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Book review

Unseen Academicals, (Discworld 37) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2009

Unseen Academicals - Wikipedia

Yes, Unseen Academicals is ‘the one with the football’ but it is so much more than that. Pratchett’s extraordinary ability to find new heights and depths to his universe was not dimmed by the fact that he was at this point 37 books into the series and that he was using very familiar characters and settings. His power to reinvent Discworld, and Ankh-Morpork in particular, here rests not on his principal theme, football, but on his exploration of the servant underclass that previously has been largely silent. Almost all the characters we have met thus far have been either fairly high-status – lords, ladies, wizards, guild leaders, etc, – or from the criminal underworld (sometimes both of course), but rarely ordinary working people.

The wizards of the Unseen University face disaster – they will lose a significant endowment unless (for reasons that are somewhat contrived) they play a game of football. The loss of income will restrict them to only three meals a day, an unthinkable deprivation, so the game is afoot. Flimsy though this reason is for introducing sport to that most unsporting of environments, the further complication is that Ankh-Morpork football is nothing like the sport we know today, and much closer in spirit to the medieval village game where everyone takes part, the ball is a wooden block covered in rags, and violence is a key part of any match. It becomes clear that the rules will need to be updated to make this more a gentleman’s sport, where the risk of decapitation and death are reduced and where a winner can eventually be determined.

Previously we have been introduced to a few of the higher status servants that keep the Unseen University running, but here for what I think is the first time we actually go into the kitchens and cellars where all the work is done, and are introduced to the people who do it. A key part of keeping the lights on is, well, keeping the lights on, and at the Unseen University all candles must be expertly dribbled for the right medieval aesthetic effect. The university’s master dribbler is Mr Nutt. Mr Nutt, we are told, is a goblin recently arrived from Uberwald. Parts of the story are told through Mr Nutt’s internal narration, and it becomes clear that he has a secret, hidden to even himself. He is extremely intelligent, physically hugely powerful, and constantly suppressing what seems dangerous instincts and dark, violent impulses. At first he is hidden away in the cellars, but the Arch- Chancellor is aware of his presence there, as is Lord Vetenari.

Mr Nutt starts to explore the working class culture of his friend and colleague Trev Likely. Trev has only one obsession – football. They go to a game and see up close the dangers of the rampant football hooliganism which appears to lead to Mr Nutt being killed, only for him to spring back alive before treatment can even begin at the Lady Sybil hospital. (Of the many things I loved about this novel, the way Sam Vimes and his good lady wife have become part of the language and culture of Ankh-Morpork was both touching and wonderful). At the same time we are also introduced to two of the staff who work in the University’s night-kitchens. Glenda Sugarbean bakes the best pies in Ankh-Morpork and is observant and intelligent. Her kitchen-maid friend Juliet yearns for more than can be found in the boring life below stairs.

Like many stories of working class life, the main theme here is escape. Juliet’s transcendent beauty allow her to go on to become a catwalk model of the new dwarven material, micromail; Trev’s skills with a tin can, a substitute football, win the Unseen Academicals a key game, and Nutt – well Nutt comes to terms with his dark secret, which is that he is an orc. This is the first time orcs have been mentioned in the Discworld series. They are fabled creatures, thought long-extinct, and utterly terrifying. While they are recognisably the creatures of Tolkien’s creation, there is a Discworld twist – they were bred by men as creatures of war, and their inner nature is peaceful and artistic. Mr Nutt writes love poetry, and yearns to be a valuable member of society. His relationship with Glenda blossoms into the most unlikely of romances, until finally he is asked to try to discover any surviving members of his species and re-introduce them to society. If trolls and vampires can live amongst men, why not orcs?

“Many bad things were done under the Evil Empire” she said. “The best we can do now is undo them. Will you assist in this endeavor?”
“In every way that I can” said Nutt.
“I would like you to teach them civilized behavior,” said Ladyship coldly.
He appeared to consider this. “Yes, of course, I think, that would be quite possible,” he said. “And who would you send to teach the humans?”
There was a brief outburst of laughter from Vetinari, who immediately cupped his hand over his mouth. “Oh I do beg your pardon,” he said.”

Unseen Academicals is a joy. Pratchett’s trademark silly jokes still abound – one of the wizards is on exchange from a distant university and is called Bengo Macarona – unsurprisingly he is brilliant at football. As always, the game of spot the reference is rewarding. Pratchett wears his learning lightly, and some lines are almost thrown away. One example is a version of the couplet from Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress , (summarised (if not dismissed) earlier in the novel along with all other love poetry as “as a means to an end, to wit, getting a young lady to take all her clothes off.”)

“The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.”

Which comes out as:

“The crypt’s a handsome place to be, But none, I think leave after tea”

Most obviously Trev and Juliet’s whole storyline is a Ankh-Morpork version of Romeo and Juliet, lovers from two bitterly divided families, fanatical supporters of opposing football teams, but at the same time and rather brilliantly Juliet’s story is also that of both Pygmalion and A Star is Born, a beautiful young woman transformed into a supermodel. Mr Nutt’s unusual training techniques – he takes his team to the ballet, and has them practicising blindfold – also reminded me of How Steeple Sinderby Wanders Won the FA Cup. Someone has done a fantastic job of collecting all these references in one spot at https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Book:Unseen_Academicals/Annotations but don’t spoil the fun and look them up first. The references are often easy to miss but there is a certain satisfaction to be gained from spotting them unassisted.

Ankh-Morpork is changing. Technology is threatening old ways, and in a most striking illustration of the new times one of the wizards of the Unseen University, the Dean, has taken a job in another university as their Vice-Chancellor, an unheard of move that Ridcully sees as a betrayal. It is probably just because I know that the series was to end after four more novels, but I saw a slight sadness in this event, a recognition that all good things must end. Like this review,

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Book review

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by J K Rowling, 1999

I had the huge pleasure of reading Prisoner to my sons a few years back, and it was that experience which finally persuaded me to take J K Rowling seriously as an author.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.jpg

Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets had been fun, with dark moments but plenty of silliness as well, and it seemed the level of peril Harry was going to face was never going to be that serious. He certainly didn’t seem to need the help of adults to face down Voldemort once a year. His plot armour was unbreakable and extended to all his companions. While there is also a strong case to be made for Goblet of Fire being the turning point in the series, where there are key character deaths and the novels begin to grow much longer, I think Prisoner is equally a significant milestone in the series.

First, Prisoner is a much darker novel than its predecessors. Sirius Black has been built up through out the novel as a psychotic and dangerously powerful killer, the only wizard to ever escape from Azkaban (even though his attempts to break into the castle and the Gryffindor common room and bedrooms have not seen anyone killed or even hurt). Having been told relentlessly that he is an extremely dangerous character, we have no reason to believe he is not the novel’s principal villain. After all, who else could it be? In the novel’s climax n the Shrieking Shack the trio are ‘captured’ by Black, Ron is seriously injured, and the only possible help, Professor Lupin, seems to be a traitor. It’s hard to see a way back for them at that point.

The darkness of the novel is underlined by introduction of dementors, a disturbing new element to the narrative. While much of the landscape of Hogwarts is familiar, drawn from traditional stories – ghosts, goblins, giants, unicorns and centaurs – dementors are something new and very scary.

“Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them… Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself… soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.“

What’s worse in many ways is that the dementors are ostensibly on the ‘good’ side – the Ministry employs them to run Azkaban where psychological torture is the state-sanctioned fate of all, to act as security guards around Hogwarts once the threat to Harry from Sirius becomes understood and to execute prisoners without benefit of trial or sentence in the most appallingly cruel fashion, using the Dementor’s Kiss. They are the stuff of nightmares:

Where there should have been eyes, there was only thin, grey, scabbed skin, stretched blankly over empty sockets. But there was a mouth … a gaping, shapeless hole, sucking the air with the sound of a death-rattle.

Fluffy falls asleep when you sing to him, Aragog is Hagrid’s friend, and the basilisk is pecked out of action by Fawkes – but the dementors will eat your soul.

Second, the climax of the novel following Buckbeak’s ‘execution’ is a sustained, extraordinarily breathless series of reveals, twists, and surprises. Reading these chapters (from seventeen to the end of the novel) I found it virtually impossible to find a natural place to find somewhere to pause for the night – each one ends with a cliff-hanger that demands you read on. It’s brilliantly constructed. Prisoner is still an adventure novel for children and young adults, but the shift in tone and quality from the earlier novels is apparent.

Third, complexity. In the course of this novel that Rowling is able to sustain dramatic tension and build a world of depth and complexity, demanding that we look again at the first two novels, re-evaluating references, incidents, and even casual apparently throwaway lines for new importance. You can start to see her cash in some of the investment made in earlier novels. Scabbers, for example, introduced on that first ride on the Hogwarts Express as Ron’s rather pathetic hand-me-down pet, suddenly becomes a much more important character. Equally, the passing reference to Sirius in the opening chapter of Philosopher’s becomes strikingly poignant when it is revealed he is Harry’s godfather. (Incidentally it is surprising that suspicion did not fall on Sirius immediately following the attack at Godric’s Hollow. Dumbledore knew James and Lily were hiding under the protection of a secret-keeper and believed that person to be Sirius – hence his willingness to let Sirius rot in Azkaban for 12 years. But when he hears that Sirius lent Hagrid his motorbike to convey Harry to Privet Drive – no reaction!)

The case against Prisoner revolves mainly around the use of the time-turner as a plot device. It’s a classic deus ex machina, and invites the question why the Ministry allowed a school-girl to casually use such a powerful magical device for relatively trivial purposes. Within the context of the novel however these questions usually don’t occur to the reader, and the time-travel resolution of the plot seems neatly done. Again, if we can suspend our disbelief to allow the existence of magic, magical creatures, and the whole wizarding world, why can’t we allow for time travel as well, and just skate on past any awkward paradoxes?

These elements build into a powerful combination, using the characters, locations and structures that Rowling established in the first two novels, but beginning to explore the wider wizarding world. These are still school-children, struggling with homework, exams, and the awkwardness of teenage friendships (Ron spends a long time sulking when he thinks Crookshanks has eaten Scabbers). Prisoner begins the transition to the darker, more mature themes that dominate the rest of the series.

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Book review

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J K Rowling, 1998

Again, not a review, which would be redundant, but some observations:

  1. The comfort of familiarity. Re-reading Chamber of Secrets I was struck by how similar the story is to Philosopher’s Stone. I am not going to list all the points of comparison here, but (to mention a few) both stories involve:
  • a search for something hidden “miles” beneath the castle
  • a dangerous trip into the Forbidden Forest
  • Hagrid providing clues to the ‘secret’
  • the climax of both novels featuring Harry travelling under the school with his friends, only to be separated from them and having to face You-Know-Who on his own.

The stories are not just similar in terms of their plots. Rowling developed a structure for these novels that was to serve her well and provide a comforting familiarity to her readers. (To be honest it came as a shock when she abandoned that formula in Deathly Hallows). Apart from that one outlier, all the novels start in Privet Drive, feature the journey to Hogwarts, the welcome feast, the three school terms, and culminate conveniently at the end of the summer. Harry’s birthday, lessons, feasts, Quidditch, Halloween, Christmas, Easter and exams are all fixed points of reference in each novel. (It is rare for Rowling to introduce new milestones – so far as I can remember, for example, neither Ron nor Hermione’s birthdays are mentioned or celebrated). This is not an objection, (and I suppose it’s not much of an observation either), but it does mean that each novel was constructed within tightly prescribed parameters, with only limited variations at each outing.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets By J. K. Rowling

2. Still not sure. Rowling was careful not to assume that readers of Chamber had read Philosopher’s, so provides a detailed if rapid explanation in the opening chapter – Harry is a wizard, he goes to a magic school, he is an orphan, etc. Even the rules of Quidditch get a recap. In later novels Rowling is confident enough to assume that her readers are not joining the series mid-way and dispenses with these summaries, which I suspect were something her editors suggested.

3. Believability. When I first read Chamber I was mildly irritated by some of the plot inconsistencies and absurdities. Would Hagrid really have been carted off to Azkaban just on suspicion of involvement in the opening of the Chamber? Could a massive basilisk have moved freely around the pipes of the school’s medieval plumbing? And why didn’t it eat any of its victims, given how hungry it insists it feels? I could probably explain away these and the many other problematic issues that readers have identified over the years, but I am fairly sure that would be missing the point. This is not a realistic adventure story, and it is wrong to treat it as one. There are ghosts, trolls, centaurs and unicorns for goodness sake, not to mention the giant squid living in the lake! It is a children’s story where suspension of disbelief is required. As the series turns darker a more careful analytical reading can be justified, but for now this is still a bit of a lark.

4. A detective story? One of the pleasures of a re-read of any mystery is spotting the clues one missed the first time round, the misdirection and red herrings. Should I have been able to work out the ending and the plot twists? Most readers assume that the heir of Slytherin is unlikely to be either Malfoy or Harry, following the convention that it is never the more obvious characters ‘whodunnit’. But should I have been able to guess that Ginny was the one opening the Chamber and controlling the basilisk? On a reread the clues are there in plain sight, but the added complication of the diary being haunted by the spirit of Tom Riddle (who mysteriously still has his award for services to the school on display in the trophy room, despite the later difficulty with ahem trying to take over the world) clearly wasn’t guessable, in the same way that Quirrell being the host for You-Know-Who’s disembodied spirit wasn’t work-out-able either. The technique works surprisingly well – Rowling makes us think we should have been able to see the solution while at the same time making it obscurely improbable.

5. Easter Eggs. The other main pleasure of Chamber is seeing some of the skeleton of Half Blood Prince in the bones of the plot. References and objects pop up in passing – the Hand of Glory and the opal necklace from Borgin and Burke’s in Knockturn Alley (one of the many things I still really enjoy from the series are silly little jokes like that), the vanishing cabinet and of course Riddle’s diary.

Chamber isn’t the strongest novel in the series, but there’s still so much to enjoy. The story is told with the wonderful economy that was such a feature of the early novels. The central characters are beginning to come alive and be fully rounded, with the supporting cast also assuming much more depth. New characters such as Dobby are introduced, and the portrait of Lockhart is a wonderfully spiteful sketch. Despite the ghosts and the magic there is a grounded believability about Harry and his friends. They struggle with schoolwork, bullies, unpopularity and peer-pressure – the only thing that no-one seems to suffer from is acne. It’s been a real pleasure to return to Hogwarts, and while I doubt I am going to work my way through the whole series again, I might!

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Book review

How to Stop Time, by Matt Haig, 2017

Time travel is an obvious source of plot material for authors, but it is also inherently problematic – making it plausible is always the challenge. Over the years authors have adopted a range of different approaches to making it believable. None have ever really cracked the central practical problems associated with the idea, but Matt Haig comes close in this novel, mainly by redefining what we mean by time travel. His central character, Tom Hazard, has a rare genetic condition which causes him to age extremely slowly.

I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong.

For every ten to fifteen years of his life his body ages approximately one year of everyone else’s. And this is his story. At the time we are introduced to him he is around 400 years old. Much of the novel is spent revisiting Tom’s memories of his earlier lives, from medieval England to 1920’s Paris. The gift of long-life has not been without its problems. His mother is drowned as a witch because of his eternal youthfulness, and he has to separate from his Elizabethan wife and daughter to prevent something similar happening to them. He is forced to change identity every eight years, can never put down roots, learn a profession, build a family, or settle down. And of course the things he can’t have become the things he wants.

In the present Tom works as a teacher, teaching history from first-hand experience. He becomes attracted to a colleague who comes close to working out his secret, but Tom knows that if he allows that to happen he would be putting her in danger. Because Tom has reluctantly joined a group of ‘albas’ – albatrosses, people with the same long-life gene as Tom – determined to protect their secret from big-tech or anyone who would want to analyse their genes for the secret of near eternal life. This group takes a unequivocal approach to secrecy – anyone who finds out about the albas is murdered.

The central concept of this novel is original and interesting. But the novel never really grabbed me. The main character, Tom, doesn’t realise what an amazing gift he has, and to be honest spends a lot of time complaining. His focus is relentlessly on how difficult long-life is amongst normal people, rather than “Wow, I met Shakespeare!”. The resolution of the plot in which he has to choose between enforcing the secrecy code of the albas or embracing the possibility of love is sentimental and unconvincing.

Sorry – I hate reviewing books that I feel underwhelmed by. I’d rather review a book I full-on hate rather than something that is not that bad. But this was just OK. The author can clearly write, and come up with great ideas, so I genuinely hope he finds the right combination one day.

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Book review

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J K Rowlng, 1997

I normally flag these posts as book reviews, but this won’t really be a review as such – every word Rowling wrote has been analysed in such microscopic detail that any attempts at a summary would be redundant. But ‘I read it so I write about it’ is the rule here, so here are a few things I noticed on this reading of Philospoher’s:

Compression. At around 220 pages the Philosopher’s Stone is a masterpiece of compression. After a relatively leisurely start the last few chapters fly past. Let’s look at what Rowling squeezes in to the novel’s final three chapters:

Having been caught smuggling Norbert out of Hogwarts, the trio are taken to Professor McGonagall’s office where she deducts 150 points from Gryffindor. Harry becomes a pariah and considers resigning from the Quidditch team. Harry, Hermione, Neville and Malfoy report to Hagrid for their detention in the Forbidden Forest. While in the forest Harry sees a cloaked figure drinking unicorn blood, then is rescued by the centaurs, who reveal who is behind the mysterious goings on at the castle. After the year-end examinations, Harry learns Hagrid has revealed the secret of getting past Fluffy. Dumbledore has been lured away from the castle and Professor McGonagall refuses to take them seriously, so the trio set out to stop ‘Snape’ from taking the stone themselves, immobilising Neville on the way. They get past Fluffy, Devil’s Snare, the room of flying keys, and the giant wizards’ chess game, losing Ron at that point. Hermione works out the potions puzzle and then goes back to help Ron while Harry pushes on to find Quirrell looking into the Mirror of Erised. There are a few pages left for Harry to defeat You-Know-Who, rescue the stone, recover in hospital with the benefit of a visit from Dumbledore, attend the end of term feast, win the House cup, and catch the train back to Kings Cross.

This is breathless, extraordinarily compressed stuff – in the film version almost a third of the 160 minutes running time is occupied with these three final chapters, beginning with the Forbidden Forest detention. There’s not a word wasted. The speed with which events flash past make the book hard to put down – where would one pause? – and don’t allow the reader time to consider the extraordinary recklessness with which the trio proceed – for example what were they planning to do when they caught up with ‘Snape’? The later books in the series unfortunately lose this economy, and while the world-building is mainly fascinating and well done, they become more self-indulgent and much slower.

Frivolity. For a story which starts with the attempted murder of a baby and the actual murder of his parents, and which ends with the death of a teacher, this is a surprisingly light-hearted book. The sense of peril is limited – the bad guys are easily foiled, and the trio deals with them without help from friends, teachers or any adults. This sense of comfort – we know things are going to end with the good guys winning – is emphasised by a strong sense of playfulness running throughout the book. Dumbledore consistently messes about, whether in his opening comments to the school – “Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you.” – or in his comments about his scar being in the shape of a map of the London Underground (I wonder how they translated that joke in foreign language editions?) Even at the end, when announcing the imminent death of Nicholas Flamel and his wife, he still has time to joke around with Bertie Botts every-flavour beans.

Age-appropriate content. Possibly Rowling’s cleverest idea in terms of the structure of the series is the way the books age with the reader. School stories usually have two ways of handling this issue. One choice – the Simpsons model as I think of it – is for the characters never to age. That way the Secret Seven can enjoy perpetual summer holidays staying with relatives in a variety of unremarkable locations each of which have hidden secrets. The alternative approach, for the characters to proceed through the school years in each episode of the series, can be problematic. The number of stories the author can write using these characters is fixed to the seven secondary school years (none of these stories are ever set anywhere other than in secondary schools). Second, as the children age hormones kick in, more adult themes are introduced, and the author runs the risk of losing younger readers.

Rowling’s chose the latter approach – her characters start school aged eleven, and each story spans one school year. But she was able to write sufficiently quickly – seven books in eleven years (1997-2007) – that the pre-teen readers she captured with this first book aged with her characters, cementing their identification with Harry, Ron, or Hermione. Talk of ‘growing up’ is common among Potter fans (and even her critics), and going through that collective experience, together with all the ceremony that became associated with the later books, made Harry Potter an important part of many people’s adolescence.

Nostalgia. I may have written about this elsewhere in this blog, but I once spoke to a group of primary school children about my experience of going to school in the UK in the sixties and seventies. They all had just the one question – ‘Were the teachers really allowed to hit you?!!’ Rowling is a near contemporary (she was born in 1965) and attended school in Gloucestershire, so would have had a very similar educational experience – and in particular one in which teachers, and adults more generally, were allowed to hit children. (Bear in mind corporal punishment was made illegal in schools in the UK in the1980’s.) Harry’s experience of being hit by his teachers (including the excruciating scenes with Professor Umbridge) are really a reflection of Rowling’s own experience, and something that would alien to children of the late nineties or later. Which point underlies the profoundly nostalgic flavour of the books – they are in the tradition of the boarding school stories of Enid Blyton, Anthony Buckeridge, Angela Brazil and Frank Richards (to name a few). The Potter books are suffused with the atmosphere, themes, values and language of these earlier stories – Malory Towers, Secret Seven, Famous Five, Jennings and Billy Bunter – which I am sure Rowling would have grown up with, but would have been largely unfamiliar to her younger readers. All the cultural references throughout the stories, from lemon drops to the excitement of travelling by steam train, are rooted in Rowling’s childhood.

This is surely part of the incredibly successful formula of Harry Potter – the boarding school story has deeply, rigidly established patterns and structures (crushes, pranks, midnight feasts, inter-house rivalry, letters home, the crusty old janitor, and so on) which will have been well known to adult readers, but felt quaintly historic to most of her millennial audience.

So those were my impressions of this reread of Philosopher’s Stone. It’s aged well, and while you can never recapture the impact of the first read, with all the well-timed surprises and reveals, there are sufficient Easter eggs and signs of how cleverly plotted the whole series was (for example I had forgotten that Hagrid borrows the flying motor-bike he delivers Harry to Privet Drive on from Sirius) to justify one more return to Hogwarts.

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Book review

Making Money (Discworld 36) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2007

Making Money is the sequel to the transcendent Going Postal. It is the story of the further adventures of Moist von Lipwig as he takes on his next challenge – reforming the Ankh-Morpork banking system. For a choice of topic Pratchett couldn’t have been more prescient, coming as it did just a few months before the international banking crisis which precipitated a decade of economic misery.

Anyone who has read this blog before will know that I rate Pratchett as one of our finest writers, so it pains me to concede that Making Money doesn’t quite meet his usual high standards. Just to be completely clear I don’t think for one second this had anything to do with his diagnosis in the same year – his illness was a form of dementia that left him lucid to the end – this article he wrote about his condition explains it far better than I could. Perhaps it is more a case that Going Postal set such a high watermark that any attempt at a sequel would always struggle to compare.

Banks in Ankh-Morpork are failing, and who better to give them a shot in the arm than an admitted thief and smooth-talking showman? “The city bleeds, Mr Lipwig,” says Vetinari, “and you are the clot.” (It has taken me a very long to realise this, but there is a strong case for Vetinari being Pratchett’s greatest creation.) Lipwig is bored running the Post Office, which no longer needs his buccaneering approach to management. So he takes over the running of the city bank and mint. As you would expect there is a cast of comic characters involved. The bank’s chairman is a fussy little dog, the chief clerk, a mathematical savant, obviously harbours a dark secret, which sadly disappoints when it is finally revealed, and a sinister opponent has ambitions to replace Vetenari. In the basement of the bank (is it a bank, or a mint, or both – I was never really clear, so the powerful sense of place which dominates Going Postal, that extraordinarily evoked abandoned Post Office, stuffed to the rafters with undelivered post, is not recaptured) someone has built the Glooper, a model of the city’s economy that develops a life of its own.

There’s not enough of chain-smoking Adora Belle Dearheart in this novel. She is away finding more buried golems, who eventually appear in large numbers only to walk back off stage almost immediately, consenting to be buried in a most improbable fashion. Would Adora, who has dedicated her life to liberating golems, really be happy with this resolution of the ‘what to do with the golden golems conundrum?

Money is an elusive concept, so I am aware of the irony when I say that Pratchett never quite pins it down. It’s not intrinsically good or bad, so the novel is deprived of a cause (compared to say, its predecessor in which privatisation and modernisation are firmly skewered). Pratchett asks the right questions – of course – such as why we trust banks or what the “tacit understanding that we will honour our promise to exchange a dollar for a dollar’s worth of gold provided we are not, in point of fact, asked to” actually means, but never really gets to grips with the topic, skirting around it before moving on to other more tangible, plot-related issues.

My other disappointment with this novel, however slight, centres on Pratchett’s prose. usually his ability to craft a sentence is unparalleled, but here many of the lines fall flat.

“I wouldn’t trust you with a bucket of water if my knickers were on fire!”

“The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I’m not sure about the turnip.”

“I’m an Igor, thur. We don’t athk quethtionth.”
“Really? Why not?”
“I don’t know, thur. I didn’t athk.”

That’s not always the case of course – I loved this image:

“It seemed to Igor that trouble hit Mr. Lipwig like a big wave hitting a flotilla of ducks. Afterward, there was no wave but there was still a lot of duck.”

Making Money is a fun story featuring many of the Discworld characters that by this stage in the series need to do little more than walk on, say their lines, and move on. Moist and Adora really deserved more than a light retread of Going Postal, but that’s essentially what they got.

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Book review

The Power, by Naomi Alderman, 2016

Many of the great dystopian novels have at their centre what amounts to a thought experiment – a ‘What If….?’ What if women were enslaved and used to breed children? What if totalitarianism ruled our lives? What if our obsession with technology distorts society to remove all meaningful human relationships? And so on. Alderman’s master-stroke in ‘The Power‘ is to imagine a new and compelling ‘What If?’ – what would happen if women had the ability to generate electric shocks from their bodies? What if they literally had ‘the power’? What would that do to gender relationships in society? Would women be free from sexism, oppression, sexual violence and so on? Ultimately, would the world be a better place?

Alderman uses a rather clumsy framing device to provide a structure to the narrative. The novel is book-ended with correspondence between a male historian turned author and a female editor. He seeks her comments on and support for his novel, ‘The Power’. He is attempting to find a wider audience for his archaeological findings by turning them into a novel, recreating the world he has discovered . She patronises him, finding the scenes of female on male sexual violence and the idea of male soldiers “sexy”. She suggests the novel is published under a male pseudonym, in an ironic inversion of a practice in publishing that still survives to this day. Their letters are written several thousand years after the central events of the novel. The historian’s theory, given imaginative form in the novel, is that women have not always had ‘the power’, and in earlier pre-power societies men were the dominant sex. He describes the period when women’s electrical abilities first emerged, and the events leading up to the global war which followed.

This framing technique is not new of course – Margaret Atwood (who mentored Alderman during the writing of this novel) does something similar at the end of the Handmaid’s Tale, as does Orwell at the end of 1984, but the impact of the device in both is different, distancing the reader from the grim dystopias, and offering hope that the world has changed. In The Power, Alderman both opens and closes the novel with the correspondence, so we are aware while reading the novel that things don’t end well – chapters headings even have a grim countdown to the apocalypse to emphasise the point. Between chapters are illustrations of archaeological finds. The historian ‘author’ speculates on their purpose, often wildly inaccurately. Alderman has some fun here – for example she talks about the mysterious meaning of the ‘bitten fruit logo’, although this ignorance of twenty-first century technology is not really consistent with the story within the story, in which email and smart-phones are fully understood.

The central narrative is told through the intersecting stories four main characters: Roxy, the daughter of a British drug baron; Margot, mayor of an unnamed city in the United States; Allie, a teenage girl in an abusive foster home in Alabama; and Tunde, a young male Nigerian journalist. Tunde stumbles into journalism driven by a need to understand ‘the power’, and through his efforts the reader sees the its impact on countries around the world. In some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, the changes are literally revolutionary. Allie is at the heart of the development of a new religion focussed on women and their new powers, reinterpreting Christian theology with a fresh emphasis on the role of women. Margot’s story shows the impact of the power on politics and the military-industrial complex – the military possibilities of the power are quickly identified. Finally Roxy’s story shows how organized crime reacts to the opportunities of the changes within society. These disparate narratives converge, improbably, on the newly declared central European nation of Bessapara, which becomes the focus for their stories and the stage on which a new world order begins to emerge.

At first, the power liberates women. No longer frightened of the men in their lives, they begin to take control. The reversal of roles happens quickly – stripped of their power to physically dominate women, men become subservient. This is shown in some obvious ways – there is a scene when women soldiers rape some young men – but also in subtler ways, such as the male newsreader who claims not to understand the political stories he is covering, and is relieved to turn to lighter news or the traffic reports.

The central concept of ‘The Power‘ is remarkably effective. It is thought-provoking and challenging. It locates the oppression of women in their physical weakness relative to men, and asks what would happen if that situation were to be reversed? Whether women’s oppression is solely down to this issue or is rooted in other causes is probably beyond the scope of this review, but what is interesting to me is that Alderman argues quite explicitly that once women have the upper hand, they behave just as badly and oppressively as men. They abuse their physical superiority to strip men of their human rights, to demean them, to torture, humiliate and assault them. Women are not the gentle sex here, they are just weaker, and as soon as that changes they exact revenge. As a mediation on the relationships between the sexes and their capacity to change, this is therefore ultimately a pessimistic book. It argues that human power is not located in the rules by which we agree to conduct civil society, but in our brute strength and ability to harm one another:

“It follows that there are two ways for the nature and use of human power to change. One is that an order might issue from the palace, a command unto the people saying “It is thus.” But the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is that those thousand thousand points of light should each send a new message. When the people change, the palace cannot hold.”

Furthermore that physical power cannot be trusted in the hands of either sex. Women’s liberation in these circumstances becomes impossible. Their oppression is caused by their physical weakness relative to men (the author suggests) and there is no mysterious electrical power that is going to spontaneously emerge and liberate them – but even if there were, that freedom would be at the expense of men, civil society, and peace.

The contrast with ‘The Handmaid’s Tale‘ is stark. We believe that Atwood’s world is possible, not least because it is drawn from the real-life oppression of women. Women can be freed from Gilead not through any superhuman or supernatural external forces, but through their own actions (and those of their allies). Atwood’s novel is therefore at the same time both more chilling and more optimistic about the future of our species.

I am left wondering, worrying – have I misunderstood the allegory of ‘The Power‘? Does a novel that ostensibly seeks to imagine a world in which women do not have to fear men really end up by concluding that such a world is impossible, unattainable? In a way I hope so.

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Book review

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, 2020

It feels as if I am the last book blogger on the planet to get round to reading this magnificent novel. I am more than happy to join in with the praise this wonderful book has been showered with, because it is extraordinarily powerful, easily the best novel I have read this year.

Even if you had managed to avoid any of the publicity about this novel, you would know its subject matter from the title. Described in the Guardian review as the “tragic tale of the Latin tutor’s son” (which cleverly highlights the novel’s way of looking at the story with a fresh pair of eyes) Hamnet is about many things, but at its heart this is a novel about grief. How people process loss, how it impacts us differently (particularly poignant was the scene when Judith, Hamnet’s twin sister, asks her mother what the word is for a bereaved twin – after all we have words for orphans and widows). I have never read a book where the rawness of grief is conveyed so powerfully – I sobbed. Written in the present tense it has an immediacy that gives the scenes of loss such impact, and of course the fact we are now living through another pandemic, gladly one a lot less dangerous than the plague of the middle ages, goes to emphasise the tragedy in an unexpected and dramatic way.

But it’s not just about grief. It is an extraordinarily evocative recreation of late sixteenth century rural Warwickshire (London is also summoned up vividly, but it is not the focus of the novel). The extended Shakespeare and Hathaway families are brought to life – and while this novel sent me back to the internet time after time to check various details of their lives (those we know, of course) I didn’t resent that in the slightest. One of its many strengths is that this book isn’t over-researched – it takes the little we know about Shakespeare’s family background and life, and fills in the gaps imaginatively and convincingly. O’Farrell is happy to take risks and present less popular versions of the story – the idea that Will and Anne met while he was tutoring her step brothers in Latin for example. I loved the way the novel rescues Anne Hathaway from the condescension of history and reinvents her as a wise confident young woman. I also think it was a brave decision to foreground Anne (known here as Agnes, the name her father uses for her in his will, apparently) rather than Shakespeare, who remains unnamed throughout the novel.

The mystery of the relationship between Hamnet and the play in his name written just a few years later (O’Farrell mentions only briefly the fact that Shakespeare is believed to have written some of his best comedies in between the two events) is one that invites speculation. Was Shakespeare simply callous, indifferent to the feelings of his family, or (as O’Farrell compellingly speculates here) using the play to explore his grief for his lost son? Other family relationships and characters – the bullying glove-maker John Shakespeare, or Will’s mysterious brother Edward (here Edmond) are all brought to life vividly.

There are many gaps in what we know about Shakespeare. Why did he live long parts of his life in London and not bring his family to live with him, even when he was financially successful? What impact did these long periods of separation have on his marriage. How did he go from being the son of a glove-maker to a phenomenally successful playwright? Why on earth did he leave his second-best bed to his wife in his will? And most of all, what impact did the loss of his son have on his work? Although this is not Shakespeare’s story, along the way O’Farrell acknowledges these many mysteries and provides thought-provoking answers. Which means you can enjoy this novel if you know all there is to know about Shakespeare, or nothing.

I can’t recommend this novel highly enough. I suspect it will go on to win many more awards than the entirely merited Women’s Prize for Fiction it was awarded earlier this year against stiff opposition.

PS The season finale of series three of Upstart Crow, the David Mitchell/Ben Elton BBC sit-com about Shakespeare featured Hamnet’s death. In this episode Judith falls in first, Shakespeare is sent for from London, and between this message being sent and his arriving home Judith recovers and Hamnet has fallen ill and died, the exact sequence O’Farrell follows here. It’s well done in both versions, but I can’t find any evidence or source for this version other than here. I wonder whether the television programme acted as a spark of inspiration for this part of O’Farrell’s story? The programme ends with this apposite and poignant speech from King John:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
Fare you well: had you such a loss as I,
I could give better comfort than you do.
I will not keep this form upon my head,
When there is such disorder in my wit.
O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort, and my sorrows’ cure!

King John, Act 3 scene 4

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Book review

Wintersmith, (Discworld 35) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2006

Wintersmith (Discworld Novels) by Sir Terry Pratchett - Paperback - from World of Books Ltd (SKU: GOR001210366)

The Tiffany Aching series of novels gave Discworld a wonderful burst of new life – almost half of the last dozen novels in the series were Tiffany stories. We have followed Tiffany’s story since she was nine, and her training as a witch now sees her placed with Miss Treason, a 113-year old witch renowned for her dark and mysterious powers (which Tiff quickly works out are simply “boffo”, or as Granny Weatherwax would put it, headology. )

Unusually for Pratchett the novel opens with the novel’s climax, and then takes the reader back to the story’s origins. This structure isn’t a problem – it allows the reader to navigate the plot more easily when we know the destination, and is one of the more telling signs that this is a story for younger readers. Tiffany’s problems begin when she goes to observe the traditional “dark morris” dance which welcomes in the winter, Tiffany spontaneously joins the dance, interrupting the passage of the seasons between the two elementals, the Wintersmith and the Summer Lady—the personification of summer. The Wintersmith has never met anyone like Tiffany before, and once the dance is over determines to become a mortal and seek her out, using their spiritual connection forged over Tiff’s silver horse pendant.

This disruption of the natural order of things isn’t going to go well. With the help of the Feegles, and the loving support of Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, Tiffany has to put things right. It’s not easy when you are being wooed by someone who can make all snowflakes in your image – and icebergs as well! At first Tiff takes refuge in Lancre, and the warm embrace of Nanny Ogg’s cottage, but the elemental Wintersmith is going to track her down.

Like most young adult novels, Wintersmith is really about growing up. Teenage Tiffany has to work through many of the problems and issues young teenagers face. Her fledgling romance with Roland, the Baron’s son (who she rescued in the first novel in the series, The Wee Free Men) is coming along nicely, but she has to battle to keep it private from the feegles and the witches. Speaking of battles, maintaining any sense of privacy from feegles (who take their geas to protect their ‘big wee hag’ very seriously) and witches who can see through her eyes isn’t easy. Later she has to come to terms with the death of an older character. Her place in her peer group is delicately balanced, and she manages to do the right thing and find her place in that hierarchy despite being aware of the subtle manipulations of Granny Weatherwax. Finally, she takes responsibility for her own actions when the temptation to shift the blame or hide behind others is overwhelming. While she may be flawed we are never in any doubt that Tiff will do the right thing and that will bring its own reward:

“It was lonely on the hill, and cold. And all you could do was keep going. You could scream, cry, and stamp your feet, but apart from making you feel warmer, it wouldn’t do any good. You could say it was unfair, and that was true, but the universe didn’t care because it didn’t know what “fair” meant. That was the big problem about being a witch. It was up to you. It was always up to you.”

I love it when Pratchett has the confidence to make such epic characters as Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg minor players in Tiffany’s story. The feegles are an endless delight, and there are some interesting new characters, not least 113 year-old Miss Treason, who wonderfully calls Granny “the girl Weatherwax”. Arguably the novel’s only weak spot is its fairly innocuous ending, but as I always say whoever reads Pratchett for his plots is really missing the point. I don’t think I read these novels with any particular care when they were first published, unwisely seeing them as books for younger readers, (which of course they are) but wrongly concluding there would be little in them for older readers. I am so glad to have got that wrong.

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Book review

The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch, 1978

I’ve just spent a week in the company of a monster, and I didn’t enjoy it.

I really hated The Sea, The Sea. Or rather I really hated the novel’s protagonist, which on this occasion amounted to the same thing. For a novelist with a reputation for labyrinthine plots, this narrative is fairly straightforward. Theatre director Charles Arrowby the novel’s narrator, retires to the seaside to write his memoirs. Arrowby is utterly self-absorbed. His life has seen a succession of women throwing themselves at him and this pattern continues as he is visited by a series of former lovers, actresses of different degrees of fame, all wanting to resume their relationships. He is not interested, principally because he prefers to steal married women away from their husbands. As soon as each conquest has been mastered he loses interest. His latest obsession is Hartley, a childhood friend who he happens to meet in the village, who he sets about trying to persuade to leave her mild-mannered husband. He even goes to the extreme of kidnapping her, and only releases her once it is obvious she is not going to relent. To justify his obnoxious and criminal behaviour he persuades himself that Hartley is the long lost love of his life, although she clearly sees their friendship in a different light.

Charles’s magnetic attractiveness to women is not however just in his imagination – even at the end of the novel he received letters from a 17 year-old young woman offering him her virginity and to bear his child. But it is mysterious, because he is a bully and a bore. He is always having epiphanies, supposedly profound insights into what is really going on in people’s heads, insights which are invariably wrong. Undeterred he pushes on to the next revelation. When he finds out that his cousin James and his former lover Lizzie have been meeting for coffee occasionally, he throws a tantrum, reacting as if they have been betraying him. Instead of telling him to grow up they indulge his hurt feelings, apologise and withdraw. When he is pushed into the sea and nearly drowns the list of possible suspects is long – I think I would have been tempted!

So we’ve established that Charles is a deluded ego-maniac who is a danger to all around him. Just in case this point needs reinforcing, Murdoch has him see a monster in the choppy waters around his house. This monster is quickly dismissed as a LSD flashback, but later Charles reflects that “I let loose my own demons, not least the sea-monster of jealousy” (528) just in case anyone had missed the heavy-handed symbolism in the preceding 527 pages,

We are supposed to find Charles’s pretentious approach to food amusing. He prepares various mildly eccentric meals for himself and others. At first they are very slightly comic – I stress slightly:
“Anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil… Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water-biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese. Of course I never touch foreign cheeses.”

But there’s a relentlessness to this, and we get descriptions of meal after meal:

“Lentil soup, followed by chipolata sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea, then dried apricots and shortcake biscuits… Fresh apricots are best of course, but the dried kind, soaked for twenty-four hours and then well drained, make a heavenly accompaniment for any sort of mildly sweet biscuit or cake. They are especially good with anything made of almonds, and thus consort happily with red wine.”

OK, we get the point.

Murdoch is a hugely respected writer, but even her greatest fans seem prepared to acknowledge her flaws. Here the greatest sin is simply repetition – if something is worth saying it is repeated time after time. The scenes where Arrowby tries to persuade Hartley to leave her husband, and she asks to be allowed to leave, go on for page after page with little variation. The conceit that the novel is Arrowby’s memoir is inconsistently maintained – the struggle of having to construct time for him to draft his recollection of the previous events gets tiresome and is quietly dropped. Murdoch’s (alright, Arrowby’s) technique for building suspense is limited:

“Something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it” (1)

“Something rather odd and distressing has just occurred”

“I was sitting writing the above late last night in my drawing room when something very disconcerting happened” (74)

“Shortly after this something very disconcerting happened”. (107)

Obviously this is equally a reflection on Charles’s limited ability to express himself, but the end result is wearying.

It should be possible to enjoy and appreciate a novel where the central character is obnoxious or deluded (Pale Fire?) but I didn’t find it so here. Arrowby is a pompous bore who desperately needs to wake up to his own short-comings, but never. Even someone trying to kill him doesn’t make him pause for reflection! There’s no development in Charles’s character – he remains as deluded and ignorant at the end of the story as he was in its beginning. Is it my shortcoming in not being able to enjoy this widely revered novel(ist)?

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