Book review

Men at Arms (Discworld 15) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 1993

It is incredibly hard to choose a favourite Discworld novel. It’s like choosing a favourite ice-cream (what, only one?!). But if forced to choose it might well be Men at Arms. I have a suspicion I have said the same thing about previous novels in the Discworld series, but I am too lazy to go back and check, and it wouldn’t invalidate the choice in any event.

Men at Arms

Men at Arms opens with Edward D’Eath, an assassin becoming convinced that the restoration of the monarchy will cure Ankh-Morpork of its various problems, and restore his family to their rightful place in its heirarchy. He discovers after a suspiciously brief and cursory amount of research that Corporal Carrot Ironfoundersson, recent recruit to the City Watch, is the rightful heir to the AM throne. He charts a course for the restoration of the monarchy by plotting to make the Patriarch deeply unpopular, assuming that the populace will want the intervention of a fairy-tale king to right all the wrongs.

You might reasonably expect this plot line to be central to the novel, but it dwindles away rather quickly, or rather fades into the background, and only comes back when ends need tidying away. I think this is because Pratchett’s real interest is in the men and women of the Watch. Sam Vimes is preparing for his marriage to Sybil and his subsequent retirement from police work, while at the same time dealing with the new recruits to the Watch: Cuddy (dwarf), Detritus (troll), and Angua (female, and we soon discover, also a werewolf). Several murders follow swiftly on the back of D’Eath’s discovery of Carrot’s ancestry, and a standard police procedural begins to unfold, albeit in the bizarre and dangerous setting of Ankh-Morpork. Vimes eventually works out from a trail of clues that D‘Eath has stolen a gun (‘gonne’), Discworld’s first firearm, from the Assassins’ Guild. This being Discworld, this is no ordinary gun – it seems to have a personality all of its own. The investigation’s conclusion is revealed with a flair that suggests Pratchett could have made a lively writing detective novels had he ever tired of Discworld.

So while Vimes and Sybil are eventually married, Vimes’ reluctant plans to retire are foiled as he is appointed Commander of the Watch, to all intents and purposes his old job with a new rank. The temporary changes to the Watch that Vimes and Carrot have improvised during the course of the investigation are made permanent, and by the end of the novel it is on the path to becoming the formidable force that keeps the peace in the world’s most anarchic city.

The debate about the best segment of Discworld novels and the best place to start will always crop up whenever Pratchett fans convene, and of course it doesn’t have a right answer, but if you haven’t read Pratchett before and are worried that the novels might be a little childish (they are, but in the best possible way) then Men at Arms might be the key to a lifetime of wonderful novels.

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Book review

Here be Dragons, by Stella Gibbons,1956

Long-term readers of this blog, if there is such a thing, will know of my futile quest to find a novel by Stella Gibbons that contains a scintilla of the wit and wisdom of Cold Comfort Farm. I keep buying the lovely Vintage reprints, knowing that it’s not going to happen, but each time hoping to be wrong.Here be dragos

But I’m not. This novel, like all the rest, shows glimpses of promise but would probably not have been printed without the huge affection everyone feels for CCF.

This is standard-fare Gibbons. A sensible, down-to-earth heroine in her late teens or early twenties, in the Flora Poste mould, comes into contact with a group of rather louche bohemians, who are gently poked fun at, with a lot less if any of the suppressed anger and contempt that characterises “Conference at Cold Comfort Farm”.

(‘Has Benedict a beard?’

‘Not so far,’ said Nell cautiously, ‘but they do tend to grow them suddenly, you know.’)

Our heroine, Nell Sely, is uprooted from her comfortable family life when her father, a Church of England vicar, loses his faith. The family moves to a flat in Hampstead provided free of charge by her generous but unappreciated aunt, a nascent radio personality. Said aunt gets her a job as a typist but Nell gives it all up for her remarkably modest dream, a waitress job at The Primula tea rooms. At the same time she falls inexplicably for her cousin John, a scruffy and mildly comic figure who thinks of himself as an artist, but is (depending on how you react to men of this ilk) a privileged, patronising fool or a charming free-spirit. After a lot of tea being drunk and minor incidents to keep the pages turning, the novel fizzles out inconclusively. Nell gets her teashop but not her man, John being called up for National Service after rather pathetically trying to avoid it by hiding from the police (who were sent out to enforce call-ups) in a little old lady’s cottage next door to the family apartment.

This is gentle observational comedy where the interest level never really ticks above medium. We don’t really care what happens to these people – they aren’t engaging or interesting enough. Although Gibbons evokes the grimness and griminess of 1950’s London wonderfully, the plot is paper thin, little happens, and an attempt to inject a little drama as the novel wanders to an ending falls flat. The humour can at times be diverting, even though this world seems very alien from the other side of the millennium, where the worst thing that can happen is for someone to lose their faith or be called up into the Army and where sex is only hinted at as something that only bad girls do.

I won’t stop reading Gibbons, but I will continue to do so with a sense of melancholy that each novel isn’t Cold Comfort Farm, and a sense of delight that at least Cold Comfort is!

 

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Book review

How to be Right by James O’Brien, 2019

James O’Brien is that rarity, a progressive talk radio host. While most of his fellow talkshow hosts seem to actively encourage people to spill their prejudices, O’Brien confronts them. His technique and reasons for doing so are the heart of this book – it’s not really a handbook for being right (I think the structure of the title is self-consciously copying Caitlin Moran’s ‘How to be a Woman‘ and similar works) more a series of essays about current affairs and controversial issues, illustrated by extensive extracts from O’Brien’s many conversations with right-wing callers.

As you would expect, Brexit is front and centre of the book, together with the closely related issue of immigration to the UK. O’Brien cleverly unpicks the prejudices of his callers, exposing their logical fallacies, lack of understanding of the issues, and his command of the facts. Whether he is ever bested in argument – it is what he does for a living after all, and has plenty of time to choose and prepare his field of battle – we don’t learn, I doubt it.

How to be Right is both the Waterstones and WH Smith’s non-fiction book of the month for June (2019), and not surprisingly is selling very well. How to explain the popularity of this book? The sub-title provides a clue – How to be Right – in a World gone Wrong. There is unquestionably an appetite for answers to the question of why the world feels to many people as if it is going wrong, and specifically as if years of progress in which civil and human rights have been taken forward have all of a sudden started to go backwards. We see this most vividly in the USA where women’s productive rights are under open attack, although best not to forget that one of the allegedly moderate candidates in the campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party underway right now is in favour of more than halving the period within which abortions can be performed.

So the world feels as if it has gone wrong, and people are hungry for answers as to why, and what can be done about it. Which is where O’Brien’s book falls short. Because while it is excellent at pointing out, often using their own words, the weaknesses in the arguments of racists, homophobes and Brexiteers, O’Brien hasn’t any constructive alternative, other than not being racist, homophobic, and staying in the EU. I am aware I am being very unfair here. First, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with arguing that the best reaction to racism is not being racist, and so on. Although I suspect that few people listening to his programme or reading his book will have said “you know what, I am being a bit of an idiot, James is right, and I will renounce my former unpleasant and regressive attitudes”. It would be nice if they did of course. The other reason for considering this argument as unfair is that O’Brien makes no claims about his ability to articulate a vision for a better world. His book is simply a handbook for winning arguments with idiots, not a manifesto.

O’Brien has done his homework. He has taken time to read all the relevant background issues and understand the difference (for example) between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. He knows his stuff, and is able to deploy lots of facts and figures to win his case. Would I have enjoyed this book a fraction as much if O’Brien had been a persuasive, charming, well-informed conservative? I doubt it, which means I am still stuck in the progressive Remain echo-chamber. But at least I am better informed than I was before I learned how to be right.

This is an entertaining and straightforward read. O’Brien seems a nice bloke, and he is on the side of the angels. If you want to see how he does it, recommended.

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Book review

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carre, 1963

I read ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold’, as a standalone novel, without realising that it is to all intents and purposes a sequel to A Call for the Dead, Le Carre’s 1961 debut novel. Reading the novels out of sequence meant that the central plot twist – which I won’t give away here even though I usually very relaxed about spoilers – was kept disguised for much of the novel, even if on reflection it was fairly guessable.

Why read a Cold War spy novel now? Is it in any way still relevant? Certainly the political context of the novel has changed dramatically – when The Spy was first published it had an immediacy and relevance it has now lost. It exposed the dark underside of the world of Cold War espionage, in which each side, East and West, were both morally equivalent and ambivalent, where murder was commonplace, and where the only justification for one’s actions was the final outcome. Now it is just a historically based adventure novel, with as much relevance as The 39 Steps or The Riddle of the Sands.

Alec Leamas runs the Berlin office of the British secret service. Berlin is divided between East and West by the recently constructed Wall (a landmark point was passed recently when the time the Wall has been down became longer than the time it stood).  The novel opens as Leamas’s operation loses its last double agent, shot whilst defecting from East Berlin. Leamas is recalled to London by his boss, ‘Control’ and is given one last mission: to fake his defection to East Germany and to undermine their ruthlessly efficient secret service. There is very little exposition setting all this out – we learn of this plot only gradually as it unfolds.

I am not sure Leamas would have made a convincing potential defector. Yes he is fired, starts drinking, has money problems and serves a short prison sentence. But there are surely flags that this is a trap. He falls into the clutches of the East Germans far too easily. A menial job in a library leads him to meet Liz Gold, who just happens to be secretary of her local cell of the Communist Party of Great Britain. This obviously isn’t a coincidence – Liz is unknowingly part of the plot. After his release from jail Leamas is approached by an East German recruiter and with little pause for breath he defects and sells all his country’s secrets – or what little he purports to know – for a few thousand pounds.

During his interrogation Leamas mentions British payments to a double agent in the East. This, we later come to understand, is part of the plot to sow discord among the East German spy operation, which culminates in a trial of the Communist spymaster Mundt. During the trial the British plot is exposed when Liz is called as a surprise witness, only for a secret underlying plot, to which Leamas has been oblivious, to be revealed. The novel’s tragic denouement comes swiftly thereafter with a degree of inevitability.

This is a well-written page-turner. Le Carre evokes the seediness of Leamas’s world with very precise prose and imagery:

“They walked to her flat through the rain and they might have been anywhere—Berlin, London, any town where paving stones turn to lakes of light in the evening rain, and the traffic shuffles despondently through wet streets.”

Although there is a moral ambivalence about the novel’s portrait of espionage, Le Carre still takes sides – he is disgusted by intellectual, moral and actual poverty of the East. Although the world Le Carre portrays is now gone, this didn’t feel like an anachronism (in the way the Buchan and Childers books now do). In part this is because of the enduring popularity of Le Carre’s work to film and television adaptations, which keep it current, and in part due to his cynicism and amorality which is very modern in its sensibility. I am glad I have now read Le Carre – he was a novelist I have skirted around many times but never quite got round to – but I suspect his other spy novels will be very similar to this one. But next time I am looking for a book to help pass a train journey I will know not to overlook Le Carre.

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Book review

Lords and Ladies (Discworld 14) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 1992

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded”. I suspect most readers would identify this as something Douglas Adams wrote, rather than his successor in genius, Sir Terry Pratchett.  It sets the tone for this wonderful novel. But perhaps I shouldn’t use this term, because as Lords and Ladies points out

“Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.” 

This is just one aspect of the genius of Sir Terry – his ability to use language creatively to make us think deeply about language and beyond, to a very serious discussion about power and responsibility within society.

Of course there is a lighter side to this novel. It includes one line much loved by Discworld fans:

“Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.”

I first read Lords and Ladies a long time ago. I have a vague memory of being slightly disappointed. But one of the many wonderful things about STP as a writer is his re-readability; I honestly can’t think of another writer whose novels retain their freshness and originality on multiple re-readings in the way Sir Terry’s do. In a word, I was wrong, Lords and Ladies is magnificent.

It follows chronologically immediately following the events of Witches Abroad. I could easily be wrong about this but I think this is one of the few times in the series that STP does this (The Colour of Magic/The Light Fantastic being the other example that springs to mind.) This gives the reader the impression that they are enjoying a continuing narrative, an adventure in real time. Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick return from their adventure in Genua to find that while they have been away the people of Lancre have neglected their defence against the dark arts lessons. In particular the witches’s warnings about the Dancers, a mysterious stone circle outside the village have been ignored. With Lancre’s magical protections weakened and unguarded, a portal to the world of the elves is opened.

But as you will have seen above, these elves are not the noble creatures of MiddleEarth- they are amoral monsters that use “glamour” to alter human’s perceptions of them. The elves break into the Discworld and cause carnage at Magrat’s wedding, to be confronted (and OK, yes, spoilers, ultimately defeated) by a feat of magic that only Granny W could pull off. There is a sub-plot featuring a visit by the Arch-Chancellor and the Librarian to the wedding, but otherwise that is pretty much it – a fairly unsubstantial piece in terms of the plot. But reading STP for this plotting would be very much missing the point – you need to read him for his characterisation and his ideas.

STP really hit his stride at this point in the Discworld history, and never really took a misstep thereafter. So many great novels to come.

 

 

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Book review

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde, 2001

When I was drafting my review of Fforde’s recent novel, Early Riser, I planned to refer back to an earlier review of his first published novel, The Eyre Affair – only to find that in fact I hadn’t written it! I must have read this novel before I started my blog, although I have reviewed some of the later novels in what was to go on to become the Thursday Next series.Fforde

The Eyre Affair is a brilliantly original genre-busting novel. It follows the adventures of Literary Detective Thursday Next, on the trail of a genuinely sinister villain, Acheron Hades. The novel is set in a strangely recognisable parallel universe, in which England and Imperial Russia are still fighting the Crimean War, Wales is an independent nation, and where literature is given its rightful value by society (one of my favourite scenes is where Thursday and her on/off boyfriend Landen Parke-Laine go to a performance of Richard III which is a parody of the audience-participation showings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show).

Some of the jokes – a character is called Braxton Hicks, for example – are groan-inducing, but the literary references are very clever. There’s a throw-away joke about Cardenio and the repartee about the Shakespearean authorship “question” for example shows a depth of knowledge and love of literature you won’t find in many mystery/adventure/detective novels, let alone comedies.

Thursday is a strong central character around which Fforde builds his narrative. She is a veteran of the Crimean war, where she lost her brother in a modern version of the Charge of the Light Brigade. She is in the career doldrums when she is unexpectedly recruited to track down criminal mastermind Acheron Hades, her former university professor.  Hades is a formidable and ruthless criminal, kills without hesitation or any trace of remorse, and nearly kills Thursday herself until the fortunate intervention, and this is where it gets really wild, of Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre. Yes, that Mr Rochester. Because in this universe it is possible, somehow, to move from the world of literature to what I am going to refer to as the round world, and vice-versa.

This fluidity between worlds allows Thursday and others to intervene in texts and change their outcomes. Some of what happens to Thursday, such as the supernatural message that leads her to change her life, is paralleled in the events of Jane Eyre, but Thursday is no Jane. She is not a passive figure but a woman of action and ideas.

Fforde’s achievement is that he doesn’t just parody genres, he delivers a series of interwoven narratives that all succeed in their own right. The detective story is an enjoyable mystery; the adventure elements are exciting, and the romance between Thursday and Parke-Laine, albeit kept in the background, is believable and touching, and plays its part in the novel’s finale. Fforde’s world building relies on the contrast between the familiar and the bizarre – for example in this world the dodo has been genetically re-engineered. Best of all, for me, were the literary jokes, which are done with respect for the source material. Both of the novel’s endings, one in Jane Eyre, the other in the ‘real world’ are borrowed from the Bronte text but with a clever twist.

Basically, I loved it. I can’t understand why it’s not been adapted for television I will never know, I can see it working brilliantly.

 

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Book review

An Author Ian Likes: in memorium, Sir Terry Pratchett

Perfectly put

stuffianlikes's avatarStuff Ian Likes

(This post was originally written on the original stuffianlikes blog the day after Sir Terry passed. I’ve tidied up some grammatical errors and added a couple of pictures but this is otherwise the way it appeared 4 years-minus-a-day-ago)

I usually dwell on these posts for bloody ages but this one needs to be gotten down quickly or it will never be done.

It’s 1985. I’m a weedy, bespectacled kid of 15 with acne, bad hair and a desire to see more of other worlds. I see a new book on the shelves of Angus & Robertson on my weekly trip into Hobart to bookshop crawl. The Colour Of Magic, by Terry Pratchett. It’s thin but the cover looks great and the blurb sounds pretty cool (I have no idea who Jerome K. Jerome is but I still think Douglas Adams is funny so half of it has worked) so I’ll…

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Book review

Small Gods (Discworld 13) by Terry Pratchett, 1992

It feels appropriate (if unplanned) to publish this review on the sad fourth anniversary of Sir Terry’s untimely death.

By this point in the Discworld saga, he was really hitting the peak of his powers. This was a writer who is really confident with his material, able to tackle large themes and ready to take risks. And for any writer religion is arguably the biggest risk – you are always going to upset someone. Small Gods is a fascinating discussion of the nature of divinity. That makes it sounds very serious, but that was the author’s genius – to write about serious themes in a very funny way.

The novel is set in Omnia, a kingdom in the continent of Klatch, new to Discworld at this point I believe, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to a medieval Catholic country in the grip of a frenzied search for any trace of heresy. Pratchett has given Om a far-eastern name, and mixes up his religious references freely, but the use of torture by the Quisition to enforce religious conformity and stamp out free thinking, has only one true origin. In Omnia religion has become a distorted version of itself, with torture and fear being its dominant characteristic. In these circumstances true belief in the God Om himself has begun to wither, so much so that the God Om finds himself reincarnated in the body of a tortoise. It seems he is destined to return to the world of once great but now Small Gods who exist on the borders of reality, desperate for believers from whom they derive their existence.

By a million to one chance, and therefore a literary certainty, Om in his tortoise form encounters the novice Brutha, the only remaining true believer in Omnia. Brutha’s idetic memory is used Vorbis, the head of the ExQuisition, to memorise the way through a labyrinth used to guard the library of Ephebe. Vorbis is one of Pratchett’s scariest monsters, a psychopath so controlled and uncaring that he is able to retain his position at the head of the Omnian church by fear alone. An underground movement, reminiscent of the early Christian church, survives in secret, passing its belief in the Disc-shape of the word through its slogan “The Turtle Moves”. The scene is set for a clash of beliefs in which someone is going to die. Guessing who isn’t a challenge, but the journey – in this case a physical journey through the desert – is where the transformation of Brutha from a menial drudge to a prophet occurs.

As always with Pratchett his wit and wisdom shines through. Here he is on religious repression, for example:

“Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.”

or here on the miracle of our existence:

“Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that’d happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time…”

Sir Terry’s death was such a loss, but he left us a wonderful collection of novels that are a fine legacy.

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Book review

Paris Echo, by Sebastian Faulks, 2018

Have you ever got the end of a novel and asked “What was the point of that, then?” In a sense I know this is a futile question – there is no ‘point’ to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or Beethoven’s Fifth. Equally not all novels have a point – they exist as a work of the author’s creativity and can’t be judged for their utility. I can think of some exceptions to this rule – there is a very definite point to Gulliver’s Travels, for example, or Animal Farm, but most novels are not didactic – they just tell a story, introduce some characters, and tell us something about the human experience. Continue reading →

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Book review

Witches Abroad, (Discworld 12) by Terry Pratchett, 1991

Is it possible to have two favourite Discworld books? I have three favourite children after all, so conceptually it should be possible. Were it to be deemed so by the powers that be, then ‘Witches Abroad’ would definitely be my joint favourite Discworld novel alongside Witches-abroad-cover‘The Night Watch’. Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, her perfect foil, and Magrat Garlick on a road trip across the Disc, travelling through a landscape of fairy stories brought to life by Lilith de Tempscire, Granny’s evil sister. Just perfect!

Granny and Nanny are two of my favourite Discworld characters – Magrat is a wet hen, and I can take her or leave her – and together they are wonderful. Nanny Ogg is sometimes overshadowed by Granny’s awesomeness, but her she is in full flow, a force of nature that bulldozes its way across the Disc, all the way to Genua. Genua is a coastal town with an annual celebration called Fat Lunchtime, a tradition of cooking based around gumbo and, and all in all bears a strong resemblance to New Orleans.

Witches Abroad also contains the greatest Discworld story Sir Terry never wrote. At the end of this novel, when the bad guys have been defeated and order restored, the witches have a choice – to go home, or to go and “see the elephant”, a colloquial expression for going home the long way, continuing their holiday as much as possible. They agree to see the elephant, and the reader is left to picture what a glorious, outrageous adventure that would have been. (If it turns out that this novel was actually written, and I have just forgotten it, which is quite possible, I will be both deeply embarrassed and hugely delighted).

So what is it about this novel that makes it so full of wonder? It can’t be the jokes, because they almost all qualify as ‘dad’ jokes – even the title is a pretty silly play on words (Witches Abroad = witches out and about, and also in foreign lands). Or try this schoolboyish fun with the fact that in some languages words have gender, which might be funny if you are 11

“‘S called the Vieux River.”
– “Yes?”
– “Know what that means?”
– “No.”
– “The Old (Masculine) River,” said Nanny.
– “Yes?”
– “Words have sex in foreign parts,” said Nanny hopefully.”

Or here’s another joke, when the witches see a stuffed lion’s head:

By gor’, that’s a bloody enormous cat.’
‘It’s a lion,’ said Granny Weatherwax, looking at the stuffed head over the fireplace.
‘Must’ve hit the wall at a hell of a speed, whatever it was,’ said Nanny Ogg.
‘Someone killed it,’ said Granny Weatherwax, surveying the room.
‘Should think so,’ said Nanny.  ‘If I’d seen something like that eatin’ its way through the wall I’d of hit it myself with a poker.”

OK, silly jokes yes, but slapstick can be funny?

Is it the ‘world building’? (“The process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe. The resulting world may be called a constructed world.”) I think this is getting closer. STP made no attempt to make the basic concept of Discworld anything other than fun, but over time he developed a geography and history for the world that within its own constraints – it is balanced on a turtle carrying four elephants after all – is believable. Is it the story-telling? Definitely not. One of the joys of rereading these novels is rediscovering (and then quickly re-forgetting) what happens, because what happens is usually not very important. We know the good guys are going to win, and the demons from the Dungeon Dimensions are going to be defeated in that somewhat vague way that most of these novels deploy to resolve matters. In the tradition of most great story writers STP borrows plot lines freely and openly, even going so far in this novel to make that borrowing itself part of the plot. Dracula, The Wizard of Oz, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, – you name it, STP borrows from it.

So what’s left? It would be wrong to use the term “philosophy”, but the underlying humanism of the author’s perspective on the world shines out from every one of his novels. He has profound insights into the human (and dwarven, troll and other life-forms) condition. You really have to read the books to get this point properly, but for now how about this from Granny Weatherwax?

“You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage.”

Lastly, there are the novel’s extraordinary, deeply loved, characters. I’ve written at length in previous Discworld reviews about Granny, Nanny and Sam Vimes in particular, so I am not going to repeat myself too much other than to say they are utterly magnificent, utterly believable, and full of the humanity that makes these novels some of my favourites on the planet. Sorry, roundworld.

 

 

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