Looking Out To Sea

Just finished two books in the last week: Sword Song and Making History, both with a vaguely historical theme.

Sword Song is one book from the middle of a series by Bernard Cornwell, of Sharpe fame. Sword Song follows the adventures of Uhtred of Babbenburg in the reign of Alfred the Great. That’s about 880AD, in case Wikipedia’s not working for you at the moment. It is more or less Sharpe-in-Wessex: orphan boy, good military strategist, brave, canny, etc, struggling against his own incompetent superiors who were born into positions of power, rather than earning them. The language of people and place names takes a bit of getting used to but luckily there’s a glossary to help you translate Hrofeceastre to Rochester and so on. After a while you learn to guess what the modern equivalents might be.

It was enjoyable enough though I don’t think I would rush back for another one. I didn’t feel greatly involved in Uhtred’s struggle nor did I care much for the welfare of the kingdom as a whole. Interesting but ultimately uninvolving.

Making History is the first Stephen Fry novel that I’ve read. I had assumed that his books would be rather obscure or learned — the product of a literature degree, in fact — but if this one’s anything to go by there’s nothing to worry about. A history student finishes his PhD dissertation on the childhood and early years of Adolf Hitler and ends up using a time machine to change the past and prevent Hitler’s birth. So the characters ends up adrift in an alternate twentieth century with his own memories of our century still intact. (There are interesting snippets of fact amongst it all which makes me want to follow up the one or two biographies recommended in the author’s notes at the end. How did the epitome of evil in Western society get to be that way?) The book is funny, prompts interesting questions about the role of circumstance and accident in history and, thankfully, not in the least bit difficult. I am keen to read some more of Fry’s books now.

Right, since I’m getting complaints from my mother that I don’t update my blog often enough, you have to suffer my thoughts on the two most recent books I read —

The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins

You might well think, “another in Richard Dawkins seemingly endless variety of books explaining evolution which will be ignored by the people who need it most”. And you’d be right. I really enjoyed The Selfish Gene. Climbing Mount Improbable was an interesting new take on the matter. But The Extended Phenotype was a bit too extended for my liking — so why did I think my book shelf needed this one?

It was mostly because of the fundamental premise of using The Canterbury Tales, a pilgrimage with varied storytellers, to tell a backwards story of evolution. I liked the idea of each animal telling a story — a scientific story, about what we learned from its fossils or its DNA or its behaviour. And it works very well. Starting from present-day Homo sapiens we step back in time through our recent ancestors, learning the problems of differentiating species across time and how it is we can say that humans are brainy for their size. At some point we reach our first waypoint, where the chimpanzees meet us. This is our common ancestor, some 6 million years ago, and we learn a little about common chimpanzee and bonobo social behaviour and why these can’t be generalised to find “human nature”.

Then we step further back in time to the common ancestor between us chimpanzees (naked and hairy) and the other great apes. And so on, learning what each animal probably looked like and where they fit into the wider scheme. At times I felt slightly overwhelmed by the names, which got worse as the book travelled further back in time — I could never tell when we were meeting several varieties of obscure worm or sponge or something else entirely. To say that the obscuriae family contain the thingimiumins and the whatchacallioids was not so enlightening.

Each chapter had a prologue and sometimes several ‘tales’ but sometimes the prologues dwarfed the actual tales. Sometimes a section seemed little more than an excuse to reference other tales without saying anything substantive. At many points I felt confused by the sequencing — I couldn’t really remember if a particular Tale was still to come or had already passed. At many points an interesting discussion is omitted because it is covered in another of Richard Dawkins’ books.

The flaw in the idea of delving backwards through time is that while we can follow the slow ‘regression’ of our line, occasionally another entire troupe would arrive that utterly dwarfed our own. The common ancestors of humans and insects is a long way into the past, but when we reach that point in the past all the interesting speciation of the insects has been ‘undone’ since they now look just like us! And so on for other major groups. There is great variety in fishes and plants and fungus but their interesting recent stories have to be ignored for the sake of scale. Which I guess is another way of saying that there are at least half a dozen further books to made from this idea, but not starting at the human leaf on the tree.

Borderliners by Peter Høeg

Peter Høeg’s a slippery one and no mistake. It is not surprising that this book is quite different to his others, though there is still a common style. The narrator is an orphaned(?) boy growing up in the institutions and child homes of 1970s Denmark. Seemingly by chance he ends up at a prestigious private school run on strict disciplinarian and ideological lines. He has trouble concentrating and keeping to the exacting timetables of his life. He becomes friends with an older boy and a younger girl, all outcasts and misfits in this school, and they try to find out why they are tolerated at the school despite being “defective”.

Alongside this story of institutional life is a strange dissertation on time, written by the author as an older man, but weaved into the main parts of the story in many places. It’s largely incoherent and contradictory, and what it tries to say comes across as either obvious or obviously wrong. At one point the author, or the narrator (the young boy’s name is also Peter Høeg), get to the point of denouncing all progress, much like the miserable people with their digital watches:

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

If you’re willing to sit through the babble there’s an interesting story in there, but it’s largely been smothered.

After however many pages and words and months I finished reading the last volume of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, The System of the World. Back in August I was effusive with my praise of part one but never got round to saying anything when I finished part two (The Confusion). So let this entry mark as my feelings on both.

Brilliant! Read them now!

Ahem. The two books that comprise The Confusion are the intertwined tale of piracy on the high seas, and political intrigue in the court of Versailles. They follow on from the events of Quicksilver though many other characters drop out and others become more important. It’s in The Confusion that many of the important links to Cryptonomicon become obvious — many of the family names which appear in that latter book first make an important appearance here — the Hacklhebers, Gotos and so on. It’s also in The Confusion that Stephenson lets his nerdy side really come to the fore. The chapter about the creation of phosphorous from urine was exciting and informative and hugely enjoyable — all that from chemistry, you ask, but it really was damn good reading.

The events which unfold at the very start of Quicksilver aren’t mentioned again for the remainder of Quicksilver and the entirety of The Confusion. All that is basically flashback. The thread is picked up again in The System of the World as one party attempts to reconcile the deep philosophical rift between Newton and Leibniz while another attempts to sabotage Newton’s work at the Royal Mint. Again we’ve got political intrigue combined with stunning action sequences that would overwhelm the audience of most heist movies.

Rather unusually for Neal Stephenson he manages to end everything too. Maybe given 2500 pages of writing he has finally worked himself into the right position to pull it all together. His other books have disappointed me on the last page, but I was very thankful that such an epic series ended right.

Make that investment! Read these books!

We’ve had so much success with recipes in the last few years that it’s sometimes easy to forget that some recipes are useless through and through. If you’re not very familiar with the general idea then it’s easy to get dragged far from the path by a instructions that are confusing or just downright wrong.

That’s what happened to me last week when I tried Scrummy Chocolate Swirl Shortbread from the Green & Blacks Chocolate Recipes book. I couldn’t really remember what the process for shortbread was so I just followed the instructions and ended up with something useless quite demoralising. I later checked Delia and James Martin’s respective recipes for shortbread and confirmed that the recipe in the Chocolate book is utter bobbins. Compare:

• Cream sugar into butter, then add flour.
• Mix dry ingredients then rub in butter.

The first one gets you a stiff dough, the second ones gets you breadcrumbs. And at that point there’s not much you can really do to pull it back — it’s not easy to decrumb crumbs.

I’ve just tried again, ignoring the mixing process they suggested in favour of Delia Smith’s instructions, and they seem much better. They’re cooling at the moment. Now I get to revisit the original recipe and mark it up for future occasions. I’m not sure if I should write proper instructions, or just score the whole thing out with “Wrong! Consult Delia!”. That would be more satisfying.

I read Jane Eyre and now I finally understand The Eyre Affair. The “original” ending in The Eyre Affair is not the real one, and the one which gets created is the real one (to some approximation: there are no time-travelling super-villains).

I was getting worried as the book went on because it seemed so much like the rubbish ending from The Eyre Affair was going to be the real one. That Jane really was going to India to be a missionary’s wife to the detestable St John Rivers. But she pulls it back from the brink.

So now that I’ve thoroughly spoiled the book for you, what’s it actually about? Well, it’s your standard fare of feisty young lass being brought up by an aunt who hates her. She’s sent off to school to have some docility and meekness beaten into her, which thankfully doesn’t work. Then there’s stuff about growing up and falling in love. It sounds bland in these terms but it’s pretty riveting when you’re inside it.

I picked up two books at last month’s book group but it’s taken me a wee while to get through this first one. It wasn’t the rollicking read I was hoping for.

Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs is about a group of programmers in the early 90s who leave Microsoft for a Silicon Valley startup. It’s populated by the usual nerdy stereotypes — bearded millionaires, basement dweebs, greasy marketing guys and social misfits.

microserf (day 99)
© Jenny Spadafora

Tragically, none of it seems remotely interesting. All these smart people say nothing very interesting at all. The computer game which they create is not very interesting. Nothing very interesting happens to them in the creation of the game. It reaches completion without any hitches or even much in the way of work, as far as I can tell.

Along the way the characters have uninteresting conversations about… well, anything that strikes their fancy. As long as it remains uncontroversial and shallow they’ll talk about it — TV series, junk food, roads and buildings. But if there’s anything to be gleaned from these conversations it’s probably wrong. Even the one topic of conversation you would assume the techies could manage, computers, remains strangely beyond them. Who could seriously say something like “your body is your hard drive” who knew what either was?

The book is written as a diary, interspersed with pages of stream-of-consciousness word association. Nothing else irritated me quite as much as the word-association pages, because nothing else was quite so explicity saying look how goddamn deeeeeep I am.

In the last dozen pages the shallow characters of these people is thrown into stark relief, as something truly emotional and affecting happens. This really just illustrates how pointless the previous couple of hundred pages was, as we really know nothing about these people other than their ability to make dull conversation.

If you want to compare this tedious nonsense to something that is at least a real diary of a real programmer at a real startup, Jamie Zawinski has published diary excerpts from the early days of Netscape (then Mosaic). He at least mentions the programming once in a while.

So, now that this disappointment is over I’m going to start something which has been recommended by more people, Jane Eyre. This will also help me to put another recent book into its proper context.

I’ve just come to the end of Derek Robinson’s Goshawk Squadron, a sort of Catch 22 for First World War pilots in the Royal Flying Corps.

It’s a short book that drops the reader straight into the scene: an airfield in France, some miles behind the Western Front; unreliable planes; barely-trained pilots; jolly good chaps. It’s about well-educated English fellows who like cricket and wanted to do medicine and couldn’t dream of shooting someone in the back or taking part in something that’s not a fair fight. (Think Lieutenant George from Blackadder.) And how these men learn that war isn’t a fair fight and die regardless.

It’s not a harrowing book. There is no great trauma or emotional knife that gets twisted inside you. The characters drift through the book in a surreal manner very similar to the action of Catch 22. But slowly the force of the story picks you up and carries you aloft. So the inevitable fall at the end still leaves you a bit winded. It’s a completely compelling book. I’ve had trouble putting it down lately. Now it’s done and I don’t really want to read anything else until I’ve recovered a bit.

Another book down! I am now officially either a Terminator or a Cylon, though I never saw a Terminator relaxing with a good book so we’ll go with Cylon for now. (For context, see this comment.)

The latest book was The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. (Is that just like Ford? Or is it supposed to be pronounced Effin’ Ford?) It’s a light-hearted comedy detective novel, with little shots of science fiction and surreal horror. Robert Rankin meets Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams.

I read Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho a few years ago. (I definitely recommend it but it’s categorically not for the squeamish or faint-of-heart.) Many chapters are devoted to the main character’s analysis of Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis albums. These chapters meant nothing to me, though I understand from further reading that they were almost entirely fictional. Whole chapters devoted to demonstrating the narrator’s unreliable nature were completely lost on me.

Dodo ancora in viaggio!
©

Reading The Eyre Affair was similarly awkward. The central character is a literary detective, in the sense that she solves crimes to do with books, as well as being a detective in a book. There is a lot of detail about books in the alternate world of The Eyre Affair, but I’ve never read any of the books! What a doofus I am! You’ll get a lot more out of this book if you’ve read Jane Eyre and maybe Martin Chuzzlewit before. Alas I have not.

But this is not a criticism, except of me being ill-read. I enjoyed the book a lot. It was alternately subtle and slapstick. If you like witty wordplay and easy heroics this is your book. If you enjoy characters with silly names doing outlandish jobs, this is your book. If you love villains who revel in their own lack of morals, and know just when to employ a mad cackle, this is your book. If you enjoy time travel in fast cars and characters from novels coming to life, this is your book. And if you like dodos, how would you like one as a pet?

Last month Helen’s mum picked up a copy of Quicksilver for a book group, but chose the wrong Quicksilver. (I don’t know which one she was supposed to buy, but I can only hope it wasn’t quite as long as this one!). She passed along to us the one she hadn’t meant to buy — Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.

I enjoyed Quicksilver in the same way I used to enjoy Saturday afternoons watching the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. There’s nothing to beat a good fictionalised retelling of history. And Neal Stephenson’s stories are tinged with enough science fiction that when you read up on some fact or other and discover it to be true it makes things that much more fun.

The story is set in the mid-17th century — the newly-crowned Charles II and the newly-created Royal Society are important features of the story. The events of 1660-odd onward are recounted from the view of a not-brilliant Natural Philosopher, a vagabond and an escaped Turkish slave.

Apart from a much greater familiarity with Restoration-era England and the European royal family (let’s face, it is just one family) I also picked up more interesting facts like the origin of the word “dollar” and the surgical method for removing bladder stones. Which, not coincidentally, are also known as calculi.

The book is exciting — Plague! Fire! Invasion! — and devious, held together with encrypted letters and metaphors. There are interludes of absurdity, such as chapters written in the style of a Restoration comedy, and others devoted to slight-veiled descriptions of important scientific discoveries. The events of the story never seem to stray too far from reality.

If you’re looking for something engrossing, irreverent and enriching to get your mind around, this might well be the book you need.

Despite being over 900 pages long, this book comprises only the first part Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle series. I’m really looking forward to getting the next two, The Confusion and The System of the World.

This Sunday we’ve got another Potluck and Prose, the lazy person’s book group, where you don’t technically need to have read your book, and bringing one is only suggested. As long as you’ve got a dish then all is fine.

Thankfully, after a bad start with Swallows and Amazons which I took two months to get through, I’m on a roll. This month I finished my own Foundation and Helen’s book too, Flowers for Algernon. Since then I’ve also been reading Innocent When You Dream (a compilation of interviews with Tom Waits) and started Quicksilver.

This latter is another seriously hefty book from Neal Stephenson, and is something like a prequel to Cryptonomicon. I cannot praise Cryptonomicon enough and would recommend it to anyone who asked. It was a fictionalised account of cryptography in the Second World War and modern computing, and riveting to boot. In order to outdo himself, Stephenson has chosen “science” as his theme and “the Age of Enlightenment” his time period. I’m only a few chapters in but it’s not disappointing so far!

Back round to the other book group, for science stuff, the next few books have been announced. One in particular looks very interesting, and will no doubt be particularly enjoyable once I’ve finished Quicksilver. It is Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. That’s not until March next year though.

But before that we’ve got:

• How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood by Alison Gopnik, Patricia K Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff
• Genesis Machines by Martyn Amos, which I own and have read
• Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould