionally doing while reading Dalva is referring to the Northridge family tree to remind myself which of the various John Wesley Northridges was married to whom. As it happens there isn't actually a family tree printed in Dalva, but as luck would have it there is one in The Road Home which I took a handy snap of with my mobile phone just for quick reference. Here it is:

Not actually a massive number of people in total, but some confusion possible nonetheless owing to the multiple marriages and occasional out-of-wedlock sexy sexy times going on. Anyway, this set me to thinking - very much like the occasional list of books featuring explanatory maps, most recently Tokyo Express, are there any other books that have family trees in them? My gut feeling here is there will be considerably fewer of these, as in most cases there isn't a need. It's really only sprawling family sagas with gigantic casts of inter-related characters that justify including one, and the only examples on this list I could find (The Road Home aside) were Hilary Mantel's two Thomas Cromwell books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, both of which contain similar family trees representing the Tudor royal family and the various pretenders to the English throne. 

Outside of books which have featured on this blog the only other one which sprang to mind was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude (recently serialised for TV), which contains the family tree below; a bit like The Road Home, part of the usefulness of this is to distinguish between multiple characters who have pretty much the same name. 

the last book I read

Dalva by Jim Harrison.

Let's meet our main character, who is called *checks notes* Dalva. She's forty-five and living in California, doing excellent and worthy social work with abused and underprivileged kids, but feeling the pull of her childhood home in Nebraska, in a very general way, and in a far more specific way an urge to finally track down the son she gave up for adoption at sixteen after a brief but intense fling with a young half-Sioux man who worked on her grandfather's farm.

An opportunity is provided when her friend and occasional lover Michael, a drink-sozzled university professor, takes an interest in the diaries of her great-grandfather, John Wesley Northridge, an unconventional guy for his time and a big supporter of the rights of the native Sioux in the face of their vicious subjugation by the settlers of the Nebraska plains in the second half of the 19th century. Dalva takes it upon herself to deliver Michael to the Northridge farm and stay for an indefinite amount of time facilitating his access to old man Northridge's journals and whatever other material can be found, and possibly persuading him to take it a bit easier on the old sauce for a bit. Of course this also affords Dalva an opportunity for an extended reunion with various family members, in particular her mother Naomi and sister Ruth, as well as the various long-term staff and hangers-on at the farm whom she has known since childhood.

Of course what this also affords Dalva an opportunity to do is re-live some of her formative childhood experiences, in particular the series of events surrounding the arrival of Duane Stone Horse, the taciturn half-Sioux boy and incomparably expert horse-wrangler taken on by her grandfather (also John Wesley Northridge, as was her late father), his and Dalva's brief relationship and her subsequent pregnancy and the series of furtive shenanigans required for her to have the baby and then give it away. Her relationship with Duane was brief because her grandfather sent him away once he realised that Duane was the baby's father; this, it turns out, was because the old man knew something Dalva didn't, specifically that Duane was John Wesley Northridge III's son - product of an equally brief extra-marital relationship with a native Sioux woman, Rachel - and therefore Dalva's half-brother.

No chance of an emotional reunion between Dalva and Duane, though, because Duane has been dead for fifteen years or so - wounded and shell-shocked after serving in Vietnam and suffering from incurable cancer, he checked out in an impressively dramatic manner by swimming out into the open sea off the Florida Keys on his horse and then offing both of them with a pistol (horse then himself, presumably).

Michael's journal investigations don't go entirely to plan, partly because of his enduring fondness for The Drink and also his decision - while evidently a bit bored during one of Dalva's occasional absences - to attempt to lure local girl Karen into the sack by offering to use some big city contacts to help her establish a modelling career. Perhaps if she were to supply some Polaroids of a, hem hem, candid nature that he could pass on? This plan works better than Michael could have predicted as not only does Karen supply the goods, she also supplies, as it were, the goods, by agreeing to shimmy out of her bathing suit and sit on his face. Barely has he finished going WAHEEEYYY at this, though, than a male family member decides to strike a blow for Karen's honour and puts Michael in hospital with a broken jaw.

It only remains for a couple of outstanding items to be revealed and resolved: firstly a mysterious letter left for Dalva by her grandfather in the family safe which alludes to some specific entries in the great-grandfather's journal and alludes to some items which can be found in the always-locked cellar. This turns out to be the mummified remains of some meddlesome soldiers who came a-calling after Northridge has returned to his farm to settle into retirement, asked too many questions and were aggressive towards Northridge's Sioux wife, whereupon he shot the lot of them and bundled them into the cellar, subsequently taking their horses and abandoning them many miles away to throw pursuers off the scent.

Secondly, a young man called Nelse has been doing some work with Naomi cataloguing wildlife and doing some light horse-wrangling and such like. Dalva hasn't up to this point had much to do with him but eventually Naomi and Nelse call upon her with the revelation that Nelse (now nearly thirty) is her long-lost son. 

That revelation is just about the last thing in the book (it literally happens on the penultimate page) and won't actually be a revelation to anyone (like me) who read Dalva and its successor The Road Home in the "wrong" order. The two books' timelines overlap somewhat, but the second book then extends the timeline forward to incorporate Dalva's cancer diagnosis and her preparations for her own death. It also centres other narrative voices, in particular Dalva's grandfather and Nelse himself. Dalva, as the title suggests, is mostly delivered in Dalva's voice, although the middle section is presented as an extract from Michael's journals. Michael, presented here as a vaguely comic character, is used as a vehicle for delivering a bit of satire on academic pursuits, and indeed on any vaguely squishy city types who can't ride a fish, gut a horse and whittle a makeshift shelter out of a giant redwood. Dalva herself, on the other hand, is an intensely endearing central character - my only reservation is just the faint suspicion that, as a woman written by a man, she represents some sort of outdoorsy male fantasy of an ideal woman: fit, active, clearly absurdly hot even in her mid-forties, and with a commendably robust, guilt-free, no-strings attitude to sex.

Overall I didn't think Dalva was as good as The Road Home, but as always that may just be a consequence of the order I read them in. It just seemed a bit more meandering narratively, in the early sections in particular, and the late and slightly off-handed revelation of oh yeah, I shot some guys and hid them in the cellar, you might want to tidy up a bit, was a bit jarring. Just to be clear, though, it's still very good and I'd highly recommend reading both books, preferably in the intended order.

incidental music spot(s) of the day

It seems that Adriano Celentano's 1972 single Prisencolinensinainciusol is the advert music of choice at the moment, as I've seen (or more accurately heard) it used in two places lately, firstly this easyJet advert and secondly this advert for Poretti beer. 

I first encountered Prisencolinensinainciusol while watching this episode of QI, which was first broadcast in December 2014 - I couldn't say whether I watched it "live" or not; probably not. Anyway, Adriano Celentano seems to occupy a similar niche in Italian popular culture as Serge Gainsbourg occupied in France - massively popular and influential in his own country, little-known outside it. Celentano is still alive (at 87), however, Gainsbourg very much is not.

Just to recycle a couple of observations from this tweet (plus a couple of new ones):

• it's an absolute banger and somewhat ahead of its time for 1972
• its influence on Yello's The Race in particular seems clear to me: insistent beat, semi-spoken lyrics, parpy horn stabs and all
• Mike Reid's cover version Freezin' Cold in 89 Twoso was released not, as you might have assumed, in 1989, but in 1974 and is not significantly more comprehensible than the original despite presumably containing some actual English words. He definitely says THAT'S TRIFFIC at one point, though
• Celentano is name-checked (at about 2:05 here) in Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3 by Ian Dury and the Blockheads

The other thing I noticed this week was during a viewing of Beethoven's 2nd, the vastly-inferior sequel to the barely-tolerable Beethoven, featuring a dead-eyed Charles Grodin, phoning in a performance while presumably looking forward to paying off his mortgage, and also some "endearing" kids and a large St. Bernard dog, which we Brits, as custodians of English as she should be spoke, would pronounce St. BER-nard in the proper God-fearing way. The Americans, however, pronounce it as St. Ber-NARD with the emphasis on the second syllable in a slightly weird and jarring way. This is by no means my biggest gripe with the movie, just to be clear.

One of my many other gripes is the seemingly arbitrary use of Jimmy Olsen's Blues by the Spin Doctors as musical overlay to some sort of comedy montage. I have fond memories of the Spin Doctors being A Thing for about five minutes back in the early 1990s and I did at one point have a copy of their album Pocket Full Of Kryptonite, which has a few rockin' tunes on it, along with some more questionable stuff. The good stuff includes the hit singles Two Princes and Little Miss Can't Be Wrong, as well as the opening track Jimmy Olsen's Blues. Now I had no idea who Jimmy Olsen was, but it's pretty clear from the subject matter of the song that he's part of the Superman universe, that being what the song is about, and one of the lines in the song provides the album's title. A song with that clear and specific a set of subject matter is a bit of an odd choice for a film sequence completely unrelated to it; to put it another way, it's a bouncy tune and I guess it works fine as long as you don't listen to the lyrics, something I concede the film's target audience of under-10s probably don't do. 

I should add I also remember seeing the Spin Doctors at Glastonbury in what this clip tells me was 1994 - my principal memory is of some crunchy renditions of the hits and a bit too much free-form guitar noodling from the undoubtedly very talented Eric Schenkman, which I evidently had not taken enough drugs to fully appreciate. 

we'll tear your sole apart

Time for a deep dive into the world of shoes; my shoes in particular. I have no authority to speak for or about anyone else's shoes, nor would I be so presumptuous as to seek to do so. But I am conscious that I have in the past marked the passing of certain items of footwear, in particular shoes dedicated to the specific pursuits of running and walking, and by walking I suppose I sort of mean mountain hiking, rather than just going down the shops; you can pretty much wear any shoes for that, after all.

So I see that I commemorated the passing of my old Saucony running shoes in favour of a fairly cheapo pair of Crane-branded ones from Aldi; at some point after that I upgraded those to a pair of blue Nikes for running purposes, probably around the time I decided to have another crack at getting into doing parkruns in 2018. Those did me for a while but earlier this year I decided it was time to invest in another pair. Now at some point between about 2018 and 2025 there's been a revolution in the world of running shoes whereby every pair you can buy now has these absurdly thick bouncy soles. This has caused some controversy among elite athletes who could suddenly complete entire marathons in a single bound and some restrictions have had to be applied. The pair of Asics shoes I eventually bought are by no means the most extreme example but, as you can see from the photo, are much thicker than the old wafer-thin Nikes, though of course these have had to endure the best part of a decade of being pounded flat by my gargantuan weight. I should add that the new ones are also absurdly comfortable and forgiving of my elephantine running style and certainly reduce the impact of my clumsy lumberings so that I can now hear my music over the deafening thwacking of my feet on the pavement. As a data point I haven't broken the world marathon record or anything while wearing them but I have recently slightly lowered my long-standing parkrun PB. More tedious parkrun evangelism and nerdy stattery in a later post.

You might also recall the progression of my walking shoes from the old Salomons, which bit the dust after a soggy visit to Pembrokeshire in 2010, through the brown Tevas (which are probably still my favourite pair of walking shoes of all the various ones I have ever owned), to the blue Karrimor pair I bought in late 2016. That pair were first-choice walking shoes for only a relatively short space of time as they weren't all that good and were replaced by a pair of grey Mammut shoes I got in Go Outdoors in what was probably around 2018. I can narrow the date down in this way because while I'm still in the Karrimors in this photo at the top of Pen y Fan in June 2018, I'm in the Mammuts in the following photo of me atop Striding Edge in the Lake District in April 2019.

But eventually the Mammuts too became a victim of their own success, by which I mean they were so comfortable they ended up getting worn all the time, and needed replacing, which they have now been by this splendid pair of North Ridge shoes, also purchased from the excellent people at Go Outdoors only a few days ago. You will notice, though, that the super-thick and bouncy soles thing has now extended to walking shoes as well. 

Note also that I still possess both the blue Karrimors, which are very much relegated to mowing the lawn and other gardening activities these days, and my pair of grey Tevas which I bought as a backup for the brown pair, never liked or wore quite as much, and which a couple of decades later the soles are starting to fall off. What will happen now is that the Mammuts will be relegated to general odd-job shoes and the Karrimors and Tevas will be relegated to, erm, the bin. The ciiiiircle of liiiife, etc. 

the last book I read

The Hunted by Gabriel Bergmoser.

G'day, mate. Welcome to Australia. Land of Fosters, Castlemaine XXX, kangaroos, Shane Warne and all sorts of bonzer fair dinkum stuff. So come and visit! Although there's always a few less appealing things, like the crocodiles, but also a few people whose welcoming matey Aussieness has curdled in the sun and the solitude, like a pair of yellow crusty sweat-soaked underpants, into something altogether less pleasant.

Speaking of solitude, here's Frank, a man of slightly shady and dubious past including many things he'd rather forget, running a remote petrol station and shop on a remote rural highway. It's not the middle of nowhere, but you can definitely see it from there. Rather unexpectedly, Frank is currently accommodating a guest, his grand-daughter Allie, delivered to him for a brief stay while her parents work through some marital issues. 

Allie is a typically surly and uncommunicative teenager, not especially impressed at being dumped out in the sticks where nothing ever happens. Well, careful what you wish for, as things are about to Kick Off in a big way.

First, random couple Charlie and Delilah show up, needing fuel but also slightly lost and slightly grumpy with each other. They are followed onto the forecourt shortly after by a second car which swerves wildly to a halt, and from which emerges a female figure festooned in mud and gore who promptly collapses onto the tarmac.

Frank, Delilah and Charlie take the new arrival back to the house and Charlie - who turns out, handily, to be a nurse - stitches up the several nasty gashes she has in her leg while she is unconscious on the sofa. Meanwhile Allie minds the front desk and the till, and is soon visited by a shady-looking bloke who's very interested in whether she's seen a young woman recently, probably driving a car, maybe a bit dishevelled-looking. Erm, awkward.

Probably time for a bit of a flashback into a prior timeline to find out who this young woman is and what she's been up to, right? You betcha. But first we have to meet Simon, a city boy out on a road trip to find the "real" Australia in some ill-defined way. Perhaps this slightly mysterious girl he meets in a bar will help him? Or maybe she will just agree to sleep with him; that would be good too. Simon and the girl, whose name turns out to be Maggie, head off down the highway together with no particular destination in mind until, at Maggie's suggestion, they turn off the main highway down a rutted track. I mean, what's the worst that could happen, right?

Well, what happens in the short term is that they meet up with some young blokes seemingly out hunting and, after some initial tension, are invited back to their village to throw a few prawns on the barbie and blow the froth of a bit of the amber nectar. They are even offered some rustic but acceptable accommodation for the night. All nice and friendly and relaxed, and maybe Simon's detection of a bit of an edge beneath the rugged blokey banter is just him being a nervous city boy uncomfortable with this sort of thing? Maggie seems to be enjoying herself anyway. Or is she?

Spooked by some of his encounters with the locals and suspicious of Maggie's motives, Simon decides to escape the following morning in the car, but doesn't get very far before he is dragged from the car, given a beating and then offered a choice, be killed on the spot or provide a bit of sport by trying to escape into the bush and be hunted down. 

Maggie, meanwhile, is doing a bit of snooping around and comes upon a shed in which various meat is hanging from hooks in various states of ripeness. but WAIT A MINUTE these are actually people, presumably the remnants of people who have stumbled upon the village in a similar way in the past. While still reeling from this discovery Maggie is surprised by one of the villagers, but he is even more surprised when she stabs him in the throat with a meat hook and escapes. There is still the little matter of getting out of the village, though, something Simon was unable to do. Simon, however, is, or rather was, a soft namby-pamby city boy and Maggie, it turns out, has been hardened by a series of abusive childhood experiences into a one-woman killing machine just waiting for an opportunity to be unleashed. And this is that opportunity, right here. 

So Maggie slips away, under cover of darkness, and, inconvenienced only slightly by stumbling into a man-trap and having her leg lacerated, finds a car and makes good her escape, with only a couple of brutal killings required on the way. Her subsequent wild flight back across the scrub leads her to the road and the forecourt of Frank's garage. 

So now we're back where we came in and Reg, the guy who turned up asking after Maggie, smells a fairly obvious rat and finds his way over to the house, whereupon he finds Maggie, and shortly afterwards finds the contents of both barrels of a shotgun heading for his head. But he's got friends, including the various characters that Simon and Maggie have already met, and soon they turn up with revenge on their minds and only a few people standing in their way: Frank, Allie, Maggie, Charlie and Delilah, and Greg, a random guy in a suit who just happened to turn up on the forecourt at the wrong moment and would really just like to exit the whole situation, none of his business, no questions asked, thanks very much.

After a tense stand-off at the garage attention turns to the house, and Maggie and Allie are besieged while Charlie, Delilah and Greg are taken as hostages by the gang. That just leaves Frank, who just happens - like Maggie, legacy of a troubled past - to be something of a merciless killing machine himself, which is quite handy. The siege continues, various hostages are offed in messy ways, Frank makes it back to the house to help out the girls, and eventually it falls to Maggie to bring things to an end, with a bit of help from Allie, new to the whole merciless slaughtering game but showing a promising aptitude for it.

As gripping as The Hunted is, and it certainly is, the first thing you find yourself doing is ticking off things that resemble other works in a similar genre. For one thing, the whole premise broadly resembles the plot of the 2005 film Wolf Creek. Some more specific things: the Greg character in his role as Weaselly Corporate Guy resembles both Ellis from Die Hard and Craig Toomy from The Langoliers, and the business right at the end where Maggie rips off someone else's face and wears it to effect an escape is straight out of Silence Of The Lambs. And you can't really have human torsos on meat-hooks without it being reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Then you move onto the plot contrivances that seem a bit clunky and awkward: Allie's parents' somewhat quixotic decision to house her with Frank, someone they haven't seen for years (haven't they got any mates?), the whole back-story with Maggie's mother which doesn't really add anything, and the thing with the two periods of siege where the villagers conveniently give the besieged people many minutes thinking time before steaming in and setting fire to things. 

So it's certainly not perfect, and does sort of give the impression of being bolted together from some bits of other classics of the genre with some perfunctory plot grouting in between, but it does its brutal business very effectively and in only a relatively slim 266 pages. 

the last book I read

Rabbit Redux by John Updike.

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is in his mid-thirties, living with his wife, Janice, and their teenage son, Nelson, in a (fictional) city in Pennsylvania. He works a fairly dead-end job (alongside his father) as a linotype operator at a local printing firm, a job which is under threat of becoming redundant as a result of advances in computerised typesetting. 

Harry and Janice have a chequered history together: married quite young, and parents of both Nelson and a younger daughter, Becky, who Janice drunkenly drowned in the bathtub while Harry had briefly left the family home to shack up with a prostitute. But age has calmed things down a bit, or at least it has on Harry's side. Janice, on the other hand, feeling neglected and restless, begins an affair with local man Charlie Stavros, exotically Greek to Harry's corn-fed American, and an anti-war Democrat to Harry's hawkish Republican. Plenty to chew on there, as we're at the cusp of the 1960s turning into the 1970s and the Vietnam war is in full swing.

Keen to exercise his freedom now that Janice has swanned off with another man, Harry starts hanging out at a local jazz club and soon acquires a couple of lodgers: Jill, a young white girl from Connecticut and Skeeter, an eccentric black Vietnam vet with some radical political views and a mild Messiah complex. Harry is conscious that Jill is young enough to be his daughter, and moreover intermittently addled by the increasingly hard drugs Skeeter is plying her with, but when a bunk-up is offered is nonetheless unable to resist the urge to go WAHEYYY and climb on with some gusto. 

The loose commune at Harry's house is the focus of some local scandal, especially given Skeeter's increasingly eccentric behaviour and Jill's increasing detachment from reality and dependence on harder drugs, including, eventually, heroin. Harry seeks some solace by hooking up with the woman next door, Peggy Fosnacht, who despite being considerably older and plumper than Jill is a much more rewarding lay. It is while over at Peggy's in a post-coital slumber that Harry gets a call from Skeeter alluding vaguely to Bad Stuff happening at the house, and when Harry gets there he finds it on fire and with the fire service in attendance. Once they eventually get the fire under control they do a sweep of the house and bring out Jill's body - Skeeter had made good his escape but she was too deep in smack-induced slumber to wake up. 

So with his house destroyed and his erstwhile sort-of-girlfriend dead, and, moreover, with the axe finally falling on his job at the printing firm, Harry finds himself (and Nelson) back living with his parents again. As it happens Janice is starting to cool off on the whole Charlie Stavros thing and the end of the book finds Harry and Janice testing out a tentative reconciliation.

Rabbit Redux is the second book in the Rabbit series (which comprises four novels and a concluding short story) and a sequel to Rabbit, Run which I read probably thirty years ago. My recollections of that book are fairly hazy but I seem to recall having slightly mixed feelings about it, partly because of the unlikeability (if that is even a word) of the central character. Oddly, despite my being much closer to Rabbit's fictional age (mid-twenties) then than I am now I enjoyed Rabbit Redux considerably more, perhaps because my advancing age means I identify more closely with Rabbit's character traits (general grumpiness, irascibility with young people, persistent horniness). Marry Me is the only other Updike on this list, way back in 2009. 

As often happens, what it's actually about is a little more difficult to pin down. The idea of producing one of these novels every decade or so is presumably to produce a sort of audit of the current state of the USA through the eyes of a fairly ordinary everyman character (Rabbit has no pretensions to intellectualism); in the case of Rabbit Redux this means late-1960s topics like Vietnam and sexual politics. Much of the sex stuff was probably bracingly frank at the time, but has lost the power to shock fifty-odd years later. 

One odd parallel with a recent book on this list: Light Perpetual also featured a character whose job involved manual typesetting and who found themselves having to rethink their whole career after automation meant their former job no longer existed.