A Hit, A Very Palpable Hit

The Lambs Of London
by Peter Ackroyd
fiction | georgiana

I cracked. My careful attempt to read more books from the pile than I bought for it fell over with a outburst in the charity shops this weekend. Five novels, taking the pile back over 50 books. I did break into the pile and liberate The Lambs of London last month.

This is a new fiction work by Peter Ackroyd, whose arcane knowledge of London is reknown. I am a big fan of London: A Biography but had failed to really get to grips with his fiction before. I did start Hawksmoor which, with its discussion of pyschogeography and architecture (especially that of Hawksmoor, whose work is a heavy presence in the wonderful Alan Moore comic, From Hell), should have been right up my alley. Figuratively and literally. Unfortunately, it never fully grabbed me, perhaps because I had already encountered some of the ideas in From Hell and London: A Biography. I grabbed The Lambs of London in a 3 for 2 in Waterstones because the title recalled something to me, and the back blurb sounded interesting:

Mary Lamb is confined by the restrictions of domesticity: her father is losing his mind, her mother watchful and hostile. The great solace of her life is her brother Charles, an aspiring writer. It is no surprise when Mary falls for the bookseller's son, antiquarian William Ireland, from whom Charles has purchased a book. But this is no ordinary book - it once belonged to William Shakespeare himself. And William Ireland with his green eyes and his red hair, is no ordinary young man...The Lambs of London brilliantly creates an urban world of scholars and entrepreneurs, a world in which a clever son will stop at nothing to impress his showman father, and no one knows quite what to believe. Ingenious and vividly alive, The Lambs of London is a poignant, gripping novel of betrayal and deceit.

This time, I was caught up in the fiction. The year is never stated, but must be gathered from the references to famous people of the time (Pope, Sheridan etc). There are some of the many potential cliches of the London novel (commiting suicide by leaping into the Thames, fog, slums) which work within the context of the plot rather than as mere set-dressing. The Lambs - and it came back to me partway through that they were the siblings who created Tales from Shakespeare - are lambs in a Blakian sense: innocents who are willing to follow a trail towards their own potential destruction. To be gulled by fake Shakespearian work seems implausible - as modern readers we know that no-one has found the missing plays and that very very little exists in his own hand - but the novel is set in the Georgian period when the first real revival of Shakespeare began and it was believed possible that Vortigern would reappear. That Vortigern did, in fact, make it onto the stage at Drury Lane seems rather surprising now, when such works would be treated to huge amounts of cynicism and disbelief. The Lambs - eager Charles and inexperienced Mary - are easily pulled in by Ireland's deceit. But Ireland too, is unwise. Ackroyd posits that he intended only to fool his father and their friends, but his father's desire to make money from the works he thought his son was finding led to publicity and scandal. Ackroyd definitely positions the young people at the core of the story and emphasises their longing to escape their everyday lives. Mary, especially, disintegrates as the story continues.


I'm not sure about the switches in perspective throughout the novel, but there are scenes which are vividly painted and moments where you care about the protagonists and the obvious downfall ahead. This is a book with London at its heart: the city the characters walk in is still the city Shakespeare walked in, the Victorian Embankment is yet to be built, there are few bridges etc etc. This reads like a more assured work than Hawksmoor was, more confident in its ability to let the characters inhabit the city.

Crime Spree

My attempt to start digging into the to.be.read mountain continues, although I did get three books from a charity shop the other day and have read 1.5 of them, thus not making a proper dent in the mountain. Winter has arrived, with the wind hugging the chinmeys and the rain splattering the glass and the cat suddenly deciding that actually, it will sleep on the bed after all due to the feline principle of stealing human's heat. And when winter suddenly drops in, I get an urge to read crime fiction.

The Fashion in Shrouds
by Margery Allingham
(1938)
fiction | UK crime | C20th | Campion series
I've previously mentioned that I have read all the Campion series, so this was technically a reread. It's the one in which Albert's sister, a fashion designer, is suspected of attempting to murder her rival (an actress) for the love of a airplane designer. The rival's husband dies. Then the model he had taken up with, who looks like the actress, is murdered. And the actress's previous lover shot himself three years before. The press, naturally, are having a field day. Like a lot of jazz era novels involving celebrity, it doesn't require much to translate it into Heat-era speak: at one point a dress design by Val is replicated by a cheaper house, recalling Burberry's current embarassment over market-stall copies of their check.

Except this is also so of its era that it passes beyond pastishe. Not just the automatic exocticism of air travel - something long lost in the easyjet era - or the colonial elements (the husband was the governor of a Ivory Coast British colony snadwiched between the Belgiums and Germans). Not even the fact that women wearing trousers is terribly shocking. No, it's the language and mindset which seems shocking. The casual use of 'nigger' pulls you up before you even get to Albert's awful line to his sister: "What you need is a good cry or a nice rape, or both." Campion has been sepia'd by the television adaptations with Peter Davison as the detective, so it seems even worse that a detective thought of as pleasant, diffedent and shy would casually say these things. I've no idea if the book has been allowed to fall out of print (this was a green Penguin editon I found to add to the collection) or if it has been bowdlerised as Christie's Ten Little Niggers (1939) became Ten Little Indians became And Then There Were None. Perhaps surprisingly, given the ageless elements, or unsurprisingly, given the dubious language it was not amongst the Campion stories filmed back in the late 80s. But neither was my favourite, Traitor's Purse.

The Silver Pigs
by Lindsey Davis
(1989)
fiction | UK crime | C20th | Falco series
Like many crime readers, I devour entire series about a particular detective. Discounting the Famous Five, I think the first series I read through was Lord Peter Wimsey, then Campion, then Roderick Allyn, then Cadfael and so on. I was late to Christie which may explain my dislike of Poirot. I keep meaning to read the Morse books, and I like several more contemporary series, like Christopher Brookmyre, but I wanted new historical crime so I asked for recommendations. One person whose name came up was Lindsey Davis so I picked up The Silver Pigs whilst in Waterstones (at the same time as The Palace Tiger). What struck me almost immediately - whilst reading the list of characters - was the humour of it.

Titus Caesar:
Aged 30. Vespasian's elder son; popular and brilliant.
Domitian Caesar:
Aged 20. Vespasian's younger son; not so brilliant, and not so popular.
...
A gardener's horse:
(disposition unknown)

Also, there are maps. I like extras with my crime. The novel itself is an entertaining mixture: Falco would like to see himself as an ancient Rome version of Philip Marlowe, but he's hampered by his large family, his mother and the fact he is too kind-hearted. Like Cadfael, he's a former soldier but unlike Cadfael, who went to the Meditterainean on the First Crusade before returning to Shrewsbury, Falco was sent from Rome to Britainnia during the Bodicea uprising and is, unsurprisingly, very unhappy to be sent back there. Davis's Rome has both the marble beauty of the Senate and the piss-tubs of the launderies in the backstreets. (As a sidenote, anyone who found the HBO Rome series to be less enjoyable than they hoped should try these books.) Her Britain is damp, cold and corrupt. Unlike now, obviously. Part of the British section is set in Isca Dumnoniorum or, as it is known today, Exeter, which was one reason I followed the recommendation to try the book. There was a bit in which a bunch of drunk soliders were described as at a crossroads in the city: that was also true in the Civil War era, and right up until 3am last night.

The central mystery is laid out in such a way that the reader suspects as Falco does, so that you neither feel superior due to working it out far in advance of the detective, nor cheated because information enabling you to solve the murders is withheld. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that, when I saw Scandal Takes a Holiday in a charity shop last week, I grabbed it and am currently halfway through.

Love and Time Travel

After a recent long look at the dreaded to.be.read pile, I mentally instructed myself to not bring any more books into the house (discounting research books because, yes, I am starting to work again after the fallow summer). I even mentioned it in Annie's '7 things' meme and since I have made some headway with one thing listed there, I decided to be strict.

At which point someone lent me The Lady and the Unicorn and The Virgin Blue by Tracey Chevalier. This was my own fault for telling anyone who cared how much I enjoyed Girl With a Pearl Earring (see several previous posts). On the plus side, I did also get two books off the mountain and read them as well: Longtitude by Dava Sorbel and The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. The former was found in a charity shop but had been on my 'ought to read one day' list whilst the latter was in a 3 for 2 with Going Postal and The Lambs of London. Running through the books are themes of craftsmanship and/or time, so it seems like my recent reading has at least been compiling ideas. So...the books...

The Lady and the Unicorn
by Tracey Chevalier
fiction | C20th | historical
Multiple narrators in two worlds which run in parallel. Some characters cross from one to another, most notably the painter Nicolas des Innocents, but also the middleman Léon Le Vieux. The interweaving of the narrators and perspectives clearly mimicking the tapestries about which the novel revolves. Unfortunately, for me the voices of the different narrators were not distinct enough. Whilst the language they used varied according to their social position, gender etc, the tone seemed more constant throughout. Did it create a field of colour containing characters restricted by circumstances? Yes, but it didn't engage me with them.

Longtitude
by Dava Sorbel
non-fiction | C20th | historical
In contrast, the recounting of a family's attempt to master longtitude in bitter competition to the Royal Astronomer and others, captures the emotions. It's the classic underdog story, obviously, which automatically puts the reader on the side of the Harrisons, but Sorbel explains the logistics and mechanics of creating time so simply that you marvel at the story. The way in which time became delineated and contains is something which fascinates me: I love the way in which time in Britain was unified by the railways and that, until then, everyone ran on their own time according to their longtitude.

The Time Traveller's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
fiction | C21st
This is one of those books that everyone appears to be reading, so I read it. The plot is very neatly fractured and then reconstructed. The whole grandfather paradox element is given very short shrift: the protagonist tells his wife that he has tried and concluded that the multiverse theory of time travel doesn't work. All of which is fine and it is enjoyable to see a SF conceit being used well in contemporary fiction: quite why people treat SF as contemptible whilst reading and watching a lot of popular fiction (written, televisual and cinematic) based on SF premises is beyond me. However, the main problem I had with The Time Traveller's Wife is that I am not fond on contemporary American fiction. The clipped straightforward sentences with their lack of rhythm do not engage me with the story. The denoument of the novel should contain pathos, a sadness about the inevitability of the protagonists to change events, which should make me care. For me, it didn't. Technically, this is a good book but that excellence is in the narrative and the structure, not the prose itself.

The Rotter's Club

The Rotter's Club
Jonathan Coe
(2001)
catagories: fiction | C21st

I'm never really sure how to tag a book like this. Coe uses a framing device of the story being told not by two of the protagonists reminising over shared experiences but two of their descendents, trying to imagine life in the world before they were born: the modern nostalgia not for real memories but for the idea of them. Yet the book is truly nostalgic in recalling not the rosy idealised past but the real brown and orange, mushrooms-as-exotic, 1970s. Despite the framing device, the narrative is left open but with the promise of a follow-up, The Closed Circle. I was assuming this was a little pomo joke - a promise of closure for those who require it - until I checked and it turns out the book does exist. I find that vaguely disappointing.

The Vampire Blood Trilogy!!!!

The Vampire Blood Trilogy
Darren Shan
catagory: kid.lit

I've been reading some recommended teen fiction this year. This is partially because I don't want my knowledge to become outmoded. It's easy for me to point out that Ursula Le Guin did a boy heading off to wizard school to face a shadowy evil back in the 70s with the seminal A Wizard of Earthsea with a startlingly sparse style which leaves me in awe of it. It's probably also not surprising that I grew up avidly reading Susan Cooper and Alan Garner with their heady worlds of raillings that becomes a spear, willow green witches sacrificed to the sea, patterns repeating through time and lost Welsh lands. I'm not bad on earlier stuff like E.S. Nesbit either. But, aside from a glance through the first Potter and the obligatory reading of His Dark Materials, I'm not sure what the books are now. The books which kids want to read rather than the ones they ought to read.

I started with Witchchild a few months back, which I found a very effective and engaging historical built around a voyage to the New World and religious fervour/persecution. It comes with a handy framing device and a refusal to provide a final answer to what becomes of the narrator. This is very much a book which would have appealed to me as a teenager, and I can see how it carefully sets up the historical setting to mimic twentieth century social interaction. The way the daughters of the leaders form a clique which excludes the narrator is clearly meant to resonate. One thing I've often noticed with teen fiction is that the main character will be a bookish girl i.e. one who appeals to, er, bookish girls. I'm not sure how I feel about that: at its worse it's simple manipulation to make the reader continue but then you couldn't have made me part with DragonsongDragonsinger back when I was a teenager.

The Vampire Blood Trilogy is a collection of the sort of books I hated in school. Not like Persuasion (which an English teacher unwisely suggested to my 14 year old self to stop me reading SF) but like anything by Stephen King or James Herbert. Fat books with black covers and dire promises of gore on the back. Again, not like the post-apocalpyse horror I liked such as Z for Zachariah, but junk like The Fog. In short, boys' fiction. Once I got past the deeply irritating use of exclamation marks in every paragraph I found these quite fun! I'd told boys love exclamation marks! There's good set up and follow through of events but the style means I'm unlikely to get the next three in the set.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys

Continuing in my quest for fiction which emerges from other fiction, I finally filled a gap in my knowledge and read Wide Sargasso Sea the other week.

This is the story of Antionette, a Creole girl who finds herself marrying a man newly arrived from England in the 1830s. Her background, rejected by an insane mother, and his fear of her culture turns the relationship sour and causes her to go mad. Eventually, he takes her back to his home in England and locks her in the attic. The man is never named, but it is obvious who it is: Mr Rochester, the hero of Jane Eyre.

Rhys admitted when working on the novel that she had become fascinated by 'Bertha' from Jane Eyre and wanted to tell the other side of the story. Rhys came from a Jamacian background but had settled in London: in short, she wanted to see what had sent 'Bertha' mad. What, then, makes a novel such as this - or such as Pemberley - acceptable yet fanfic unacceptable to so many? Rhys's motivation was to fill in a story from her own perspective, to expand a character who was just a cipher in the original work. And she didn't have permission to use all these Bronte characters. Yet, as if the act of publication is alchemical, this is considered real fiction and not fan fiction. Strange.

What of the novel? I can see why someone was surprised I'd not read it. It plays with different points of view, it gives us conflicting narrators and cultures, with the voices of Antoinette and [Rochester] clearly expressed. Those are things which always tick my boxes - or push my buttons. It is rather sexy - the seductions of [Rochester] hum with night heat - and rather disturbing - the fractured voice in the final third is so far removed from the girl at the start. It also toys with imagery from Jane Eyre - storms and trees being split apart - which add to the knowingness: there can be no happy resolution to this gothic romance because as readers we already know the happy ending will go to Jane instead.

One difficulty I have in trying to describe the novel is resisting the urge to call it "the story of the first Mrs Rochester". Why resist? It's a neat phrase which immediately gives an idea of the story etc. Yet the novel is about reclaiming "the first Mrs Rochester" as a person in her own right, and about how Rochester forces her to sublimate her own identity under that of his idea of what a wife should be. It therefore seems to go against the theme of the novel to describe it with the neat phrase.

Fianlly, I always enjoy a novel which causes Orson Welles' voice to purr in my head.

Bearing Witness

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Girl With a Pearl Earring

Girl With a Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier

Wow. Short, clear and ravishing. The descriptive style is very beautiful and the scene with the earrings made me catch my breath. This is one of those novels which make me sit afterwards, the finished novel in my hands, and wonder both why I write and if I could ever write anything as evocative and subtle as this. I love works which make me reassess what I want to achieve, make me think about how to write cleanly yet sumptuously. And this makes Vemeer paintings glow in prose - a doubly impressive feat given that a) it is very hard to describe paintings in prose and b) I'm not a fan of Dutch painting in general.

Universally Acknowledged Truths

Pemberley: Or Pride And Prejudice Continued
by Emma Tennant
(1993)

It is a truth universally acknowlegded that all Pride & Prejudice pastishes, spoofs or reviews must be in want of an opening line which mimics the opening line of P&P. Right, that's that over with.

I'm pro-fanfic. My Microcon talk a couple of years back was on the history of forms of fanfiction and the idea that, once a story is 'out there' a sign of its universality is if becomes reworked, rewritten and generally posessed by the audience. You can argue that the myth cycles (Arthur, Norse, Indian) etc are such stories: they capture your imagination to such an extent that you want more about the characters and situation. It is only in the industrial age that the notion of copyright, and the related idea of idea theft, comes into its own (I could disgress here about the commercialisation of the printed word but this isn't the review for that). There's notions of 'canon' and 'fanon' etc etc. It's a fun world of shifting ownership of ideas.

Pride and Prejudice (1813) is one of the first novels to gain a fan following, way before Dickens was packing them into the theatres or queues were forming outside the Strand magazine for the next Holmes installment[1]. P&P echoes through English culture: Gaskell's North & South (185?) suggests the Mancunian novelist was utterly smitten by Elizabeth and Darcy's sparky romance whilst Bridget Jones' Diary reworks it as a modern chicklit novel. Obviously Lizzy & Darcy are not unsimilar to earlier romances (Beatrix and Benedict spring obviously to mind[2]) but they are the ur-romance of the last two centuries. Women still fall for Darcy.

Which is where Pemberley, Or Pride & Prejudice Continued comes in. Austen herself continued to consider her heroines' lives but she had no knowledge of the intimacies of marriage. Indeed, there's an argument that we never see happily married couples in Austen (Mr & Mrs Bennett being the most extreme example but Maria and Mr Collins is clearly only a sanguine relationship due to Maria's diligence in avoiding her husband's company). Tennant picks up the story of Lizzy Bennett a year into her marriage to Mr Darcy and, as one might expect, things are not perfect in this 'happy ever after'.

Tennant, as far as I can tell from having read about half of The Bad Sister, writes about the interior lives of women and Pemberley, naturally, focuses on Elizabeth's reaction to her new life. Jane is married to Bingley and about to produce a second child. Lydia has a whole passel of brats with Wickham. Mr Bennent has been summarily despatched to the great beyond and Mrs Bennent is concerned to secure a future for her two as-yet unmarried daughters, bookish Mary and impressionable Kitty. Elizabeth has yet to have a child and Lady de Burgh is preparing to ship in a distant cousin to take over should no heir arrive. And it's going to be a family Christmas at Pemberley.

As with P&P, the differences between exterior and interior life - both mental and physical - are played with: the extended families go on a shooting party to the Yorkshire moors and Lizzy chided for wandering about the countryside. Confusions abound, causing Lizzy and Darcy to seperate. One major element is Lizzy's belief that Darcy has had a child with "the Frenchwoman" who has now died. Combined with the Yorkshire moors and Lizzy's running off to become a governess there are moments where this seems to be borrowing as heavily from Jane Eyre as from P&P (I must get around to Wide Sargasso Sea).

This could be a great sequel but for one key element: I didn't find Tennant's authorical voice convincing enough. We'll slide over the fact she gives Mrs Bennent a narrative point-of-view (unlike the almost entirely Lizzy-based narrative of P&P) because really it's the lack of a wickedly sly authorical voice which meant the novella left me cold. A Lizzy who lacks her spark is not terribly interesting, and Darcy's absence makes this into a rather lacklustre sequel. Obviously, some of the point is to show the banality and new worries and fears of an older woman who is now married into social and familial responsibilies but it doesn't put any relish into the authorial commentary on Lizzie's behaviour.

Having been searching for this book for a while, as it helps me move into a more literary discussion of the story-reclaiming urge, I was pleased to find it in a charity shop. Having read it I'm vaguely disappointed that it does not make me want to believe it is 'canon'.

---

[1] Although the Doctor's "I'm your biggest fan!" scene with Dickens in the new Who made me roar with delight.

[2] "I do love nothing in the world so much as you, is that not strange?" Benedict remarks - a sentiment Darcy shares with his "I have struggled against my reason..." proposal.

Murder in Baker Street

Murder in Baker Street
edited by Greenberg, Lellenberg & Stashower
(2003)

I've been having a bit of a Sherlockian craze over the last few months and, having reread the Canon, I've moved onto the non-Canon. (Some of this I can blame of Kelly Hale, whose non-Canon Holmes novel I read a couple of years ago and which is finally getting published.)

This is a collection of short stories featuring Holmes and Watson by modern crime writers. There's nothing very wrong, just the occassional jarring Americanism or a not-quite-right Watson voice, but they do seem to lack a certain something. It's not that I am wedded to the Canon - I thoroughly enjoyed the recent Rupert Everett non-Canon adventure on the BBC - but the devilish detail doesn't work in most of these. Some suffered from what we in the Doctor Who trade would call the HGWells effect: let's get our famous fictional character to meet a famous author/person of the time and the historical one will be inspired by him! Thus Holmes is brought into a case, involving mysterious marks on someone's neck and Mittel European servants getting all superstitious, by one Abraham Stoker.

The best was, I thought, A Hansom for Holmes which put aside Watson as a narrator in favour of a cabman who gets entangled in a case. This had the lively narration you want from Holmes, without trying to mimic ACD's style.

Ah well, it passed the time until the New Annotated... arrived.

Whatja readin' for?

Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines
Bill Hicks
(2004)

I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me: "Hey, whatja readin' for?"

Isn't that the weirdest fucking question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading for? Well, godammit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well... hmmm... I dunno... I guess I read for a lot of reasons, and one of the main ones is so I don't end up being a fucking waffle waitress like you.

I know Bill Hicks's Dangerous and Relentless albums well. Really well. I can recite The Gulf War Distraction ("it's so pretty and it takes our minds offa domestic issues") more easily than a Monty Python sketch. It was the early 90s: Cobain had been blasting through our eardrums with his particular brand of nilhisism, Hicks and Leary were on constant play because all the British comedians had run out of anger after yet another Conservative election victory[*], and I was in tattoo parlours. That I know Hicks' material well cannot be a shock. I'm not really sure what I wanted from this book. New insight into someone whose career is one of the seminal influences on modern standup? Perhaps. To revel in his style? I can do that by putting the albums on.

This transcribes many of the recordings of material. After the fourth time you've read that Hicks, like UFOs, is appearing in small rural communities all over America I realised what this primarily does is a forensic autopsy of his comedy. You can see the slight changes he makes, the comments to hecklers, and the way, like all pro comedians, he hauls himself back onto his script and keeps on going. This is the body of his work lain out on a slab to be dissected.

It may be of interest to aspiring comedians, and it did still provoke the odd smirk from me, but it is step one on the road of deification. Cobain's diaries, every element of his life, is churned out for obsessive consumption by the eager fans. We've been saved from seeing either he or Hicks degenerate or sell out to the Man by their early deaths (one from suicide, the other from pancreatic cancer). So now their legacy is being packaged up and sold to us, their images becoming safe, unchanging icons. Just as I'd rather stick some Nirvana on the mp3player than read Cobain's diaries, I'd rather whack the Hicks tapes back into the machine and play them at 10 than read this book.

---

[*] this, I feel, is one reason for the return of British surrealism (Izzard, Hill etc) and music hall slapstick (Reeves & Mortimore). A decade of angry young comics hadn't changed a damn thing and we wanted something new.

Traitor's Purse

Traitor's Purse
Margary Allingham
( Penguin, 1941)
One of my favourite Campion novels, which I bought just to have it in the classic Penguin green and cream design. An amnesiac Campion wakes in a hospital, suspected of murder.

One of the reasons I like the Campion novels is that he goes through WW2 and emerges a different character. You can contrast the early novels like Mystery Mile in which he is a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster with these later novels (Traitor's Purse, More Work for the Undertaker etc) in which he has ended up a government agent albeit one still with Woosterish mannerisms. Allingham writes war and post-War Britain with a staggering grinding sense of impoverishment so Campion's changing character reflects the changing eras.

Carter Beats the Devil

Carter Beats the Devil
Glen David Gold
( sceptre, 2001)

I was utterly captivated by this novel, despite working out one of the mysteries quite early on. It tangles together stage magicians, childhood tramas, fate-dictated romances and the American Secret Service. The opening of the second section, dealing with Carter's childhood reminded me sharply of Citzen Kane, although doubtless the mentions of (William Randolph) Hearst were also responsible for that. In fact, the entire book reminds me of Welles and his fascination with magic and illusion. There are the occassional moments where Gold spells things out a little too hard, and one supporting character who really should work very well as a hard-boiled anti-hero has a curiously lacklustre storyline despite some excellent character pieces. Overall, though, a great read.

(Any Doctor Who novels fan reading this will be hopelessly reminded of Sabbath as well, I should warn you)

The Wee Free Men

The Wee Free Men
Terry Pratchett
( corgi, 2004)

Pratchett's Discworld books for children have the confident reliance on story which, I can't help but feel, has been mislaid or waylaid by the ongoing characters in the 'main' series. Like Maurice and his Educated Rodents, this plays with narrative unashamedly and is more entertaining for it. Strip away the continuity from the 'main' series and this is what you get: smart writing about the nature of reality and of story-telling.

The Jaguar Smile

The Jaguar Smile
Salman Rushdie
( picador, 1987 )

There's always something strange about reading of-the-moment political travel journalism after decades have elapsed. The one thing I wish The Jaguar Smile had contained was more contextualisation. True, I am a child of the 80s and remember the Sandinistas and Contras, the CIA aid and the now strange paranoia over communism. I ought to know this stuff, the book contained names I recall such as Daniel Ortega, and perhaps its a lot to ask to have clearer political delineations in a work from the time (although Orwell managed well enough in Homage to Catalonia) but I did occassionally feel an assumption of understanding had been taken by Rushdie. It can be argued that the mild bewilderment is meant to create the confusion and ambivilance Rushie himself feels in the face of a complex geopolitical war and certainly as a portrait of a country in revolution, The Jaguar Smile really works.

A Metropolitan Murder

A Metropolitan Murder
Lee Jackson
( heinemann, 2004)

Told in the present tense, this is a novel about a murder on the Metropolitan railway, the first underground railway in the world. A while back a friend did a checklist of 35 things you must including if writing a piece of Victoriana. I have marked in bold all the ones this novel ticks:

1. Whores.
2. Fenians.
3. Urchins.
4. Social deprivation.
5. Incompetent policemen.
6. Brutal murders on the darkened streets of the capital.
7. Cockney cut-throats who don't care about anything except money.
8. Comment on sexual inequality.
9. Comment on class division.
10. Comment on British imperialism.
11. Scene set in a music-hall.
12. Scene set on a period railway station.
13. At least one evil right-wing wife-beating aristocrat. (this has an evil left-wing middle-class type instead)
14. At least one handlebar moustache, often attached to evil right-wing wife-beating aristocrat.
15. At least one fascinating-but-true fact about Victorian life not previously used by a work of fiction set in the era.
16. At least one in-joke referring to another work of fiction set in the era. (can it be coincidence that the body is discovered at Baker Street station?)
17. Cameo appearance from man in deerstalker hat who's clearly not Sherlock Holmes. (see above)
18. Cameo appearance from random character who just happens to be called Moriarty.
19. Cameo appearance from well-known eighteenth-century artist/ writer/ inventor.
20. Closet homosexuality.
21. Bodies in the Thames. (actually, this one is undercut but the expectation is there)
22. Fog.
23. Various derogatory terms for "Jew" no longer in common usage.
24. A pocket watch, probably stolen and possibly inscribed with the initials of a murder victim.
25. Attempted rape or kidnapping of heroine by burly East-End thugs (if rape, then bound to be interrupted by policeman's whistle).
26. Someone who's spent time in Africa.
27. Someone who shoots tigers.
28. Good-natured but subserviant maid who can supply important information.
29. Drunken Irish navvies.
30. One brief reference to the current Prime Minister, in order to ground the story in actual historical events.
31. Several people modelled on British character actors
32. The line 'Queen Victoria, Gawd bless 'er'.
33. Gin.
34. Slang.
35. More whores.

I'm never convinced about present tense in crime fiction. The idea, one suspects, is to increase the tension but for me it does little because I am always immediately aware of it as a device. This novel also seems uncertain about narration, with multiple characters getting their moment of third person glory. I actually felt this distracted from the notion of the novel as a crime thriller. The reader is given too much infomation whilst at the same time the lack of focus allows the tension to drift away: it's very hard to care about any of these characters as none are given enough time to become emotionally engaging.

In terms of the use of the tube (hello, Annie!) it is enjoyable although I thought the first tube lines were cut and cover whilst this seems to suggest the first extension of the Metropolitan was dug out as if by miners*. It's possible they had already started using the shield method by then but I'd need to check. However, the description of the passengers and their behaviour will strike a cord with anyone familiar with the rules of tube travel. And the fact that, even in its first year of operation, the underground was subject to delays, poor lighting and cancellations raises a chuckle.

*tangently madly: in a flashback episode of Buffy with a caption "London, 1865", Dru has a vision of a 'cave in' down the 'mine' which causes much hilarity to British fans. I've long argued that she meant the tube, since there were collapses whilst the Metropolitan was being built in...1864/5.

Half Life

Half Life
Mark Michalowski
(BBC Books, 2004)

wicked Mr Michalowski, distracting me from my writing with a lovely EDA. The first I've read in one sitting since...erm...the last Lloyd Rose, I think.

Empress Orchid

Empress Orchid
Anchee Min
( bloomsbury , 2004 )

This is a fictionalised biography of Tze-Hsi, the Dragon Empress who ruled China through her son from the 1860s until 1902 (IIRC). She is a remarkable parallel to Queen Victoria, the contemporary Empress of India, and was, in real life, fascinated by the British woman who could rule in front of the screens.
I've read this for work purposes: it comforms to many of the genre rules of 'Chinese female semi-fictional autobiography' writing (for example, Wild Swans, Women of China etc etc) in that it is first person, it emphasises the subservience expected and yet has a feisty heroine who overcomes adversity. Tze-Hsi is a figure who was demonised in the West for many years, and this sets out to reclaim her. Yet it stops at the precise moment in which she becomes the Dragon Empress, as if aware that some of Orchid's well-documented decisions and policies of her later reign, especially her response to the 1898 reform and the 1900 Boxer War, are difficult to shed favourable light on.

I enjoyed the novel but for a more complex portrait of Tze-Hsi I would recommend Marina Warner's biography instead (especially the revised edition).

The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time
Jospehine Tey
(Penguin, 1981 edition of 1951 story)

I had, as I suspected, read this before. Tey specialises in historical crime novels in which the past is uncovered layer by layer (there was a lovely one she did about son coming back from the dead - Brat Farrar - which is allegedly being filmed with Brad Pitt in the lead). In The Daughter of Time, a police detective laid up in hospital sets out to find out whether Richard III did kill the Princes in the Tower. This is historical research, the process of it, laid out in the forensic police procedural style and a light easy read. There is even a nod to the parallel between criminology and writing, in that a character within the novel plans to write a book about the process of the policeman discovering the past from his hospital bed.

Archangel

• Archangel
  Robert Harris
  (arrow, 1998)
  F | crime
  added to pile: 1st April 2004
  read: 6th April 2004
  the usual Harris with some great touches (such as the descriptions of what they find in the woods) and ideas about the past, about the act of historical research etc. Shame that it's been incorrectly printed, with a sudden dollop of 20 pages repeated and a key event entirely missing.