2021/091: The Last Graduate -- Naomi Novik

The only teachers in here are the maleficaria, and they don't have pets, they have lunch. [loc. 334]

Second in the now-a-trilogy that began with A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate starts where that book ended: in the cafeteria of the Scholomance, with a horde of freshmen still reeling from their magical arrival at this wizardly school that hangs in the void, and El and her friends now the senior class. Which means that, in just under a year, they'll be braving the Graduation Hall (did their attempt to fix the cleansing system work?) and the maleficaria that lurk there.

Though this year might be different. El slowly realises that the Scholomance is focussing on her, giving her a challenging schedule and a group of freshmen to protect, and channelling mals in her direction. Is it trying to nudge her towards the dark destiny she's struggled not to fulfil, or does it have another agenda?

El's classmates are realising just how powerful she is, and she's tentatively forming more alliances and friendships. Her relationship with Orion Lake, the insanely powerful mal-hunter who actually gains mana from killing maleficaria, is also developing. (El's familiar, a small white mouse, does not approve of Orion, and nor does her mother. El keeps telling herself that she doesn't approve of him either.) Orion has grown up both lauded and exploited: valued for his power, taken for granted by those who expect his protection and barely lift a finger to help themselves. El, no stranger to being isolated by her powers, begins to recognise how much damage his upbringing has caused. And she is increasingly uncomfortable with an educational setup that rewards selfishness and murderous intent.

Meanwhile, there are rumours of catastrophe from the outside world, which serve to make the students even nervier, uttterly ignorant as they are of current affairs. Even while she's tentatively planning life after graduation, El is unsure what she'll find when -- if -- she makes it out of the doors of the Graduation Hall.

I enjoyed this very much, though I noted a couple of plot points that could (maybe should) have been foreshadowed in the first book (for instance, the school's motto). It felt more hopeful than the first volume, with a strong theme of change, solidarity, revolution. El is maturing, less prickly and more receptive to overtures of friendship, and her relationship with Orion is changing them both. I enjoyed the friendship between El, Aadhya and Liu, and the shifting feuds and alliances of the senior class. The worldbuilding is lavishly detailed (El does like to digress) and the moments of beauty in a grim and dangerous setting add poignancy to the sheer grind of survival.

This book ends on an appalling cliffhanger, and now I have to wait until next year to find out whether that last spell worked ... and whether we've seen the last of some characters.

Thanks to NetGalley for the free review copy, in exchange for this honest review.

2021/090: Mend the Living -- Maylis de Kerangal (translated by Jessica Moore)

He likes his shifts, Sundays and nights ... He likes their alveolar intensity, their specific temporality, fatigue like a surreptitious stimulant that gradually rises through the body, accelerates and makes it sharper... likes their vibratile silence, their half-light – devices that blink in the dimness, blue computer screens or desk lamps like the flame of a candle in a La Tour painting – The Newborn, for example – and again this physicality of the work, this climate of an enclave, this watertightness, the department like a spaceship launched into a black hole, a submarine plunging into a bottomless chasm, The Mariana Trench. [loc. 234]

I wishlisted this book in 2016 following a fascinating review in the Guardian; five years later, I decided to purchase and read as part of my non-fiction diet; only very gradually did I realise that Mend the Living is actually a novel. In my defense, my limited experience of translated French nonfiction has been strikingly poetic: "Atoms in stars speak to atoms in eyes using the language of light" ... and Mend the Living won the Wellcome Book Prize, which I thought was for non-fiction ... and though some covers say 'novel', mine didn't ...

It's the story of a young man's heart. Simon Limbeau goes surfing with his friends one winter's morning: on the way home their van crashes, and Simon arrives at the hospital in a coma. His brain has ceased to function, but his heart still beats. His appalled parents are told that they have to decide whether his heart can be donated for transplant: they must decide quickly, for there's a narrow window of time during which the process can be carried out.

This is a beautifully-written book, with language that is joyous and intense and often very technical. (I found translator Jessica Moore's Afterword intriguing and thought-provoking, a fascinating personal account of the challenges involved in translating "the streaming realm of long sentences and what Maylis has called a “language hold-up” (braquage du langage) – an inventive use of rare words and concrete vocabularies." [loc 2844]). The narrative touches on the lives of many affected by Simon's situation: his divorced parents, the nurse who tends his still-breathing body, the head of organ donations, medical technicians, the transplant surgeon, the intended recipient of the heart. There are precise descriptions of medical matters (I did not know that transplanted hearts are sometimes stitched onto the original heart) and achingly credible accounts of interior emotional landscapes. I found myself rereading some of de Kerangal's intricate paragraphs, for instance the metaphor of a massive landslide for the irrevocable change, the before-and-after, experienced by Simon's mother Marianne.

This is a beautiful and strangely uplifting novel, the story of twenty-four hours in a mosaic of the individual lives affected by Simon's death. It makes the ordinary extraordinary, almost mythic, and celebrates the intricate connections of those who give Simon's heart a second life.

2021/089: Sorceress -- K L Noone

...a ghost of the young man he’d once been, before the deliberately constructed rumors and perilous persona: the boy who’d defended his kindhearted impractical younger brother through the years... [loc. 271]

A short story rather than a novella: this was a very quick read, which I'd have liked to be longer. Read within an hour of finishing Magician, which I enjoyed enough to search out, purchase and read this prequel.

Lily is raising a child by herself, living in poverty and constantly exhausted. She learnt magic from the infamous Lorre, the world's greatest magician, but he's vanished and left Lily and his daughter to survive as best they can. Lily does not welcome the arrival of the king's disreputable bastard brother, Will, who hauls her (and baby Merry) off to the palace. The king is afflicted by some frightful magical illness, and Will -- despite his bloodthirsty reputation and well-known ambition -- doesn't want his brother to die.

I liked the tension between Will and Lily: Lily herself is a great character, independent and gifted and very human, and her frustration was wholly relateable. If Noone ever decides to tell more of her story, I'm keen to read it.

2021/088: Magician -- K L Noone

Magic shivered and scurried and sang along all the strings of his being: little swinging swaying bolts of light reached out to other lights, caught the threads of the universe, wanted to play. [loc. 315]

This was just what I needed on a muggy summer Sunday: a sweet, comfortable, low-conflict romance between a powerful but reclusive wizard and the young prince who's come in search of magical help.

Lorre has exiled himself from human society and lives on a tropical island, changing shape as the whim takes him and enjoying his separation from the human race. Here, he can't shift the balance of power, or harm anyone, or disturb the world. Sometimes people come looking for him, but he never lets them find him. Until Prince Gareth shows up, talking to thin air (of course Lorre is listening) and reading a novel and generally being optimistic, pleasant and charming. Also very handsome, which does not harm his chances of persuading Lorre to help him against the magical coldness afflicting his homeland.

Lorre's magic, his integration with the world around him, reminded me somewhat of Patricia McKillip's wizards. He's centuries older than Gareth (and possibly functionally immortal) but, frankly, does not act his age: the difference in their life experiences is written as a fascination with each other's histories, rather than a cause for incompatibility. Lorre has acquired a fearsome reputation, but he's always tried to do the right thing, though sometimes his temper has got the better of him: Gareth has read all the stories, and there's an element of hero-worship (in both directions -- Gareth is the archetypal hero) which is leavened with plenty of humour and common sense.

I especially liked how comfortable this novel felt: the stakes are moderately high but there's little peril, few confrontations and no major miscommunications. Lorre and Gareth are both likeable characters, and their growing attachment to one another is thoroughly believable and very sweet.

I hadn't read the prequel story, Sorceress, in which Lorre's history (as a dragon, and a somewhat inadequate father) is seen through the eyes of his former lover, but I didn't feel that my experience of Magician was lessened by this omission: I did buy and read it immediately after finishing the novel, though. Review soon!

2021/087: Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain -- Charlotte Higgins

I think of Roman Britain above all as the place where these islands were begotten in writing. In a landscape that vibrates with stories, where every crag and moor, city and suburb, wasteland and industrial tract has been written into being, the Romans were the first to mould the land in prose. If it is to medieval literature that we owe the idea of Britain as a busy and productive and domesticated land, a ‘fair field full of folk’, then it was the Romans who first made it wild, a land of sudden mists and treacherous marshes, a territory of mountains and impassable rivers. [loc. 3652]

The title comes from Tacitus' account of a speech by Boudica: 'we Britons are cut off from all other men by the Ocean such that most people believe we live in another world, under another sky' [loc. 665]. Higgins spent some time travelling around Britain in a camper van, visiting Roman ruins and reflecting on the people who lived there, and the people who have written about the Romans over the centuries since their departure.

I was moved to read this after a reread of Gillian Bradshaw's excellent and evocative novel Island of Ghosts: I've been interested in Roman Britain since I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff in the school library, and am pleased to find my joy in Sutcliff shared by Higgins. ("The Eagle of the Ninth speaks deeply of its time of writing, during Britain’s post-war era of decolonisation. Reading half a century on, when the the imperial age is viewed in a more critical light, Sutcliff has Esca relate to his master in a way that we might now find troubling." [loc. 1253]) Higgins is very good at showing the past through the filters of different times and cultures: the outrage -- admittedly in the comments section of a Daily Mail article -- when a Roman woman's remains showed she'd been African; the various interpretations of grave goods by antiquarians; the stories that grew up around ruined Roman buildings.

She's an erudite and entertaining writer, and the book is replete with anecdotes about misread curse tablets, troops gathering seashells, the Roman mythologisation of Caratacus and Boudica. She discusses the Romanisation of the British, and the lack of barbarian hordes north of Hadrian's Wall. (I hadn't known that the Wall was originally thought to be the work of Severus.)

A fascinating read, containing accounts of many sites I've visited and some splendid landscape-descriptions. (For instance, the description of the oil refinery at Grangemouth: "Monstrous pipes vermiculated their way around structures made on no human scale.") It made me want to go and wander around ruins myself: it made me want to go out into a historic landscape and consider it.

Wishlisted in about 2014, when I first read reviews of the book: purchased and read this year as part of my non-fiction reading diet.

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2021/086: A Marvellous Light -- Freya Marske

"We don't know how many men -- er, or women -- are involved."
"They're men ... if even a single woman was involved, they wouldn't have decided that a man who'd been working there one day was a more likely source of information than a woman who'd been there for years." [loc. 4104]

A Marvellous Light is the first in the 'Last Binding' trilogy, set in an alternate Edwardian England. Civil servant Robin Blyth, recently become a baronet after the (unexplained) deaths of his socialite parents, finds himself appointed as Assistant in the Office of Special Domestic Affairs. His first morning in the job is an eye-opener, as he encounters not only a lady civil servant of Indian origin -- the marvellous Adelaide Morrissey -- but the prickly Edwin Courcey, his liaison to the Magical Assembly. Courcey is a very minor magician, but yes: magic is real. And as Robin makes his way home, he falls victim to a rather darker enchantment than the snowflake conjured by Courcey: a curse is laid on him by men who believe the prior holder of his office passed on a vital secret ...

Afflicted and frightened by the curse, Robin accepts Edwin's invitation to his family home, where he meets Edwin's appalling siblings, narrowly escapes drowning, visits a charming country house with a murder maze, and begins to realise that he's attracted to Edwin -- and that it's mutual. Cue the 'can you help me with my cufflinks?' ploy, which felt like a deliberate shout-out to K J Charles' excellent Think of England.

A Marvellous Light focusses on the romance, though it doesn't ignore the magical mystery. There are themes of consent (both magical and sexual) and of confidence and its lack. Edwin and Robin, despite their shared tastes in pornography, are very different people -- the former a dedicated scholar, accustomed to hiding everything that matters beneath layers of emotional armour; the latter a hearty athletic type with a strong protective streak -- and their growing regard for one another is expressed as much in mutual support and encouragement as in romantic gestures. Their nascent relationship is inextricably entwined with, and affected by, the secret which Reggie Gatling (the previous Assistant in the Office of Special Domestic Affairs) died to keep.

That, by the way, is something that the reader knows (courtesy of a rather gruesome opening scene in which Reggie meets his end) but the characters don't: given that for much of the book there's discussion of how frightfully out of character Reggie's disappearance seems, this was unsettling. Though of course foreknowledge is an endemic issue in historical fiction: we recognise that the 'something terrible coming', feared by the Magical Assembly and by the villains alike, is very probably the First World War.

There are several characters I'm hoping to see in subsequent volumes: rude and arrogant Hawthorn, Edwin's ex; Adelaide Morrissey's sister Katy; Edwin's mother, afflicted by an unspecified malaise; Robin's sister Maud, who is keen to study at Newnham. And I look forward to seeing how the elements of the Last Contract are revealed and reunited ...

Reread for this review, and it's just as delicious the second time around. Thanks to NetGalley for the free copy, provided in exchange for this honest review.

2021/085: Mauve: How one man invented a colour that changed the world -- Simon Garfield

Industry had shown Victorian chemists what was possible, and now nothing seemed beyond achievement; an eighteen-year-old had created a new shade for a woman’s shawl, and the full force of chemical ambition was unleashed. [loc. 1044]

Framed as a biography of William Perkin -- who in 1856, aged 18, synthesised an aniline dye while attempting to make artificial quinine -- this book also provides an overview of the history of chemical dyes, the tension between pure and applied science, and the machinations of fashion.

Mauve was one of the first of the books dealing with a single significant substance, innovator or phenomenon: dust, foam, rats, cod, salt ... I was pleased to find it on Kindle Unlimited (though vexed by the large bold type used for footnotes) and found it an interesting read, with the chemistry explained in comprehensible terms. Garfield touches on the medical properties of various dyes, something I'd like to read more about: I wonder if there might be connections to folkloric beliefs that particular colours were apt treatments for specific diseases (red hangings for smallpox, for example.)

If I have a criticism, it's that some of the content is only tangentially related to Perkin and his work: there's an account of the murder of wrestler Dave Schultz by John Eleuthère du Pont (scion of the company which had been a major producer of chemical dyes) which is tied into the main narrative by a mention of Schultz's red and mauve leotards.

2021/084: The Secret History of the Blitz -- Joshua Levine

Within days, Morrison was allocating new funds for shelters. ‘What does money matter?’ he asked. ‘There are thousands of lives at stake!’ In Britain, during the Blitz, a lot of relationships started changing. The loveless marriage between government and people was only one of them. [loc. 918]

The 'secret' is that there was no consensus, no 'Blitz spirit': not all Londoners bonded in shared peril (singalongs in air raid shelters), or indulged their baser fantasies (looting bombed houses, illicit relationships), or approved of the government's policies, or put on a brave face as the bombs fell. Some Londoners were proud of having been bombed, others utterly terrified. Daily privations didn't prevent people from, well, acting like people.

Some really fascinating history here, told in a mixture of personal accounts -- letters, Mass Observation diaries, interviews et cetera -- and lightly-editorialised reportage. I had not previously heard of the Sherwood Forest oil drilling, run by Americans, which extracted nearly a million barrels of crude oil in a single year. I also wasn't aware that peregrine falcons were culled because they might have preyed on carrier pigeons ... And I did not know that there was a popular magazine, London Life, which featured articles on fetishism: apparently the people in one shelter were so engrossed in discussion that they 'failed to respond to a bomb exploding nearby' [loc. 1171] and later agreed 'to host a special evening in the shelter where everyone would dress according to their own particular pleasure'.

Levine argues that the Blitz was a period of misrule, of disruption to peacetime moralities and hierarchies: that it led to the creation of the National Health Service, free education for all, and the institution of the welfare state. (The Citizens Advice Bureau was originally formed to provide assistance to those left homeless by the bombs.)

It's hard to read this and not draw parallels with the ongoing pandemic, and the frequent calls on 'Blitz spirit'. If the Blitz was the dawn of the welfare state, is the pandemic its dusk?

The Blitz was the dark crucible of the National Health Service, of free education for all, of the collective spirit that guided much of the last century. Today’s politicians and policy makers were born long after these benefits evolved, and this, perhaps, is why they are now being allowed to erode. [loc. 4630]

Purchased 2018, read as part of my non-fiction 'reading diet'.

2021/083: On the Move: A Life -- Oliver Sacks

... my writings need extensive pruning and editing, because I may express the same thought in many different ways. I can get waylaid by tangential thoughts and associations in mid-sentence, and this leads to parentheses, subordinate clauses, sentences of paragraphic length. I never use one adjective if six seem to me better and, in their cumulative effect, more incisive. I am haunted by the density of reality and try to capture this with (in Clifford Geertz’s phrase) “thick description.” [loc. 2280]

Okay, six adjectives to describe Oliver Sacks, as conveyed in this memoir: shy,curious, gregarious, reckless, energetic, cerebral. But wait: that's not sufficient... Sacks is perhaps best-known as the author of Awakenings, which was made into a film starring Robert de Niro (of whom Sacks writes engagingly) and Robin Williams. Sacks was a neuropsychologist with a gift for writing about his work in accessible and poetic prose. He was also Jewish, gay and, for most of his life, an expatriate: he was born in London but lived in the States from the early 1960s until his death in 2015, just after the publication of On the Move.

I am fascinated by the persona depicted in this book, while accepting that it was written at the end of a long and varied life, with the benefit of hindsight and years of reflection. Despite being painfully shy, Sacks comes across as a gregarious and sociable type: his friends included Thom Gunn and W H Auden, he worked with Francis Crick of DNA fame, he name-drops throughout the book. He also presents as a profoundly physical person, with a passion for surfing, swimming, riding motorbikes and body-building: perhaps to balance this physicality, or because of his lifelong professional fascination with the workings of the human brain, he also drank, took drugs and became addicted to amphetamines.

On the Move isn't truly chronological, though it starts with his childhood and ends with his old age, but the general movement is forwards. However, as indicated by the quotation at the top of this review, he digresses and parenthesises and revisits: he is a profligate footnoter* and the footnotes are always worth reading.

When his mother, whom he adored, found out he was homosexual, she told him he was an 'abomination': he doesn't discuss the impact of this on his emotional and sexual life (except to remark that it was 'anguish as much as accusation'), but it may have contributed to his long periods of celibacy. Only late in life did he form a lasting relationship. This was not due to any emotional lack: his love and compassion is evident in his accounts of various patients: he gives the impression of caring deeply about them, and of a determination to remain open-minded and receptive rather than diagnosing by the book. (There's rather less compassion for his own injuries and accidents: he seems to regard them as payback for his misjudgements.)

A fascinating account of a life, of a man with immense energy and humanity who used his intellectual gifts for the good of others, not only in a medical setting but in daily life. I'm looking forward to reading or rereading more of his work.

Purchased 2016: read as part of my non-fiction 'reading diet'.

*So much easier on Kindle! I think I gave up on Musicophilia in paperback because of the sheer weight of footnotes and the tiny font in which they were printed: I'll buy the ebook and give it another try.

2021/082: Into the Wild -- Jon Krakauer

...if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours—because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down—it’s not apparent from the photograph. [p. 198]

In August 1992 24-year-old Chris McCandless, who'd donated his savings account to Oxfam and taken off into the wilds of Alaska, died in the wreckage of a disused bus. Into the Wild is an examination of his story, and the stories of other young men -- often inspired by writers such as Jack London -- who've been driven to escape modern life and retreat into an idealised wild state. There's mention, too, of the Franklin expedition, similarly ill-prepared for survival in the frozen north.

Author Jon Krakauer, who'd previously written a long article on McCandless for a magazine, retraced the young man's last year of travel (hitchhiking from California to Alaska: vividly recalled by those who helped him) and tried to make sense of his death. Krakauer writes of how he empathised with McCandless because he too had had a difficult relationship with his family, a yearning for wilderness, and a hubristic expedition into the Alaskan wilderness that was nearly fatal. In his original article he was somewhat disparaging about McCandless' survival skills: over the course of this exploration, he discovered that McCandless had not been as hapless as he'd previously thought.

There's a lot of splendid description of the wilderness here, and Krakauer writes with compassion for McCandless' family and friends. Much of the account, though, is based on extrapolation of McCandless' laconic journal entries, and inevitably there's some invention. (See here for a rigorous critique.) But I found this very readable, often poignant, and informed by the author's sympathy and affection for his subject. McCandless seems to have died because of bad luck as much as arrogance, and though in some respects his abandonment of friends and family was selfish, I can't help admiring his desire to extract himself from civilisation.

I bought this in 2017, because the story fascinates me: read it now, in 2021, because I'm on a 'reading diet' of non-fiction.

2021/081: Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars -- Francesca Wade

Square Haunting takes up Woolf’s call for a different sort of history: it is a biography of five great women, about feelings and drawing rooms, but also about work, politics, literature and community. And, indeed, about war, which affected each of these lives deeply. [loc. 446]

Square Haunting (the title's taken from a line in Virginia woolf's diaries) focuses on five independent, intellectual women who lived in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, between the first and second world wars. Beginning with HD (Hilda Doolittle) who lived there from 1916-1918, the book continues with Dorothy Sayers (who lived in the same rooms that HD had rented), then historian and economist Eileen Power; classicist Jane Harrison, who set up home with Hope Mirrlees; and finally a brief residency by Virgina Woolf.

The book focusses on the time spent in the Square, but isn't always limited to that time: there is much about Harrison's life at Girton prior to her move to London, and about Woolf's time in Sussex. Still, the author's main concern is with these five women, and their struggles to balance hearts and brains, to achieve independence of thought and deed and emotion without compromising themselves. (This endeavour was greatly aided, at least for some of them, by the employment of domestic staff.)

There are connections, some more tenuous than others, between the women. Woolf and Harrison were friends, and Harrison's work was published by the Woolf-owned Hogarth Press; Sayers and HD both had one-sided relationships with translator John Cournos (HD rejected him, and he rejected Sayers, who may have based the character of Philip Boyes, in Strong Poison, on him; also worth noting is Harriet Vane's residence on Mecklenburgh Square.) Sayers and Power discussed Roman rule in Palestine at a party; Woolf ate chocolate creams in Power's kitchen. But the book is about the women, not their friends or relationships, and indeed the predictable 'big names' (T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, D H Lawrence, Freud) are mentioned only in passing, when relevant.

I wasn't familiar with Power (though I believe I read her Medieval Women at university) and found her emphasis on social and domestic history fascinating. More familiar with the others, but I still learnt a lot: I hadn't known that Sayers had an illegitimate son (whose father's wife sounds absolutely amazing: she helped and supported Sayers during the pregnancy); I wasn't aware of just how fraught HD's marriage to Richard Aldington had been; and I hadn't realised that Harrison had burnt all her papers and effectively eloped to London with Hope Mirrlees, reinventing herself in her seventies.

A fascinating read, especially the framing chapters: the book opens with the bombing of Mecklenburgh Square during the Blitz, and closes with a description of a 'living memorial' to Woolf:

Researchers have established, as far as possible, exactly where Virginia Woolf’s study at 37 Mecklenburgh Square would have sat within the modern building [of Goodenough College]. Now, that room is given over each year to a woman student...[who] finds a book sitting on the desk, ready for her to turn the first page: A Room of One’s Own. [loc 4937]

(Also see Goodenough News, Autumn 2015, page 14.)

2021/080: After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5,000 BC -- Steven Mithen

Who, he thinks, would be a town-dwelling farmer rather than a hunter-gatherer? Having travelled through all but one of the world’s continents he knows the answer: almost everyone in the prehistoric world. [loc. 9624]

A survey of history before anything was written down, covering the period from the Last Glacial Maximum to the establishment of farming. To bring archaeological, ecological and geological discoveries to life, Mithen invents an invisible observer who observes life on each continent (except Antarctica) over this period of fifteen millennia. This observer's name is John Lubbock, named after the Victorian author of Prehistoric Times (1865), a work that was groundbreaking for its time but nevertheless portrayed our ancestors as savages with undeveloped minds. Lubbock, in After the Ice, can 'travel in the same manner as an archaeologist digs – seeing the most intimate details of people’s lives but being unable to ask any questions and with his presence quite unknown' [loc. 254]. I ended up feeling immensely sorry for Lubbock, especially when he'd been waiting for centuries for people to return to a site ... "Lubbock leaves his seat in 7000 BC, breaking through the dense mat of grass and shrubs that has bound him to the floor." [loc. 8943]

Mithen provides a thorough survey of archaeological discoveries from the last Ice Age, through the Younger Dryas (another cold period around 9000 BC), to the rapid warming that facilitated cultivation and farming. He emphasises, both in the main body of the text and in his Afterword, the role of climate change in human history. Rapid rises in global temperatures -- 7^o in a decade around 9600BC, for instance --  drastically altered the ecology: species became extinct, areas became unliveable, land became sea, people moved on.  I was especially intrigued by the prehistory of the Nile: the river is now fed by the Blue and White Niles, but the latter was blocked off by sand dunes between 20,000 BC and 12,500 BC, while the former had less flow due to shorter wet seasons. Global warming, increased rainfall and the erosion of the sand dunes led to the 'Wild Nile', with faster flow, narrower floodplain and massive depopulation.

At that point, most, if not all, humans lived as hunter-gatherers, moving with the seasons, perhaps planting seeds in the spring but not hanging around to wait for the harvest. (Africa and Australia, Mithen points out, were so well-endowed with edible plants that there was no need to cultivate anything until well after farming had taken root, ha, in Europe and Asia.) The hunter-gatherer people portrayed here do seem to have a healthier and less industrious existence than those who settled, farmed and built towns. (For values of 'town' including anything from four or five huts upwards.) Settling means territory: territory means overcrowding, conflict, an us-and-them mentality. Though at least there is plenty of evidence to be found in the places where early humans lived: farming, it seems, was invented well before tidying up, and a great many of the finds discussed are objects or remains that have been left lying, or pushed aside into corners.

There are some fascinating insights, observations and theories in After the Ice. Phallic pestles; beetles indicating a maximum summer temperature of 10^o in Britain at the Last Glacial Maximum; children and adults buried within the walls and floors of houses; modern-day non-Indo-European languages (Basque, Finnish) reflecting areas where the Mesolithic inhabitants lingered and mixed with the Neolithic; the oral histories of Australian Aborigines which may reflect events of ten or twenty thousand years ago. 

Though human history progressed (?) along similar lines in many different regions -- pottery 'evolved' several times, as did farming, religion and various improvements to basic tools -- the vignettes of life observed by Lubbock (based on specific archaeological discoveries, such as graves) and the discussion of various theories kept the narrative fresh and readable, and prevented it from feeling repetitive. Mithen's Afterword is thoughtful and relevant, a good discussion of anthropogenic climate change: perhaps more controversial on first publication, in 2002, than it is now.

Are the delights of the microscope, the thoughts of Darwin, the poetry of Shakespeare and the advances of medical science, sufficient recompense for the environmental degradation, social conflict and human suffering that ultimately derive from the origin of farming 10,000 years ago? [loc. 11252]