2024/047: All the Hollow of the Sky — Kit Whitfield

Farriers wrestled with the unkenned all their lives; they ran alongside the People from childhood, sometimes befriending, sometimes negotiating, sometimes fighting, but whatever course they took, it could be guided by the iron rule that mortal folks must be protected from the People. [loc. 543]

This novel is (mostly) a prequel to In the Heart of Hidden Things, and it is considerably darker in tone. Though it features the three generations of fairy smiths -- Jedediah, Matthew and John -- much of the novel deals with events a generation or two before, beginning Jedediah's grandfather Clem being befriended by a fae who he names Ab. Like many fae, Ab is very powerful and wants to help: but its definition of helpfulness is inhuman, and Clem's daughters (he has no sons) are 'gifted' with fae magic in their cradles. Agnes is inconveniently strong; Constance is inconveniently beautiful; Mabel has the voice of a bird, and understands that the dawn chorus is a litany of abuse and threat.

Lacking a son, Clem marries his daughter Constance to the scion of another smithing clan, Caleb Mackem, known as Corbie. The marriage is not a successful one. Corbie is an insecure and abusive husband, and later father: Jedediah grows up braced against sudden violence and mockery. Corbie wins fame for being the Sarsen Shepherd, the man who brought the Sarsen Wolves to heel (via a chalk figure designed by Jedediah). Finally, Ab is captured and imprisoned in a hollow tree, and Corbie vanishes around the time of his son's wedding to calm, beautiful Louise. Jedediah, relieved, does not make much effort to locate his father: he's more than ready for a quiet life. But, after many years, Ab is freed ...

Whitfield's writing is a delight: steady Matthew, neurodiverse John, stoic Jedediah, and John's delightful teenaged sister Molly are vivid characters written with compassion and wit, and the other characters they encounter are splendidly described. These include a giant spidery fae which calls itself No One, and a pig named Left Lop which declaims in alliterative verse like an Anglo-Saxon. (‘You’re willing, wisewoman? You truly want me? Shield and shelter me, shrewdest of shes! Left-Lop would like it,’ it added, rather shyly, ‘if you’ll lend me your love. Just a little.’) And as the complex story is slowly revealed, it becomes obvious that kindness, loyalty and common sense (not to mention John's curiously other perceptions: 'there was something about today that was not quite itself, and John couldn't stop paying attention') will be the Smiths' salvation.

I found some scenes in this novel quite harrowing, but there was enough humour and light-heartedness to leaven the darkness. Kit Whitfield has a lovely line in metaphors (a spider is a 'boiling scrape of legginess') and an eye for an arresting image (the roiling cloud of feathers and eyes that is Ab; a mouth 'fringed with a flexing display of fingers and toes'). The intricacies of familial relationships, feuds as well as unity, are detailed with tolerance and affection, and John's ways of looking at the world are evocative and rather enticing. I hope for more Gyrford books, with their pre-industrial English setting and the constant presence of the 'kind friends'.

2024/046: The First Fossil Hunters — Adrienne Mayor

Something real must have continued to confirm the most remarkable features about griffins: They had four legs but also a beak; they were found in deserts near gold. What kind of physical evidence might have verified their existence for so many people over so many centuries? [p. 34]

Adrienne Mayor, 'a historian of ancient science and a classical folklorist', uses her knowledge of classical literature and of paleontology to argue that the ancient Greeks interpreted fossils that weathered out of the ground as the bones of heroes, giants and monsters. She begins with the suggestion that the myth of the griffin -- a creature with four legs, but also a beak -- is derived from ancient discoveries of intact Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus skeletons, observed by nomads and miners in the steppes of Central Asia. She cites Pliny, Pausanius and Ctesias, all of whom wrote about griffins and described them as 'four-legged birds': there are even mentions of them laying eggs, and nests of eggs have been found in the region.

Her other main thesis is that bones discovered in the Mediterranean area (largely more recent, Pliocene megafauna such as mastodons, cave bears and rhinoceri) were identified either as the remains of giants from the Gigantomachy or as the bones of legendary heroes such as Theseus and Heracles. She notes dryly that 'this vigorous early traffic in celebrity relics helps explain how the term “heroes’ bones” came to mean any large prehistoric skeleton that came to light in later Roman times' [p. 113] and discusses the various bones that were described by classical authors as being displayed at temples, viewed at certain places (which turn out to be key sites for fossils) and revered as remains of a time when men and beasts were larger than their contemporary counterparts.

There are some intriguing references to ancient 'tombs' where gigantic fossil bones were found buried with Bronze Age weaponry or stone tools: perhaps an indication that humans in earlier times also revered the bones, and gave them ritual burial? And I was utterly delighted to discover the story of Tjanefer's sea urchin, a fossil with an inscription in hieroglyphics recording the name of the man who found it. Mayor's hypothesis that the Hesione vase shows a fossil skull weathering out of a cliff is so credible as to seem obvious.

The discussion of whether the Greeks understood, or accepted the possibility of, evolution is interesting, if occasionally dry; the footnotes, appendices and bibliography very thorough. I'd argue that the book's title is something of a misnomer: it's not so much about fossil hunters as fossil interpreters. But I found it fascinating, and I have no regrets about buying it at full, non-fiction-ebook, price.

Fulfils the ‘posture’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge. Mayor discusses the postures in which Psittacosaurus skeletons are found, and how they can be interpreted as gold-guarding griffins.

2024/045: To Shape a Dragon's Breath — Monaquill Blackgoose

I was going to make sure that the Anglish understood that we had never gone anywhere. That despite their best efforts, we were still living here among them on the lands where we’d always lived. I was going to show them just how many of us there were. [loc. 6012]

Anequs is fifteen, two years a woman, when she discovers a dragon egg -- the first her people, the Naquisit, have seen for many years. When the egg hatches, in Masquisit's meeting-house and surrounded by the people of the island, the hatchling Kasaqua chooses Anequs to be its person -- its Nampeshiweisit. (If the unfamiliar names and words in that summary have put you off, this is not the book for you.) Anequs quickly learns that the Anglish colonisers have Rules about dragons: they must be registered, and properly trained, because a dragon's breath can reduce any material into its component atoms. Anequs and Kasaqua have to go to Kuiper’s Academy of Natural Philosophy and Skiltakraft in Varmarden, run by the formidable Frau Kuiper: almost all of the other students are male, and there is only one other Naquisit at the Academy.

This is a world in which history happened rather differently. Christianity doesn't exist (despite which -- and I realise this is a minor vexation -- the year is 1842: on what calendar?) and science and culture seem to have their roots in northern, rather than southern, Europe. The Anglish are not English, but a Viking-flavoured hegemony of colonisers. Their religion features Fyra, Joden, Enki and Rune: their interests are conquest and exploration. (There's a map, but it's not very readable on the Kindle.) The Naquisit -- nicknamed 'nackies', a name that they use among themselves and which doesn't seem to have any negative connotation -- mostly inhabit coastal islands, sharing resources communally. Anequs misses her brother Niquiat, who's working in a fish cannery on the mainland, but he sends back enough money that they can buy kerosene and calico 'to share with our neighbours'. Niqiuat also has some ideas about bringing the Naquisit into the modern world, and Anequs is determined to learn all she can about the Anglish.

This is, apparently, a YA novel (it's shortlisted for the Lodestar Award for Best YA Book), so it's unsurprising that a great deal of the novel deals with Anequs' attempts to fit in at Kuiper's Academy. She befriends a Black maid, Liberty, despite Liberty's protests that it is not the done thing; she also befriends the autistic Sander, and Theod, the other Naquisit at the Academy. She stands up to bullies -- some of whom are teachers -- and studies hard, and even manages to get along with her snobbish roommate Marta. She forms not one but two romantic relationships (bisexual and polyamorous!). And she learns skiltakraft, which is basically chemistry, and finds ways to connect it to her own experience.

I would have liked more of Kasaqua, especially her development and personality: she's no Temeraire. I did occasionally find Anequs a bit humourless, though one can hardly blame her in such an atmosphere of racism, social unrest and prejudice. But I enjoyed this alternate history a great deal, and I'm very much looking forward to the next in the series.

Fulfils the ‘featuring indigenous culture’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

Fulfils the ‘a fantasy by a non-Caucasian author’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/044: All the White Spaces — Ally Wilkes

...my brothers would never see Antarctica. Never know a clear day on the South Atlantic, or the jewelled ice of the floes. Their dreams had come to nothing, but I was the last Morgan sibling, and I knew where I’d find them. I knew where I had to go. [p. 8]

Jonathan Morgan stows away on the Fortitude to join the (fictional) 1920 British Coats Land Expedition, bound for Antarctica. Morgan's elder brothers Rufus and Francis both died in the Great War, before they could join explorer James Randall's expedition: Jonathan is still young enough to believe in heroism and desperate to prove himself as much of a man as his brothers. He is helped by Harry Cooper, an old friend of the family, but is of course discovered, some days into the voyage south. Expedition leader James 'Australis' Randall decides to let him stay, and Jonathan (having proved his worth by saving a crew member from going overboard) shares the peril of the crew as disaster strikes and they're stranded on the ice, with the southern winter closing in. The men are whispering about ghosts, about half-heard familiar voices, about vivid hallucinations of the War. And Jonathan begins to believe that he's glimpsed the ghost of his brother Francis.

This is an alternate history: instead of Shackleton's heroic efforts to save the Endurance expedition, Wilkes gives us Randall, damaged and flawed, unwilling to admit that he could ever make the wrong call when it comes to polar exploration. All the White Spaces explores ideas of masculinity: Randall, bluff and tough; Tarlington, the expedition's scientist, a former conscientious objector who's ostracised by the rest of the crew; Harry Cooper, who continually behaves as though Jonathan is a girl disguised as a boy; and Jonathan himself, self-made into the man he always knew he was, desperate to belong to 'the place I’d won by the fire, in that circle of men'.

Wilkes writes beautifully of Antarctica's stark beauty ('Tiny cracks marbled the furthest ice, thin and dark as the veins on an old woman’s hand. Everything else was glittering, sharp—dead white.') and imbues the crackling aurora australis, flickering red and green overhead, with dread. The aurora seems to herald visitations by something that Jonathan calls 'the nightwatchman'; blizzards come out of nowhere; a previous, German, expedition has vanished without trace. If All the White Spaces was a simple horror novel, it would be an accomplished example of its kind. The interactions between Jonathan, Cooper, Tarlington and Randall add a dimension that I found compelling and fascinating. Looking forward to reading Wilkes' second novel, Where the Dead Wait, which seems to riff off the Franklin expedition...

"We’ve dropped down a ... hole in the cloth of the world. Been sucked into one of the white spaces on the map.”

Fulfils the ‘grieving characters’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge: Jonathan and Harry are grieving the Morgan brothers, Randall is grieving his son, many of the crew have lost friends and relations to the War.

2024/043: Deep Wheel Orcadia — Harry Josephine Giles

The maet o this transietion wis kent langsinsyne,
nae bother fer mosst o space, like jacks an limb extenders
an aa the bruck o bidan i'the varse, but sheu wis cursed
wi the wrang kinno faimly on the wrang kinno yird...[p. 90]

A verse novel written in the Orkney dialect, accompanied by an English 'translation' that's poetic in itself, Deep Wheel Orcadia won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2022, and I have been starting and abandoning it ever since.

Two travellers meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a space station near the galactic centre but also on the edge of everything. Astrid is returning from art school on Mars, and finding it difficult to fit back into her Orcadian life: Darling is fleeing her controlling parents, trying to find a place she might call home. The folk of the Wheel are struggling with the pace of change and the shifting economics. The primary industry seems to be catching Light(s) from the gas giant the Wheel orbits, and turning those Lights into fuel. But the Lights are not necessarily what they seem, and the wrecks that keep showing up near the Wheel -- studied by archaeologist Noor -- are also a mystery.

It's a very Orcadian story, from the isolated close-knit community once at the centre of things (see The Edge of the World for Orkney's former importance in the North Sea trading milieu) to the small 'yoles' (here spacecraft, historically fishing or whaling boats) going out to catch fuel. (In our book group discussion we talked about the ethical issues of whaling and how they might map to ethical issues with harvesting Lights.) For a novel set in deep space, it's remarkably nautical, and remarkably Norse: I'm sure I spotted Odinn, and the nearby gas giant is referred to as a 'yotun' (compare with 'jotun').

Deep Wheel Orcadia is easier to read than I'd expected, once I got into the rhythm of the dialect and remembered how to read a paper book. (I read ebooks for preference these days: better contrast, adjustable font and highlights that can be retrieved online.) I also listened to the audiobook, read by the author and alternating the Orkney and English chapters: their voice, in every sense, is a delight. I found it easier to understand spoken Orcadian than written: perhaps the Norse-inflected spellings obfuscated the meaning. I did find some of the English 'translations' decidedly clunky -- 'waitstaylive' for 'bide' and so on -- but this may well be deliberate, for one of the novel's themes is the difficulty of understanding, of translating. And indeed this may also extend to the Lights: are the 'visions' they seem to cause really an attempt to communicate?

I like the denseness of the Orkney verse, and the unwieldiness of the English translations, and the contrast between Astrid's sense of unbelonging and Darling's feeling that she could make a home here: I wanted more about the Lights, and the wrecks, and the gods, and Darling's past. And, indeed, Astrid's future, now that someone else on the Wheel has her name... A fascinating, if not wholly straightforward, read.

Fulfils the ‘abrupt ending’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

The quotation at the top of this review is translated as:

The foodmeat of this transition was long since known, no problem for most of space, like jacks and limb extenders
and all the rubbishscrap of waitstayliving in the universe, but she was cursed with the wrong sort of family on the wrong sort of groundworldsoil.

2024/042: Death in the Spires — K J Charles

He was frightened, and once he recognised that, he realised he'd been frightened for a very long time, at a level so deep he hadn' known i. One of the people he most loved had become a murderer, and he'd never trusted anyone again. [loc. 1548]

1905: Jem Kite is working as a clerk in London, his dreams of academic excellence and a comfortable life shattered ten years before, when he walked out of a final exam at Oxford after the murder of his friend Toby Feynsham. But was Toby really his friend? Who killed him, and why? Jem knows he's not the murderer, but it must have been one of their group of friends, the Seven Wonders: a black man, a flamboyant homosexual, working-class Jem, ambitious Hugo, plain Prue, Toby's twin sister Ella, and Toby himself. When Jem receives a note accusing him of the murder -- and losing him his job -- he decides it's time to settle the matter once and for all.

Death in the Spires is very much a murder mystery with romantic elements, rather than the author's more usual romance with mystery elements: some familiar tropes (perilous inheritance, illegitimate child, social injustice) are present, but the novel is structured quite differently and Charles keeps us guessing until the very end. Each of the characters is intriguing, and each has been badly affected by Toby's death -- but they all have secrets to keep, and none of them were wholly honest with the police at the time, or with one another a decade later. On rereading, I could see that some of those secrets were laid out in plain sight, though blended with plentiful red herrings. There's a strong theme throughout, familiar from Charles' m/m romances, of 'a crime against law but not humanity': the denouement may displease some, but I found it very satisfactory.

Fulfils the ‘academic thriller’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 11th April 2024.

2024/041: Alien Clay — Adrian Tchaikovsky

[the painting is] a kind of hell, except it was called 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'. The joke, I take it, being that it's a delight humanity is excluded from. Everything else in the picture's having a grand time living it up at our expense. Being on Kiln feels like that to me. I can almost hear the pop and fizz of the planet's biospehere having its riotous party... [loc. 3147]

Xenoecologist Professor Arton Daghdev has been exiled from the repressive and totalitarian Mandate for political dissidence. Alien Clay opens with his horrific descent through the atmosphere -- in a flimsy capsule, from a disintegrating single-use spaceship where he's been freeze-dried for the journey, watching as others die ('Acceptable Wastage') when their capsules fall apart -- to Kiln, one of only three planets yet discovered where multi-cellular life has evolved. Daghdev is desperate to investigate the mysterious ruins left by a lost civilisation, but instead he's set to labour in the riotous and deadly jungle that surrounds the penal colony. When he's not hacking his way through the Boschian biota to reveal more ruins for others to investigate, he's assisting in the dissection of dead (or mostly-dead) alien creatures. (Not that the colony's findings can be reported to the Mandate, since what they're discovering doesn't fit the restrictions of Mandate scientific thought.) Daghdev, with his brilliant mind and his regrettable habit of heterodox thinking, may be the best person to unravel the mystery of Kiln, if it doesn't kill him first.

Tchaikovsky has written some of my favourite science fiction novels of the last decade -- for example, Doors of Eden and Dogs of War: I find him a very variable author, though, and didn't like Alien Clay as much as I'd hoped. It's a good read, inventive and well-written and with an intriguingly bleak narrator, but it meandered and became somewhat repetitive towards the end -- which makes perfect sense in terms of the plot, but could still have been tightened up without loss of impact. I might have liked this more if Daghdev had been more likeable, or if it hadn't been solely his narration. Perhaps if one of the two major female characters (both scientists) or fellow non-binary dissident Ilmus, had taken over some of the narration...? A fascinating scenario, though, and the science is compelling.

Fulfils the ‘Has futuristic technology’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy. UK Publication Date is 28th March 2024.

2024/040: Divine Might — Natalie Haynes

[Erysichthon, cursed by Demeter] eats the racehorses, a warhorse and an ailouros – the animal they keep for catching vermin. This word was usually translated as ‘cat’ when I was a student, but some archaeozoologists now think domestic cats were quite late arrivals in Greece, so an ailouros might actually be a weasel or a pine marten. Whatever it is, Erysichthon eats it. [loc. 2795]

Haynes offers a witty, feminist account of six Olympian goddesses -- Aphrodite, Athene, Artemis, Demeter, Hera and Hestia -- bracketed by chapters on the Muses and the Furies. Her text is peppered with pop culture references (Katniss and Kate 'Hawkeye' Bishop, Lizzo and Cardi B, Lady Gaga and Arnold Schwarznegger, Jessica Jones and Barbie) as well as references to the myths in their various forms, and to artworks based on those myths. (I'd have liked more illustrations of the latter, but then again Kindle is not a great medium through which to view images, and the internet was at hand...)

Haynes reclaims Hera, who's typically depicted as foul-tempered, rageful and unreasonable, as the champion of married women -- and, implicitly, of a type of civilised order to which the 'petty, aggressive and routinely obnoxious' male gods are oblivious. She shows us the power of Demeter's rage and grief when Persephone is abducted by Hades; the destructive, sacrifice-demanding side of Artemis, and the great antiquity of her myth; the underappreciated Hestia, 'a goddess who doesn’t often do, but always is... our warm homecoming, our baked bread, our light in the dark' [2983]. She writes about how the Sirens were turned into magpies by the Muses (a myth I hadn't encountered before) and about the ways in which the Greeks identified and understood psychological states -- such as PTSD -- by thinking of them as curses dealt by particular deities.

Haynes is often slyly hilarious, for instance her remark that 'I too have been perplexed by Zeus’ habit of converting himself into a bird for the purposes of impressing or beguiling women'. I appreciate her humour a great deal and think it will appeal to the demographic that's perhaps her target audience: young women without much experience of Greek mythology. Her style is informal, her breadth of knowledge impressive and her observations highly relevant to the modern world. I've read and admired Haynes' novel Stone Blind, which retells the story of Medusa and her sisters: I think her non-fiction writing is equally accomplished.

of all the goddesses in this book, the Furies – not in their role of vengeance-goddesses but in the sense of collective, societal shame that they also personify, shame at breaking your word or behaving cruelly and dishonestly – might be the ones I would most like to see restored to a modern pantheon. [loc. 4040]

2024/039: Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes — Rob Wilkins

...it was frequently said that no train anywhere in Britain was permitted to run until it was established that at least one passenger on board was reading a Terry Pratchett. [loc. 370]

Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, by his assistant and friend Rob Wilkins, is always honest, sometimes sentimental and frequently very amusing. It shows us a man fuelled, to some extent, by anger, and perhaps by a sense of class inequality. He was told at school that he'd never amount to anything. Indeed, he left the education system to take up a full-time job as a reporter for a local paper -- but by then he'd already been published in John Carnell's 'Science Fantasy' magazine, at the age of 15. Some familiar names in the chapters about his teenage years: Rog Peyton, Christopher Priest, Dave Langford... and the British Science Fiction Association.

The early chapters focus on Pratchett's career as a reporter, and his work as a PR man for the Central Electricity Generating Board: but the book really becomes interesting after he gives up the day job and begins writing full-time. Some interesting insights into his process -- a combination of self-discipline and distraction. From the sound of it, he just wrote. (‘A 60,000 target, that means 212 days. No, let’s say by Christmas which means 370 words a night. Aim for 400!’ [loc. 3441]). Rob Wilkins started work as his assistant in 2000, and shows no reluctance in documenting Pratchett's less dignified moments -- argumentative, irritable and unreasonable. But it's also clear that there was great affection between the two of them. And Pratchett remained deeply in love with his wife Lyn, and devoted to his daughter Rhianna, until the end. (I still think he had the best possible death: at home, surrounded by family and with his cat on his bed.)

Wilkins' account of the Embuggerance -- Pratchett's term for the posterior cortical atrophy that killed him at 66 and affected him for at least a decade before that -- is moving and terrifying. Wilkins went from font-fixer and technical support to piecing together scraps of dictation -- as well as looking after Pratchett in more practical, physical ways. Dementia is horrific in its sheer randomness; the moments when Pratchett's brain failed him, leading to panic or incoherence or rage; the feeling of helplessness in the face of a disease for which there is as yet no cure. I watched my father's personality fragment and erode in the face of a similar illness (though he was much older, and had suffered multiple strokes). I hope it does not happen to me.

I can carry a grudge as well as anyone, and Terry Pratchett was once rudely dismissive of me, so I haven't read any of his books for many years. (Apart from rereads of Good Omens.) This is my problem and my loss. And hey, the books are still there waiting... I suspect I'd have enjoyed A Life With Footnotes even more if I'd been more of a Pratchett fan: I think it's about time I got over that long-ago dismissal and got reading. So many books! And who knows how much time any of us have?

Fulfils the ‘Nomination’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge, on the rather shaky basis of this quotation: "...the idea of getting shortlisted for prizes and not winning them was worse to Terry than the idea of not getting shortlisted for them in the first place. This had been his mindset since at least 1989, when Truckers was nominated for a Smarties Book prize, only to be ruled out on the contentious grounds that the story seemed to be inviting – as indeed it was – a sequel." [loc. 3979]

For as long as he writes, he is still Terry Pratchett. So, for as long as he needs me to, I will help him to write. [loc. 6628]

2024/038: The Night Watch — Sarah Waters

How long did they have to go on, letting the war spoil everything? They had been patient, all this time. They’d lived in darkness. They’d lived without salt, without scent. They’d fed themselves little scraps of pleasure, like parings of cheese. Now she became aware of the minutes as they passed: she felt them, suddenly, for what they were, as fragments of her life, her youth, that were rushing away like so many drops of water, never to return. [loc. 5289]

London, 1947: Kay lives in a half-derelict house owned by a Christian Scientist, mourning a great loss. Helen lives with popular author Julia, but is jealous of Julia's other friends. Duncan works in a candle factory, and lives with an older gentleman he calls 'Uncle Horace'. Duncan's sister Viv lives with her father, works with Helen and is in a relationship with Reggie, who is married. All of them are lonely, miserable and greatly changed by their wartime experiences.

Then Waters takes us back to 1944 and shows us how they got to where they are: the mystery about Duncan's time in prison, Kay being her best self as an ambulance driver during the bombing of London, Helen's infidelity, Viv's catastrophe. And further back, to 1941, as a kind of epilogue: how Kay met Helen, how Viv met Reggie, the evening that Duncan's life changed.

This is a book that demands to be reread: at least, I had to immediately turn back to the first chapters to reread in light of what was only revealed later in the novel. Waters never lapses into explanation: every 1947 scene, every emotion, has its roots in chronologically-earlier events, showing us (rather than telling us) how wartime exigencies shaped and changed each protagonist's life. The prose is lucid and informal, each chapter with the subtly distinct voice of its focal character. (Viv: 'she couldn’t bear it when they started talking so airily about prison, all of that'; Kay: 'with absolutely nothing wrong with her, living like a cripple, like a rat'; Helen: 'as if herds of great, complaining creatures were hurling themselves through the city sewers'; Duncan: 'Never being able to say the thing that people expected'.)

These are ordinary people. Nothing exceptional happens to them. They bear witness to the war, and to its little horrors: a child's jawbone full of milk teeth, a pigeon with its wings ablaze, a botched backstreet abortion. They learn to take each day as it comes. They find moments of joy amid the chaos. And then the war ends, and they are all, in different ways, suddenly lost.

I'm still thinking a lot about this novel (which I have owned for years, but only recently felt ready to read). I think it will haunt me for a while.

Fulfils the ‘Nominated for The Booker Prize’ (it was shortlisted in 2006) rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

2024/037: Checkmate in Berlin — Giles Milton

the most pressing issues facing the city’s traumatised population, including law and order (there was none), Nazis in hiding (there were many) and the challenges of governing a city in which the entire infrastructure had collapsed. [loc. 1706]

I'm coming to rely on Milton for straightforward accounts of historical events, peppered with fascinating anecdotes: Checkmate in Berlin, which deals with the beginning of the Cold War, was no exception. Due to the lacunae in my historical knowledge (not helped by lacklustre syllabi at secondary school, which was mostly local history and The Causes Of The First World War) I was only vaguely aware of the Berlin Airlift, the partition of post-war Berlin, et cetera. Milton illustrates the personalities involved (Roosevelt not far from death, Churchill bellicose and drunken, 'Uncle Joe' avuncular and scheming, et cetera) and describes the aftermath of the 'liberation' of Berlin from the Nazis -- a free-for-all of rape and looting, officially sanctioned by the Soviets and perpetrated by military personnel at all levels. 'Ulbricht refused to countenance abortion for women who had been raped, since it would be tantamount to admitting that the Red Army had done the raping.' [loc. 994] Britain and America were both slow to recognise that their wartime allies, the Russians, were now the enemy.

Tensions remained high, with Soviet interference in politics, Nazis recruited into key positions, combative radio stations and all manner of skulduggery. Then, in June 1948, the Soviets cut off all land routes to Berlin: the British and Americans refused to retreat, and instead designed and carried out the immense humanitarian effort of delivering thousands of tons of food and other supplies every day. Which meant over 500 daily flights; which meant an upgrade to the Tempelhof airport. 'The bulldozers required to transform the place were brought in by plane. Too heavy to be transported in a C-47, they were sliced into segments using oxyacetylene cutters and then welded back together once they were in Berlin.' [loc. 4944] The British civilian flights alone carried over 150,000 tons of supplies -- from a country where most of the population were living on rations similar to those of Berliners. The blockade lasted for 323 days, until the Soviets admitted defeat (of a sort). A monumental effort (and one that feels in sharp contrast to contemporary affairs) it had moments of lightness. I was charmed by Operation Little Vittles, in which American pilots dropped sweets for the children of Berlin. 'As a ‘good news’ story, it was hard to beat: smiling children devouring huge quantities of sweets supplied by caring pilots of the American Air Force...radio stations across the United States took up the cause, launching appeals for handkerchiefs so they could be turned into parachutes [for candy bars]: ‘Send in a handkerchief and we’ll play your request tune.’' [loc. 5361]

Lots of appalling, yet fascinating, detail here: the fate of Hitler's teeth, and of the German dental nurse who identified them; the looting of the Pergamon altar; the symptoms of Asiatic syphilis; the eye-opening nightclubs, such as the Tabasco, where it was apparently '‘genuinely impossible to tell who was a man or a boy and who was a girl’'. Recent reading has given me some affection for the Russians: Checkmate in Berlin has done a great deal to counter that.

Fulfils the ‘obstacle’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge, with particular reference to the 323-day Soviet blockade. Many more obstacles were provided by the Russians, though the Americans, French and British could be immovable if necessary.

2024/036: In the Heart of Hidden Things — Kit Whitfield

We build our houses with sense and geometry and plough our fields with toil and patience, and all the while, a blink away are the People, dancing and tearing, gifting and stealing, snatching up fury and scattering light, feeding on air. [loc. 48]

In a rural, pre-industrial setting with strong overtones of England, three generations of Smiths are walking through the forest with a friend of the family, Franklin Thorpe. When Franklin accidentally steps off the path, it's Matthew Smith who rescues him from the fairy ring, while Matthew's son John is sent to fetch snails as a gift for the inhabitants of the ring, and Matthew's father Jedediah reproves John for his abstracted air. Truly, John can't help his fascination with the People, also known as the 'kind friends': there's a rumour that he was conceived the same night as his mother Janet had some dealings with the fae. But when John tries to save the mute, wild lad Tobias -- who's liable to be hanged for poaching, and to enable wicked landlord Ephraim Brady to score a point against his tenants -- he overreaches himself.

There's a shuck-like figure called Black Hal (seen seven times a year, brings death to those he hunts) and a disdainful and easily-offended talking cat, not to mention a bramble-bush that's home to an entity who doesn't care for being uprooted: but there are also cruel landlords, iniquitious Lord Robert, and unsteady husbands. And at the heart of the novel is John, whose unique perceptions reveal inconvenient truths and the ways in which they can be remedied. And John is not a lonely outcast, but is surrounded by his family and friends.

I liked this novel very much indeed. John (and, perhaps to a greater extent, Tobias) are affected by the People's influence in ways that reflect neurodivergent behaviour, and that mindset has unexpected benefits when it comes to making deals with, and outmanouevring, the kind friends who live 'a blink away'. Whitfield's prose is calm and measured and occasionally very unnerving through its understatement. ('The verges streamed past him, everything in manic flow, and the sky was clenched, the light squeezing out of it like blood draining from pressed flesh.') There are frequent digressions, old stories, scenes of smithcraft, anecdotes and asides: this is not a book that cuts to the chase. As soon as I'd finished it I bought the next in the series, All the Hollow of the Sky (at full price!), which should indicate my regard for this, the first in a series.

Kit Whitfield writes in her afterword that 'I live among the hidden things, and my normal is very far away from what most people think of when they hear the word ...I didn’t decide to write neurodivergent characters when I began this book. I just wrote characters that appealed to me, and at a certain point noticed what I was doing.' Her son is autistic and ADHD.

2024/035: Home: A Time Traveller's Tales from Britain's Prehistory — Francis Pryor

...what we might loosely term ‘religion’ was increasing in importance. But instead of being removed from daily life to somewhere less accessible, more and more remote, more liminal, it was brought closer to home, because that was where it was needed. [loc. 3445]

I've read and enjoyed a couple of Pryor's other books (Britain BC and Scenes from Prehistoric Life: From the Ice Age to the Coming of the Romans) so it's probably not surprising that some parts of this engaging book, which Pryor describes as being 'about home and family life and the way ordinary people managed their affairs in the nine or so millennia between the end of the Ice Age and the coming of the Romans', felt familiar. He focuses closely on Britain, and on the archaeological record: there are many anecdotes about his own work in the field -- and I do mean in the field, and in the fen. He's fascinated by the ways in which the lives of prehistoric Britons can be understood from the remains of houses, places of worship and boundaries.

Pryor's overarching theme here is that it was families and small communities, rather than an elite class of warriors and leaders, who drove most of daily life during British prehistory. He posits a major change around 1500BC (the end of the Early Bronze Age), when some kind of religious 'revolution' seems to have occurred: the grander ritual sites, such as barrows and henges, were abandoned, and smaller and more community-based rituals ('often based around water ... but show clear links to aspects of ordinary domestic life') became commonplace.

Pryor is at his best when he conveys the excitement of archaeology: not the grinding monotony of trowel-work, but moments like seeing Mesolithic footprints, left by adults and children in the mud of the Severn. "I found it hard to accept that those footprints had survived for perhaps seven thousand years and then been exposed for just two or three hours, before the next tide washed them away, for ever.' [loc. 1543] In Home, he isn't attempting an objective, scholarly review of the evidence, but a very personal and 'bottom-up' account of the archaeological record and his feelings about it. I disagreed with some of his more sweeping statements ('had the Romans not invaded in AD 43, I’m in little doubt that Britain’s subsequent history would not have been adversely affected' [loc. 4882]), but it felt more like a friendly argument than an author enforcing his views.

Fulfils the ‘moment’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge, just because of that bit about the footprints.

2024/034: The Mars House — Natasha Pulley

January had a bizarre out-of-body moment where a detached part of his brain said: You’re very cold, it’s Monday, and a senator is arguing about you with a mammoth. On Mars. [loc. 4929]

When London floods, America is on fire and at war, and most countries aren't accepting immigrants or refugees. January Stirling, principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, is offered a place on a ship to Tharsis -- which, he is surprised to discover, is a Chinese colony on Mars. Several generations into the colonisation process, the air in Tharsis (four miles below 'sea level') is more or less breathable; refugees from Earth, known as 'Earthstrongers', must wear restrictive cages to stop them injuring Mars-born people (despite which Earthstrongers are the leading cause of death in Tharsis), or undergo the risky and potentially fatal naturalisation process; and gender has been pretty much abolished, through a combination of genetic and social engineering.

January, who's been working as a manual labourer, makes the mistake of arguing very publicly with Senator Gale, a nationalist and pro-naturalisation politician who was badly injured by Earthstrongers in a riot: his joke about not murdering anybody falls flat. In short order he's out of a job, destitute and desperate. He's about to submit himself for naturalisation when he receives an unexpected visit, and an offer of marriage, from Gale themself.

The Mars House feels very much a pandemic novel, though here the catastrophe that confines everyone to their homes (and provokes online exercise classes, daily briefings and requests to check in on neighbours) is an apocalyptic dust storm that blocks almost all sunlight -- essential for energy and water on a cold, dry planet. It's also a novel about immigration and colonisation, and about vengeance: and it's a romance, a political thriller and a murder mystery. Gale hopes to be elected as the next Consul; the current Consul is pro-China and wants Tharsis to remain a colony, and also happens to be related to Gale's former partner, Max, who disappeared without trace. January is increasingly drawn to Gale despite finding their political views abhorrent: he wants to believe that Gale is a good person, but he'd like to know whether Max really ran off with Gale's 'twin', River, or whether Gale had them killed. 

It is possible to love a book while appreciating that it is flawed, and not the author's best. This is certainly true of The Mars House, which has brought me a great deal of joy with a soupçon of annoyance. There are some inconsistencies in the world-building (why don't they use water from the Poles? why only mention the third, artificial moon very late in the story? why does nobody ever question Kasha the dog's reactions?); the story of River and Gale and Max, which casts a very different light on earlier scenes and events, is unravelled too late in the novel; the finale lacks resolution; and I found Gale's comparison of Earthstronger-Martian deaths with historical femicide jarring and rather distasteful. ('There is another situation in which one set of adults mixes with another set who are generally far stronger. It's on Earth. It's men and women...The worst genocide there has ever been... is femicide: the murder of women. It happens everywhere, in every culture, in every time, ever. Except ours.' [loc. 943]) For one thing, Gale has already stressed that most deaths at the hands of Earthstrongers are accidental: most femicide is decidedly not.

But I loved the romance; I loved the mammoths, and Ariel (the AI in charge of the Met Office, who lives twenty vertical miles above Tharsis, on the peak formerly known as Olympus, with a genetically-engineered cat), and the hints of the original, American colony's fate; I love Pulley's prose and the sometimes-whimsical little details and the fascination with language and interpretation. The footnotes (which feature Mori and Daughter, a shop on Filigree Street; bathroom terminology in Mandarin; The Clangers; mammoth jokes and mythology; and Shuppiluliuma, Ariel's cat) are sheer delight. And I adore the exchange between January and Gale, near the end of the novel, when Gale says 'I can tell you, if it would help', and January says, 'it doesn't matter'.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 19th March 2024. An earlier 'review' appeared here, last September: basically just an expression of my joy in the footnotes.