Books

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 …

Agatha Christie Comics

I am a poor judge of whether or not a bit of PR work will lead to press coverage or not. Take the Agatha Christie comic adaptations story that’s been doing the rounds - this looks like a non-starter to me but everywhere has covered it. I will make a second - possibly bad - prediction and say that all this publicity will not help these comics sell very many copies.

For one thing, I can’t believe comic adaptations of books sell very well. They must make some economic sense because publishers keep doing them, but is there really much of a market beyond a particular type of mentalist collector? Children barely read comics any more, and for the adult reader it’s hard to escape a sense of illegitimacy if you’re reading an adaptation - like, shouldn’t you really be giving the prose version a go? … read on …

JOHN DICKSON CARR - It Walks By Night

It Walks By Night was the very first book published by Dickson Carr, master of the locked room mystery. I didn’t know this while reading it, but it makes sense: the style is rambling and florid, it feels like a book by someone pleased to be stretching out across a book’s length. Those aren’t bad things: the book is as much gothic horror as murder mystery and the occasional ornateness suits this. There is a great scene in a bower where the hero is romancing a lady and a DREADFUL THING is discovered: it wouldn’t work if Carr didn’t take his prose way over the top. … read on …

TSUNAMI OF FEAR

We interrupt yr regularly scheduled iced wafflings for an important artistic announcement:

BUY THIS BOOK NOW.

What’s it about? CLOCKWORK DEATH. Who will enjoy it? YOU YOUR PARTNER YOUR NAN AND YOUR CAT. Is it violent? ONLY WHEN IT’S ESSENTIAL TO THE PLOT. Is that all the time? YES.

“Certainly the best thing to appear on Amazon since Best Music Writing 2007 - possibly even since the BFI book on If….” - Publolsher’s Weekly.

Harry Pooter

This is an expanded version of a reply to Mark S during a LiveJournal conversation about the Harry Potter books. It was written before the final book was published.

Magic in the HP books is really unlike magic in almost any other novels (kids’ or otherwise) in that it’s used, by and large, simply to recreate the “mugglish” life the wizards can’t join in with. So you have wizard banks, wizard shops, wizard GCSEs and A-Levels: the amazing world of magic promised at the start of book one turns out to be a funnified version of the “real world” - and as the series goes on not even that: you realise that the wizards are actually recreating stuff like job anxiety, bureaucracy, petty jealousies and professional rivalries as well as the school and administrative systems of Muggle-land. … read on …

Skooby Snacks & Spotty Man

So I had a little wander through the snazzy Brunswick Centre today. Mainly to go to the bank, but i thought I would sniff around. And I thought I would reacquaint myself with Skoob. Skoob being a rambling old second hand bookstore belov’d of old in the manky, pre-re-fit Brunswick Centre. Whilst their new Aladdin’s Cave of second hand stock is not in such a prime place as the old one, I am glad that it was deemed to be an important part of the The Brunswick (as the Centre now calls itself). It is possible that it is due to long leases as well, but I would liek to think that in any snazzy mall there is a space for a down at heel second hand store. … read on …

His Dark Materials: Where’s The Controversy?

Most discussion I’ve seen about the upcoming His Dark Materials films has focused on the film-makers’ decision to tone down the anti-religious element. This leads to the question of how they’re going to tackle the scenes in the third book where (spoilers ahead) … read on …

thrillers by (grown-up) kids: some more agatha christie

ok so now in my trek through a.christie decade by decade i have reached one i like unreservedly (=no.1 in the 1930s omnibus, The Sittaford Mystery, 1931, where she really finds a rhythm), so i am going to try and sum the 1920s AC for you

i. AC invented the teenager (tuppence in The Secret Adversary; anne bedingfield in The Man in the Brown Suit; bundle in The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery, in this last alongside a whole bunch of generally idiotic young men)
ii. servants are largely emo, except when they are jeeves knock-offs
iii. haha the empire wtf*
iv. the appeal — besides i-iii — is that AC (and her heroines, and YOOF IN GENERAL) are BOTHERD. oh it’s a murder, oh it’s politics, oh it’s me getting married — everything is just a lark, it’s fun to play detective, nothing matters; AC is observant, clever, funny, and almost MILITANTLY flippant — people-as-types have amiable fun poked at them; she has a real ear for the rubbish people say to one another, but this isn’t SATIRE, that would imply an idealism somewhere in her and i don’t think there is, except a deep belief that whatever commitment-to-real-serious-life drives people to kill, or rob, or become politicians, IS ALL FOOLISHNESS, so you might as well just BE foolish, or clever but direct it towards frivolous puzzlesolving time-killing (bcz at least no harm can come of that?)
v. this sets her apart from her predecessors — even chesterton, who is all-fun-all-the-time, turns it to serious moral ends (he is telling us how complex people are; and father brown is a detective of the material facts of the SOUL); conan doyle is passionate about logic, rigour and evidence, and the rich variety of london; dorothy l.sayers cares about the intelligence of women as an issue, and that people are decent to one another — all three keenly sketch the shifting mores of the day; which agatha does too, except she turns it all into tintin-ish cartoons (the seven dials is as nuts as cigars of the pharoah), and it all feels second-hand in her hands (not necessarily in a bad way)
vi. maybe this is a post(great)war thing — like the anomie and jazz-age dazzle in sayers’s murder must advertise, where the Young Things party like it was already after the end of the world — anyway i’m definitely interested to see how it keeps up (i associate agatha with UNCOOL and ELDERLY detectives, after all)
*viii. to exaand on this: where real-world elements do intrude — like rhodesia or the balkans or wealth and aristocracy, AC is clearly perfectly capable of seeing right through the rubbishness of the set-up; and sort of does, the way she comments on it; but just doesn’t (even slightly) make the common next step, which is to want to do something about this…

UPDATE: i meant to include this, which is my absolute LOL-fave of a line, from seven dials: “When you ran up and said there might be danger, I was more determined than ever,” went on Loraine. “I went to Harrods and bought a pistol.”

Top 5 Science Books You May Not Have Read - #4 Julian Jaynes ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’

Crazy title, crazy book. And for a while Jaynes was painted as a crackpot too — he had committed the sin of publishing his theory as this popular and accessible book instead of in the technical language of a peer-reviewed journal. The book received a sort of Von-Daniken vibe, but it gradually became a bit of a cult best seller and was widely discussed in the many relevant academic communities.

There are not many science books like this, which is perhaps why it took on cult status. Most science books take a close look into a narrow niche of science - expanding what can be found outwards, showing you why it matters. TOOCITBOTCM, as everyone is calling it, is quite the reverse. The theory at the book’s core provides a new perspective and a broad panorama showing connections between archaeology, literature, neurology, psychology, philosophy and all the sights inbetween. The occasionally florid prose clues the reader to the author’s eclectic knowledge and the wide roaming ideas that pack out this book.

Quickly then… Jaynes theory is that consciousness is not an innate feature of the brain - but it is a trick that we learned. The trick is now learned by children in modern societies, but was only hit upon in historically recently times - specifically some time around 1000BC. … read on …