Sunday, March 10, 2024

2024/039: Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes — Rob Wilkins

...it was frequently said that no train anywhere in Britain was permitted to run until it was established that at least one passenger on board was reading a Terry Pratchett. [loc. 370]

Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, by his assistant and friend Rob Wilkins, is always honest, sometimes sentimental and frequently very amusing. It shows us a man fuelled, to some extent, by anger, and perhaps by a sense of class inequality. He was told at school that he'd never amount to anything. Indeed, he left the education system to take up a full-time job as a reporter for a local paper -- but by then he'd already been published in John Carnell's 'Science Fantasy' magazine, at the age of 15. Some familiar names in the chapters about his teenage years: Rog Peyton, Christopher Priest, Dave Langford... and the British Science Fiction Association.

The early chapters focus on Pratchett's career as a reporter, and his work as a PR man for the Central Electricity Generating Board: but the book really becomes interesting after he gives up the day job and begins writing full-time. Some interesting insights into his process -- a combination of self-discipline and distraction. From the sound of it, he just wrote. (‘A 60,000 target, that means 212 days. No, let’s say by Christmas which means 370 words a night. Aim for 400!’ [loc. 3441]). Rob Wilkins started work as his assistant in 2000, and shows no reluctance in documenting Pratchett's less dignified moments -- argumentative, irritable and unreasonable. But it's also clear that there was great affection between the two of them. And Pratchett remained deeply in love with his wife Lyn, and devoted to his daughter Rhianna, until the end. (I still think he had the best possible death: at home, surrounded by family and with his cat on his bed.)

Wilkins' account of the Embuggerance -- Pratchett's term for the posterior cortical atrophy that killed him at 66 and affected him for at least a decade before that -- is moving and terrifying. Wilkins went from font-fixer and technical support to piecing together scraps of dictation -- as well as looking after Pratchett in more practical, physical ways. Dementia is horrific in its sheer randomness; the moments when Pratchett's brain failed him, leading to panic or incoherence or rage; the feeling of helplessness in the face of a disease for which there is as yet no cure. I watched my father's personality fragment and erode in the face of a similar illness (though he was much older, and had suffered multiple strokes). I hope it does not happen to me.

I can carry a grudge as well as anyone, and Terry Pratchett was once rudely dismissive of me, so I haven't read any of his books for many years. (Apart from rereads of Good Omens.) This is my problem and my loss. And hey, the books are still there waiting... I suspect I'd have enjoyed A Life With Footnotes even more if I'd been more of a Pratchett fan: I think it's about time I got over that long-ago dismissal and got reading. So many books! And who knows how much time any of us have?

Fulfils the ‘Nomination’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge, on the rather shaky basis of this quotation: "...the idea of getting shortlisted for prizes and not winning them was worse to Terry than the idea of not getting shortlisted for them in the first place. This had been his mindset since at least 1989, when Truckers was nominated for a Smarties Book prize, only to be ruled out on the contentious grounds that the story seemed to be inviting – as indeed it was – a sequel." [loc. 3979]

For as long as he writes, he is still Terry Pratchett. So, for as long as he needs me to, I will help him to write. [loc. 6628]

Saturday, March 09, 2024

2024/038: The Night Watch — Sarah Waters

How long did they have to go on, letting the war spoil everything? They had been patient, all this time. They’d lived in darkness. They’d lived without salt, without scent. They’d fed themselves little scraps of pleasure, like parings of cheese. Now she became aware of the minutes as they passed: she felt them, suddenly, for what they were, as fragments of her life, her youth, that were rushing away like so many drops of water, never to return. [loc. 5289]

London, 1947: Kay lives in a half-derelict house owned by a Christian Scientist, mourning a great loss. Helen lives with popular author Julia, but is jealous of Julia's other friends. Duncan works in a candle factory, and lives with an older gentleman he calls 'Uncle Horace'. Duncan's sister Viv lives with her father, works with Helen and is in a relationship with Reggie, who is married. All of them are lonely, miserable and greatly changed by their wartime experiences.

Then Waters takes us back to 1944 and shows us how they got to where they are: the mystery about Duncan's time in prison, Kay being her best self as an ambulance driver during the bombing of London, Helen's infidelity, Viv's catastrophe. And further back, to 1941, as a kind of epilogue: how Kay met Helen, how Viv met Reggie, the evening that Duncan's life changed.

This is a book that demands to be reread: at least, I had to immediately turn back to the first chapters to reread in light of what was only revealed later in the novel. Waters never lapses into explanation: every 1947 scene, every emotion, has its roots in chronologically-earlier events, showing us (rather than telling us) how wartime exigencies shaped and changed each protagonist's life. The prose is lucid and informal, each chapter with the subtly distinct voice of its focal character. (Viv: 'she couldn’t bear it when they started talking so airily about prison, all of that'; Kay: 'with absolutely nothing wrong with her, living like a cripple, like a rat'; Helen: 'as if herds of great, complaining creatures were hurling themselves through the city sewers'; Duncan: 'Never being able to say the thing that people expected'.)

These are ordinary people. Nothing exceptional happens to them. They bear witness to the war, and to its little horrors: a child's jawbone full of milk teeth, a pigeon with its wings ablaze, a botched backstreet abortion. They learn to take each day as it comes. They find moments of joy amid the chaos. And then the war ends, and they are all, in different ways, suddenly lost.

I'm still thinking a lot about this novel (which I have owned for years, but only recently felt ready to read). I think it will haunt me for a while.

Fulfils the ‘Nominated for The Booker Prize’ (it was shortlisted in 2006) rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

2024/037: Checkmate in Berlin — Giles Milton

the most pressing issues facing the city’s traumatised population, including law and order (there was none), Nazis in hiding (there were many) and the challenges of governing a city in which the entire infrastructure had collapsed. [loc. 1706]

I'm coming to rely on Milton for straightforward accounts of historical events, peppered with fascinating anecdotes: Checkmate in Berlin, which deals with the beginning of the Cold War, was no exception. Due to the lacunae in my historical knowledge (not helped by lacklustre syllabi at secondary school, which was mostly local history and The Causes Of The First World War) I was only vaguely aware of the Berlin Airlift, the partition of post-war Berlin, et cetera. Milton illustrates the personalities involved (Roosevelt not far from death, Churchill bellicose and drunken, 'Uncle Joe' avuncular and scheming, et cetera) and describes the aftermath of the 'liberation' of Berlin from the Nazis -- a free-for-all of rape and looting, officially sanctioned by the Soviets and perpetrated by military personnel at all levels. 'Ulbricht refused to countenance abortion for women who had been raped, since it would be tantamount to admitting that the Red Army had done the raping.' [loc. 994] Britain and America were both slow to recognise that their wartime allies, the Russians, were now the enemy.

Tensions remained high, with Soviet interference in politics, Nazis recruited into key positions, combative radio stations and all manner of skulduggery. Then, in June 1948, the Soviets cut off all land routes to Berlin: the British and Americans refused to retreat, and instead designed and carried out the immense humanitarian effort of delivering thousands of tons of food and other supplies every day. Which meant over 500 daily flights; which meant an upgrade to the Tempelhof airport. 'The bulldozers required to transform the place were brought in by plane. Too heavy to be transported in a C-47, they were sliced into segments using oxyacetylene cutters and then welded back together once they were in Berlin.' [loc. 4944] The British civilian flights alone carried over 150,000 tons of supplies -- from a country where most of the population were living on rations similar to those of Berliners. The blockade lasted for 323 days, until the Soviets admitted defeat (of a sort). A monumental effort (and one that feels in sharp contrast to contemporary affairs) it had moments of lightness. I was charmed by Operation Little Vittles, in which American pilots dropped sweets for the children of Berlin. 'As a ‘good news’ story, it was hard to beat: smiling children devouring huge quantities of sweets supplied by caring pilots of the American Air Force...radio stations across the United States took up the cause, launching appeals for handkerchiefs so they could be turned into parachutes [for candy bars]: ‘Send in a handkerchief and we’ll play your request tune.’' [loc. 5361]

Lots of appalling, yet fascinating, detail here: the fate of Hitler's teeth, and of the German dental nurse who identified them; the looting of the Pergamon altar; the symptoms of Asiatic syphilis; the eye-opening nightclubs, such as the Tabasco, where it was apparently '‘genuinely impossible to tell who was a man or a boy and who was a girl’'. Recent reading has given me some affection for the Russians: Checkmate in Berlin has done a great deal to counter that.

Fulfils the ‘obstacle’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge, with particular reference to the 323-day Soviet blockade. Many more obstacles were provided by the Russians, though the Americans, French and British could be immovable if necessary.

Sunday, March 03, 2024

2024/036: In the Heart of Hidden Things — Kit Whitfield

We build our houses with sense and geometry and plough our fields with toil and patience, and all the while, a blink away are the People, dancing and tearing, gifting and stealing, snatching up fury and scattering light, feeding on air. [loc. 48]

In a rural, pre-industrial setting with strong overtones of England, three generations of Smiths are walking through the forest with a friend of the family, Franklin Thorpe. When Franklin accidentally steps off the path, it's Matthew Smith who rescues him from the fairy ring, while Matthew's son John is sent to fetch snails as a gift for the inhabitants of the ring, and Matthew's father Jedediah reproves John for his abstracted air. Truly, John can't help his fascination with the People, also known as the 'kind friends': there's a rumour that he was conceived the same night as his mother Janet had some dealings with the fae. But when John tries to save the mute, wild lad Tobias -- who's liable to be hanged for poaching, and to enable wicked landlord Ephraim Brady to score a point against his tenants -- he overreaches himself.

There's a shuck-like figure called Black Hal (seen seven times a year, brings death to those he hunts) and a disdainful and easily-offended talking cat, not to mention a bramble-bush that's home to an entity who doesn't care for being uprooted: but there are also cruel landlords, iniquitious Lord Robert, and unsteady husbands. And at the heart of the novel is John, whose unique perceptions reveal inconvenient truths and the ways in which they can be remedied. And John is not a lonely outcast, but is surrounded by his family and friends.

I liked this novel very much indeed. John (and, perhaps to a greater extent, Tobias) are affected by the People's influence in ways that reflect neurodivergent behaviour, and that mindset has unexpected benefits when it comes to making deals with, and outmanouevring, the kind friends who live 'a blink away'. Whitfield's prose is calm and measured and occasionally very unnerving through its understatement. ('The verges streamed past him, everything in manic flow, and the sky was clenched, the light squeezing out of it like blood draining from pressed flesh.') There are frequent digressions, old stories, scenes of smithcraft, anecdotes and asides: this is not a book that cuts to the chase. As soon as I'd finished it I bought the next in the series, All the Hollow of the Sky (at full price!), which should indicate my regard for this, the first in a series.

Kit Whitfield writes in her afterword that 'I live among the hidden things, and my normal is very far away from what most people think of when they hear the word ...I didn’t decide to write neurodivergent characters when I began this book. I just wrote characters that appealed to me, and at a certain point noticed what I was doing.' Her son is autistic and ADHD.

Saturday, March 02, 2024

2024/035: Home: A Time Traveller's Tales from Britain's Prehistory — Francis Pryor

...what we might loosely term ‘religion’ was increasing in importance. But instead of being removed from daily life to somewhere less accessible, more and more remote, more liminal, it was brought closer to home, because that was where it was needed. [loc. 3445]

I've read and enjoyed a couple of Pryor's other books (Britain BC and Scenes from Prehistoric Life: From the Ice Age to the Coming of the Romans) so it's probably not surprising that some parts of this engaging book, which Pryor describes as being 'about home and family life and the way ordinary people managed their affairs in the nine or so millennia between the end of the Ice Age and the coming of the Romans', felt familiar. He focuses closely on Britain, and on the archaeological record: there are many anecdotes about his own work in the field -- and I do mean in the field, and in the fen. He's fascinated by the ways in which the lives of prehistoric Britons can be understood from the remains of houses, places of worship and boundaries.

Pryor's overarching theme here is that it was families and small communities, rather than an elite class of warriors and leaders, who drove most of daily life during British prehistory. He posits a major change around 1500BC (the end of the Early Bronze Age), when some kind of religious 'revolution' seems to have occurred: the grander ritual sites, such as barrows and henges, were abandoned, and smaller and more community-based rituals ('often based around water ... but show clear links to aspects of ordinary domestic life') became commonplace.

Pryor is at his best when he conveys the excitement of archaeology: not the grinding monotony of trowel-work, but moments like seeing Mesolithic footprints, left by adults and children in the mud of the Severn. "I found it hard to accept that those footprints had survived for perhaps seven thousand years and then been exposed for just two or three hours, before the next tide washed them away, for ever.' [loc. 1543] In Home, he isn't attempting an objective, scholarly review of the evidence, but a very personal and 'bottom-up' account of the archaeological record and his feelings about it. I disagreed with some of his more sweeping statements ('had the Romans not invaded in AD 43, I’m in little doubt that Britain’s subsequent history would not have been adversely affected' [loc. 4882]), but it felt more like a friendly argument than an author enforcing his views.

Fulfils the ‘moment’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge, just because of that bit about the footprints.

Friday, March 01, 2024

2024/034: The Mars House — Natasha Pulley

January had a bizarre out-of-body moment where a detached part of his brain said: You’re very cold, it’s Monday, and a senator is arguing about you with a mammoth. On Mars. [loc. 4929]

When London floods, America is on fire and at war, and most countries aren't accepting immigrants or refugees. January Stirling, principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, is offered a place on a ship to Tharsis -- which, he is surprised to discover, is a Chinese colony on Mars. Several generations into the colonisation process, the air in Tharsis (four miles below 'sea level') is more or less breathable; refugees from Earth, known as 'Earthstrongers', must wear restrictive cages to stop them injuring Mars-born people (despite which Earthstrongers are the leading cause of death in Tharsis), or undergo the risky and potentially fatal naturalisation process; and gender has been pretty much abolished, through a combination of genetic and social engineering.

January, who's been working as a manual labourer, makes the mistake of arguing very publicly with Senator Gale, a nationalist and pro-naturalisation politician who was badly injured by Earthstrongers in a riot: his joke about not murdering anybody falls flat. In short order he's out of a job, destitute and desperate. He's about to submit himself for naturalisation when he receives an unexpected visit, and an offer of marriage, from Gale themself.

The Mars House feels very much a pandemic novel, though here the catastrophe that confines everyone to their homes (and provokes online exercise classes, daily briefings and requests to check in on neighbours) is an apocalyptic dust storm that blocks almost all sunlight -- essential for energy and water on a cold, dry planet. It's also a novel about immigration and colonisation, and about vengeance: and it's a romance, a political thriller and a murder mystery. Gale hopes to be elected as the next Consul; the current Consul is pro-China and wants Tharsis to remain a colony, and also happens to be related to Gale's former partner, Max, who disappeared without trace. January is increasingly drawn to Gale despite finding their political views abhorrent: he wants to believe that Gale is a good person, but he'd like to know whether Max really ran off with Gale's 'twin', River, or whether Gale had them killed. 

It is possible to love a book while appreciating that it is flawed, and not the author's best. This is certainly true of The Mars House, which has brought me a great deal of joy with a soupçon of annoyance. There are some inconsistencies in the world-building (why don't they use water from the Poles? why only mention the third, artificial moon very late in the story? why does nobody ever question Kasha the dog's reactions?); the story of River and Gale and Max, which casts a very different light on earlier scenes and events, is unravelled too late in the novel; the finale lacks resolution; and I found Gale's comparison of Earthstronger-Martian deaths with historical femicide jarring and rather distasteful. ('There is another situation in which one set of adults mixes with another set who are generally far stronger. It's on Earth. It's men and women...The worst genocide there has ever been... is femicide: the murder of women. It happens everywhere, in every culture, in every time, ever. Except ours.' [loc. 943]) For one thing, Gale has already stressed that most deaths at the hands of Earthstrongers are accidental: most femicide is decidedly not.

But I loved the romance; I loved the mammoths, and Ariel (the AI in charge of the Met Office, who lives twenty vertical miles above Tharsis, on the peak formerly known as Olympus, with a genetically-engineered cat), and the hints of the original, American colony's fate; I love Pulley's prose and the sometimes-whimsical little details and the fascination with language and interpretation. The footnotes (which feature Mori and Daughter, a shop on Filigree Street; bathroom terminology in Mandarin; The Clangers; mammoth jokes and mythology; and Shuppiluliuma, Ariel's cat) are sheer delight. And I adore the exchange between January and Gale, near the end of the novel, when Gale says 'I can tell you, if it would help', and January says, 'it doesn't matter'.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 19th March 2024. An earlier 'review' appeared here, last September: basically just an expression of my joy in the footnotes.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

2024/033: Medea — Rosie Hewlett

Atalanta once told me the world would make me the villain of this story, but she was wrong.
The world tried to make me the victim, so I became its villain. [loc. 4372]]

This is the second modern retelling of Medea's story that I've read in the last year (the first being Rani Selvarajah's Savage Beasts, which transplants the story to 17th-century India): I may avoid further novels based on this particular myth, because neither novel really came together for me. While all the key elements are present in Hewlett's novel, the pacing is uneven and the characters -- apart from Medea herself, and perhaps her aunt Circe -- one-dimensional.

Medea endures a horrific childhood after playfully transforming her brother Apsyrtus into a pig. Once returned to human form, he is cruel to her, as is their abusive father. Medea loves her sister Chalciope, but Chalciope is married off to a man who Medea had hopes of wedding. Then Jason and his crew show up, keen to commandeer the Golden Fleece: Medea helps Jason to accomplish the impossible tasks, leaves Colchis with the Argo and its crew, and dedicates her energies to Jason and his ambition. Jason, here, has little in the way of personality: just a stream of demeaning remarks, reframing Medea's actions and casting doubt on every aspect of her behaviour. Ugh.

Medea would have done well to listen to Circe's advice, which included not marrying Jason, and not turning to the dark 'death' magic unleashed by murder. Instead, she decided (like any teenager) that she knew best, and that Jason's ambition -- and her own desire to be in control of her life -- justified any atrocity. Her use of the dark magic, and her fight to stay in control of it, was at once the most original and the most unsettling aspect of the novel.

I found Medea unevenly paced, with sudden jumps of a year, ten years, five years. That final section came with an unexpected and perhaps unnecessary change of narrator, too, to Chalciope: but Chalciope's sympathy and pity are a good contrast to Medea's rageful hatred. The use of modern colloquialisms -- 'OK'; 'I'll take it from here'; 'that must've been tough to hear' -- jarred with me, too: I don't expect dry old-fashioned language but the dialogue felt false. Sadly, this novel just didn't work for me.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 21st March 2024.