Author Archives: The Reading Bug

Book review

Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood, 1972

Surfacing, Atwood’s second novel, is an elusive narrative. Ostensibly it is a simple story – after a long absence an unnamed narrator returns to her childhood home in the remote Canadian countryside to try and find her missing father. Her boyfriend, Joe, and a married couple, Anna and David, complete the group. The homecoming is uneasy – despite being familiar the setting feels alien and disturbing. On arrival at the family home there is no obvious sign of her father. The group agrees to stay for a week and turn the visit into a short, back to nature holiday. Tensions between each couple slowly emerge – David belittles Anna, who tells the narrator that he is a philanderer who objectifies women – for example he insists that she always wears makeup. The narrators relationship with Joe is equally strained.

Time is whiled away in fairly banal tasks – they go blueberry-picking, fishing and swimming, weed the vegetable patch and play board games. The women do the bulk of the domestic tasks. The narrator’s mental state slowly deteriorates and the narrative begins to fragmented. Sentences become short and disjointed, and eventually incoherent. The narrator is haunted by memories of her marriage, her child, and the abortion she was pushed into having. Her increasing sense of paranoia is fuelled by David’s constant references to an impending American invasion of Canada, which she treats entirely seriously. She sees hidden messages from her parents in every day objects around the house, and cannot decide if he is really alive or dead. Meanwhile David and Joe are making a modernist film, Random Samples, which is really just a collage of miscellaneous scenes. This again emphasises the narrator’s sense of alienation, making her feel like a performer rather than a real person with her own identity.

The novel draws to a climax when both men attempt unsuccessfully to pressurise the narrator into having sex with them – when rebuffed they sulk. This may have been the final trigger for the narrator’s descent into a full blown psychotic episode. She destroys David’s film and escapes in a canoe, hiding in the forest until the others leave the island. She trashes everything in the cabin, and runs around naked, eating unwashed plants, and living outside. I found these quite disturbing scenes, and although the end of the novel suggests a return to some form of normality it was something of a relief. This will probably sound patronising, but this felt like an early sketch for a novel – lots of themes and ideas are laid out for consideration, but the narrative was erratic and very difficult to engage with. There’s little here to suggest the impressive prose and strong ideas that Atwood was to develop in her later work.

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Book review

Monstrous Regiment (Discworld 31) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2003

Did I mention that Terry Pratchett was, amongst many other things, a brave writer? In his novels he tackles some of the most difficult subjects, and the fantasy settings can only provide so much “it’s only a story about vampires and trolls” cover. In Monstrous Regiment he addresses some seriously weighty issues – war, the status of women in the military and wider society, and fundamentalist religion.

Dueling Book Clubs Review Monstrous Regiment - The Fandomentals

For much of the time he is on a tightrope, balanced finely between being preachy while also avoiding being insensitive – these are not laughing matters. Amazingly he pulls it off – there’s never a point in this novel where I felt spoken down to or where the material wasn’t treated with the respect it deserved, while all the time making a series of serious points about the issues discussed. It’s mature writing of the highest order, Pratchett at the peak of his powers.

Which begs the question – what’s the novel about? Monstrous Regiment is set in Borogravia, a deeply traditional country not far from Uberwald, and therefore a long way from anywhere else. Its people are followers of Nuggan, a weirdly strict deity who rules through his representative on earth, or in the part of it that is Borogravia, the Duchess, the country’s monarch, who is almost certainly long-dead. There is strong middle-European feel to this country, not least to its constant border disputes with its neighbours over who owes a particular field or tree.

The current war with Zlobenia is going badly for Borogravia, and we join the novel with recruiters scouring the countryside for anyone who can hold a gun. The narrator follows Polly Perks, who joins up to try and find her missing in action brother Paul. (This is not just sisterly love – if Paul cannot be traced the family pub will pass to her drunken cousin when her father dies. It is one thing to recognise the unfairness to women of inheritance law, and another to include such reference in a fantasy novel). Joining a long tradition of women in the military, Polly disguises herself as a man. Much fun is had with her attempts to adopt a male swagger, to occupy space, and to fart and belch convincingly. Other recruits sign up – Maladict, a vampire, a troll called Carborundum, an Igor, and Tonker, Shufti, Wazzer and Lofty. Without wanting to spoil the reveal, this unlikely bunch of recruits are not what you might expect of a group of young men and persons joining the army.

They set off for the front, led by Sergeant Jackrum, a corpulent and highly experienced recruiting officer and their commanding officer, Lieutenant Blouse. Their first encounter with an arrogant troupe of Zlobenian cavalry is surprisingly successful. even more so when their unlikely victory is reported on by war correspondent William de Worde, he of The Truth. They quickly become popular figures of interest followed back home, and elsewhere by Commander Vimes, sent from Ankh-Morpork to try to broker a peace and protect Ankh-Morpork interests. Vimes sees that a straightforward Zlobenian victory will lead to an imbalance of power in the area, so he wonders whether the small band of plucky recruits working their way to the war might prove more useful than just cannon fodder. Sergeant Angua keeps track of the recruits as they make their way to the front, occasionally providing help, such as an unexpected package of coffee when Maladict, a black ribboner, (a vampire who has foresworn blood) begins to suffer withdrawal symptoms. On their journey the links between the unlikely recruits grow stronger, and their various backstories and secrets slowly emerge.

When they reach the front the recruits realise that the war is at a stalemate – Borogravian troops are pinned down and unable to break out of a small area of land; Zlobenian and alliance troops holding the area’s principal fortress but are unable to press their advantage. Control of the castle is key, and in a highly risky plan (which is therefore guaranteed success) they decide to infiltrate the Keep disguised (of course) as washerwomen, free the prisoners, and end the war.

I can’t tell you much more without revealing some important plot points, and for once I don’t intend to do so. As always with Pratchett the plot is really secondary to the character development anyway, and the outcome is not really that much of a surprise.

This is one of my favourite later Discworld novels – it’s set in largely new territory with only a brief appearance of regular characters, but remains unquestionably Discworld in feel throughout. The sensitivity with which the material and issues are handled is impressive, and although the jokes as always are pretty basic, the central characters are fully rounded and utterly believable. There are no bad starting places in the series, but if you have preconceptions about fantasy novels as being full of dwarves and dragons, there are worse places to put you straight than this.

P.S. I am sure you will have spotted it, but just in case, the title is an ironic reference to this 16th century misogynist pamphlet against women in positions of authority.

P.P.S. Towards the end of the novel, Pratchett uses the haunting refrain “the world turned upside down” several times. You might recognise this phrase from the musical ‘Hamilton‘. But Wikipedia tells me that the phrase derives from a pamphlet published in the 1640s “as a protest against the policies of Parliament relating to the celebration of Christmas” and has an even earlier origin in Scripture:

“These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also; Whom Jason hath received: and these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus‘.” Acts 17:5-7

The Hamilton reference derives from a legend that the British army marched to this tune when they surrendered after the Siege of Yorktown. The British army would apparently have played an American or French tune in tribute to the victors, but General Washington refused them the honours of war and insisted that they play “a British or German march.” Like most good stories of this kind it is probably apocryphal – it first appears in the historical record a century after the surrender!

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Book review

The Wee Free Men (Discworld 30) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2003

Some books are harder to review than others. Sometimes it’s just difficult to find something interesting or original to say, and you don’t want to just summarise the plot and wrap it up with some platitudes about the author’s writing style. But this isn’t that kind of difficult. The Wee Free Men is so full of wonderfulness that it is impossible to capture it all – and to fail would be a disservice to the breadth of Pratchett’s skill as an author. It’s not perfect of course but it’s pretty damn close. For younger readers it is an ideal entry point into Discworld.

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The Wee Free Men features the magnificent nine-year old Tiffany Aching. She lives with her farming family, helps out around the farm, and looks after her irritating younger brother Wentworth. Tiffany is special – ferociously intelligent and with a thirst for knowledge and understanding.

I am careful and logical and I look up things I don’t understand! When I hear people use the wrong words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That’s the kind of person I am!

Pratchett’s ability to create fully-rounded female characters always astounds me, and here he does it again, entering imaginatively into the mind of a precocious young girl and getting it pitch perfect. I can’t think of another author of his generation who writes such brilliantly fierce, independent and strong women as Pratchett. They are not just adornments to his novels, they are centralised and given distinctive voices which articulate the reality of their lives. Of course a man can never fully understand what it is to live the life of a woman, but Pratchett does an amazing job of trying. And he defies stereotypes at each turn, not in a self-conscious “I am going to create a gender-fluid character to show how progressive I am” way, but because such characters genuinely interest him.

Although this is a younger reader’s novel, there’s nothing patronising or simplified about the story – it is nuanced, layered, and contains several moments of genuine peril. The bad guys have grim-hounds, dream-stealers and things too scary to describe, and are led by a witch several times scarier than anything in Narnia.

“Zoology, eh? That’s a big word, isn’t it?”
“No, actually it isn’t,” said Tiffany. “Patronising is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.“

In the previous novels in the series Pratchett created many vividly imagined settings: the sprawling chaos that is Ankh-Morpork; the mountain kingdom of Lancre, the Unseen University, and so on. The Wee Free Men is set in the countryside, a sheep-farming area of grassland known as The Chalk. This small patch of Discworld is vividly evoked and drawn with so much reverence and respect – you have to wonder if Sir Terry grew up somewhere similar to The Chalk.

Anyway, back to the novel. One day while out for a walk with Wentworth, Tiffany sees what the reader knows are Nac Mac feegles, tiny blue kilted men speaking a chaotic and hugely entertaining form of Glaswegian. They warn her of a monster lurking in the river. Using Wentworth as bait, Tiffany bashes the creature with a frying pan. Without mentioning this supernatural experience to any other adult, all of whom are too busy to listen anyway, she seeks out Miss Tick, a visiting witch, who teaches Tiffany some important lessons:

“If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”

She also tells her all about the Nac Mac Feegle. These riotous pictsies are at the heart of the novel, and are an inspired, vibrant creation. I particularly enjoyed their fear of lawyers – “We’ve got a cheap lawyer an’ we’re not afraid to use him!” In a nod to Tolkien, the Feegles’ swords glow blue in the presence of lawyers. The Feegles believe they are dead – this world is so full of wonders that it must be heaven. When they die therefore there is no cause for grief – you can’t die if you are already dead. That feels seriously profound to me – comforting and at the same time reminding one to appreciate the world as it is.

All of which is a prelude to Wentworth being kidnapped by the Queen of the Fairies, and Tiffany’s rescue mission. She is aided by the Nac Mac Feegles, including Rob Anybody (I confess I only got that joke (that he will steal from anyone) when I read the name out loud; before that I just thought it was a silly name. This might suggest that the novel was written to be read to younger children perhaps?) Big Yan, Daft Wullie, Hamish, the Feegle’s Gonnagle William. The Gonnagle is the Feegle’s battle poet, reciting poetry of Vogon severity that causes enemies to flee. Well I never said the jokes were going to be sophisticated did I?

Tiffany and the Feegles’ adventures in fairyland are scary enough. All through the novel Tiffany remembers her Granny, Granny Aching, an iconic figure of the Chalk who died a few years earlier but remains a crucial figure in her life. This is a touching tribute to the importance of grandparents in children’s lives, and I am sure would be a comfort to any younger reader going through a similar loss.

The novel ends with what is in effect a guest appearance by Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. In true fairy godmother style, Granny gives Tiffany an imaginary witch’s hat. Tiffany asks

“Is it really there?”

“Who knows….It’s virtually a pointy hat. No-one else will know it’s there. It might be a comfort.”

“You mean it just exists in my head?” said Tiffany.

“You’ve got lots of things in your head. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real”.

The Wee Free Men, page 307

Surely it’s not just me who sees this line reappear in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when Dumbledore says to Harry:

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry. But why should that mean that it is not real?”

I’ve only scratched the surface of the wonders of this novel. If you haven’t read it before I am so jealous.

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Book review

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (Discworld 28) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2001

My lock-down guilty pleasures Discworld series reread continues with another novel I have not read before.

Let me explain. I discussed at length in my previous post the fact that The Last Hero and Maurice were not originally considered part of the Discworld series of novels. The change, from them being Discworld stories to becoming part of the series happened around 2009 or thereabouts. The Amazing Maurice has even weaker claims to be part of the series than Hero – apart from the setting (Uberwald, although it really could be anywhere vaguely middle-European), a mention of the Unseen University, and a brief appearance by Death and the Death of Rats, this is very much a stand-alone novel. So although I religiously bought each Discworld novel as they were published, from as early as The Colour of Magic, I missed some of the Discworld stories, including, obviously, this one.

The Amazing Maurice is marketed as a children’s or younger reader’s novel. I don’t want to argue with that because what makes a children’s novel is a matter of authorial and publisher’s judgment that I am not in a position to question, But there are dark elements to the story that I will come back to later which could easily upset a younger audience.

The Amazing Maurice is a cat who has acquired the ability to talk. He did this by eating a rat who had the same ability, having lived on a rubbish dump outside the Unseen University, where lots of background magic had accumulated. Maurice works with a troupe of talking rats with the same powers, and their human, Keith, a piper. They travel around from town to town embezzling communities by a minor variation on the Pied Piper scam – the rats make a nuisance of themselves, and then for a modest fee Keith pipes them out of town. We join them as they arrive at a town in Uberwald called Bad Blintz. This, they promise themselves, is going to be their last heist before retirement, the set up line for so many unsuccessful adventures (and bad movies). Maurice is the brains of the operation, keeping the fairly gormless Keith out of trouble as best he can.

Bad Blintz turns out to be a troubled place. Rats have already impoverished the town, and while food continues to disappear there don’t seem to be many surviving rats left. Keith meets the mayor’s daughter Malicia who is obsessed with story-telling, and has a thin grasp on the difference between reality and fiction. For example, when she is searching the town’s rat-catchers’ hut for clues she keeps leaning casually on walls hoping false walls will open. The fact that they do find a hidden trapdoor, leading to a network of cellars full of stolen food and caged rats, naturally encourages this fantasy. Malicia learns about Maurice and the rats ability to talk but is unfazed by it – it’s the sort of things that happens in stories.

At the heart of the novel is the quest to work out what is happening in Bad Blintz – where all the food is going, and what has happened to the rats? In the course of that quest we are introduced to many of the rats in the ‘clan’ – their aging leader Hamnpork, Dangerous Beans a spiritual rat, his assistant Peaches, and Darktan, the trap expert, to name a few. In the nightmarish cellars of the town they meet and confront the sinister Rat King, Spider, who is able to control rats, cats and even humans with the powers of his mind.

Some of the scenes with the rats, caged and cannibalistic, are vivid and scary, and I can only imagine how a pre-teen reader would react to them. There are also some character deaths, not all of which are temporary, and while the happy-ever-after ending is well constructed and satisfactory, the scares and genuine sense of threat along the way contribute to that sense of darkness I mentioned earlier. Pratchett has learned from Roald Dahl and others that stories for children can be nasty.

Pratchett was a wonderfully thoughtful writer, always with something interesting and original to say about the big issues of life, so I should not have been surprised to read such insight and compassion in a children’s story about talking rats. Along with the ability to speak the rats (and Maurice) have developed consciousness, and dare I say it souls. They develop concepts such as the self, an awareness of evil, and debate moral issues such as whether to eat non-talking rats, and what happens to them after they die. The rats are not overly anthropomorphised, certainly not sentimentally. They still widdle on everything, can’t wear clothes because they get in the way, and take their names from the sides of tin cans. In case we miss the point the contrast is emphasised by the snippets from a children’s story which the rats carry around in a manner akin to a holy book. This gave Maurice and the rats a depth of character that you just don’t expect in a story about talking animals, and for a brief moment my lifelong aversion to rats was abated.

Storytelling is an important theme in the novel. Malicia think life is just a story, the kind in which there is always a happy ending. Speaking of endings, I think Maurice has one of the most satisfying and effective endings in the series. The rats work out a purpose in life, which isn’t to run away and live on an island, but to use the power of narrative force to shape their destinies;

“If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.”
“And what if your story doesn’t work?”
“You keep changing it until you find one that does.”

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents

Maurice is an important link in the Discworld chain because it kept the franchise alive and fresh, introducing a whole new group of readers to Discworld, who would of course go on to read the ‘main’ series. It was awarded the Carnegie Prize in 2002. This was Pratchett’s first major award, and in acceptance he gave this wonderful quote reflecting on his ambivalent about the fantasy genre:

“Stick in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer’

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Book review

The Last Hero (Discworld 27), by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2001

I haven’t yet worked out why this matters to me, but for some reason it does. If you look up a list of Discworld novels on the internet today it will tell you there are 41, starting with The Colour of Magic and ending with The Shepherd’s Crown. There are many other Discworld books, from guides to the streets of Ankh-Morpork to Nanny Ogg’s recipe book.

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But it was not always thus. The list of Discworld novels used to run Thief of Time (26); Night Watch (27 – now 29), omitting The Last Hero (now 27) and The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (now 28), both of which at the time were firmly non-canonical “other” Discworld stories. By ‘the list of Discworld novels’ I am mainly referring to the list as published in each new instalment of the series. I have a first edition of Night Watch for example, which shows this order, and categorised The Amazing Maurice as a Discworld story. I can perfectly understand why, for marketing purposes, Pratchett’s publisher would want to differentiate the novels written for younger readers – essentially the Tiffany Aching books – although I am not convinced that the differences between the younger reader novels and the mainstream Discworld novels are all that significant. Over time this distinction might fade, and they will just be considered part of the golden thread of the series. The Sir Terry website maintained by his publishers lists the Tiffany Aching books both in the main series of novels and in the younger reader section (along with the carpet People, Truckers, Dodger etc) in classic having their cake and eat it fashion.

The only real difference between the Last Hero and (say) Thief of Time i.e. a conventional Discworld novel is that The Last Hero is illustrated. It’s not a comic book – there are no speech bubbles – but there are illustrations on every page, and it was always conceived as such. It could be published without the illustrations as a Discworld novella, but that would be ripping the heart out of the novel (or whatever it is) because the illustrations, by Paul Kidby add significantly to the text. Kidby was at this point (2001) just taking over as the principal Discworld illustrator from Josh Kirby who was to die the year The Last Hero was published.

The plot is a very conventional Discworld adventure. Cohen the Barbarian sets off with his Silver Horde to return fire to the home of the Gods, Cori Celesti. A message is received by Lord Vetenari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, warning him that if their quest succeeds, the world will end. He assembles an unlikely team to stop them –  Leonard of Quirm, Captain Carrot, and the world’s worst wizard, the irrepressible Rincewind, backed up by the wizards of the Unseen University. They travel into space and round/under the world in a contraption invented by Leonard, in scenes that combine multiple references to the Apollo missions with echoes of Jules Verne and Dan Dare thrown in, arriving just in time to save the day, inevitably. It’s great fun, and a wonderfully fresh addition to the series. I thought I had read all the Discworld novels already, but because of the issues I mentioned in the opening of this post (at far too great a length!) I had missed this one. It was a wonderful to discover another chapter in the Discworld story.

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Book review

The Thief of Time (Discworld 26) by Terry Pratchett, 2001

In Thief of Time Terry Pratchett gives his by now bulging bag of Discworld characters, settings and scenarios a good shake, and comes up with an entertaining story about the end of the world. There are some distinct echoes of Good Omens along the way, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The Auditors of Reality, who as we know from Hogfather want to end the world, finding humanity unnecessarily messy, are back. The Auditors had the potential to be fairly sinister, dementor-like figures, in their floaty grey hooded-cowls, but their susceptibility to explode when tasting chocolate is a bit of a weakness. They don’t seem to have learnt much from their previous encounter with Death and his grand-daughter, Susan Sto-Helit, who set out to stop their latest attempt. The Auditors’ dastardly plan this time is to hire a clockmaker Jeremy Clockson (yes, this is the standard of the jokes. If you don’t like them then don’t read the book, it’s quite simple really) to build a perfect glass clock. There is at this point what David Tennant’s incarnation of Dr Who called some “timey-wimey” stuff. We are asked to accept that a clock that can measure time perfectly will stop the universe. There are quite lengthy attempts to explain why this might be the case, and these have a sufficient veneer of plausibility to hold the rest of the plot together.

Another reappearing character is sweeper Lu-Tze of the History Monks. Lu-Tze first appeared in Small Gods but here the character is expanded significantly, as is the role and history of the History Monks themselves. Lu-Tze is the only known master of “déjà fu” a martial art in which the hands move in time as well as space. This leaves one’s opponent with ‘the feeling you’ve been kicked in the head this way before‘. Lu-Tze usually relies on the principle that no-one notices a sweeper, which allows him to go anywhere in the monastery, together with ‘Rule One’. Rule One states “Do not act incautiously when confronting little bald wrinkly smiling men”.

Pratchett spotted that as Westerners often draw inspiration from spiritual figures from the East, so seekers of enlightenment from the East may well look for insights into philosophy from the West. The Discworld version of this concept is Lu-Tze’s following of ‘The Way of Mrs. Cosmopilite’, drawn from the everyday sayings of Mrs Marietta Cosmopilite, his landlady when he lodged in Ankh-Morpork. For is it not written that ‘a penny saved is a penny earned’, ‘do you think I’m made of money’, ‘don’t make me come in there’, and ‘because’ and other pearls of wisdom.

To help him track down the doomsday clock, Lu-Tze takes a bright young apprentice, Lobsang Ludd. Lobsang is a relatively new recruit to the History Monks, having previously been raised by the Ankh-Morpork Thieves’ Guild. Lu-Tze quickly learns that Lobsang is (of course) no ordinary apprentice, having powers to manipulate time way ahead of anyone of comparable experience or age. Lu-Tze and Lobsang set out to find the maker of the glass clock, and in part to make repairs for the last time such a clock was made, which caused huge problems with the history of Discworld before breaking. Motifs from road-trip and master and apprentice stories are used as well as a slightly out of place reference to James Bond – they are equipped with special devices by a quartermaster called Qu!

Susan is against her better judgment called in to help Death. This involves her leaving her day job as a teacher (the scenes of Susan teaching her class Geography by magically transporting them to the country concerned are wonderful). She questions Nanny Ogg, given a guest appearance as the world’s best midwife, who eventually reveals she once helped Time herself have twins. As two young men in the novel, Lobsang and Jeremy, have already demonstrated a special relationship with Time, joining the dots by this point isn’t too difficult.

Thief of Time is also a Death novel. As well as commissioning Susan’s help, Death organises a reunion of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who are joined by the Fifth Horseman, Ronnie Soak, a personification of Chaos and now living in quiet retirement as the world’s most efficient milkman.

This is perhaps not Pratchett at his peak, but not far off. The jokes are, as always, wonderfully terrible, and the pop-culture references come thick and fast. The plot hangs together – just – and while there is little suspense we keep reading because we want to know how it is all resolved. There is even just a hint of romance for Susan, which is nice.

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Book review

“The presumption that what is male is universal is a direct consequence of the gender data gap. Whiteness and maleness can only go without saying because most other identities never get said at all. But male universality is also a cause of the gender data gap: because women aren’t seen and aren’t remembered, because male data makes up the majority of what we know, what is male comes to be seen as universal. It leads to the positioning of women, half the global population, as a minority. With a niche identity and subjective point of view. In such a framing, women are set up to be forgettable. Ignorable. Dispensable – from culture, from history, and from data. And so, women become invisible.”

It is difficult to read this book without succumbing to a sense of both rage and frustration. Rage at the endemic discrimination against women which seems hard baked into all areas of society, all deriving from the often-unacknowledged assumption that women are the

deviation from the male norm. And frustration at the speed of change in a society which has known about many of these issues for a long time but seems to have made little progress in addressing them.

“The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience–that of half the global population, after all–is seen as, well, niche.”

The depth and range of research that went into this book is breath-taking. The author’s examples touch on almost every area of life, and consistently return to the same conclusion: women just haven’t been thought about when it comes to the design of the constructed world we live in. It is hard to pick representative examples from the book, but here goes: at Google, which likes to think of itself as a progressive company, they hadn’t realised that parking spaces for pregnant women shouldn’t be at the back of the car park until the Chief Operating Officer fell pregnant; when first launched the Apple Health app didn’t include a menstrual cycle tracker; car crash dummies are 1.7m tall, the size of the average man, leading directly to women being 47% more likely to be seriously injured if they are in a collision; the average smartphone is 5.5 inches long and is too big for most women’s hands; speech-recognition software is trained on recordings of male voices and therefore much more likely to understand men. I could go on – this is not a book short on evidence or examples.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. This is not just a collection of evidence, powerful though that would be on its own. It is a manifesto, a rallying call for change. It is not enough to just witness this inequality; we should not accept women being treated as an anomalous version of masculinity and data collection should recognise sex and always consider how men and women are impacted differently.

“Closing the gender data gap is only step one. The next, and crucial step, is for governments and organisations to actually use that data to shape policy around it. This isn’t happening.

(page 120)

I am well aware that it is going to seem churlish of me to write about one of the very few passages in this book that I disagree with, but I think the issue is sufficiently important to address. In Chapter 12 ‘A Costless Resource to Exploit‘, the author writes about the post-2010 General Election austerity policies of public sector cuts. She describes how these cuts fell on women particularly hard (although you could add people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Northerners and the working class to that list) and observes that by comparison “men in the richest 50% of households actually gained from tax and benefit changes since July 2015”. So, an ideologically hard-Right Government cuts benefits, attacks the poor and gives tax breaks to the middle classes – Criado Perez rightly asks “So why is the UK Government enacting policy that is so manifestly unjust?” Her answer I have to say made me splutter:

“The answer is simple: they aren’t looking at the data”!!

Really? So it is not that there is a gender-gap in the data, which has been the central thesis of the book thus far, but that the Government and the thousands of civil servants that advise it have either chosen or forgotten to look at the data forecasting the impact of their cuts before implementing them. I can imagine George Osborne sitting in his office at the Evening Standard reading this chapter and saying “If only someone had told me that closing all those children’s centres, shutting down Sure Start, cutting funding to local Government, imposing the bedroom tax etc would have been damaging to working people and women in particular. If I had known that of course I wouldn’t have cut public spending and given tax breaks to the rich.”

This is important, because if we accept Criado-Perez’s idea that the problem is the data gap (which unquestionably exists in many areas) then the obvious remedy is to gather more data. That would no doubt help, but I struggle to believe that it would address the injustices in society on its own. Because there are plenty of situations where we have more than enough data, we just have politicians and people in power who choose not to use that data. Equal pay is an obvious example – we have a vast amount of data about how much people are paid, not least through the income tax system, yet the pay gap between men and women remains shamefully high. Do we need more data as to why that is, or do we just need to do something about it, and if so what? (Incidentally the Office for National Statistics has got a wonderfully detailed report on the gender pay gap on its website.)

Perhaps I am being unfair. Elsewhere the author is much more direct about the issue of whether the problem is missing data, or the willingness to use the data to confront inequality. It’s clearly both, and the motivations ascribed to the Government when imposing austerity were hyperbole.

The only other critical observation I would make is that Criado-Perez is inconsistent in her treatment of unpaid work. In Chapter 12 she points out that it is a political choice to exclude unpaid work, done largely by women, from measurements of national wealth and economic activity, usually expressed as GDP (gross domestic product). She illustrates how much GDP would increase in various countries if unpaid work was included in the measurement. But later she argues that

“Increasing the amount of unpaid work women have to do (by closing children’s centres, for example) lowers their participation rate in the paid labour force. And women’s paid labour-force participation rate has a significant impact on GDP.”

Invisible Women, pages 245-6

Enabling women to undertake paid work by providing adequate childcare would only raise GDP if we exclude the economic value of unpaid work from that measurement? Otherwise women would just be swapping unpaid work in the home for paid work outside of it. The actual value generated would be neutral.

These points might seem like nit-picking, but there is a far more serious issue that goes unaddressed here. The author treats data as if it is neutral, objective, the elusive source of answers to any question if it is collected correctly or if just enough data is gathered. But it’s not. It is possible to frame or interpret data in many ways. It isn’t passive – the exact same data set can be read to mean entirely different things (we’ve all seen those drawings – is it a duck or a rabbit?). Data can be twisted to make difference seem less drastic, false correlations can be drawn, how data is collected and presented can make huge differences to what it appears to tell us, and of course numbers can be manipulated depending on the question asked. Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science has some fascinating evidence on this, showing how it is possible to manipulate the results of supposedly double-blind trials simply by how you select your participants. We have seen during the recent Covid 19 epidemic that it is possible to the collect and present data to show how successful the UK Government’s handling has been despite it being seen by the rest of the world as an unmitigated disaster. Data is political.

Criado-Perez doesn’t directly address transgenderism, but it is an underlying topic in many sections of the book. A book called Invisible Women needs a working definition of ‘women’ for starters. One of the structural responses to the public discussion of transgender issues has been the introduction of gender-neutral toilets in public spaces. Criado-Perez is not sure that this is the correct approach. Not only does it reduce the availability of toilets for women (because they need to use stalls) but:

“We have learned from so many mistakes in the past that women are at a greater risk for sexual assault and violence if they don’t have separate bathrooms” (quoting an Amnesty International official).

Page 303

And on the topic of transwomen competing in women’s sport, the author provides the following significant evidence (I have removed the half a dozen or so footnotes from this quote, which provide evidence for each of the statistics quoted, but they are there to be checked if required) :

“Upper-body mass is approximately 75% greater in men because women’s lean body mass tends to be less concentrated in their upper body, and, as a result, men’s upper body strength is on average between 40-60% higher than women’s (compared to lower-body strength which is on average only 25% higher in men). Women also have on average a 41% lower grip strength than men, and this is not a sex difference that changes with age: the typical seventy-year-old man has a stronger hand grip than the average twenty-five-year-old woman. It’s also not a sex difference that can be significantly trained away: a study which compared ‘highly trained female athletes’ to men who were ‘untrained or not specifically trained’ found that their grip strength ‘rarely’ surpassed the fiftieth percentile of male subjects. Overall, 90% of the women (this time including untrained women) in the study had a weaker grip than 95% of their male counterparts.

Food for thought.

This is not a book to be rushed, but one once read to keep on the shelf for reference. It should be compulsory reading for anyone in a position of authority whether in Government or private enterprise. It’s a landmark study that will be looked back on in decades to come, hopefully as a record of how we got things wrong in the bad old days.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez, 2019

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Book review

Decline and Fall, (Diaries 2005-2010) by Chris Mullin 2010

These diaries cover the long slow death of the New Labour experiment from Blair’s comfortable third win in 2005 to Labour’s election defeat in May 2010. The diaries were published later that year, which suggests either that Mullin used his self-imposed retirement productively or that he was actively preparing them for publication while still writing them. Is this different from keeping a diary and one day getting round to editing it for publication? I think so, although I recognise the distinction is a narrow one. Mullin’s earlier edition of his diaries A View From the Foothills was published during the period covered by this book, so you have the slightly surreal occurrence of a diary recording the publication of and reaction to a diary. He was later to go on to publish a third edition of his diaries A Walk on Part covering the period 1995 to 1997.

Decline & Fall: Diaries 2005-2010 (Mullin Diaires 2): Amazon.co.uk ...

It goes without saying that on the course of a politician’s day-to-day life they will have lots of conversations about politics. It must be so tempting to just publish those conversations that appear prescient, making one look a wise political forecaster, and edit out any instances where one gets it spectacularly wrong. To be fair to Mullin he studiously avoids this temptation; these diaries book is full of forecasts that make him look like he really didn’t know what was going on. He confidently predicts David Davis will win the contest for leadership of the Conservatives (David Cameron won) for example, and that Gordon Brown will not lead Labour into the 2010 general election (he did). Sometimes he does get it right of course, such as this entry November 2005, only a few months after Blair’s third election victory:

“I think we will lose the next election. The Tories will come to some sort of understanding with the Lib Dems”.

In 2005 that wouldn’t have been an obvious outcome, but I can see why that conversation would have seemed important when editing the diaries in 2010, because of course that is precisely what did happen. This sense of foreboding about Labour’s prospects suffuses almost every entry. Labour seemed to Mullin, and to most people he spoke to, to be in irreversible decline, and he often refers to the inevitability of the party not just losing the 2010 general election but being displaced from power (or office) for good, and it losing its ‘historic purpose’.

The Labour Government of 2005-2010 had a secure majority of over 60, not that much smaller than the current administration. This was the third consecutive Labour Government, and the malaise of all long-term administrations is clearly articulated in these entries. Large numbers of disaffected former Ministers now on the back-benches led to lots of resentment against whips and party leaders. In the early years plotting over the succession to Blair gripped the Parliamentary party. Incompetence ruled – if it could go wrong it did, and the atmosphere was suffused with decay and corruption. This was also the period of the huge expenses scandal, with hundreds of MPs over-claiming their expenses, and several eventually going to prison.

It is hard to see from these diaries whether this administration achieved anything much at all. If it did Mullin didn’t seem to notice, and the best he can say about the Government is that it is not as bad as the Tories. It was obsessed with the idea that to build on the successes of the previous Blair Governments it had to be as right-wing as possible. New Labour as an ideology still gripped the party. The diary is full of daft right-wing proposals that Mullin feels compelled to vote against. The Government tries time and again, expending huge amounts of political capital, to extend the period of detention without charge for terror suspects, without anyone other than Ministers thinking it a good idea. I had forgotten that it was a New Labour idea to privatise the probation service, an idea that the Tories subsequently pushed through and have just had to unpick because it was so stupid. It is almost as if the party had a death-wish, recognising the need for a period in opposition to cleanse itself of New Labour and to put the calumny of the Iraq War behind it. (Incidentally, Ed Miliband features very little – when the surname Miliband is used it almsot always refers to David, always seen as the more senior figure.)

Much of the headline stories of this period are familiar, and Mullin’s observations are more in the way of reminders rather than new insights. This in part is because he was by this time a peripheral figure – he does not appear in any of the extensive memoirs of Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson or Alastair Campbell. This sense of being an observer was partly what drove his decision to stand down at the 2010 election. Revisiting this period does bring home the tragic mismanagement of the opportunities a 60+ majority brings. Mullin records in detail the period when Gordon Brown took over from Blair (in 2007) and flirted with the idea of calling a snap election. At the time it seemed another daft idea, with three years left to run on the Government and a secure majority, but no-one foresaw the banking collapse of 2008 which was to inflict such damage on the Government’s reputation for fiscal rectitude.

With maybe one or two honourable exceptions it is hard to over-state just how catastrophically bad this Government was. Initially the pressure on Blair to stand aside for Brown was hugely damaging, but that is only one small part of the problem. Politically the party was bankrupt; financially things were equally disastrous, with membership in freefall. If a mistake was there to be made the Government embraced it enthusiastically, from the expenses scandal to cash for questions. If bringing Peter Mandelson back into Government was the right answer then you have to wonder what the question was. The sense of decay is compounded by the regular visits by the grim reaper as various Labour figures met their maker – Robin Cook, Michael Foot, and Mo Mowlam to name a few.

For anyone supportive of the Labour Party this is sad but instructive read. The Party was captured by a right-wing faction that was very good at what it set out to achieve – to win elections – but missing many of the other qualities needed to form a successful reformist Government. Lessons for today are there for the taking.

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Book review

The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902

Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead of a heart attack, his corpse disfigured by an expression of horror. Next to the corpse the footprints of a gigantic hound are found. There is a sinister curse on the Baskerville family dating back to the brutal abduction of a local girl by one of Sir Charles’ ancestors. The girl died escaping from Baskerville Hall and her abductor was killed by a demon hound which has haunted the family ever since. The curse has now returned to the Baskervilles once more. Can Sherlock Holmes work out what’s going on and save Sir Charles’s heir from the curse?

The Hound of the Baskervilles - Wikipedia

Thus begins the atmospheric classic The Hound of the Baskervilles, the third of Conan Doyle’s four full-length Holmes novels. The formula that Conan Doyle used to construct his detective short stories was well honed by this point, but did not lend itself comfortably to being adapted to novel length. This in part explains why structurally the novel is a mess. But I really don’t want to write a review explaining why The Hound of the Baskervilles is a flawed mystery story, not least because that kind of deconstruction of the novel has been done before. Instead I wanted to focus on at least one of the reasons why the novel works in spite of its plotting weaknesses. Much of its undeniable impact is down to the strong evocation of place created by Watson’s descriptions of Baskerville Hall and the moor.

Watson and Sir Henry, Sir Charles’s successor, newly arrived in the country, travel down to his estate on Dartmoor. They have good reason to feel apprehensive about what they will find. This is Sir Henry’s first visit to Baskerville Hall. He is aware of the family curse, and has been troubled by mysterious events while staying in London which add to the sense of foreboding.

We first see the moor from Watson’s train carriage window:

“Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream. “

The formal squares of the rural landscape break down into jagged, vague shapes as the train progresses from the farmed countryside to the dream-like moors. The other-worldly quality of the landscape is something Watson returns to time and again.

Our first sight of Baskerville Hall, ancestral home of the Baskerville family, is soon upon us. The point of view narration as Watson provides an almost minute-by-minute account of his journey gives an immediacy to the narrative:

The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart’s-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the grey boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and fir…. a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year. Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed. The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation—sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.

This is fine descriptive writing of a quality not often found in the short stories, where there is rarely the room for Watson to be expansive about landscape or place (although to be fair some of the descriptions of foggy London streets are very evocative). Again the emphasis is on the melancholy atmosphere of the countryside, in which the dying vegetation provides a suitable setting for the scenes that are to follow.

The road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders. Now and then we passed a moorland cottage, walled and roofed with stone, with no creeper to break its harsh outline. Suddenly we looked down into a cuplike depression, patched with stunted oaks and firs which had been twisted and bent by the fury of years of storm. Two high, narrow towers rose over the trees. The driver pointed with his whip.

“Baskerville Hall”

(One might reasonably expect a crash of thunder at this point, but sadly, no.) Patched, twisted, stunted, bent – this landscape is described using the language of sickness or illness, and stands in stark contrast to the ordered, productive fields which had come before.

Inside, Baskerville Hall is equally striking, a fine setting for a murder-mystery:

It was a fine apartment in which we found ourselves, large, lofty, and heavily raftered with huge baulks of age-blackened oak. In the great old-fashioned fireplace behind the high iron dogs a log-fire crackled and snapped. Sir Henry and I held out our hands to it, for we were numb from our long drive. Then we gazed round us at the high, thin window of old stained glass, the oak panelling, the stags’ heads, the coats of arms upon the walls, all dim and sombre in the subdued light of the central lamp...the dining-room which opened out of the hall was a place of shadow and gloom. It was a long chamber with a step separating the dais where the family sat from the lower portion reserved for their dependents. At one end a minstrel’s gallery overlooked it. Black beams shot across above our heads, with a smoke-darkened ceiling beyond them. .. A dim line of ancestors, in every variety of dress, from the Elizabethan knight to the buck of the Regency, stared down upon us and daunted us by their silent company.

Again this is impressive descriptive writing. Unusually Watson is not now writing for the magazine readers who follow his accounts of Holmes’s achievements but for Holmes himself, stranded back in London dealing with a tricky blackmail case (or so we are told). So attention to detail, even if it is not immediately clear whether it is relevant to the case or not, is key, and Watson completes his commission diligently. The detailed layout of the Hall is to prove an important aspect of the mystery.

The setting of The Hound of the Baskervilles is a key element of its enduring success as a novel. Holmes fades into the background for much of the narrative, allowing Watson more time to expand his observations and at least start to unpick the mystery.

P.S. On re-reading this post in draft I am conscious that it is mainly extracts from the novel, with little by way of commentary or analysis. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t think I can call it a review. I will however let it stand, because the extracts are fine writing, and if they prompt anyone to go on and read the novel itself (free online, or otherwise) then that can’t be a bad thing.

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Book review

The Truth (Discworld 25) by Terry Pratchett, 2000

In the mid-1990’s, in response to the question “Do you see yourself still writing Discworld books in ten years’ time?” Sir Terry gave a very definitive reply:

“No. Not even in five years time. Certainly not on a regular basis, anyway. There’s only so much I can do with it.”

The Truth (novel) - Wikipedia

Published in 2000, The Truth was the 25th novel in the series, and came at a point when Sir Terry was clearly questioning whether that it had run its course. I believe it represents an important turning point for the series (just a personal theory): previous novels had shown hints of the series running out of steam. Taking established characters and putting them in novel situations can only take you so far. The Last Continent = Rincewind and the wizards in Australia; Carpe Jugulum = striking similarities to Lords and Ladies; The Fifth Elephant = the Watch in Uberwald. But in The Fifth Elephant Pratchett had also introduced the idea of the clacks, telegraphy, and with it the idea that technology had begun to arrive in the Discworld. The Truth picks up this idea and runs with it, introducing a new group of novels in the series, often grouped under the heading ‘Industrial revolution’, charting the arrival of technology in Discworld. It is more than possible that it was that idea that persuaded Sir Terry to keep writing the Discworld novels until he died. If that tentative theory is right, then let’s be grateful for great ideas.

William de Worde is a scribe (as if that name would allow him to be anything else!) He writes a monthly newsletter for leaders and senior figures outside Ankh-Morpork, which is produced for him in paper copy by an engraver, Mr Cripslock. William meets a group of dwarves who are starting a printing business. Printing technology, and in particular movable type, has been known for a while in Discworld, but has never been adopted in Ankh-Morpork. This is partly because there hasn’t been much need for it, but also because of the grip of the Guild of Engravers. (This situation, where a technology is known about but not widely adopted despite its obvious technical advantages, is not unheard of here in the round world. Examples that come to mind are the use of the wheel in Central and South America.

Almost by accident, William and the dwarves establish The Ankh-Morpork Times, and begin to publish daily editions, using Foul Ole Ron and friends as distributors. Their new venture is given impetus by a sensational story featuring the Patrician, Lord Vetenari, who is arrested for the attempted murder of his clerk, Drumknott.  William’s nascent journalistic instincts tell him something is not quite right about the official account of the attack, and he begins to investigate, helped by his colleague Sacharissa Cripslock, daughter of his former and now out-of-work engraver, and by Otto, a recovering vampire and iconographer (the Discworld equivalent of photography).

The reader is aware that de Worde’s suspicions are justified. A conspiracy is underway by the ‘Committee to Unelect the Patrician’.  These anonymous but influential figures have hired two assassins, the formidable Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip, to frame the Patrician and replace him with a look-alike. Mr Pin and Mr Tulip are two of Pratchett’s finest villains. Mr Tulip is psychotically violent, strong enough to take down a troll. He consumes industrial quantities of drugs, although these are usually ersatz concoctions powdered mothballs mixed with icing sugar or similar. Mr Pin is the brains of the pair, the menacing presence who doesn’t need to be violent to terrify people (that’s Mr Tulip’s job).

The joy of The Truth lies in its insightful descriptions of the birth of journalism onto the blank page that is Ankh-Morpork. The exploration of the responsibilities of the press sounds like a worthy subject matter, but it is done, as is pretty much everything Pratchett wrote, with a joyfulness. William discovers the power of just asking questions and writing down people’s answers, even when that answer is “Don’t write that down! Nor that!”. The truth is more than just what William and the Times says it is, but the ordinary people of Ankh-Morpork equally seem happy to consume any nonsense that is published by the Times’s competitor, the Inquirer, simply on the basis that if it is written down it must be true. William works out in real time some important journalistic principles, such as not being intimidated into giving prior copy approval to anyone, even the police. He also discovers the power of being ‘clever’ with words – “He was appalled at the ease with which the truth so easily turned into something that was almost a lie, just by being positioned correctly” – an idea which could have had a personal significance for Sir Terry, a writer supremely clever with words.

There’s a very welcome freshness to The Truth. Partly this comes from the introduction of new characters – Mr Pin and Mr Tulip in particular are a terrible combination of the Krays and the killers in Pulp Fiction (there are even playful references to the “royale with cheese” discussion from the film, and the use of the term “going medieval on…him”). Seeing the Watch from another perspective – they are important characters in the novel, but secondary to the Times’ team – also serves to give new energy to the novel. And while movable type is not really new technology as such, it is new to Ankh-Morpork, and I found the reference to the power of science to change the world strangely moving:

“Kings and lords come and go and leave nothing but statues in a desert, while a couple of young men tinkering in a workshop change the way the world works.”

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