2025/206: The Children of God — Mary Doria Russell

What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? ... What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around for other failures to convince ourselves: it's not just me. [Prologue]

Audiobook reread, after listening to The Sparrow. It's many years since I last reread: here are my brief notes from 2007 reread. I stand by my original opinion, that this is not nearly as good or as well-structured a novel as The Sparrow. There is gorgeous prose, interesting ideas and a crowd of new characters: but there is also uneven pacing, political manoeuvring, and outright war.  There are, possibly, too many viewpoint characters, and a lack of the precise focus of the first novel. And there are several developments which felt unnecessarily cruel. ('She died last year.')

Narrated by Anna Fields, who manages the many accents and character voices -- across three species and a dozen nationalities -- admirably, with the sole exception of Northern Irish priest Sean Fein. I was especially impressed by her range of masculine voices.

I still hope for more SF from Mary Doria Russell, and I wish more of her books were available as ebooks in the UK.

2025/205: Nonesuch — Francis Spufford

...it had to be done whole-heartedly or not at all. Not at all! voted Iris the chief clerk, Iris the careful calculator of odds, Iris the prudent investor. All in, all at once, and fuck it, voted the bad girl, and the lover, and the risk-taker, and the suburban slut not willing to be defeated by some whey-faced bitch of a fascist. [loc. 3855]

Another alternate history, in a sense, from Francis Spufford. Set in London during the Blitz, it focusses on Iris Hawkins, an ambitious young woman prevented from success in business by her gender, but determined to make the most of her natural gift for finance. She's also determined to enjoy life: she's sexually active, self-sufficient and eminently pragmatic. She hooks up with Geoff, a young and innocent BBC engineer, on a night out, and finds herself drawn into an occult underworld, an anti-fascist plot, and some unexpected statues.

On the one hand, my favourite read in December and one of my favourites of 2025: on the other, these terrible words which I was not expecting: 'To be continued'. Woe!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers! Proper review nearer publication, which is due 26 FEB 26.

Read an excerpt here, and listen to The Coode Street Podcast featuring Spufford.

2025/204: Crypt — Alice Roberts

In politically tense times, differences – rather than similarities – can easily be brought into sharp focus. And such differences can be exploited by any politician who ultimately cares more about their own power, or indeed some abstract idea of nationhood, than about the lives of ordinary people and the ordinary communities that they govern. [loc. 317]

Following Ancestors (which examined several prehistoric burials) and Buried (ditto, but Roman and early medieval), Crypt explores the discovery, social context and archaeological significance of a number of burials that date to between 1000 AD and about 1500 AD. There's a mass grave in Oxford: not fighters, but likely settled Danes slaughtered as a result of Æthelred the Unready's 1002 edict that “all the Danes who had sprung up in this island are to be destroyed by a most just extermination". There's a medieval hospital where 85% of the skeletons excavated showed signs of leprosy. There's Thomas Beckett, assassinated at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral and later beatified. There is the Justinian Plague, which -- contrary to usual narratives -- does seem to have reached Britain; an anchorite with syphilis; the sailors on the Mary Rose; and a cluster of skeletons in a cemetery near Runcorn, showing signs of Paget's Disease -- a disease now on the wane.

Some of the chapters interested me more than others: the chapter on Beckett, for instance, focussed mostly on the history of the assassination and subsequent relgious controversy, as -- thanks to Henry VIII's destruction of Beckett's tomb and suppression of his cult -- there were no actual remains to examine. I was fascinated, though, by the ecology of M. leprae, the mycobacterium that causes leprosy: apparently it is completely unable to survive on its own, and can't even be grown in a laboratory. The descriptions of the damage it inflicted on sufferers were horrendous, but I am thankful that it's not more infectious. Happy news: 40% fewer new cases of leprosy in 2019 than in 2014!

I found the discussion of archaeogenetics really interesting: not only the detection and evolution of various pathogens, but also the new method for detecting biological sex: 'the amelogenin gene appears on both the X and Y chromosomes, in slightly different forms on each. DNA analysis focusing on the amelogenin gene has become a standard method for determining sex in forensic cases' [loc. 1085]. And I applaud the ways in which Roberts brings past lives to life.

2025/203: The Sparrow — Mary Doria Russell

‘At the end of his description of the first contact, in a locked file, Father Yarbrough ... wrote of you, “I believe that he was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Today I may have looked upon the face of a saint.”’
‘Stop it. Leave me something.’ [p. 298]

Audiobook reread on a lazy Boxing Day -- perhaps inspired by the excellent Jesuit priest in Snake-Eater. I first read this novel in 1997, when it was a submission for the Arthur C Clarke Award (which it won): some thoughts from an informal review back then. I hadn't reread since 2007, and was surprised at how much I remembered -- mostly about the humans, rather than the Runa and the Jana'ata.

The audiobook is splendidly narrated by David Colacci, who manages a huge range of character voices. Listening to the novel gave me a better appreciation of its structure: the pacing, the braided timelines, the suspense. And the pivotal scene, the scene where Sandoz's eager anticipation is destroyed, is incredibly powerful when experienced at speaking-pace rather than reading-pace.

I had a big argument with a well-known genre writer about this novel. He dismissed it as 'homophobic': I countered that the worst thing that happens to Sandoz is not with Hlavin Kitheri, but with Askama.

In some ways the novel is dated: AI is depicted positively, climate change is barely mentioned, and of course SETI has not picked up any songs: nor are we asteroid-mining. But the emotional and spiritual elements are timeless, precise and profoundly moving. Still one of my favourite SF novels ever, though often harrowing.

2025/202: The Riddle of the Labyrinth — Margalit Fox

The pull of an undeciphered ancient script comes not only from the fact that its discoverer cannot read it, but also from the knowledge that once, long ago, someone could. [p. 38]

Margalit Fox offers the 'first complete account' of the decipherment of Linear B, the earliest Greek script, which was first identified on tablets excavated by Arthur Evans at Knossos. Fox worked with the newly-opened archive of classicist Alice Kober's papers to uncover her role in decoding an unknown language, written in an unknown script, with unknown meaning. 

 Credit for Linear B's decipherment is generally given to gifted amateur Michael Ventris, whose debt to Kober's work -- as Fox puts it -- 'he acknowledged less conspicuously than he might have' [p. 262]. It was Kober who determined that Linear B was a syllabary script rather than an alphabet; that it was inflected; that it was possible to distinguish relationships between the characters without any knowledge of their meaning. It was also Kober who worked extensively on Arthur Evans' Scripta Minoa, at the expense of her own work and her health: it's tempting to see Evans as a dragon hoarding his treasure, not allowing anyone to publish work on, or even view original photographs of, the thousands of tablets he'd discovered.

Kober was hampered by class, gender and the need to support her widowed mother (who, in the end, outlived her). She never married, and there is no indication of any romantic relationship, though she had a close scholarly friendship with archaeologist John Franklin Daniel: when he died at the age of 38, she was devastated. Despite her gifts as a classicist and a linguist, she was only awarded the rank of full professor a few months before her death. And she was rejected by academia in favour of less-qualified men. Grr.

Fox brackets her account of Kober's life and work with sections on Evans (apparently incredibly near-sighted, a huge advantage for an archaeologist) and Ventris (who was a navigator during WWII and was known for working on Linear B on the way home from bombing raids). Fox is at pains to be fair to them, but it's clear that her sympathies are with Kober: as are mine.

A fascinating book with clear explanations of linguistic theory for the non-technical reader. And the whole story of Linear B and the tablets, baked to clay, which record slaves and stores, rations and resources, ties in very well with some of my other reading, from 1177 BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed to The Hymn to Dionysus.

...what we have, then (and all we will ever have), are the records of the final year of each palatial center before some cataclysm—invasion, earthquake, lightning strike—and the subsequent fire reduced the Mycenaean Age to ash. [p. 272]

2025/201: Skyward Inn — Alisa Whiteley

‘I put my hands in the mud and it said to come here. Mud, speaking to me in my head. They had a word for that when I was young: touched, they would have said. But here I am, and I’ll be touched if that is what’s next, because I felt certain it was Tom’s voice. Can you tell me—was it Tom’s voice? I suppose it couldn’t have been.’ [loc. 2155]

By the author of Three Eight One, this novel is set in the aftermath of interplanetary war. Two veterans of the war, Isley and Jem, have returned to the Western Protectorate (Devon and Cornwall: 'a small area of a small country that decided to secede from modern life, from space flight, from the Coalition and the conquering spirit of the new age') to run the Skyward Inn, née the Lamb and Flag. Jem is human, and comes from the nearby town, where her brother Dom (the Mayor) looks after her estranged son Fosse. Isley is a Qitan, from the side that lost: he's in charge of preparing the Qitan drink, 'brew', that the pub serves. It may be addictive, and it is certainly popular.

Things are changing, though. There are incomers at the deserted farm where Fosse hangs out, and they claim they can do magic. There's another stranger, a friend of Isley's, stranded and hiding in the cellar of the Skyward Inn. Outsiders threaten the precarious post-apocalyptic peace of the Protectorate, and raise issues of xenophobia, isolation, colonialism and the impossibility of communication between species -- or even between people, human people, who have every reason to yearn for mutual understanding.

I loved the wildness of the setting; was uneasy at the invasion of Fosse's private place, because it reminded me of my own childhood; and was deeply unsettled by the climax of the novel. Whiteley's prose is beautiful and her characters, though not always likeable, are solidly constructed with emotional depth and unspoken histories. I'm still not sure I liked this book but I found it fascinating and impressively understated.

2025/200: Unaccustomed Spirits — Elizabeth Pewsey

‘That’s no guitar, ignorant and misguided girl,’ said Sylvester. ‘That’s a lute. Strange tuning; it must be one of these authentic renderings.’
‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Adele.
‘Of course, the house is haunted,’ said Lily in matter-of-fact tones ...[loc. 578]

Comfort reread, which also fulfils my "reread beginning with 'U'" challenge. This is a very Christmassy romantic comedy, set in haunted Haphazard House, in Pewsey's imaginary northern county of Eyotshire. Familiar characters from the Mountjoy series (famous cellist Sylvester, his witchy housekeeper Lily, Val's son Thomas) appear, along with protagonist Cleo, her dastardly cousin Henry who wants to demolish the house but needs someone to housesit over Christmas, and Henry's Gothic housekeeper Mrs Grigson. 

Not to mention Lambert and Giles, the ghosts of the house, who (between eavesdropping on phone conversations and watching Star Trek) provide a running commmentary on Cleo, her friends and her dull fiance Perry. Giles is the lutenist, banished by Queen Elizabeth for ogling one of her favourites; Lambert the Roundhead, granted the house and the title after harrying the original occupants. 

There's some excitement in Cleo's trip to Hungary to rescue Prue, whose husband has fallen foul of the Party; there is amusement as dressmaker Adele and ghost-hunter Will negotiate a relationship; and there is unexpected romance, and Sylvester being awesome. Still a delight!