By complete coincidence, having just finished Dr Bloodmoney, I put my hands on Greybeard. Both are tales of a dystopian near future, both predicatBy complete coincidence, having just finished Dr Bloodmoney, I put my hands on Greybeard. Both are tales of a dystopian near future, both predicated on a nuclear accident, written at the same time in the early sixties and set in the aftermath, 1980s or so onwards.
I've already commented on the former: not well written, though not the worst of Dick's that I've read, and rather simplistic. Then again, the dilemma itself is simpler. The world is contaminated, but there is no doubt that human life will go on. Lots of mutant babies born, but also ones that aren't. Civilisation stays, well, civilised. Shortages lead to commerce, not to violence. Good old capitalism seems to hold everything together. Aldiss's scenario sees the human race and most, but not all, animals immediately become sterile. There is no optimistic streak that things will get back to the good ole days. Instead, if there is a note of optimism it's in the observation of Nature taking back control. Water expands its territory as does greenery. As humans abandon their own areas, Nature soon dominates, just as we observe in the real life catastrophe of Chernobyl.
My heart sank as I started Greybeard. There was plenty not to like, the main character is a man called Greybeard, people walk with big sticks, there are lots of stoats, probably sentient, and humans are clothed in what seems like medieval style. They live in the country. It felt like I'd walked into a fantasy book somehow managing to masquerade as SF. However, I stuck with it and it soon became reassuringly and more obviously dystopian. It might seem like Aldiss has the simpler job of the two authors. Everybody's sterile? So what's the problem. Humans are going to be extinct very soon. But that in itself creates a much more interesting set of problems. Why work? Why accept authority? What, exactly, is the point of anything? Is everybody really sterile? I thought Aldiss considers these issues with a depth which was lacking in Dick. I wonder if anybody has read both and would call me out as unfair to Dick?
I don't want to give away any of the story of Greybeard, but it's definitely worth a read and perhaps it makes sense to read Dick as well, just to see how two similar starts can develop in such different ways. It was my first Aldiss, and I immediately found myself looking through the shelves for another....to be continued....more
Maybe after three books I loved by Parks, a stinker was inevitable.
That said, maybe like Tim Winton on surfing, Parks is good on rapids. But I liked Maybe after three books I loved by Parks, a stinker was inevitable.
That said, maybe like Tim Winton on surfing, Parks is good on rapids. But I liked reading Winton on surfing, whereas I can't say I enjoyed this book in any way.
Yet I finished it. I kept thinking I'd get it. But I didn't.
NB: my esteem for Parks has not been dented, I have half a dozen others on the to-read-shelf in the loungeroom and finish them I will....more
Cat Bordhi died in September 2020. Her significance to the world of knitting would be hard to exaggerate. According to her NYT obituary, one of her knCat Bordhi died in September 2020. Her significance to the world of knitting would be hard to exaggerate. According to her NYT obituary, one of her knitting videos on youtube has over 1M views. She also won a literary prize for a YA novel.
I want to rant and rail against the system. Loving Roger is a wonderful - let me shout that, WONDERFUL - novella which is, 25 years or so after being written, neither fish nor fowl. Not old enough to be considered for Classic status. Not young enough to be modern. It's the sort of book not read because its date is wrong.
On top of this, to add injury to insult, Tim Parks is an all rounder. Every bit of it is connected to writing. It isn't like he does spin bowling and writes novels. No. However, he just won't specialise and that's considered plain unseemly now and for some time past. One isn't allowed to be good at more than one thing. The very hint of it smacks with the suspicion that maybe one isn't very good at either. Or, in the case of Parks, more.
He's a teacher of literature. He writes novels. He writes memoir. He translates. He writes important books about translation. As far as I can tell, he's damn good at all of these. But he must suffer the fate of the all rounder and somehow escape the much higher praise he would have been awarded for any one of these, if only he could have stuck to it and only it.
Grrrrrrr. I regularly get very cross about this!
It's hard to talk about this book without giving away things that are best left discovered in the reading of. He is amazingly good at doing a female perspective, in the process making many sad-amusing digs at males. This makes me want to reference The Bleeding Tree by Cerini, of which we saw a wonderful production on Saturday night. Both start off with a killing which one might describe as a murder. In each the murderee is male. In neither does one wish to see him as a victim. From that start, Cerini and Parks go in very different directions, but nonetheless they share a point which is to talk about how it transpires that women may do these things. In the process the reader will not have the tiniest sense of sympathy for the blokes. There is nothing to be generalised here, they aren't 'people' doing these deeds, they are 'women' and the dead body in each case was up to that point a 'man'.
More on this here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... as by coincidence, reading/seeing both these over a few days, it is obvious that Loving RoMore on this here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... as by coincidence, reading/seeing both these over a few days, it is obvious that Loving Roger by Tim Parks and The Bleeding Tree go together.
There is a nice review here. Cerini's script is riveting and clever and it's poetry and it manages to be humorous in a way I'm reluctant to call black because I don't think black and pain go together.
To quote Limelight's review: 'The Bleeding Tree...has the cadence of a ballad and the narrative audacity and guignol of a Coen Brothers film. Poetic, macabre, tender and funny, it explores the subterfuge and complexities of domestic violence more urgently and powerfully than naturalistic theatre can.' Well said.
It's strange but true that truth may be best exposed in a relatively artificial structure.
Other links worth exploring in regard to this splendid play:
'I've come,' announced Mr Joyce, 'to talk about Martha.'
That's a real suck-you-in sentence which had me loving Martha without knowing a dang thing abo'I've come,' announced Mr Joyce, 'to talk about Martha.'
That's a real suck-you-in sentence which had me loving Martha without knowing a dang thing about her. I imagined that she'd run rings about Mr Joyce and that she'd make me laugh in the process.
Margery Sharp again manages to combine sheer elegance of language with heroines that are anything but. Martha is fat and plain, but she doesn't give a toss - or not even that, it's more that she hasn't even ever thought about such trivial matters. She's an artist, obsessed with shape, and then with colour. Nothing matters to her apart from that. Oh, she likes a good bath, and she eats like she is built. But if she had the least reason to think that either of those habits were bad for her art, they'd be out on their ear. Just like Eric.
In fact, just like her baby. She gets pregnant to Eric. Drops him without his knowing that - he had plans to marry and obviously then she'd give up art. She has the baby in secret, and then leaves it with a note at Eric's front door. It's the spitting image of him. He lives with his mother. She left formula for the baby. Sorted. Back to painting.
'I've come,' announced Mr Joyce, 'to talk about Martha.'
That's a real suck-you-in sentence which had me loving MarthaBe warned, spoilers abound below.
'I've come,' announced Mr Joyce, 'to talk about Martha.'
That's a real suck-you-in sentence which had me loving Martha without knowing a dang thing about her. I imagined that she'd run rings about Mr Joyce and that she'd make me laugh in the process.
Margery Sharp again manages to combine sheer elegance of language with heroines that are anything but. Martha is fat and plain, but she doesn't give a toss - or not even that, it's more that she hasn't even ever thought about such trivial matters. She's an artist, obsessed with shape, and then with colour. Nothing matters to her apart from that. Oh, she likes a good bath, and she eats like she is built. But if she had the least reason to think that either of those habits were bad for her art, they'd be out on their ear. Just like Eric.
In fact, just like her baby. She gets pregnant to Eric. Drops him without his knowing that - he had plans to marry and obviously then she'd give up art. She has the baby in secret, and then leaves it with a note at Eric's front door. It's the spitting image of him. He lives with his mother. She left formula for the baby. Sorted. Back to painting.
Hard not to love an archetypal English countryside mystery first published 1962, that has a homage to Tom Lehrer in it.
'A piano, you idiot?....I'm not
Hard not to love an archetypal English countryside mystery first published 1962, that has a homage to Tom Lehrer in it.
'A piano, you idiot?....I'm not expecting a piano. What should I want a piano for? To play myself to sleep with Mozart and that crowd?' Channing-Kennedy gave a short, sharp bellow of laughter on this, so that one had to suppose he considered it a considerable witticism.
It is undeniable that the story line is thin - a fan tells me that is often the case - but it isn't why you read an Innes. You read it to share his lighthearted love of language, the fun he has with it, the droll wit. It's so jolly English, what.
I complained in my review of Donleavy recently that he is frequently described as having a staccato style, which I think is predicated on a misunderstanding of how he writes, perhaps because Donleavy himself played the master of the manor. But here Innes captures exactly that staccato upper class English way, that inability to construct sentences. Having read these books back to back it really struck me, the contrast between this, and the dreamy melodic nature of Donleavy's prose.
I was sorely tempted to review this in conjunction with Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, which if I had to put it in a genre, I would call historical I was sorely tempted to review this in conjunction with Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, which if I had to put it in a genre, I would call historical fiction. Yet the two books could scarcely be more different. Ishiguro gives you an idea of a period, it's hazy, impressionistic. Ghosh is very precise about historical themes. The book is sweeping - panoramic - but his focus is not on detail. If one might call World War one, for instance, a 'detail', it is noted in passing, perhaps in no more than a sentence, whilst the process of logging teak in Burma (as it was for most of the story) is told in depth over various settings and periods.
What a fascinating pair to read back to back. Payment Deferred is a very modern psychological thriller which hooks the reader in from the start: an astonishing work to come up with in the 1920s by a young man at the start of his career. The Snow Kimono might also be defined as a psychological thriller, as long and meandering as Forester's is to the point. And, again in contrast, Henshaw's novel is the first he'd written for 25 years, having a normal career after realising that there would be no money in writing for him.
I suspect that Henshaw is too clever for me. I spent too much time wondering what I was doing. Whereas CS Forester knows exactly what you are doing. Following the journey this simple question takes you on: will the murderer get away with his deed? And despite - or perhaps because of - the implications of the title, the reader is sort of barracking (in the Australian usage of the word) for the petty man who acts on this big idea.
An evening out for Paul Bryant. Ian Bell was in town to open a display of his photography of rock musicians and I was lucky enough to get to talk to hAn evening out for Paul Bryant. Ian Bell was in town to open a display of his photography of rock musicians and I was lucky enough to get to talk to him.
Paul, I’m sure you are going to want to start with the bad news.
Me: Have you photographed Leonard Cohen?
Yes, a few times.
Me: And Bob Dylan?
Maybe half a dozen.
Me: What do you think of Dylan’s concerts?
Picture being at a Heston Blumenthal dinner. It’s cost you $500. The table is lovely, the view gorgeous, the menu looks fantastic. And then you get served up cheese sandwiches. Not even special cheese sandwiches. Bob Dylan’s like that. All the elements are there, but you get something else. For a while I kept going to them figuring that I’d go to the right one, but there isn’t a right one. Do you know his radio show?
Me: No
He had this radio show for a long time, it was in themes and it was witty, the guy’s got a great sense of humour. But he isn’t willing to bring any of it to the table when he’s performing. He almost died in a car crash at one point and started acting like maybe presenting his music in a concert wasn’t the worst thing in the world that could happen to him. But it didn’t last for long. Meeting him was no fun either.
Me: So who do you prefer out of Dylan and Leonard Cohen?
I’m Team Leonard. Dylan gives nothing at his concerts. Leonard gives everything. He’s respectful, he’s….
Paul, I will spare you the rave review of Leonard.
You will be pleased to hear that there is good news.
The Ian Bell I talked to was erudicate and entertaining and informative….and…
is considering writing a book one day.
It was THE WRONG IAN BELL.
So you can relax. Maybe Bob’s best after all....more
An evening out for Paul Bryant. Ian Bell was in town to open a display of his photography of rock musicians and I was lucky enough to get to talk to hAn evening out for Paul Bryant. Ian Bell was in town to open a display of his photography of rock musicians and I was lucky enough to get to talk to him.
Paul, I’m sure you are going to want to start with the bad news.
Me: Have you photographed Leonard Cohen?
Yes, a few times?
Me: And Bob Dylan?
Maybe half a dozen.
Me: What do you think of Dylan’s concerts?
Picture being at a Heston Blumenthal dinner. It’s cost you $500. The table is lovely, the view gorgeous, the menu looks fantastic. And then you get served up cheese sandwiches. Not even special cheese sandwiches. Bob Dylan’s like that. All the elements are there, but you get something else. For a while I kept going to them figuring that I’d go to the right one, but there isn’t a right one. Do you know his radio show?
Me: No
He had this radio show for a long time, it was in themes and it was witty, the guy’s got a great sense of humour. But he isn’t willing to bring any of it to the table when he’s performing. He almost died in a car crash at one point and started acting like maybe presenting his music in a concert wasn’t the worst thing in the world that could happen to him. But it didn’t last for long. Meeting him was no fun either.
Me: So who do you prefer out of Dylan and Leonard Cohen?
I’m Team Leonard. Dylan gives nothing at his concerts. Leonard gives everything. He’s respectful, he’s….
Paul, I will spare you the rave review of Leonard.
You will be pleased to hear that there is good news.
The Ian Bell I talked to was erudicate and entertaining and informative….and…
is considering writing a book one day.
It was THE WRONG IAN BELL.
So you can relax. Maybe Bob’s best after all....more
What a fascinating pair to read back to back. Payment Deferred is a very modern psychological thriller which hooks the reader in from the start: an astonishing work to come up with in the 1920s by a young man at the start of his career. The Snow Kimono might also be defined as a psychological thriller, as long and meandering as Forester's is to the point. And, again in contrast, Henshaw's novel is the first he'd written for 25 years, having a normal career after realising that there would be no money in writing for him.
I suspect that Henshaw is too clever for me. I spent too much time wondering what I was doing. Whereas CS Forester knows exactly what you are doing. Following the journey this simple question takes you on: will the murderer get away with his deed? And despite - or perhaps because of - the implications of the title, the reader is sort of barracking (in the Australian usage of the word) for the petty man who acts on this big idea.
Mainly I wish to apologise to the author for my failure to get publishers to take this up. It deserves better, but publishers these days are scaredy cMainly I wish to apologise to the author for my failure to get publishers to take this up. It deserves better, but publishers these days are scaredy cats.
To be fair, so are readers. The publisher and their target customer both want books that have a hashsign on the front cover. The Adventures of Something #8. Ugggh.
Unfortunately the author has decided to turn this into an ebook. Evidently one in ten or so copies of ebooks are bought and the rest are taken without being paid for, let's call that theft. That being the case, I can only hope that nine million copies of it are stolen....more
One of the things I do in Geneva is hang out at the local flea market trying to suppress my urgReviewed in conjunction with Virginia Woolf's The Years
One of the things I do in Geneva is hang out at the local flea market trying to suppress my urge to preserve dead lives. Every week you'll see people disrespectfully pawing over the beloved libraries of the deceased, libraries which with possibly indecent haste, have been taken away by market vendors who, I can imagine, don't pay a cent for them. It is merely enough that they are willing to cart them off. There in the market they sit in boxes, 2CHF a book. Amongst them will often be intimate belongings such as photo albums, travel diaries or autograph books. Every time I see this, I want to save the memory even if nobody else does. Could I not keep just a skeleton of the library's existence?
As it is, my own library is, as much as anything else, a cemetery of book bones, nothing as whole as a skeleton no doubt, but each death provides my shelves with something more. There are many reasons for loving a book. Some of mine I love simply because they belonged to people who cared about them and I have inherited them if only by chance. Not least, the library remnants of the Hautevilles' library.
When the sale of the chateau and its contents was first mooted, the best of the books went to a posh auction house. The refuse of that process ended up at the local flea market. Each time I see one of these discarded deceased estates, lying higgledy-piggledy in boxes, I don't just look at the books one by one, deciding which small treasure to take home. I also read the story of the library itself. Ah, so and so was a jazz and cinema lover, as I see a record collection, the reference books lovingly collected on its side, now the junk man's province. This Swiss person made trips to Australia in the 1950s, here are the photo albums, the travel books of the period. Oh, and he was into....
So it goes on. Most of these deceased book lovers leave only a small tale. The Hautevilles, however, were a prominent family for many generations and their story is told via important legal battles, their castle and through the auction of the contents of that castle. They loved theatre and put on productions, so the auction included the costumery collected over the years. At the 'junk' end, ordinary books not worth anything, was a lovely collection of children's and adult's fiction from the pre and post WWII period. It contained many gems of the period including an author, almost forgotten these days, Margery Sharp. She is perhaps due for the requisite revival, not least because it would not be entirely unreasonable to call her the Jane Austen of her day. I hesitate to do that, but as it may get somebody to read her, and as almost nobody on GR - none of my friends - have read this, I will take the chance.
One of the things I do in Geneva is hang out at the local flea market trying to suppress Reviewed in conjunction with Margery Sharp's Lise Lillywhite
One of the things I do in Geneva is hang out at the local flea market trying to suppress my urge to preserve dead lives. Every week you'll see people disrespectfully pawing over the beloved libraries of the deceased, libraries which with possibly indecent haste, have been taken away by market vendors who, I can imagine, don't pay a cent for them. It is merely enough that they are willing to cart them off. There in the market they sit in boxes, 2CHF a book. Amongst them will often be intimate belongings such as photo albums, travel diaries or autograph books. Every time I see this, I want to save the memory even if nobody else does. Could I not keep just a skeleton of the library's existence?
As it is, my own library is, as much as anything else, a cemetery of book bones, nothing as whole as a skeleton no doubt, but each death provides my shelves with something more. There are many reasons for loving a book. Some of mine I love simply because they belonged to people who cared about them and I have inherited them if only by chance. Not least, the library remnants of the Hautevilles' library.
When the sale of the chateau and its contents was first mooted, the best of the books went to a posh auction house. The refuse of that process ended up at the local flea market. Each time I see one of these discarded deceased estates, lying higgledy-piggledy in boxes, I don't just look at the books one by one, deciding which small treasure to take home. I also read the story of the library itself. Ah, so and so was a jazz and cinema lover, as I see a record collection, the reference books lovingly collected on its side, now the junk man's province. This Swiss person made trips to Australia in the 1950s, here are the photo albums, the travel books of the period. Oh, and he was into....
So it goes on. Most of these deceased book lovers leave only a small tale. The Hautevilles, however, were a prominent family for many generations and their story is told via important legal battles, their castle and through the auction of the contents of that castle. They loved theatre and put on productions, so the auction included the costumery collected over the years. At the 'junk' end, ordinary books not worth anything, was a lovely collection of children's and adult's fiction from the pre and post WWII period. It contained many gems of the period including an author, almost forgotten these days, Margery Sharp. She is perhaps due for the requisite revival, not least because it would not be entirely unreasonable to call her the Jane Austen of her day. I hesitate to do that, but as it may get somebody to read her, and as almost nobody on GR - none of my friends - have read this, I will take the chance.
I made some comments about this play in my review of The Affair As an afterthought, I think it is worth mentioning something about the maleness of botI made some comments about this play in my review of The Affair As an afterthought, I think it is worth mentioning something about the maleness of both. Females are involved in none of the overt process of decision making in either work. Nonetheless, there is a striking difference between them. Twelve Angry Men is just that. But The Affair has a strong female presence. The men who have wives are highly influenced by them. It is the women who impel the men to action and it is the women who want justice at any cost. Behind the throne, yes, but more or less in control of it. It would be nice to think that this reflected well upon male academics, but I somehow doubt it's the case.
I guess Twelve Angry Men had to be called that. Twelve Angry People or An Angry Gender-balanced Jury or An Angry Jury of people representing the entire spectrum of sexuality doesn't really work - I hope I'm not just being old-fashioned in saying that. Please don't ban me from your university.
Still, I don't think I really noticed the maleness of Twelve Angry Men despite the way it was blatantly put forward to me in the title before I'd even bought the tickets, until I watched Amy Schumer's take on it. These are just two excepts from it and really worth watching. Wonderful cast led by Jeff Goldblum.
Whitaker put up the challenge here recently (comment 7):
Hands up those of you that have allowed a deeply held and cherished viewpoint to be changed by someone whose views are opposed to your own. Hands up those of you who have publicly contradicted someone whose political views closely align to your own on most occasions and did not end up paying a price for that. Ultimately, the majority of us are tribal.
It could scarcely have been more apposite to find myself at the time reading my first CP Snow The Affair which deals in a small closed world with just this situation. A scientist disliked by all in his Cambridge college is accused of and found guilty of fraud by the internal mechanisms of the college. Next, one of the very people who had first investigated the claims comes upon a piece of evidence that indicates there must be serious doubts as to the guilty verdict. To make it worse, not only would the College Seniors have to accept that they had been wrong, but overturning the verdict would by implication incriminate a now deceased scientist of impeccable credentials.
The book describes in minute detail the machinations that ensured, the motivations of the various players, the belief structures, both religious and political that inevitably have some sway, not to mention the notion of tradition and even what one thinks of so and so’s wife.
It is sort of like Twelve Angry Men but whereas that was a jury, and a diverse collection of individuals all strangers to one another, The Affair is a situation where everybody goes way back and the differences between people are much smaller, though they loom large in the story.
Given that St John is one of those Australians who leave and declines ever to come back, I was in an uneasy state whilst reading Women in Black. Is thGiven that St John is one of those Australians who leave and declines ever to come back, I was in an uneasy state whilst reading Women in Black. Is the satire affectionate or spiteful? One might assume the latter. And yet, thinking enough of it to try another, The Essence of the Thing set in the London in which she spent most of her adulthood, it is evident that she does have the necessary sympathy for her subjects to keep the reader onside.
Update 14/9/2018: Bruce Beresford's movie of The Women in Black has just been released. And it's called Ladies in Black. Why????? WWHHYYYY????????????Update 14/9/2018: Bruce Beresford's movie of The Women in Black has just been released. And it's called Ladies in Black. Why????? WWHHYYYY????????????????????????????? More on it here: https://www.broadsheet.com.au/melbour...
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Given that St John is one of those Australians who leaves and declines ever to come back, I was in an uneasy state whilst reading Women in Black. Is the satire affectionate or spiteful? One might assume the latter. And yet, thinking enough of it to try another, The Essence of the Thing set in the London in which she spent most of her adulthood, it is evident that she does have the necessary sympathy for her subjects to keep the reader onside.
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