Books

I Was A Cretan (Cretin?)

As heard on last weeks FTLoP, amongst the fantasy gamebook boom of the mid eighties, was an unusual threesome known as the Cretan Chronicles. Not the first linked set of gamebooks, it nevertheless followed quite swiftly on the heels of Steve Jackson’s very popular Sorcery series, and in a similar way tried to add more depth to the 400 paragraphed Fighting Fantasy books. It did this by a complex patronage/religion system, a novel setting and occasionally seeming to have a bit of sex in it.
… read on …

paper versus rock: marianne dreams at the almeida

as her xmas present, doctrah becky took the younger of her two little godsons (he’s seven) to this dramatisation of catherine storr’s puffin-club children’s classic, a book she and i grew up on — and i got to tag along (i’m 47): marianne, 10 and very ill, discovers that when she draws with a particular pencil she can visit what she’s drawn in her dreams; as her illness progresses, she learns to take responsibility for her powers in this very particular dreamworld, and to help the — rather difficult — person she has inadvertently trapped there and made life grim for… that’s a relatively unspoiler-y version of the story, which is intensely atmospheric, complete with awesomely sinister watcher-monsters, a very non-cute problem to solve, an adventure which can — very realistically within its dream-context — be undertaken by the children it features, and a lot of cheerfully inventive wit about the sometimes tricky relationship between what you drew and what you intended to draw…

The outing got exactly the right result, since smaller godson chattered very earnestly about it all the way home (including clearing up an important plot point which bears on intra-sibling jealousy, a big issue in his relationship with his older brother*), and then declared to his mum and dad on arrival home: “i think [very long pause to choose words exactly] that it was the GREATEST CHRISTMAS PRESENT EVER!” [in what follows there BE spoilers, subtext spoilers especially, though i'm keeping narrative ones to a minimum] … read on …

Big And Clever

Holidays seem to be a time when I curl up with fantasy or sci-fi books: in August in France I read Larry Niven’s Protector, and over New Years I read R Scott Bakker’s The Darkness That Comes Before. (GOTH ALERT - this is part one of a trilogy called The Prince Of Nothing!). These books have something in common, namely a protagonist (or partial protagonist) with superhuman intelligence.

Niven and Bakker are clearly clever sorts but even for them superhuman intelligence is pretty difficult to write.  … read on …

The Locked-Room Lecture

Two coffins of the way through The Three Coffins(aka The Hollow Man) the author, John Dickson Carr, breaks into the narrative through the words of his serial detective Dr Gideon Fell. Fell responds to a question:

“Because … we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories.”

He then let’s the reader know what counts as contravening his/her rights regarding the possibilities in solving a locked-room mystery:

“the low … trick of having a secret passage … so puts a story beyond the pale that a self-respecting author scarcely needs even to mention that there is no such thing. We don’t need to discuss minor variations of this outrage: the panel which is only large enough to admit a hand; or the plugged hole in the ceiling through which a knife is dropped, the plug replaced undetectably, and the floor of the attic above sprayed with dust so that no one seems to have walked there.”

Then proposes a taxonomy of locked-room solutions. First where there was no murderer in the room:
1. It is not murder, but a series of coincidences ending in an accident which looks like murder. eg a crack on the head from a piece of furniture. “the most popular object is an iron fender”
2. It is murder, but the victim is impelled to kill himself. Gas, poison, induced hysteria.
3. It is murder, by a mechanical device. Mechanical trap, concealed guns, hidden poisoned needles, “Even” says Fell ” a glove is electrified”. Er, ok. … read on …

Thoughts On The Hobbit

For the past few months I’ve been reading The Hobbit aloud to my wife - it’s relaxing for both of us and good practise for future readings to a probably more restless audience. I think it’s the first time I’ve read the book since I was seven or eight - I’d remembered the outline but not the details. Here’s some stuff I thought about it: … read on …

Whodiddit?

The seeds of the detective fiction genre were planted with Poe’s 1841 publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, but it was The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868) that introduced many of the now classic features of the genre - viz - a country house robbery, a celebrated investigator, bungling local constabulary, false suspects, the ‘locked room’ problem, the ‘least likely’ suspect solution.  By the 1920/ 1930s the genre was firmly established, and enjoying a golden age, seeing stories published by the ‘Queens of Crime’ - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham, who introduced us to detectives such as Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Chief Inspector Alleyn, Albert Campion (and less well known – Sayers’ other amateur detective - the wine salesman Montague Egg). The golden age helped cement the various characteristics (clichés even) that modern audiences feel are indicative of the genre.
In 1929 the crime writing priest* Ronald Knox wrote his Ten Commandments for detective fiction:

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.  
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.  
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.  
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.  
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story. … read on …

overgrown doorways 2: “his dark materials” no spoilers update

so this is about semi-unintended portals, and this is one — because at one point will and lyra run for safety to a BELVEDERE and this explodes a bunch of ideas in my head PP maybe didn’t mean bcz

i. belvedere just means a place that is good to gaze from
ii. belvedere is a suburb of shrewsbury where i grew up, where my school (aged 8-12) was, and the art college my sister went to, and my dad’s current GP, and the place i had my first grown-up job — i don’t know why, as it is NOT a good place to gaze from

iii. this escher picture is called BELVEDERE (click for full size)
iv. the only lectures i went to in my third year maths at oxford were by ROGER PENROSE = the guy (with HIS dad) who developed the optical illusions escher turned into these (to me) utterly evocative lithographs
v. my great friend dr vick is related to escher which is awesome!
vi. all of which amplifies PP’s precise intention only glancingly, to be sure, except that it’s about travel between worlds, and the power (and mortal peril) of imagination, and our own ability to connect
vii. and plus also THREE WORLDS dude, which is an even better escher picture (also click)

overgrown doorways

it’s a reflection of the way i read — fast skim and skip x multiple reread — that i catch onto these i think: fragments in a book which exactly transport you to another, not for reasons of “hommage” (a word i dislike: it purports to be cleverly explanatory but precisely isn’t) or transfer of energy or referential density or bigging yrself up or even just quiet self-playfulness necessarily — i mean it’s possibly any of these, but the fragment is so fleeting and the doorway so narrow and easy to miss that it may even be purely unconscious

let’s give some examples: … read on …

If / Then

Rewards and Fairies was Rudyard Kipling’s follow-up to his extremely successful Puck Of Pook’s Hill, though it’s best-known now for containing Britain’s Best-Loved Poem, aka “If-”. My last encounter with that poem - a fairly typical encounter I would suggest - was reading it in gigantic blown-up form on the wall of a senior executive at work. This executive lived up to the poem admirably - or at least, I like to think that if he’d ever encountered triumph he’d have resigned over that too.

In the context of its parent book, “If-” regains a degree of shine. It’s the postscript to the first half of a story whose hero is a smuggler, born in England with family in France, raised in America by newly-freed colonists, trained there by Iroquois. Kipling tied his end-poems quite closely to the tales they accompanied, and so “If-” was certainly intended to be a kind of moral summary of the story of “Brother Square-Toes”. That being so, its most likely reference point isn’t the boy hero (who does little but observe), but George Washington, who in the story is resolved on an unpopular peace policy with the English during their war with revolutionary France. So there’s an “If-” factoid for you, if you want one: this poem, much-referenced as a paean to Englishness, is in fact a panegyric to the man who masterminded England’s single greatest military catastrophe. … read on …

Character Witnesses

Agatha Christie’s “Evil Under The Sun” and Georges Simenon’s “Maigret And The Old Lady” have a few things in common: seasides, murder, and a lady whose intelligence and good company charms the detective even though she might be a bad ‘un. I read the former on holiday in France and the latter the week after I got back. This was the right order. Christie’s seaside resort - an island off the Devon coast - is a flimsy concoction, nicely set up for a whodunnit but with no atmosphere, and “Evil Under The Sun” is an easy read even for smooth-rolling Agatha - just right for polishing off on an afternoon in the garden. Simenon’s setting is much better-drawn, a French fishing town as the tourist season winds down, which provokes plenty of brooding in Maigret, who is in the bad position of having Proustian flashbacks to holidays he took specifically to evoke images of other holidays he DIDN’T take as a child. It’s no wonder he spends most of the book necking Calvados. … read on …