2023/180: Winter's Gifts — Ben Aaronovitch

Magic was not a factor in any of the conflicts with tribal Indians until the British intervened during the war of 1812. [loc. 1029]

My end-of-the-year treat to myself. Winter's Gifts is a novella in the Rivers of London world, but set in North America -- specifically Wisconsin -- and featuring FBI agent Kimberley Reynolds, who's appeared or been mentioned in a couple of the Peter Grant novels. Here, we get more of her story: her Christian upbringing and faith, the 'petty' job she started after leaving college, the much more interesting work she does for the FBI's Critical Incident Response Group, and the difficulties of confronting magical beings and phenomena when you're not a magician yourself.

Kimberley is sent to respond to a call from Henderson, a retired FBI agent who lives in Eloise, a small town in northern Wisconsin, and who's called with a coded message that indicates Unusual Circumstances. She arrives to find the town hall levelled by an ice tornado, Henderson's house empty bar signs of a struggle, and Eloise effectively cut off from the world. She also encounters a handsome Native American meteorologist named William Boyd ('not a hobbit'), who explains to her just how freaky the weather is; Sadie Clarkson, a charming Black librarian with a secret and a journal from an 1840s expedition, lost without trace while hunting something magical; and Scott Walker, an ethnographer who may be more than he seems. And then the weird stuff really kicks in.

TThe problem with Aaronovitch's books is that as soon as I read one, I want to reread my favourites. This time I managed not to succumb, apart from the last few chapters of Broken Homes... I enjoyed Winter's Gifts very much indeed, despite its departure from the 'magic-user investigates magical crime' template, and I would like more Kimberley Reynolds: I appreciate her grounded, pragmatic approach, and I'd like to know more about how she reconciles her experience of the magical world with her Christian faith. I'd also like more about the Virginia Gentleman's Company, founded by Thomas Jefferson as one of America's two counterparts to London's Folly (the other was founded by Benjamin Franklin) and their charged interactions with the Native American population. And the Crane from London, who flies everywhere and swaps stories ...

Bonus extra: the longest single Dewey Decimal number, cited by Sadie Clarkson when she's not encouraging local schoolchildren to read A Wizard of Earthsea.

2023/179: Shadow Baron — Davinia Evans

“What do you think about everything that's going on, anyway? ... About the city. About beings coming from other planes. About monsters. About all the other weird things.”
Ehann shrugged uncomfortably. “It's Bezim. Everyone comes here, from everywhere. Why shouldn’t they? We have a lot of strange stuff — alchemy, bravi, a cliff through the middle of the city. I don't know, I've never been anywhere else, but this seems fine. Even if it's getting stranger." [p. 269]

The second in the trilogy that began with Notorious Sorcerer, this is as complex and richly imagined as Evans' debut, though the pace seemed slightly less headlong: or perhaps that's because I'm more familiar with the characters, and more invested in what happens to them next.

In the previous book, street-rat Siyon Velo became the Alchemist and the Power of the Mundane, bringing the four planes back into balance for the first time in centuries. Siyon has achieved the impossible: now he's confronting the merely inconceivable -- the reform of the laws against alchemy, and unravelling the knots of secrecy that surround the quartet of Barons who oversee Bezim's criminal underworld. Siyon is still mourning Izmirlian, the lover he sent into oblivion, and adjusting to very different ways of working as his abilities are affected by his new status.

Siyon is not the only character changing careers. Neglected wife Anahid Joddani's gambling habit brings her an unexpected prize, and a plethora of decisions about its disposal. Assuming she even wants to be rid of it: it offers her a whole new arena for her business acumen and her organisational gifts -- and a kind of freedom not previously available to her. Anahid's sister Zagiri, meanwhile, is pursuing her ambition to become one of the people with the power to make a difference: but is that the thing that matters most, when it comes to the crunch? There are new characters, too, some of them outsiders from beyond the city (I especially liked Mayar, from the Khanate), and some at the very heart of Bezim's aristocracy.

I love the atmosphere, with all the nautical metaphors to remind us that Bezim is a trading port as well as a cultural hub. And I found it massively refreshing that so much has changed, in the city and for the protagonists, since Notorious Sorcerer: I'm sure there could have been dozens of stories about Bezim set within the status quo of the previous novel, but that novel's climax has vast and tangible effects. Eagerly looking forward to the third novel (and hoping that next time I get a review PDF that's not unreadably jumbled!)

2023/178: Three Eight One — Aliya Whiteley

I don't know why I was so obsessed with end points. I think I was still imagining that every story had one. [loc. 2021]

Rowena Savalas is seventeen years of age in body, and six hundred and sixty-three in streaming years. She begins a personal project on 7th January 2314, somewhere on the 'reclaimed Jurassic Coast'. Rowena is studying the Age of Riches (basically the 21st century) which is defined as 'an intense and consuming explosion of digital information'. From her vantage point in the calm and rational Age of Curation, she's attempting an analysis of a document called The Dance of the Horned Road, which dates from July 2024. As her reading progresses, and her footnoted annotations reflect her attempts to make sense of its references, it seems increasingly likely that The Dance of the Horned Road does not describe 'our' 2024 -- that it is, in fact, a work of fiction.

The narrator and protagonist of Dance is Fairly, a young woman who goes a-questing, as many have done before her, on the Horned Road. The world in which she lives is part Bronze Age (the stockaded village in which Fairly grew up) and part Space Age (the Spire in Telezon, from the top of which rockets are launched into space). Fairly's quest begins with her pressing a button on a Chain Device, which changes her narrative from third-person to first-person. There will be more Chain Devices: also a camper van, an ominous and persistent Breathing Man, and a plethora of the mysterious cha.

The cha -- small furry animals, possibly reddish, with pointed ears and long back legs -- are the mystery at the heart of this novel. Sometimes (as painted pebbles) they're currency; sometimes they're friends and protectors; sometimes, to Fairly's initial revulsion, they're food. There's a cult that claims they are ancient cosmic deities who will save humanity. There's a woman who claims they are pigs, and fattens them up to be made into bacon and sausages. The cha absolutely fascinated me, to the extent that when I initially started to write this review I remembered them as the focus of the novel.

But I'm not sure that there is a focus, or an explanation, or a conclusion. Rowena's life -- her physical life -- is changed by reading Fairly's document: Fairly's life changes over the course of that document. But is it a journal, or a work of fiction, or something quite other? Rowena says, near the beginning: "I asked myself the same question over and over and over while reading: What does this all mean? I'm beginning to think that's the wrong question to ask." Perhaps by the end of The Dance of the Horned Road -- or by the end of Three Eight One -- the reader will conclude that 'meaning' is not the only, or even the most important, quest(ion) within a story.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review: UK publication date is 16 JAN 2024.

2023/177: The Secret Lives of Colour — Kassia St Clair

Colours, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream. [loc. 272]

Seventy-five short essays about the cultural, social and scientific history of 75 colours, from gamboge to heliotrope. St Clair weaves in a vast array of facts, some of which surprised me: 'There is evidence that in the Middle Ages blue was considered hot, even the hottest of colours'; 'Leonhard Fuchs never saw the plant [fuchsia] that now bears his name'; 'French dyers could not touch [indigo], on pain of death, until 1737'. (Copious footnotes and a bibliography support each assertion.) St Clair has a knack for the vignette. Some of the essays examine the history of a specific dye; others explore the associations of a particular hue. (The chapter on 'Kelly Green' focuses on St Patrick.) There's a lot about the history of trading in dyes, about various artists' use of colour, and about the chemical discoveries that led to vivid modern dyes. And there's a surprising amount of etymology: for example, the word 'miniature' derives from the name of an orange-red pigment, minium, via the word for the person applying it -- the miniator.

This was a good read on my Kindle, but oh! the joy of opening it in the Kindle phone app and discovering that the grey bars that frame each chapter are, in fact, bars of the relevant colour! (I'm slightly ashamed that it took me so long to twig...) Apparently the physical book has border-stripes of the colour, so that you can flip through to the colour you're interested in. There's also a brilliant, and very useful, 'Glossary of other interesting colours' at the end, from Amethyst ('violet or purple, from the precious stone') to Wheat ('pale gold') -- again, with coloured circles to illustrate each hue.

Absolutely fascinating, and highly recommended as a book to dip into from time to time. Get the physical book, though, unless you're reading the ebook on a colour device.

Fulfils the ‘essay collection’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge (2023).

2023/176: Glorious Exploits — Ferdia Lennon

...as we listen, something happens. The words and voice blend so that what he is blends, and he becomes two things at once, a starving Athenian, yes, but something else, hidden, then rising. He's Medea, poor princess Medea from Colchis...[loc. 345]

Sicily, 414BC: two out-of-work potters, Gelon and Lampo, are on their way to the quarry with bread and olives. They'll feed the imprisoned Athenians, recently defeated at the Second Battle of Syracuse -- but only if said Athenians can manage a quotation or two, preferably from Euripides. Some of them do better than others, and after a while Gelon and Lampo hatch a plan to produce Euripides' Medea and The Trojan Women, right there in the quarry where the Athenians are surrounded by the tombs of their dead fellow soldiers; with Athenians playing all the roles, and full costume and scenery provided by our two heroes. They may be penniless potters, but they're avid theatre-goers -- and they have connections, including the delightfully sinister Tuireann, from 'the tin islands ... near Atlantis', who funds the production and who may have a god imprisoned on his ship.

The plays are produced; there's tension between Gelon and Lampo; there's a shockingly sudden act of vengeance; there's a daring escape. All fitting neatly into the historical context (which is backdrop rather than foreground: Lampo, for instance, berates a tour guide who's waxing eloquent about the death of Nicias, but barely mentions Nicias otherwise), and all exploring the multifarious shades of tragedy, from the theatrical to the personal. Happily, this is leavened by friendship, love and respect: I think the core of the novel is the friendship between Gelon and Lampo, and the things that make that friendship waver.

Glorious Exploits is the debut novel of Irish author Ferdia Lennon: I confess I was surprised (and initially irritated) by his rendition of colloquial speech as idiomatically Irish, but why not? I'd much rather read working-class characters speaking informally ("Ah, easy there now," says I. "There's plenty of fun to be had without mauling the staff. Right, lads?") than the stilted, grammatically correct dialogue found in some historical novels. Lennon's narrator, Lampo, may be a common man, but he's not immune to the magic of poetry or myth: and his and Gelon's shared passion for Euripides is a joy and an inspiration, however dark the denouement may be.

I'm reminded that I recently read another novel that featured the Sicilian Expedition: Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine. It's easy to imagine Myron, Alexias' father, as one of the Athenians who survives the quarries, who finally makes it home to tell of the Athenians' defeat.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review: UK publication date is 18 JAN 2024).

2023/175: How to be Human: The Manual — Ruby Wax

‘The brain is Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.’ [loc. 455]

Ruby Wax, long an advocate for mental health, enlists the assistance of neuroscientist Ash Ranpura and Buddhist monk Gelong Thubten in this examination of the impact of stress and informational overload on the human mind. Among the topics Wax examines are emotions, relationships, children, addiction and forgiveness. I found the Forgiveness chapter (where Wax forgives her parents, who fled Europe in the 1940s, for her rough childhood: 'Who knows who they would have been if they hadn’t had to run for their lives? The past was not their fault.') really chimed with me: I've been thinking about my parents as they might be now, as I might relate to them if we could meet as adults and equals.

Wax's sense of humour is never too far away, but she's also very honest and open about her own mental health issues. Her conversations with Ash and Thubten, which are included at the end of each chapter, give solid neurological explanations of some behaviour patterns, as well as ways in which to approach and resolve them. (I found Thubten very likeable and quietly humorous: I didn't get as much sense of Ash as a person.) There's a lot of mindfulness in this book, including a whole chapter of exercises -- varied enough that many are new to me.

I found this an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, with lots of brain-snagging ideas: the mind is bigger than its emotions; forgiveness is about releasing ourselves from resentment, rather than letting someone 'get away with' something; we can't deal with abundance ('more people die of overeating than of starvation'), hence addictions; emotional pain activates the same centres in the brain as physical pain. There's a recurrent theme of kindness and compassion, to ourselves as well as to others: I am beginning to think that kindness is more important, personally and globally, than love. And there's a theme, too, of attention: to ourselves, to our bodies, to one thing rather than the plethora of content that's suddenly (in evolutionary terms) available to us via the internet.

I'm inclined to read Wax's other books about mental health issues: luckily there's at least one in the TBR!

Fulfils the ‘By a comedian’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

Fulfils the ‘How To’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/174: Paladin's Faith — T Kingfisher

There was supposedly a whole language to fan signals and where you carried it and how you fluttered it and where your gaze went while so fluttering. Wren had no idea how you learned that language. Her fan had bluntly pointed wooden handles and she was fairly certain that if she held it right, she could jam the closed fan into someone’s eye socket with enough force to break through to the brain. [loc. 2171]

I preordered this, and read it within a day of it appearing on my Kindle: but I confess I was disappointed, and it's taken me a while to work out why.

It would have helped immensely if I'd reread the previous books in the series: Paladin's Grace, Paladin's Strength, and Paladin's Hope. While not a direct continuation, several of the characters in Faith have appeared, with greater or lesser agency, in the previous novels: I could also have done with a refresher on the world of the White Rat, especially as I have been labouring under a misconception regarding the connection between Swordheart and the Paladin series. And finally, the 'it's just me' rationale: I was overloaded with other stuff and found myself reading whole pages (at least!) without retaining much. So, when the next novel in the series is announced, I'll reread all four novels of the story so far.

The plot is fun. Our Paladin for this episode is Shane (a name I cannot take seriously due to a kid at primary school), who has extremely low self-esteem and a connection to the Dreaming God as well as to the mysteriously-deceased Saint of Steel. The Dreaming God deals with demons, and there are certainly demons in this tale, one of whom is rather likeable. Shane is assigned, with his fellow paladin Wren (who is forced to dress up as a noble lady for plot reasons, and does not care for it at all), to guard Marguerite Florian, an accomplished spy who's being hunted by the Red Sail cartel. Marguerite is immense fun and extremely pragmatic. Romance ensues -- though Shane and Marguerite have very different levels of sexual and / or romantic experience -- with typical* obstacles: holes in the ground with teeth, demons with ambition, missing horse urine, unreliable exes, and clockwork sex toys. And an inventor whose machine might change the world...

I think a reread -- including the Clocktaur duology, which I left unfinished after being told a major spoiler -- might be overdue, now I come to think of it.

* typical for T Kingfisher, anyway.

2023/173: Font Psychology: Why Fonts Matter and How They Influence Consumer Behavior — Richard G Lewis

This stylish and elegant typeface is very much suitable for official purposes. [loc. 457]

This book would have been better as a blog post. It's a short overview of font usage on marketing and publicity material, with a focus on web design, and though I'd have found it a useful reference twenty or thirty years ago, it's not saying anything new or interesting.

It would also have benefitted from an editor, or at least a proofreader. 'San serif', 'sans-serif' and 'sans serif' are used interchangeably; Montserrat is spelt three different ways; not all the fonts are illustrated with examples; the author first recommends Arial (yawn) for business purposes but then includes it in a list of fonts (including Comic Sans and Papyrus) that have been 'overused'. The footnotes aren't linked in the main text, and the descriptions of fonts are so repetitive as to be meaningless ('very much suitable for official purposes'... 'one of the most favourite typefaces of all time' ...) Might be a good starting point for a student project but not much use to an industry professional.

Fulfils the ‘Art / Design’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/172: The Empress of Salt and Fortune — Nghi Vo

Honor is a light that brings trouble. Shadows are safer by far. [loc. 902]

Chih is a travelling cleric of the Singing Hills monastery, accompanied by a knowledgeable talking hoopoe bird called Almost Brilliant. Entering the ghost-haunted lands which until recently were under imperial lock, Chih and Almost Brilliant encounter an old woman who goes by the name of Rabbit. She is the sole inhabitant of the abandoned imperial residence which was known as 'Thriving Fortune' -- a joke, because it was a place of exile, where the recently-deceased empress In-Yo had lived for many years with a court of unwilling aristocrats. Rabbit was very close to In-Yo, and as she tells the stories of the objects that Chih discovers in the dusty archives of the palace, she gradually (but with definite intent and a storyteller's gift of pacing) reveals her own role in matters of state.

I liked the layered narrative here, the ways in which stories are told and untold: I liked the worldbuilding, which is not detailed but is delivered in a few striking images: I was pleased that most of (or all of?*) the major characters were female, and that not all of them were nobles or courtiers. I don't feel I know Chih or Almost Brilliant well enough, even after this novella, to like them or not, but I understand there are further novellas in the sequence, and I'm keen to read more about this world, with its Asian influences and its mammoth-and-lion Empire.

* I am not sure how Chih self-defines: 'cleric' seems to be a gender-neutral term, and Rabbit at first assumes Chih is female: "Oh, I see I was mistaken. Not a girl after all, but a cleric."

2023/171: Release — Patrick Ness

The boy takes a breath. “Today was a day I had to let go of a lot of stuff. Like everything that was tying me down suddenly got untied.”
“And I the same,” the spirit says. “Today is the day my destiny changed.”
“So did mine.”
“I know,” the spirit says. “I heard it coming. I followed the longing for it.” [p. 275]

Over the course of Saturday in a small town somewhere in Washington State, a gay teenager's life is transformed. Also, the world -- possibly the universe -- is saved.

Adam is seventeen; still half in love with his ex, Enzo; maybe half in love with his current boyfriend, Linus; doing his best to obey his evangelical parents; reliant on his friendship with Angie. Saturday morning starts with errands for his mother, and Saturday night he plans to attend Enzo's going-away party. Between those two events Adam finds himself questioning the limits and certainties of his world, and unwittingly saving the world. For on the other side of town, the ghost of a murdered girl is rising from the lake, and somehow she's entwined with the Queen of another realm. The spirit sends the Queen on a mission of vengeance, accompanied by a seven-foot-tall faun who's unable to warn her of the dangers...

I loved this. Ness wraps together the two stories -- the primary narrative of Adam's Saturday, and the secondary (and perhaps more significant) story of the Queen, the ghost and the faun -- with care and restraint, leaving the reader to make the connections between the two. Adam's interactions with his family and friends are so vivid, especially the pivotal conversation with his father. ("It hurts my heart that you're afraid"). His gradual realisation that he's freer than he thought he was, that his world is opening up, is something I wish I'd read as a teenager, feeling doomed by very different constraints. While the story of the Queen and the spirit and the faun seems at first lighter and more predictable -- though told in a more poetic, mythic style -- it's a different sort of delight. The faun, in particular, is fascinating: "He wonders if she will win this time. And if she doesn’t, will he have time to eat anyone before the worlds disintegrate?"

I'm about to reread The Rest of Us Just Live Here for a book club discussion, and I'll be thinking about Release and comparing the ways in which the fantastical intrudes on the mundane, and how irrelevant it is or isn't.

Fulfils the ‘doesn't fit any of the other prompts’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge. I mean, it probably could be shoehorned into several of the categories, but there isn't room because they're all fulfilled.

2023/170: The Dreamers — Karen Thompson Walker

This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love. [p. 137]

I'd enjoyed Walker's The Age of Miracles, so had good expectations of her second novel. I don't think I knew that it was a pandemic novel: and technically it's not, because it was published in 2019. But it is spookily prescient, with conspiracy theories, refusal of vaccines and masks, blaming of outsiders ...

At a university campus in California, a student falls asleep and can't be woken. The sickness spreads; the inhabitants are told to avoid contact with others; the army sets up roadblocks to prevent anyone leaving town. And it turns out that the sleepers are dreaming, furiously dreaming: 'there is more activity in these minds than has ever been recorded in any human brain — awake or asleep' [p. 60].

Walker's cast includes a survivalist father and his two young daughters; their next-door neighbours, who have a small baby who's feeding on donor milk and could have been exposed to the virus; an ageing college professor whose lover is slowly dying in a care home; a psychiatrist, quarantined in the hospital and worrying about her daughter; and Mei, the roommate of the first student to die, whose shyness has prevented her from making friends with the other girls in her dorm. Each of them deals -- or fails to deal -- with the crisis in different ways. And each of them suffers loss.

There's a distinctly SFnal element to the story: the dreams -- perhaps prescient, perhaps creating whole realities -- experienced by those who've succumbed and fallen asleep. Walker's focus is, instead, on survival mechanisms, on the ways in which people push back against quarantine and lockdown, and on the small acts of kindness or selfishness which shape the world. Like The Age of Miracles, it doesn't really finish: it fades. But that openendedness fits the premise better than any definite resolution would.

It was unsettling to read this account of a pandemic, albeit a localised one, and see how accurately Walker's fiction predicted some aspects of the Covid pandemic. But this is, mostly, a kinder virus. "...how much quieter that ending would be, a whole world drowned in sleep, than all the other ways we have to fall." [p. 284]

2023/169: The Fell — Sarah Moss

... when you deprive people of external stimulus their brains slow down, almost a survival strategy, who could bear to be running on all cylinders and locked in like this, you’d go mad, poison yourself with your own fumes. [p. 25]

Kate is desperate to escape the claustrophobic confines of the home she shares with her teenaged son, so she goes for a walk. But the country's in lockdown, and Kate is supposed to be isolating after a colleague caught Covid: she's breaking the law just by leaving her garden. And she's heading up to the fells, in November, without her phone and with dusk approaching.

This is a short but powerful novel about Covid, survival, the will to live, and the ways in which people's lives are inextricably intertwined. It's told from four points of view: Kate herself, with her lack of will to live ('the longer this goes on the less she objects to dying') and her frustration with lockdown restrictions; Matt, trying to make sense of his mother and occupying himself with online gaming and half-hearted attempts at housework; Alice, their next-door neighbour, who's a cancer patient and is terribly lonely; and Rob, a divorced father who volunteers with Mountain Rescue.

Moss's writing is spare and precise: I found it very evocative of that first winter of Covid, with the usual seasonal slump in my emotions magnified by hopelessness, loneliness (not something I generally suffer from) and rage. Kate's urge to be up in the high places, 'muscle and bone doing what they’re made for', enjoying her solitude, was immensely relatable: I also found Matt's helplessness and muddled emotions familiar, and I ached for Alice and her fear of her body's rebellion. Rob is, in a way, the outsider: but his sense of duty, and the guilt he feels at abandoning his teenage daughter to go out in the dark and the weather to search for a missing woman, is in sharp contrast to the inward-looking, self-absorbed narratives of the other three. (This is not a criticism of Kate, Matt or Alice: their circumstances force them to focus on their own lives, however much they'd like to be interacting with other people or with the wide open spaces.)

It's strange to read novels about the (ongoing) Covid pandemic, especially the first year with the lockdowns and the uncertainty, and remember how comprehensively it changed (and continues to change) my life. Moss, focussing so closely on her four characters, barely refers to the wider world, the political shenanigans and the massive social and economic shifts of 2020. I think I find this tight focus preferable to the novels which try to capture the mood of a nation, or a state, or a city. But watch this space!

2023/168: The Night Manager — John Le Carré

The combined rôle of saviour, escaped murderer, convalescent house-guest, Sophie’s avenger and Burr’s spy is not an easy one to master with aplomb, yet Jonathan with his limitless adaptability assumed it with seeming ease. [p. 313]

Le Carré's first post-Cold War novel, published in 1993. (Adapted for TV by the BBC more recently: I haven't seen this version but it stars Tom Hiddleston, makes several changes to the plot, and is highly praised by Le Carré himself.) Jonathan Pine, the central character, is an orphan, an 'army wolfchild ... caterer, chef, itinerant hotelier, perpetual escapee from emotional entanglements, volunteer, collector of other people’s languages, self-exiled creature of the night and sailor without a destination'. More importantly, he's a man with a strong moral code, a thirst for adventure and an attitude towards women that is not entirely healthy. Part of his backstory involves a French-Arab woman, Sophie, who passed him some confidential documents from her arms-dealer boyfriend. She told him not to send copies to the British intelligence agencies, as the boyfriend had contacts there. Pine decided he knew best; sent the documents to a contact in British Intelligence: Sophie was brutally murdered. Pine blames himself for her death, and he's right about that. He also blames one of the boyfriend's arms-dealer pals, a fellow called Roper. When he's given the chance to infiltrate Roper's inner circle, destroy his business and avenge Sophie, he jumps at the opportunity.

This is an intricately-plotted novel with many digressions (Pine building his fake identity via sojourns in Cornwall and Canada) and almost as many factions. Pine, despite his solipsism, is an engaging character, a close observer of everything and everyone around him (which extends, of course, to Roper's girlfriend Jed, who he thinks is stupid but cannot help falling in love with anyway) and possessed of rather more courage than is good for him. Unfortunately, the aspect of The Night Manager that's stuck with me is an extended torture scene near the end of the novel: it's not explicit but the sheer inescapability, the unrecoverable damage, is distressing.

I like Le Carré's writing a great deal, and am trying to ration my consumption of his novels since there won't now be any more. I don't think this is one I'd return to, though at least I now know to skip forward at a particular point. And I am tempted to watch the TV adaptation, especially for its radical reworking of 'Leonard Burr', the dogged and stoical intelligence operative who single-handedly saves the day.

Minor gripe: what is this satellite company named 'Inmarisat'?

2023/167: Time Shelter — Georgi Gospodinov (translated by Angela Rodel)

...one day, very soon, the majority of people will start returning to the past of their own accord, they’ll start “losing” their memories willingly. The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. And not for happy reasons, by the way. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will. [loc. 592]

The first ever Bulgarian winner of the International Booker Prize, Time Shelter deals with nostalgia (in a very different, and much more European, way to Prophet) and features a character who, to a veteran reader of science fiction, appears to be a time traveller. Gaustine, who the narrator isn't sure whether he invented, is 'equally at home in all times'; writes letters to the narrator as if from 1939; and '[jumps] from decade to decade just as we change planes at an airport'. Whether this is time travel or delusion or a kind of performative outsider-ness is never explained.

The novel starts with Gaustine creating a clinic in Zurich for sufferers of Alzheimers, who often seem to live (or want to live) in the past. Each floor of the clinic recreates a different decade, lovingly and meticulously recreated: brands of cigarettes, copies of magazines, the colour of the wallpaper. The clinic proves extremely popular, not only with the patients but with their families. More clinics open, and eventually a referendum is held, in which each European country decides which decade of the twentieth century they will live in. 'There was something romantically doomed about such a referendum, especially given the recent fiasco with Brexit ...' (Britain is not allowed to participate, not being part of the EU any more.)

Much of the rest of the novel concerns the political, artistic and economic movements trying to influence referendum results in various countries, with an understandable emphasis on Bulgaria, where the rival factions favour the 1920s (the Heroes) and the 1970s (the Socs). More generally, the Seventies and Eighties prove most popular, with only Italy voting for the Sixties. Meanwhile our narrator bemoans what is lost, fears what might be to come, and wonders whether Lot's wife -- turned to salt as she looked back -- was the Angel of History.

I felt my literary credentials shrivelling as I read this. I loved the narrator's cultural milieu, his quotations of Auden and the Doors, his appreciation of the tumultous past of Europe. But I became lost in the increasing fragmentation -- of the novel's structure, and of the world, and of the narrator's identity -- towards the end of the novel. And I'm not sure that even in this weird nostalgia-shaped Europe a historical reenactment would lead to World War 3.

From the author's afterword:

For a person who loves the world of yesterday, this book was not easy. To a certain extent it was a farewell to a dream of the past, or rather to that which some are trying to turn the past into. To a certain extent it was also a farewell to the future.

2023/166: System Collapse — Martha Wells

Visual, audio, or text media could actually rewrite organic neural processes. Bharadwaj had said that was what I’d done with Sanctuary Moon: I’d used it to reconfigure the organic part of my brain... it could and did have similar effects on humans. [loc. 2020]

In which Murderbot, along with ART / Perihelion and assorted humans, deal with agricultural robots, ancient contamination, mutiny, lost colonies and PTSD.

I'm not going to go into the plot too much: it's a perfectly good adventure novel with some excellent characters (old and new), and the usual sarcastic, distinctive narration. I've been trying to work out why I found the novel unsatisfactory, and I think it's primarily because Network Effect was such a gamechanger, in terms of Murderbot's interpersonal relationships and found family. At the end of that book, Murderbot was considering joining ART's team and travelling through the wider universe, and this seemed like the beginning of a whole new phase. And then: not.

The human parts of Murderbot (and I don't just mean the cloned tissue) are definitely coming to the fore, and the events of Network Effect are causing unexpected and unwelcome repercussions which interfere with Murderbot doing its job. For much of this novel it's separated (by circumstance) from most of its support network. It forms new relationships -- notably with Tarik and Iris, who are part of ART's crew -- and begins to deal with the aftermath of trauma.

It's not at all a bad novel, but I suspect my expectations were unrealistic. I did enjoy it more the second time around, after skimming Network Effect (a stratagem I highly recommend, since there isn't much in the way of recap) and reminding myself of what had happened in that novel.

2023/165: Dark North — Gillian Bradshaw

That was the first I saw of the Empire: skill at building, and power, and tolerance. It astonished me -- and I didn't even know that Auzia was just one small fort on the fringe of something so vast a single mind can't know it. [p. 224]

Gillian Bradshaw has taken a single mention of 'an Ethiopian soldier ... a notable jester' in the Historia Augusta and spun a novel around that nameless African man. Dark North is set in Roman Britain in 208AD, during Septimius Severus' efforts to (a) prove that Britain is an island and (b) conquer all of it, even Scotland. The protagonist is a cavalry scout called Memnon: Romans can't pronounce his actual name, rendered here as Wajjaj. We first encounter him in the process of swapping the Second Parthica's standard for a lewder version of the same, an escapade that earns him the plaudits of his fellow soldiers but encourages his commander to send Memnon off on a long, potentially hazardous journey away from any chance of retribution. En route, Memnon encounters, and saves the lives of, two Romans from the Imperial household: Castor, the Imperial chamberlain, and Athenais, a secretary and a member of the Empress' household. Memnon befriends them, and their influence and support is invaluable to him when his duties (and his personal affairs) involve him with the Emperor's feuding sons Geta and Caracalla; with unrest amongst the tribes; and friction between the Aurelian Moors and the Frisian troop with whom they share a fort.

Memnon is a fascinating character: a notable jester indeed, but also a man who's lost (and bloodily avenged) his family, who fears that his bloodthirsty vengeance has made him a demon, who is the stealthiest and probably the cleverest scout in his unit, and who would quite like Roman citizenship but has no ambition to be anything other than one of the lads. 'Ethiopian' was used to refer to anyone south of Libya, and Memnon's origins are sub-Saharan: his dark skin is remarked upon as 'ill-omened', and he is likely the first Black man that any British tribesman has encountered. He's capable of extreme, and effective, violence, but clearly happier playing -- and getting away with -- creative practical jokes. Unfortunately his superiors have recognised his worth, and Memnon is forced to take life more seriously. The episode in the Historia Augusta, neatly woven in, is something of a last plantive rebellion...

It's a shame that this is out of print and unavailable as an ebook: I think Bradshaw has only written two novels set in Roman Britain (the other being the marvellous Island of Ghosts, set a generation earlier and featuring a troop of Sarmatian cavalry: one of my favourite historical novels), and it seems a shame to have 50% of them unavailable.

Fulfils the ‘Secondhand’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge. (I read this via the Internet Archive: it was a scan of a withdrawn book from the Bedlington branch of the Northumberland County Library, last borrowed in July 2019.)

2023/164: Shadow of the Eagle — Damion Hunter

He had wondered, between meeting the Old One at Llanmelin and the little blue trail markers in the bog, whether this province that had bred his mother was going to take him in or spit him out. The bog had offered an unpleasant third possibility, a gruesome combination of both. [loc. 3193]

After my reread of Frontier Wolf, I found myself in the mood for more historical fiction set in Roman Britain. I'd bought this a year or so ago, but not read it: I might have been more inclined to do so if I'd realised that 'Damion Hunter' is a pen-name of Amanda Cockrell. I am, I freely admit, biased against historical novels by male writers: all too often they focus on the military aspects of a story, to the detriment of characterisation and atmosphere. This is not the case with Rosemary Sutcliff (despite the, I think, exclusively male protagonists of her Roman Britain novels) and it's not the case here.

Shadow of the Eagle is set in Britain, around 78-80AD. The central character is Faustus Silvius Valerianus, son of a Roman father and a British mother: after his father's death he sold the family farm and enlisted in the Army, and shortly thereafter he's posted to Britain. There -- besides being haunted by his father's ghost, who's unhappy about the farm being sold -- Faustus encounters several fascinating individuals, including the tomboyish Constantia; the scholarly Demetrius; and Tuathal Techtmar, an Irish prince in exile. They are all, in various ways, caught up in Agricola's campaign to (a) prove that Britain is an island and (b) conquer it.

There are many viewpoint characters (perhaps too many?) including Faustus and Agricola, the Britons Calgacos and his wife Aelwen, and a girl in the Orkneys, Eirian, who listens to the seals. Faustus also becomes involved with the little dark people, familiar from Sutcliff: the aborigines who inhabited Britain before the Picts, Celts et cetera. Perhaps, as one of their elders says, he's related to them via his mother... Though he's a loyal soldier, Faustus also has considerable sympathy for the outsiders, the conquered, the enemy: he's an intriguing and complex character.

Apart from the multiple viewpoints this novel is very much in the Sutcliff style (though sadly the author doesn't have Sutcliff's knack of capturing an ephemeral moment in a single image, such as reflected light on a boathouse roof or a lamp guttering as the rain approaches). I enjoyed it, and will read the rest of the series -- so far there's one further book, Empire's Edge.

2023/163: The Plague and I — Betty MacDonald

[The nurses] may have had their innate sympathy and kindness worn thin by the complete ungratefulness and foolhardiness of the patients, but to me it seemed more likely that they had obtained their vocational training kicking cripples and hitting small children. [loc. 1632]

An account of the author's nine-month stay in a sanitorium near Seattle in 1937-8. This was recommended to me as great pandemic reading. It took me a while to get around to it, but I can confirm that it is witty, dry and very much of its time. MacDonald is apparently better known for The Egg and I, a memoir about chicken-farming, which I would previously have said held no interest for me. After reading this, I'm tempted to familiarise myself with her other works.

Tuberculosis was known as the 'white death', spreading by airborne transmission and, in the 1930s, was the cause of nearly 7% of all deaths in North America. (By 2010 it was down to 0.0036%.) MacDonald's understanding of the symptoms was limited to popular stereotypes, and it took her a while to realise that her constant cough, fatigue, chest pains et cetera were signs of underlying illness. 'I thought that everybody who worked felt as I did.' Once diagnosed, and relieved to find that she was 'really sick instead of ambition-less and indolent', she was admitted to a sanitorium, where the prescribed treatments were complete rest (no talking, no writing, no laughing: no reading!), good food and fresh air. There were a great many rules, which MacDonald lived in constant fear of breaking. Occasionally someone would go off to have a lung collapsed. (This was deemed therapeutic.)

And yet this is an immensely cheerful account -- or, perhaps, a lonely and frightening experience seen through the eyes of a cheerful and good-humoured woman. MacDonald befriends Kimi, a Japanese woman in the same four-bed ward; encounters a number of other patients, some of whose prognosis is better than others'; undergoes a number of treatments which seem very strange from the vantage point of the twenty-first century; and is eventually discharged. Very little happens, but the little things that do happen -- a snitch on the ward, a visit from MacDonald's two young daughters, a trip to flouroscopy, the coming of the Occupational Therapy lady -- are described vividly and amusingly. Which is not to say that MacDonald is all sweetness and light: her acid observations and her black humour delighted me.

Fulfils the ‘Classic’ rubric (at least 40 years old) of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge: first published 1948.

2023/162: Loki: Journey Into Mystery — Katherine Locke

'... back then, you could hide your heart under your guile. You've got more heart and less guile this time.' [loc. 724]

A novelisation -- or 'prose novel', a term which respects the original's literary credentials -- of Kieron Gillen's Loki: Journey Into Mystery, which began in 2011. The Loki of Journey Into Mystery is not (any of) the current Marvel Cinematic Universe Loki(s). He's a kid: literally, an adolescent, resurrected by Thor after sacrificing himself to save Asgard. Asgard itself was not destroyed, but has crash-landed near Broxton, Oklahoma. Loki has a Starkphone (the first thing he says is 'even people online think I'm lying. Why do people always assume that?') and, though we don't encounter them directly, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers are still ... around. Loki is not super-popular with the Asgardians, who all think that despite death and resurrection he's incapable of change. This Loki is determined to change. He intends to escape his story, his fate, and be a hero. With the aid of a magpie named Ikol, a (hellhound) puppy named Thori, and a romantic interest named Leah, he faces down Asgard's enemies and tries to outwit his former self's machinations. Much more mythological material here than in the MCU, and some really poignant moments as Loki -- who is, after all, still a kid, even if he's also the resurrected age-old god of chaos and mischief -- fights, flees, dissembles and makes sacrifices of his own.

Katherine Locke takes no liberties: she sticks to the original story and dialogue, and her creative input focusses on description and character exposition. Reading this novel was quite a different experience to reading the comics, which I devoured avidly some years ago. I do generally prefer prose to graphics, but while reading Locke's novel I was very aware that I was missing a dimension of pacing and tension that had been provided by the artwork. Perhaps, too, the prose format pins down some of the story in ways that were left ambiguous in the original. Still, Locke's style is engaging and the story's well-paced: I enjoyed this, and think some readers will find it more accessible than the graphic novel.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review: UK Publication Date is 19th December 2023.

2023/161: Old Country — Matt Query and Harrison Query

“Wild things go on in old country like this, Mr. Blakemore. You’ve gotta follow the rules. That’s really all there is to it.” [p. 119]

The premise of this novel is fascinating: a young couple, Sasha and Harry (and their adorable dog Dash) buy a house in a remote valley, then discover that it's haunted by a spirit which must be appeased. In spring, there will be mysterious lights in the pond; in summer, a screaming naked man pursued by a bear; in autumn, scarecrows. Their neighbours, Dan and Lucy, give them clear and copious instructions on the little rituals they need to perform to keep the spirit from becoming dangerous.

Harry, ex-military, ignores every single rule.

He goads and challenges the spirit; deliberately does the opposite of what he's been instructed to do; refuses to be guided by Dash's behaviour (though frankly the dog is more intelligent, and much more likeable, than Harry); and causes the death of an innocent man. Sasha, though slightly less infuriating than Harry, is not much use. (I can't help suspecting that the reason her bosses let her 'work from home', which seems to consist of one or two online meetings a day, is because she's less effectual than she thinks she is.) Sasha is more willing to believe what Dan and Lucy tell them, but she doesn't argue (much) with Harry when he takes the fight to the spirit. To be fair, Harry does seem to have a degree of PTSD from his time in Afghanistan, and he's been trained to be proactive. But he won't even accept what he's told by Joe, the Native American who owns most of the valley -- though not, as far as I can tell, a surname. Harry goes on the defensive, more or less saying it's up to the local tribes to sort it out. Joe, luckily, does not suffer fools gladly: "The only thing my people can do for you, white man, is remind you not to be stupid."

Harry and Sasha -- both of whom have a lot of emotional baggage -- do grow and change over the course of the novel, and affairs in the valley may have changed as well: but, despite the unsettling manifestations and the juxtaposition of glorious wilderness and supernatural threat, I didn't find this a very satisfying read. Except for Dash, who rocks.

2023/160: The Jason Voyage — Tim Severin

...here in Georgia, and at a higher level in Moscow, enormous efforts had been made to prepare for our visit - months and months of planning had been made and checked, resources delegated, schedules dovetailed, oarsmen selected and prepared, Tovarisch put on standby, an entire apparatus set in motion. All for a small open boat manned by a handful of volunteers, bobbing along at a snail's pace towards Soviet Georgia. [loc. 3489]

In 1985, Tim Severin attempted to prove the story of Jason and the Argonauts -- at least the part about the sea journey from northern Greece, through the Bosphorus and across the Black Sea to Colchis -- by ordering the construction of a reproduction Bronze Age galley, recruiting a team of rowers to row it, and making the 1500-mile journey. This is his account of the voyage, and it's a gripping read.

Severin uses Apollonius' epic poem Argonautica (written in the 3rd century before Christ) as a guide, and points out that it's the earliest story of an epic voyage: the original story seems to predate the Odyssey, and the Argo is the first named ship in history. Severin had a master shipwright build the new Argo to a design produced by a naval architect: his team consisted of volunteers, including rowing champions and the captain of a 150,000-ton supertanker, from Britain, Norway, Greece, Turkey and then-Soviet Georgia. The twenty-oar galley struggled at times -- the currents in the Bosphorus flow strongly out of the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and thence to the Aegean -- but the crew succeeded in making the journey with only sail and oar.

This was a great read, but I could have done with more context for some of Severin's statements about mythology (were the Olympian gods really unknown at the time of Jason's voyage, which Severin believes to have been no more than a generation before the Trojan War?) and some of his identifications of modern landmarks with mythological places seemed tenuous. Sadly, the Kindle version could also do with some proofreading: at one point, the Bosphorus is said to be 2112 miles wide (which is approximately 2109.5 miles in excess of actuality) whilst there are frequent references to other ships loading and receiving Argo, rather than cargo. There are also a couple of points where sentences, paragraphs or whole pages have been shuffled. A map would also have helped, but the original photographs -- and a decent translation of Apollonius -- have been included.

Fulfils the ‘Travel and Global Culture’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/159: A Man With One of Those Faces — Caimh McDonnell

Paul said nothing, in a way that left nothing unsaid. [p. 35]

In return for a house to live in and a pittance to live on, Paul Mulchrone is obliged by the terms of his great-aunt's will to do six hours of charity work every week. Luckily, Paul has 'one of those faces': he's inoffensive and nondescript, adept at passing for whichever long-lost relative is expected by the residents of the local hospice. His friend, Nurse Conroy, calls him the granny-whisperer. She approves of him, more or less: he's hurting no one, and he brings joy to the people he visits. Except one, an elderly man who seems to think Paul is the son of an old enemy, and tries to murder him. The assailant comes off worse, suffering a fatal heart attack: Paul is stitched up, and then embroiled in a murder case -- he was the last to see the old fellow alive ... and the deceased was an infamous crimelord, presumed dead these thirty years.

Then the dead man's enemies come looking, very interested in what Paul might have learnt before the demise of the man in the hospice. Aided and abetted by Nurse Conroy (a great fan of true crime) and negotiating with DI Jimmy Stewart (days from retirement, naturally) and his hapless sidekick Wilson, Paul's life gets a great deal more ... interesting.

Unexpectedly acquiring three months' free Kindle Unlimited, I trawled the site for novels set in Dublin, so that I could fulfil a book challenge prompt ('a book set in Dublin') without falling back on James Joyce. This grabbed me from the first page and was a rollicking read, with plenty of humour as well as some elaborate plotting, intriguing characters (I was especially taken, in a faintly appalled way, with Bunny McGarry, very much an old-school copper prone to resolving conflict with ... well, more conflict) and quite a bit of violence. Paul is a surprisingly likeable protagonist, Brigit (Nurse Conroy) an improbable but splendid foil to Paul's frequent bouts of haplessness, and DI Stewart and Bunny McGarry a fascinating glimpse of different traditions in policing. Plenty of hurling terminology, too, so very educational. This is the first in a trilogy -- the main plot is resolved, so I'm not desperate to read the other two novels, but I am tempted.

Fulfils the ‘Set in Dublin’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/158: A Fatal Grace — Louise Penny

It was almost impossible to electrocute someone these days, unless you were the governor of Texas. To do it on a frozen lake, in front of dozens of witnesses, was lunacy. Someone had been insane enough to try. Someone had been brilliant enough to succeed. [loc. 1134]

Having very much enjoyed the first of the Inspector Gamache books, Still Life, I decided to treat myself to the second. (After reading The Brutal Telling, out of sequence and finding it jarring, I'm determined to read in order.) A Fatal Grace, set over the Christmas period in Three Pines, is at least as intricately plotted as the other two novels I've read: it also expands on Gamache's backstory, especially the mysterious Arnot case which, as of Still Life, was blighting Gamache's career.

The primary plot thread, though, deals with the demise of CC de Poitiers, New Age influencer and generally despicable human being. Nobody liked her, so the list of suspects is long: and as Gamache investigates it becomes clear that CC's whole identity, as well as her death, is intrinsically connected to the picturesque little village of Three Pines, where she'd recently bought a house. Gamache enjoys the reunion with his friends in Three Pines, suffers the reappearance of the awkward and uncooperative Agent Yvette Nichol, and painstakingly unravels the clues -- antifreeze, niacin, The Lion in Winter, a Christmas bauble -- to reveal the murderer's identity in the nick of time. All good: but unknown to the Inspector, his opponents are at work...

I enjoyed this novel, though had some reservations about the description and characterisation of CC's overweight daughter Crie. There's backstory for Yvette Nichol as well as for Gamache, and the latter's wife Reine-Marie is introduced, as are some intriguing hints of what might come next. I'm not going to rush into the third novel, but I'm looking forward to reading it.

2023/157: Nettle and Bone — T Kingfisher

It was hard to be frightened of the unknown when the unknown kept chickens. [p. 66]

Marra is the youngest of three princesses. Their mother has made politically advantageous matches for the elder two: first Damia, who married Prince Vorling, and then Kania, who marries Vorling after Damia's early death. Marra -- who's been packed off to a convent, nicely out of the way of politics, where she has learnt to midwife and to embroider -- learns that Damia's death was suspicious, and that Vorling is immensely cruel to Kania ... and will be until she produces an heir. Marra realises that nobody else will save her sister, or herself: and sets out to find a dust-wife (a graveyard witch), and perform three impossible tasks, and then quite a few more tasks that seem even less feasible.

Nettle and Bone opens midway through the second of those tasks. Marra is making a dog out of bones, and her fingers are sore from weaving her cloak of nettles. Worse, she's in the blistered land, where the folk are mostly cannibal zombies. This turns out to be irrelevant to the wider plot (well, Bonedog is extremely relevant) which sees Marra and the nameless dust-wife venture to the goblin market, to the run-down home of a fairy godmother, and into the necropolis beneath Prince Vorling's palace.

The story is told from Marra's point of view. She's thirty, somewhat naive, often afraid and yet determined to save her sister and her kingdom. Hers is a particular kind of courage, but it's as fervent as that of Fenris, a former paladin retrieved from the goblin market. They travel with the dust-wife (who is utterly fascinating because Marra knows little, and understands less, about her) and, later, Agnes, Marra's own fairy godmother who is ... perhaps not the most powerful of her kind. Oh, and a hen possessed by a demon: when it casts a shadow, the shadow has little horns. The hen is mostly harmless, at least to the protagonists, but there are vengeful ghosts, a Boschian horror called the Tooth-Dancer, a woman ridden by a wooden corpse-child, a woman doomed to immortality. These are treated as matter-of-factly as more mundane horrors: poverty, violence, fear of outsiders, prejudice.

While this story is firmly rooted in fairytale, it also interrogates the tropes of that form. As the dust-wife says, “Fairy tales ... are very hard on bystanders. Particularly old women." The handsome prince is the villain; fairy godmothers lay curses, not blessings (though, per Agnes, "There’s only one story about godmothers that’s always true. Bad things happen if you don’t invite us to the christening"), those who are abused will often cling to their abusers, and princesses live circumscribed lives without privacy or power. Marra's down-to-earth personality and determination to be a decent person is the perfect foil to the darker aspects of the story, and her particular gifts are essential to the happy ending.

I have to say I didn't enjoy this as much as some of Kingfisher's other work: I think that was a case of 'right book, wrong time', because I've skimmed it again while writing this review and am now tempted to reread!

2023/156: Frontier Wolf — Rosemary Sutcliff

Better to remember the high moors beyond Credigone; better to remember the hunting fire and the shared laughter, and leave the rest to the wolves. [loc. 3067]

Alexios Flavius Aquila, nephew of the Roman Governor of Northern Britain, is promoted beyond his abilities. He makes a catastrophic error of judgement and is responsible for many deaths in an ill-advised retreat from Abusina, a fort on the Danube. Because of his uncle's influence, he is given another command rather than being discharged from the army: but his new command is an auxiliary cohort, the Frontier Scouts, 'the scum and scrapings of the Empire ... hard cases', mostly tribesmen, more loyal to one another than they are to Rome. His uncle says disdainfully that they might make a man of Alexios, if they don't kill him first.

Alexios' new command is based in the (fictional) fort at Castellum, far north of Hadrian's Wall in country that was once conquered (though never successfully occupied for long) by Rome. The local tribes, while apparently friendly and happy to trade with the Romans, have their own allegiances. Alexios settles into his new command, manages to calm some tribal disputes, and begins to earn the respect of the men he commands. He also becomes friends with the Votadini chieftain's son, Cunorix, and learns to appreciate Celtic culture and the fragile peace between Celts and Romans, with the highland Picts and the threat of Hibernian raiders as mutual enemies. But perhaps the worst danger will come from the south, with the visit of the new Praepositus, Glaucus Montanus.

This novel -- a reread, but I hadn't read it for many years and had forgotten all but a few fragments -- is as much about poor management as about military prowess. Alexios makes a bad decision against the advice of his staff: later, he tries to defuse a dangerous situation, but is overruled by his superiors. He deals competently with the troublemakers in his new command, and he strives for justice rather than punishment. By the climax of the novel, when he's having to make difficult decisions for the good of his men, he's learnt a great deal about personal honour, about friendship, and about loyalty.

This novel is set around AD349, when Rome's strength and influence in Britain are past their peak. Sutcliff, as usual, vividly illustrates that feeling of decay: 'the honeysuckle was still in flower in the small walled wilderness behind the officers’ quarters that had once been a garden'; the ruins of a signal tower on the Old (Antonine) Wall, where Alexios kills his wolf; the owl's nest in the fort's armoury. I found the sense of abandonment, and the contrasting warmth of Alexios' friendships, more engaging than the military action. (There's actually not a great deal of the latter, though the last third of the novel is devoted to a desperate retreat.) This isn't one of my top three Sutcliff novels -- currently The Mark of the Horse Lord, The Eagle of the Ninth and Blood Feud: ask me again next year -- but it did spark my enthusiasm for novels set in Roman Britain: reviews of Hunter and Bradshaw coming soon.

2023/155: Otherlands — Thomas Halliday

You can never visit the environments through which titanic dinosaurs strode, never walk on their soil nor swim in their water. The only way to experience them is rockwise, to read the imprints in the frozen sand and to imagine a disappeared Earth. [loc. 440]

Halliday's evocative, poetic journey into the past of our planet is an immensely readable survey of what's preserved in the fossil record. The journey starts in the Pleistocene (the geological period that began about two and a half million years ago, and ended around 12,000 years before the present), and moving backwards through Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene et cetera, he describes the flora, fauna, climate, geology and even astronomy of each period. The survey ends with the Ediacaran period, half a billion years ago, when life was just starting to become complex and multicellular. As well as ranging through time, Halliday examines different areas of the planet, though of course continental drift has shuffled everything around. For the Paleocene, 66 million years ago and featuring the Chixculub impact, it's Hell Creek in what is now Montana, while for the (deeply weird) Devonian it's Rhynie in now-Scotland.

Halliday rejoices in vivid images -- the varied colours of warm pools colonised by cyanobacteria, the sizzle of a melting glacier, the vast extent of the mammoth steppe which stretched from Ireland to Canada, the mile-high waterfall that filled the eastern Mediterranean -- and fascinating factoids. I have learnt that baby pterosaurs are termed 'flaplings', that horseflies evolved millions of years before horses, that the moon was much brighter (because closer) in the Ediacaran period, that some trilobites had bifocal vision, that ammonites could only hear sound for a brief period after hatching, that deers' antlers grow through a mechanism similar to cancer (and thus deer have only 20% the rate of cancer observed in other wild mammals). And -- in the final chapter, where Halliday discusses the current state of the planet and the threat of climate change -- I discovered that 'Between 1970 and 2019, the Great Plains ecosystem of North America moved north by an average distance of 365 miles – that is, on average, a metre every forty-five minutes' [loc. 4941].

Even that final chapter, titled 'A Town called Hope', isn't entirely gloomy. Halliday's sheer joy in the immense diversity of life, past and present -- and in the different geological and climatic environments which have preserved traces of that life -- illuminates every page of this book. I enjoyed this book so much that I found myself reading excerpts to friends at a birthday lunch: for instance, the quotation below. Which led me down another rabbithole...

... another of the earliest Paleocene mammals has been called Earendil undomiel. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s Arda mythology, Eärendil is the voyager, the morning star that heralds oncoming joy, a reference to an Anglo-Saxon poem which uses this image to describe John the Baptist, in Christianity the herald of Christ. By the vagaries of taxonomy, the specimen named Earendil undomiel is now considered to be a species of Mimatuta... Mimatuta itself has a Sindarin elvish etymology, meaning ‘jewel of the dawn’. [loc. 2193]

2023/154: The Cure for Sleep — Tanya Shadrick

I went without rest, searching always for ways to escape my self and the pain of living. To slip my skin and merge, forever, with something beyond me. I tried mothering, unpaid acts of service, immersion in cold water, the making of art, and then – lastly, disastrously – I hoped to get lost in love. [loc. 3257]

When Tanya Shadrick was 33 years old, just after the birth of her first child, she suffered an arterial tear and almost died. The experience made her feel that she had to break free from marriage and motherhood: simultaneously, she knew that she had to stay. The Cure for Sleep is her account of making public art, coming to terms with her difficult relationships with her parents (meek mother, absent father, ogrish stepfather) and her loving but perhaps claustrophobic marriage. She sat by the lido in Lewes for two summers, writing a mile of text; she spent a year repainting the railings around a vandalised tree; she embarked upon an ill-omened affair. And she opened herself to the world, and to its opportunities.

Given the subtitle -- 'On Waking Up, Breaking Free and Making a More Creative Life' -- I'd put off reading this book, I think because I expected it to be prescriptive: to tell me, too, how to stop sleepwalking through my life and reawaken my creativity. It's actually more of a memoir, and Shadrick is a very different person, in a very different place, to myself. (I have the free time she craves; I don't think I have the desperate drive to create, or the desire to create as performatively.) Her writing is beautiful though sometimes over-poetic: I felt she'd bashed away at some sentences until they were beautiful, regardless of whether the raw meaning was retained. Her account of her solitary childhood and her longing to escape her childhood home rang horribly true, and I think perhaps the most powerful aspect of the book for me was her gradual acceptance of her mother, despite the continuing friction between them.

Fulfils the ‘Author who shares your name’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

How would it be to give to myself, for even a short while, such kindness? To spend time learning or recovering what I loved, what I yearned for? To ask for exactly what I needed, as my children were able to do? [loc. 1831]

2023/153: Prophet — Helen McDonald and Sin Blaché

...just like fluoride in water protects a nation’s teeth, Prophet in water protects a nation’s idea of itself... [loc. 6139]

An American diner has appeared in a Suffolk field. It's a pitch-perfect rendition, with the neon and the jukebox: but it's not connected to any electricity supply. It's something like a memory, but not quite. To investigate this, the US military brings in an odd couple: Sunil Rao, British-Asian, ex-MI6, ex-Sothebys, who has an inexplicable sense of truth so strong and so infallible that he can zero in on a fact by asking himself questions about it; and Lt-Col Adam Rubenstein, impassive and unscrutable, the only person whose lies Rao can't detect. The two have worked together before, but there are elements to their collaboration that Rao, at least, isn't aware of. And between them they begin to discover the nature of the substance called Prophet, manufactured by an American pharma company, which -- at least initially -- allows those who are dosed with it to reify their fondest memories: for instance, that diner, created by a local fellow who's into Americana.

Nostalgia, which was regarded as a psychological disorder when it was first identified and named, is now generally thought of as a twee but harmless affection for the past: here, though, it's weaponised, and Prophet, the means by which memories become objects, is poorly understood by its creators. It's up to Rao and Rubenstein to make sense of the drug and the implications of its existence, even as its nature changes and changes again. Add to this an apparently one-sided attraction between them (Rao is a promiscuous, manic bisexual, and he hypothesises that 'whatever sexuality Adam possesses has been entirely sublimated into government-sponsored violence') and the two men's personalities and histories weave into an ever more complex web of meaning, emotion and deception.

I liked this a great deal, though I think I had been expecting something ... other, given Macdonald's solitary, rural, grief-laden H is for Hawk. I was aware, going in, that the two authors had co-written Prophet during the pandemic, and that some reviewers were comparing it to fanfiction. As someone who has co-written before, and misses it, I was especially intrigued by the collaborative aspect of the novel: as with all good collaboration, the joins are imperceptible. If there are issues, it's the uneven pacing and perhaps the skewed imbalance between backstories: we get a lot about Adam's past, but rather less about Sunil's. On the other hand, most of the narrative focusses on Sunil Rao: he is the agent of change.

The romance works; the techno-thriller more or less works; I like the protagonists (and their banter, and their very distinct voices) a great deal; I found some of the Prophet-objects, such as the dog, truly horrific; and I hope that Blaché and Macdonald collaborate again.

'Our subject, in Prophet, is the literal weaponisation of nostalgia.' -- great article by the authors on how and why this is 'Barbie meets Oppenheimer'.

2023/152: The Lighthouse Witches — C L Cooke

We are not just made of blood and bone – we are made of stories. Some of us have our stories told for us, others write their own – you wrote yours. [loc. 4542]

The story begins in 1998, when artist Olivia Stay arrives on the Scottish island of Lòn Haven, where she's been commissioned to paint a mural in a disused lighthouse. With Olivia are her three daughters: Sapphire, aged fifteen; Luna, aged nine; and Clover, aged seven. Sapphire -- Saffy -- is not best pleased to have been uprooted from her life and her friends: searching for distraction, she finds an old book and begins to read about witches and changelings and missing children. All the locals seem to be highly superstitious, and Saffy is scornful of their fears -- though it's true that a lot of children go missing from Lòn Haven. And then Clover disappears...

The second main narrative of the novel begins in 2021 (sans Covid), with Luna expecting her first child. Since she was abandoned in the forest by her mother as a child, she's grown up in a series of foster homes, which have left her with some deep-seated psychological issues and a reluctance to commit to Ethan, the father of her unborn child. Luna is very much alone in the world, and is constantly searching for clues about what happened to her mother and sisters. Then she receives a call from a police station in Scotland. Clover has been found: and, inexplicably, she's still seven years old.

The premise of this novel is intriguing, but I was unable to suspend my disbelief at certain points. Why would the police just hand over a seven-year-old child -- who's apparently the subject of a missing person report from over twenty years ago -- to a woman claiming to be her sister? Why would that seven-year-old child start behaving in deeply spooky ways, which constitute an excellent red herring but have no other explanation? Why would the 'diary' excerpts from a book supposedly written in the seventeenth century have such a modern style? And what's the mechanism by which numbers appear, cut into the skin of returned children?

The atmosphere was great, but I didn't feel the story really hung together: too much of it relied on characters being purposely opaque or deliberately dishonest. There's a subplot about cancer which I could have done without, especially as it had little relation to the main story about witches' curses and missing children. And I didn't warm to any of the characters.

2023/151: Venomous Lumpsucker — Ned Beauman

The diversity of life on earth was (as far as anyone knew) the most majestic thing in the universe, and human beings were (as far as anyone knew) the only living things with the capacity to appreciate that majesty, and yet human beings were also the ones who were stamping that majesty out, not deliberately but carelessly, incidentally, leaving nothing behind but a few scans and samples that nobody would ever look at. [p. 119]

Hilarious, mournful and eminently quotable, Venomous Lumpsucker is a technothriller with strong ecological and climate-crisis themes, focussing initially on the plight of the (fictional) eponymous fish -- possibly the most intelligent fish on earth, assuming its last remaining breeding ground in the Baltic hasn't been destroyed by a misdirected mining operation.

Our protagonists are Mark Halyard, an Australian environmental impact coordinator working for the Brahmasamudram Mining Company (and surreptitiously engaging in a little short-selling of 'extinction credits') and Karin Resaint, a Swiss-German biologist contracted by Brahmasamudram to assess the intelligence of the venomous lumpsuckers. If the fish aren't intelligent, it will cost fewer extinction credits if they're wiped off the face of the earth. Halyard argues that it won't matter: their DNA is backed up in biobanks. But then the biobanks are destroyed ...

I don't propose to recount the twists and turns of this engaging, headlong novel (though I will say how pleased I was that Beauman eschewed any cheap romantic element). Instead, I'll observe that the tone -- and the frequent asides providing context on some especially improbable invention, such as the Hermit Kingdom -- reminds me strongly of Neal Stephenson. (The Hermit Kingdom features chalk cliffs that are 'just a doomy frontage for sunlit uplands'; 'that government, like an empty restaurant who won’t give you a table, was still very much wedded to the idea that their borders were under siege, even though it was probably a decade since anybody had felt any desire at all to sneak into the country'; one of the novel's more delightful characters is the maverick Secretary of State for DEFRA, first encountered in a powered wetsuit; and the South-West Peninsula is a macabre wildlife preserve, run by tech billionaire Ferenc Barca. But I digress.)

Venomous Lumpsucker is, on one level, a profoundly depressing vision of an imminent future where failing agriculture means awful food, extinction is subject to market forces, uncontrolled spindrifters (reminiscent of Theo Jansen's creations) roam the seas whipping up random storms, insects -- 'yayflies' -- are genetically engineered to maximise the amount of joy in the universe, and everyone is embarrassed at mention of the United States. It's easy (as I've done here) to applaud the inventive details: but there is also a solid, and often poignant, plot, though it does sometimes get obscured by the sheer exuberance of Beauman's writing. Immense fun, and a worthy (and accessible) winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award.

After reading Beauman's first novel, Boxer, Beetle, I wrote "I'd like to read his other work to see if the promise of this book is fulfilled." My conclusion is a resounding 'yes, yes it is'.

'...We’re losing the spiny shore beetle and at least another ten thousand like it every year. You say you’d rather die than lose dogs, but to lose those ten thousand a year doesn’t trouble you at all.’
‘Christ, you people never stop talking about your ten thousand a year, it’s like being in fucking Jane Austen.'[p. 184]

2023/150: For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain — Victoria MacKenzie

I wanted my mind to be driven deep into God like a nail. [loc. 787]

This short novel examines the lives of the two great medieval female mystics from Norfolk, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. The two met at least once, around 1413, when Margery visited Julian in her anchoress' cell at St Julian's Church in Norwich. Victoria MacKenzie posits that, on this occasion, Julian handed the manuscript of her Revelations of Divine Love to Margery for safekeeping.

Most of this short novel is composed of alternating scenes from the two women's viewpoints: Julian looking back on the life she left behind to become an anchoress, and the ritual 'death' by which she withdrew from the world to be immured in her tiny cell; Margery complaining of being misunderstood, harassed and hounded by the townsfolk of what was then just plain Lynn. They are very different people. Julian's intensity, her almost obsessive pacing and prayer, contrasts strongly with Margery's performative faith, her public conversations with Jesus, and her frequent clashes with the religious establishment. Julian sees the world, and God, in the song of the blackbird in the hazel tree outside her cell; in a snowflake melting in the palm of her hand; in the company of her cat. Margery weeps for Christ in church, and is unable to get enough of being shriven for her sins. She's called a heretic, but she has experienced visions of Christ, and she's sure that some day she will be in heaven with Mary and Jesus and the apostles. And when they meet, there is an instant connection, a shared understanding that each has experienced revelation.

This would make an excellent play: the voices are so strong and distinctive. (The quotation at the top of this review is from Julian's narrative: Margery says, quite early on, 'as I began to tell of this sin, my confessor was sharp with me, telling me not to take all day, and then I could not get the sin out' [loc. 185].) And it's refreshing to read historical fiction which focuses tightly on the characters, rather than exploring the world around them. There are just enough hints of life in medieval Norfolk (the wandering musicians who Margery hears at the inn, the whispers of plague that reach Julian in her cell) to remind us that this is not our time.

2023/149: Daughters of the Labyrinth — Ruth Padel

One of Cézanne’s friends said the master always began a painting with shadow. He laid down a patch of shadow, overlapped it with another, then another, till all the shadows hinged to each other like screens. That’s what Mama has been doing for me. Connecting the dark bits to make a picture of her life. [loc 2898]

Daughters of the Labyrinth is the story of Ri Gold, a British artist in her sixties. Ri (short for Arianna) was born in Crete and has recently been widowed: her husband was Jewish. She's finding London, in the run-up to Brexit, increasingly unwelcoming, and when her friend Nashita visits from Mumbai for Ri's gallery opening, she points out that there's something 'withheld' in Ri's work. But then Ri's mother is admitted to hospital in Crete, and Ri flies home to see her -- and is shocked when her Catholic mother, half-conscious, begs her 'say kaddish for me'. But there are no Jews in Crete ...

Ri's mother Sophia (nee Sara) was Jewish, and during the Second World War, when the Germans invaded and the Jews were driven out of Chania -- one of the oldest Jewish settlements in the world -- she fled to the mountains, helped by Andonis, a Cretan boy who was falling in love with her. Andonis was also active, as a teenager, in the Cretan resistance, and worked with an English archaeologist who later sponsored Ri's education, as well as her brothers' livelihoods.

Ri's growing understanding of her family's history is beautifully told: her painterly eye, and especially her observations about light and shadow ('every ripple has a grin of dark') add an intriguing layer to the story. Her anger at her parents for their silence transmutes into acceptance and even pleasure at her newfound heritage, and even in the final pages, when the spectre of Covid ('koronia') looms, there's a sense of hope and inspiration. The stories of Andonis and Sara, full of long-held secrets, are grimmer and more poignant: but they survived the war, and became the loving parents of Ri and her brothers.

I read this novel about Crete whilst holidaying there: I hadn't expected to be so moved by it, and it offers a perspective on Cretan life not readily accessible to the tourist. It did make me look afresh at everything around me: at the shadows, and at the light.

The author's afterword reveals the historical inspiration for the novel: it's based on real events during the war, and Padel draws on the work of modern Jews rededicating the ancient synagogue in Chania. I do wonder if her 1940s character Tinu, formerly a Turkish slave -- the Turks only left Crete in 1900 and he's in his sixties when Sara meets him -- is also based on a real person...

2023/148: The Last of the Wine — Mary Renault

It was not that we were in love with the past. We were of an age to feel the present our own, and to suppose it would never outstrip us. [loc. 4289]

Read for book club: technically a reread, but it's at least twenty years (and probably more than thirty) since I first read this novel. Curiously, the one image that I remembered from that earlier reread is the narrator's father, Myron, turning a wine bowl in his hands: 'inscribed on the one side MYRON and on the other ALKIBIADES'. For The Last of the Wine is about (among other things) the Peloponnesian War, and Alkibiades' chequered career, and the Tyranny of the Thirty. The focus, though, is on the narrator Alexias: his adolescence, his many admirers, his education at the feet of Socrates, his love affair with Lysis, his difficult relationship with his father, and his experience of war.

This novel caused quite a storm in 1956: it's not sexually explicit, but it does deal with a homosexual relationship between a youth and an older man, and the way that relationship evolves when Lysis -- not only Alexias' lover but his mentor and role model -- marries a woman named Thalia. (After Lysis' death, Alexias, who has already saved Thalia from dishonour for Lysis' sake, marries her himself.) Renault's depiction of their relationship is understated but powerful, not least because in a hundred little details she shows us that this is wholly normal and expected in that place and time. Though a man must marry and father children, his first love affair as a youth will be with a man a few years older than himself: and, as with Myron and his long-past relationship with Alkibiades, that first love can influence and shape a man's whole life. Alexias doesn't always understand what he's seeing (for instance his father buying at auction one of Alkibiades' old mantles: 'I daresay my father thought it a bad bargain, for he never wore it') but the shadow of Alkibiades looms large in Myron's household.

Where this novel really hit home for me was the depiction of Athens' defeat by Sparta: widespread starvation and infanticide, surrender, and then the almost Orwellian Tyranny of the Thirty, which lasted mere months but saw 'the killing of 5% of the Athenian population, the confiscation of citizens' property and the exile of other democratic supporters... Many wealthy citizens were executed simply so the oligarchs could confiscate their assets, which were then distributed among the Thirty and their supporters.' (source. Renault doesn't pull her punches: Alexias suffers loss after loss, and it is he who kills the leader of the tyrants, avenging his father.

Ancient Greece is so vividly evoked: I felt as though every stele Alexias saw, every temple he prayed at, was real -- and likely many of them were, for Renault had an excellent and comprehensive knowledge of the archaeology and history of classical Greece. There are references, too, to the Athenians' own sense of history: one man has pierced ears and Alexias deduces that 'he came from one of the very old noble families, some of whom at that time still wore the ancient adornments handed down since the Wars of Troy'. (Lysis, at his wedding, wears 'a great brooch of antique goldwork from Mycenae, a gift to some ancestor from Agamemnon'.) That's a primarily oral history stretching back nearly a thousand years... There are some less pleasant, but wholly accurate, elements: the treatment of women, the custom of exposing female newborns, the enslavement of defeated soldiers, the slaughter of domestic animals in times of famine. It is a very different world: but the people in it are not that different from ourselves.

I've read another very good historical novel dealing with the rise and fall of Alkibiades: The Flowers of Adonis, by Rosemary Sutcliff. (And I note from that review that I had just completed an online course in Ancient Greek history, of which I now remember nothing. But perhaps the basics are still with me, even though I'd forgotten about the course.)

2023/147: Ink Blood Sister Scribe — Emma Torzs

At first each bookstore felt magical. Not the kind of magic Esther had grown up with but the kind she’d read about in novels, the kind that was all possibility, the chance that with one right turn in the forest or one fateful conversation with an old woman a person’s life might change forever. [loc. 3614]

The Kalotay sisters haven't seen one another for years. Esther is working in the Antarctic as a electrician, while her half-sister Joanna lives in a hidden house in Vermont, alone since the death of their father, who was killed by a book.

This is a world where magic is a closely-guarded secret, and spells are inscribed in books using ink made of blood and herbs. The talent for magic runs in families -- Joanna can sense it in the books she guards, though Esther is curiously immune -- and can be detected by other magic users. Esther was told never to stay in the same place for more than a year: 'you must leave on November 2 and keep moving for twenty-four hours, or the people who killed your mother will come for you'. But she's in love with a girl named Pearl, and doesn't want to go. Joanna, meanwhile, lives a solitary life, reading historical romances: there's a stray cat that comes looking for food, and she visits her mother in town, but she's achingly lonely.

As is Nicholas, the third of the viewpoint narrators, despite the near-constant presence of his bodyguard Collins, and the company of his uncle Richard, and of Maram, Richard's partner and Nicholas' former tutor. Nicholas is heir to the Library, a secret thaumocracy of magic-users: he's also a powerful Scribe, writing spells to order with his own blood. He lives a life of immense privilege but very little freedom. It's for his own protection, says Uncle Richard: wasn't Nicholas kidnapped as an adolescent, and didn't he lose an eye?

The three protagonists' stories converge, but the paths are twisty and the intersections unpredictable: the denouement, despite a slowing of the plot as all the convolutions are exposed, is highly satisfying, and open enough to admit a sequel. Ink Blood Sister Scribe is a pleasure to read, full of inventive turns of phrase ('He’d never felt so passionately all-caps about another person') and vivid descriptions -- of a dark garden in Vermont, of a drive through London at night, of Antarctic skies. It reminded me, in atmosphere, of The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake, but the tone is less cynical and the characters less antagonistic, less competitive. An intriguing debut.