The Masquerades of Spring, by Ben Aaronovitch

This is great fun - a Rivers of London novella set in New York in the Jazz Age, narrated by the woosterish Augustus Berrycloth-Young. Gussie has fled London and the stern wizards of the Folly because he's been using magic for daft pranks. Then Thomas Nightingale turns up on his doorstep, seeking help to track down a magic saxophone...

It's a fast-moving, quick-witted caper, full of pithy one-liners but grounded in the real history of the jazz and drag scene, prohibition, racism and homophobia. That makes it sort of Dashiell Hammett as written by PG Wodehouse, with some magic mixed in - and not nearly as easy to pull off as Ben makes it look. 

Of course, he has form here. That use of a specific time and place to add some heft to the adventure is the same trick as in Ben's Remembrance of the Daleks (which I adore). Just as that story hinted at hitherto unknown secrets in the Doctor's past, this novella provides some tantalising clues about the early life of Thomas Nightingale.

There's another link to Ben's TV Doctor Who in that Peter Walmsly is, here on p. 29, a reverend who led prayers at Casterbrook school of wizardry, decades before his stint as an archaeologist for the Carbury Trust.

I found it compelling and read it in a day. It closes with the prospect of many more such adventures for some of the principal figures here. Yes, please.

Rivers of London novels I've also blogged about:

• Lies Sleeping
• False Value
• Amongst Our Weapons

Rivers of London novellas:

• What Abigail Did That Summer
• The October Man

Garry Halliday and the Sands of Time, by Justin Blake

I'm ploughing on with my episode guide to the BBC children's serial Garry Halliday (1959-62), and ahead of an entry there on the fourth of the eight serials, here are some thoughts on the novelisation.

At the end of the third Garry Halliday novelisation, airline pilot and adventurer Garry skis down a mountain in Switzerland in time to catch the elusive criminal mastermind known as the Voice. Until now, no one - not even his own henchpeople - have seen his face. The Voice is sent to prison - and then promptly escapes.

In this next adventure, the Voice aims to deal with the 10 people who clapped eyes on him during his short time as captive, and thus regain his anonymity. The Swiss police inspector, the pilot of the plane who flew the Voice from Switzerland back to London and some prison staff at Pentonville each go missing for a week or so, and then are found with their memories wiped. As Garry, his trusty co-pilot Bill Dodds and their friend Inspector Potter from Scotland Yard investigate, they too face capture and the same sinister process.

This fourth Garry Halliday serial - broadcast over seven weeks between 5 November and 17 December 1960, never repeated but published in book form around September 1963 - taps into a contemporary fear. Brainwash Culture, Daniel Pick's 2016 documentary for Radio 3, is very good on the history of this, in real life and popular culture (and very useful when I wrote my book on 1967 Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks).

In short, during the Korean War (1950-53), reports emerged of coercive techniques being used by Maoist forces. This "brainwashing" was cited to explain why western prisoners of war had apparently aided their captors and why 21 American soldiers asked not to be repatriated. Whatever the truth behind these claims, they informed Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, in which a loyal American soldier undergoes conditioning that makes him commit treason. An acclaimed film version starring Frank Sinatra was released in 1962, the same year that Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File were published, both exploring the disturbing ways in which such techniques might be exploited.

We can see similar ideas being explored in such fare as the 1963 film The Mind Benders, the opening of Ian Fleming's 1964 novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (when James Bond is the victim of such techniques!) and lot of early Doctor Who. It's a particularly effective wheeze in TV and film, where we can see the conflict of "good" characters struggling to fight the conditioning.

Garry Halliday was tapping into the zeitgeist and was perhaps even a bit ahead of the game. But it's odd that the characters we see brainwashed are mostly those we don't otherwise know - the Swiss inspector and prison staff. Inspector Potter, who is also subjected to the technique, featured in the previous serial but played by a different actor, which may have lessened the impact of seeing him "turned" to work for the villains. At one point, Garry Halliday succumbs to the drugged water that begins the brainwashing process but we don't see him act out of character. Bill Dodds is also unaffected. It felt to me as though an obvious bit of drama had been missed.

Then there's the sense of the novelisation patching over holes in the storyline, for example why the Voice can only be recognised by the few people who saw him, rather than from a mug shot when he was arrested.

"What records there were of him had disappeared. There was one newspaper photograph. Even the Voice couldn't get rid of every copy of a newspaper with a circulation of four and a half million. The newspaper picture was blurred and grey on bad paper. It showed a bulky man with an arm over his face. Such as it was, it had been circulated to the police of every country in the world. Most of those to whom if had been circulated had replied, more or les politely, that it seemed useless as a means of identification." (p. 19)

The not quite stated implication is that he has people in the police and in newsrooms who have disposed of the original photographs. The irony, of course, is that very little in the way of visual or written records survive related to Garry Halliday.

That makes it difficult to grasp exactly what this serial would have looked and felt like on screen. As on previous serials, the location filming featured in publicity. In the story, the Voice is working from the fictional state of Balakesh, a short distance from real-life Tripoli. Producer Richard West says in his memoir The Reluctant Soldier & Greasepaint and Girls that he, co-writer Jeremy Bullmore, lead actor Terence Longdon, cameraman Tony Good and West's assistant (which may have been Jean Hart) flew out to Tripoli to film picturesque shots on location, without any idea what the story would entail. The plot would be devised around whatever they shot.

In fact, West says, not having prior permission to film outside the American-run Wheelus Air Base, they were all arrested. On another occasion, locals interrupted filming by throwing rocks. The suggestion is that the guerrilla crew didn't get as much footage as they'd have liked and these frustrations may have coloured the way that Balakesh was depicted.

There had been criticism of previous Garry Halliday serials for stereotypical depictions of silly foreigners. The Arabs here are by turns parochial, corrupt and greedy. Bill Dodds at one point adopts a disguise, half naked and blacked up. The novelisation tells us, not very convincingly, that this was,

"not in the hope of being taken for an Arab but simply so as to make it more difficult for anyone to see him" (p. 105).

Halliday expresses horror at the death penalty being used in Balakesh, though capital punishment wasn't abolished in the UK until 1965 (and not until 2000 for all circumstances). But I think the harshness of the regime is all set-up for the end of the story. The Sheikh allows the Voice to escape into the desert, which is effectively a death sentence. The Voice is last seen wandering lost in the sand with nothing to drink.

There's no mention in the surviving sources that actor Elwyn Brook-Jones was part of the crew out in Tripoli, so I wonder how this haunting scene was conveyed on screen. As with the ski chase at the end of the previous serial, it has the potential for arresting visuals if filmed out on location, and for something much less exciting if realised in studio.

On TV, this wasn't the end of the Voice. Yet by the time the book was published, Brook-Jones was dead and Garry Halliday was no longer being made or repeated. The authors therefore tell us in a foreword that this is the last of Halliday's encounters with the Voice and provide some background to the character. They say this is what Halliday subsequently learned - suggesting that this information was not given in the TV version.

Bill Dodds and his fiancee Sonya Delamare, played by Terence Alexander and his wife Juno, had also left the series, their last appearance at the end of the fifth serial. In this, their penultimate adventure, Sonya has relatively little to do, and based on the novelisation it doesn't look as though the couple were involved in location filming. Oddly, whereas the previous three novelisations were narrated by Dodds, here the story is told in the third person, as if preparing the way for his exit. We're told Bill and Sonya are now happily,

"settled down to domestic life and two kids (at the present count)" (p. 11)

But I wonder how happy things really were as the actors left the series.

Yellowface, by RF Kuang

Bestselling author Athena Liu asks her friend June Hayward to look over a manuscript she has written using an old, manual typewriter - the only version of Liu's new novel. When Liu suddenly dies, Hayward must decide what to do with a book that no one else knows even exists. The draft isn't good enough in its current state, Hayward decides, so begins to revise it. Soon she has claimed the work as her own and things begin to snowball...

This fast-moving satire of the issues of racial diversity in publishing and on social media kept me entertained as I drove to and from a work thing this week. It reminded me a bit of Patricia Highsmith, though here the narrator not so much unreliable as unobservant, failing to pick up on things that made me gasp or cringe, often because she's too eager to defend her actions and motives. She details her own anxiety, triggered by hostile behaviour experienced in person or online, but often misses the impact of her actions, such as in complaining about a junior member of publishing staff or harshly critiquing the work of a high school student.

Our narrator isn't the only character to behave badly; it's a world of self-interested, prickly people with fixed smiles (in that sense, the other thing it reminded me of was the recent Doctor Who episode, Dot and Bubble). I've seen a few reviews claim Yellowface is too on-the-nose or that June Hayward's character lacks depth - and then miss some elements that are not spelled out. Hayward's relationship with Liu is complex; Liu is herself a complex and sometimes disquieting figure. It's continually, compellingly not straightforward.

Uncivilised, by Subhadra Das

“The museum is a powerful and extraordinarily malleable cultural sorting house. [Museums] are places for demonstrating that the West is best, regardless of what the West has actually been up to. For example, when we hear the story of how Napoleon’s troops in Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century resorted to using dynamite to blow up a large, basalt statute of Rameses II, we needn’t worry in the way we do about the Taliban [destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas]. Even if they did blow up the Egyptian sculptures, Napoleon’s motive was to get them into the French national collection. They would be safe there.” (p. 188).

Subtitled “Ten lies that made the West”, this insightful and often funny book is full of historical details that challenge all kinds of presumptions. The ancient Athenians, for example, wouldn’t recognise our political system as democracy. Their whole system was about governing themselves; we elect other people, usually from the elite, to do so on our behalf.

Or there’s what Magna Carta did — or rather didn’t — do to fundamental rights here and abroad. I’d never even heard of the contemporaneous Charter of the Forest, which now seems a far more radical document, providing rights for ordinary people to land and resources; some of its provisions were still in force until 1971.

Over the course of 10 chapters, Subhadra unpicks a series of assumptions about the “civilised” and the “savage”, such as the superiority of the written word over the spoken, or the roots of political frameworks or psychological insights. In doing so, she shows how art, science and history are bound up in and blinded by a constructed, self-aggrandising narrative. 

Subhadra addresses numerous elisions from the historical record that serve to feed this false story. Repeatedly, women and non-white people and cultures have been left out of the story. I was fascinated to learn that Abraham Maslow’s work on the hierarchy of needs and on self-actualisation, which I studied as part of my training to be an adoptive parent, owes a great deal to his time among the Siksiká people in Northern Alberta — now the Northern Blackfoot Confederacy. Maslow later said he’d been inspired by news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour; Subhadra uses Maslow’s own work and accounts from women who knew him to set the record straight.

I should declare an interest in that I know Subhadra and get a credit in the acknowledgements (I had to check with her what for). The Dr is also cited as a source at one point. Some of what’s covered here I’d already heard, having seen Subhadra’s stand-up comedy act and heard her Boring Talk for the BBC on Jeremy Bentham’s “Auto-Icon”.

But there’s a great deal here that was completely new to me — a richer, stranger more diverse history than the one I thought I knew. What a delightful way to discover the myriad ways in which I’m wrong.

Roger Moore as James Bond

"The frank, uncensored story of what really happens in the making of a super-film," promises the back-cover blurb on Roger Moore as James Bond (aka Roger Moore's James Bond Diary). The star takes us through his 84 shooting days on his first Bond film, Live and Let Die, from Sunday 8 October 1972 when he leaves England for New Orleans to being told, if the rushes turn out okay, that he is done. 

On 14 October - Day 2 of shooting - Moore turned 45, the age I am now. There's a lot here about his aches and pains, his need of dental work, the various therapies employed and it's odd to think of myself, old and broken as I am, in better fettle than  Bond. There's also his anxieties and homesickness, and all the business that goes alongside making the movie itself.

"Daily more of the mechanics behind the mystique that is Bond become clear. The actual shooting, the rapport between my countenance and the camera, forms only a fraction of a field of operations which is a constant source of surprise." (Day 10, p. 27.)

The extra-curricular work includes endless press interviews, Moore is increasingly impatient when asked the same question each time: how will his Bond be different from Sean Connery's? There are endless photoshoots, appearances, charity galas, bits and pieces. Then there's the pop concert he goes to, where its announced to the audience that the new Bond is in their midst - and no one seems to care. He's self-effacing about this, and often very funny.

Yet Moore's wife Luisa is annoyed by how much this all encroaches into time he could spend with his children. Then there's the awkwardness of his various love scenes: how Luisa treats him on the days he's got sex on the schedule, the etiquette of what you say to the other actor during and after this stuff. It's Moore's diary, his version of events, but I often found myself wondering how it was for them. 

There's lots, too, that is amazing to see in an official, licensed release. In that sense, the book reminds me of Alan Arnold's absolutely extraordinary Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of The Empire Strikes Back which I now want to read again. Moore is candid about other actors fluffing their lines, mucking up shots or weeping. He cites various mistakes made by producer Harry Saltzman (such as, on page 32, making the wrong call on what the weather would be like, and so losing a day's shooting). There's stuff about Moore's children, such as his son needing an enema for trapped wind, that is personal, embarrassing and hardly relevant to the making of the film. But Moore seems to delight in this kind of thing: the gulf between movie fantasy and prosaic reality.

I wonder how much the cast and crew really enjoyed his constant pranking, which sometimes seems a bit cruel. I'm surprised, too, how little the other producer, Cubby Broccoli, features. Is that because he wasn't on set, or because he kept out of Moore's way, or because Moore had nothing funny or scathing to say about him, or because he knew better than to do so? Again, that's what make this so intriguing: Moore is sometimes brutally candid but we're not getting the whole story.

As early as day 5 we're told of plans afoot for the next Bond film, The Man With the Golden Gun, to begin shooting 18 months later in August 1974, and we really feel the weight and power of the Bond machine. But there's little on how much of a risk this all was, Moore the second attempt to keep the franchise going with a new leading man after George Lazenby had not turned out as hoped.

"The build-up of publicity and advertising for the film is fascinating. I was asking Harry [Saltzman] about the sort of money the Bonds have made in the past and he told me the biggest grosser was Thunderball which has done 64 million dollars to date. Diamonds are Forever, the last before Live and Let Die, had already grossed 48 million and it is only on its first time round [the cinemas]. OHMSS was the lowest and even that grossed 25 million dollars. I just hope ours will be as successful." (Day 52, p. 132.)

There's little sense he felt under pressure, I think because he could see the script and production were all good. But I wonder how Saltzman and Broccoli were feeling, especially given other tensions in the air. This is a film tapping into something of its moment. For example, early on, Moore was horrified to hear Saltzman shouting the N-word on set.

"He was not trying to start a race riot but simply calling to our English props man [by the] nickname he has answered to since the days of silent cinema. I pointed out that it might be better to to find him another name here in the racial hotbed of Louisiana so we have settled on 'Chalky'. As Bond, I make love to Rose Carver, played by beautiful black actress, Gloria Hendry, and Luisa has learned from certain Louisiana ladies that if there is a scene like that they won't go to see the picture. I personally don't give a damn and it makes me all the more determined to  play the scene." (Day 11, p. 31.)

There was more on this the following day: 

"Paul [Rabiger, supervising make-up] agrees with Guy [Hamilton, director], Tom Mankiewicz [writer] and myself that it would have been more interesting if Solitaire, our present leading lady, had been black as she was in Tom's original screen play, but United Artists would not stand for it." (Day 12, p. 33.)

A few days later, Moore reports on an argument on set, the black stunt team having objected to scenes being shot with white stunt performers blacked up (Day 17, p. 44). Two days after this, yet another photocall was the cause of further disagreement when Yaphet Kotto - the actor playing the villainous Mr Big - raised his fist in a black power salute.

"Whether he was serious or not I don't know but the sequel was a scorching row. [Publicity director] Derek Coyte pointed out that the pictures would rouse resentment from the rabid whites and could be seen as an endorsement of black power by militant blacks. We are making anything but a political picture but Derek said the photographs syndicated far and wide would involve us in a controversy which could do nothing but harm. Yaphet was incensed. At midday he and the black stunt men lunched together and during the afternoon Derek Coyte was ostracised by blacks who had previously been pally." (Day 19, p. 50.)

The next day, the black stuntmen were airing their grievances on local TV (p. 51). And these tensions were not confined to Louisiana. Returning to the UK, Moore shares a letter sent to him by a woman from North Wales, outraged by the sight of him pictured with Gloria Hendry as seen in the Daily Express (Day 54, p. 136).

Moore is unapologetic. It strikes me that George Lazenby had seen Bond as reactionary, but there's something here of Bond as progressive, just as they've tried to push things in the recent Daniel Craig films. Hardly perfect, but attempting to steer the juggernaut. 

I think there's something in that, too, when Moore first hears the theme tune for the film. In Goldfinger, Bond mocks the Beatles. Now a Beatle has written his title song, and Moore's response is telling:

"It is a tremendous piece of music and I will stick my neck out and say that three weeks from its release it will be number one in the charts. It's not last year's music, it's not even this year's music, it's next year's." (Day 66, p. 154.)

HV Morton's London

Having read Michael Bartholomew's biography of HV Morton, I'm now on to Morton himself. HV Morton's London is a collection of three earlier books, The Heart of London (1925), The Spell of London and The Nights of London (both 1926), first published together in 1940. Mine is an 18th edition from 1949.

Basically, they're vignettes from all round the capital, edited versions of Morton's column for the Daily Express. He visits Big Ben, goes back stage at the Old Vic, sits on more than one night-time riverboat on the look-out for suicides. There are flea markets and dances, a tour of the Royal Mint, a boxing match, a gambling den and much more. At one point, he's in the tower at Croydon Aerodrome, gazing across the Surrey fields to the twin towers of Crystal Palace - and somewhere in between, my old home.

At his best, Morton has access and insight so that it feels authoritative. Quite often, though, he gives full rein to whimsy, allowing himself to imagine the conversations - the whole lives - of people he merely glimpsed in passing, many of them salt-of-the-earth Londoners he names "Alf". More than once I was left thinking, 'But how could you know this?' or 'How could you have overheard?', so it lacks the authenticity of my friend Miranda Keeling's observations of real life.

At worst, Morton is misogynist and racist. His wandering eye falls, for example, on a pretty girl, but he assumes she is Jewish and will therefore soon grow fat. Another time, he describes the Chinese community in Limehouse as monkeys and is baffled by evidence that the men might be good to their wives. They allow him into their homes and bars; the threat of violence is all imposed by Morton. All of this stated quite openly, and shared in the popular press. It's not merely shocking; it is not the London I know.

Morton's is a strikingly dirty and polluted London, full of junk markets and rag fairs, worthless rubbish even sold from the windowsills and steps of the crumbling tenements. Almost every description of a landmark is shrouded in mist. One particular smog comprises,

“Many flavours. At Marble Arch I meet a delicate after-taste like melon; at Ludgate Hill I taste coke. … Everywhere the fog grips the throat and sets the eye watering. It puts out clammy fingers that touch the ears and give the hands a ghostly grip.” (p. 25)

The landmarks, too, are sooty. Viewed from the clock tower that houses Big Ben, he spies Nelson's column,

"stood up jet black like a cairn above the mist of a mountain top" (p. 160).

This juxtaposition of the modern and the mythic is a favourite trick of Morton's - wowed by a room in which Dickens once stood, or sounds that might have been familiar to Romans. It can get a little repetitive and yet his interest in the ancients can often provoke his most evocative writing, such as this from a visit to Cleopatra's Needle:

"Did you know that beneath the famous stone is buried a kind of Victorian Tutankamun’s treasure, placed there to give some man of the future an idea of us and our times? Did you realise that the London municipal authorities could do anything so touching? … In 1878 sealed jars were placed under the obelisk containing a man’s lounge suit, the complete dress and vanities of a woman of fashion, illustrated papers, Bibles in many languages children’s toys, a razor, cigars, photographs of the most beautiful women of Victorian England, and a complete set of coinage from a farthing to five pounds. So the most ancient monument in London stands guard over this modernity, rather like an experienced old hen, waiting for Time to hatch it.” (p. 78)

Again, he can't resist playing this against aching modernity:

"I stood there with the tramcars speeding past and the criss-cross traffic," (p. 79). 

But it's a spot I know very well, and those tramcars are from a lost world.

In describing how omnibuses have changed within his own memory, Morton reveals what else is different (as well as his usual predilection for women's underthings):

“In 1925, when this was written, London omnibuses had open roofs, and the seats were protected by black tarpaulin covers which travellers could adjust in wet weather. Nowadays the London omnibus is an enclosed juggernaut and wet seats are things of the primitive past. Also, the Strand has changed since 1925. It has been widened in parts, and it is no longer an exclusively masculine street. Silk stockings are probably now more in evidence there than pith helmets and spine pads [from the imperial outfitters].” (p. 34n)

This throng of Londoners heading out into the Empire he finds straightforwardly heroic, but anything of that world coming into London is straightforwardly threatening. In Morton's view, all foreigners are at best suspect; often they're also monstrous. Then, while out on the Thames at 2 am, he spots, “a queer fleet at anchor” in Limehouse: 

“‘The smallpox boats,’ said the sergeant [giving him this tour]. ‘They are always fitted up ready to take patients [arriving in ships] down to the isolation hospital in the event of any outbreak.’” (p. 400)

It's not as if the capital is otherwise a bastion of good health. There are no gyms or joggers in this London. Morton's description of conditions in the few free hospitals in a time pre-NHS is gruelling, for all he admires the good-hearted people running such charity. He also visits St Martin's by Trafalgar Square, where the homeless men offered shelter are divided into three types: ex-prisoners with a grudge against the world; those who won't work; and,

"those who went to the war as boys and came back men with boys’ minds" (pp. 42-43).

There's pity for these wounded men, but no sense that they are owed something more by a grateful nation. That contrasts with the dead of the same conflict. Morton passes the six year-old Cenotaph, that "mass of national emotion frozen in stone", where,

"A parcels delivery boy riding a tricycle van takes off his worn cap [as he passes]. An omnibus goes by. The men lift their hats. Men passing with papers and documents under their arms, attache and despatch cases in their hands—and the business of life—bare their heads as they hurry by." (p. 19)

That's all the more poignant given when this edition was compiled. Morton's first introduction to these three books was written in August 1940, addressing fellow imperilled Londoners. His theme is the pride and interest the Second World War has ignited in their city as it faces devastation.

"Men who in former years hardly knew where their town hall was to be found, now sleep there regularly, and have become familiar with many a municipal mystery. Men and women, to whom a fire hydrant was once a technical term which cropped up occasionally in the newspapers, can now draw you an accurate map of the water-supply of their district. Countless diligent wardens know by heart streets which, until recently were an untracked wilderness to them, although they lived just round the corner." (p. vii)

A second introduction, written in February 1941, is for American readers. London, he informs them gravely,

“has experienced the mass raid; the single nuisance raider; the high explosive raid; the fire raid; the mixed h.e. and fire raid; the raid directed against docks and warehouses; and the raid directed, apparently, against Wren churches and hospitals.”

But there are broadly two types of air raid: day and night.

“When London is raided by day, people no longer rush into shelters and cellars at the first note of the siren, as they used to when they were new to bombing.” (p. viii)

Instead, Londoners look around for signs of alarm or haste, but the traffic otherwise continues. Yet, hyper-vigilant to all sounds and senses, they will suddenly scatter. Night raids are another matter - altogether more tense and exhausting, even before the bombs come.

"As darkness approaches people become restless and begin to think of getting home before the black-out. Shops and businesses close early in anticipation of ‘siren time.’ Dusk falls, and the streets empty. It is not a pleasant experience to stand, say, in Bond Street, the pavements deserted except for anxious groups round the bus stops, every taxi-cab either occupied or else driven by a man who cannot take you back where you wish to go because he is himself trying to race the black-out to the other side of London." (p. ix) 

Despite the hardships, Londoners have met hardship - says Morton - with their usual stoicism and good cheer. He tells us about ordinary City clerks who've been transformed into lions, the "man of books" who became a man of action. There's a mug of tea with the wardens, sharing tales of their modest heroism night after night. It's all good propaganda, these honest, good people remaining quietly dignified despite the ravages of war.

"The task of such civilians in war is infinitely more difficult than that of the soldier, who is a single-minded man trained to fight with others and untrammelled by any struggle to maintain the normalities. … Most gallant, and tragic, are those others who have been bombed out of flats and houses, some of them losing everything they possessed. The ability to ‘double-up’ with relatives and friends in times of misfortune, formerly an exclusive habit of the poorest classes, is now a general tendency. Admiration for those who have no homes, who spend their nights in other people’s shelters, and turn up at their offices in the morning to carry on as usual, is beyond expression.” (p. xix)

But one line is haunting. It's surely meant to reassure, yet in a book that is testimony to all that stands to be lost.

"The result [of the Blitz] is a grim city, a shabby city, a scarred city, but not a devastated city, except round and about Guildhall, where several famous streets have been burned to the ground.” (p. x)

In Search of HV Morton, by Michael Bartholomew

This is a very good biography of a very successful writer and pretty awful human being. Michael Bartholomew brilliantly teases out the real man from the literary persona, effectively providing biographies of two people: the real Harry Morton and the invented HV.

Morton's most famous work is In Search of England (1927), in which he escaped London for excursions in a bull-nosed Morris. Bartholomew makes the point that the title suggests this England had become hidden or lost and so had to be sought through its countryside and history. He goes on that this struck a chord in a nation still reeling from war. He also points out that the final destination in the book, a village in which Morton finds this England, is almost certainly a fiction. As he says, there's a subtle but important difference between a myth and a lie... I'll return to this when I reread In Search of England.

Bartholomew is aided by a wealth of evidence which any researcher would envy (me included). HV Morton published more than 40 books, almost all of them non-fiction, often recounting his adventures with wry, self-deprecating insight. Many of the books were collections of reports for newspapers (and, later in life, features for glossy magazines), with telling differences between what was originally printed and what was then revised. That would be quite enough, but Bartholomew also had access to a 200-page unpublished autobiography written in Morton's last years and a collection of diaries and correspondence ranging right back to his earliest days. This means the biographer is able to compare a diary account of a formative experience with how Morton chose to remember it a half-century later, and then contrast this with the version put in print. There is even a dated list of Morton's sexual conquests, totalling some 100 different individuals, with "wh" marking those that he paid for, which Bartholomew matches against the other details in his timeline.

There are plenty of gaps in the record - missing diaries, absences in what Morton tells us - and Bartholomew is good at deducing connections, motives, feelings. He also tells us when it's his own speculation by adding "I think", as well as saying when nothing firm can be said. Literary biographies can all too often be an annotated list of published works, reductively pinning down real events that inspired the writer, as if writing is little more than copy and paste. Bartholomew achieves something very different - and better. Morton is more than simply a witness: we come to understand the creative act, even in non-fiction. There is careful research beforehand, skilled observation at the time, a period of reflection to put things in perspective, and then craft in the actual process writing - from moulding loose events into a story, to the striking turns of phrase, the well-chosen idiom or analogy, and the deftly worked light humour.

A good example of this use of different sources is what Bartholomew can tell us about a particular photograph, chosen for the back of the dust jacket:

The photograph is also included in the plate section of the book, with the following caption:

"The opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1923 -- Morton's first big break as a reporter. The photograph was taken by the Times photographer. Under armed escort, treasures are being removed from the tomb. The figure leading the way is the official archaeologist, Howard Carter. The figure on the extreme right, furtively shadowing the party and taking surreptitious photographs, is Morton. When the photograph was published in The Times, Morton, the interloper, was cropped from the image."

The next plate is the front page of the Daily Express for 17 February 1923, with Morton's coverage - "Pharaoh's Coffin Found" - the first headline. Bartholomew follows the thread of Morton's early passion for archaeology and friendship with antiquarian GF Lawrence, how this helped him get the Tutankhamun gig (the Express determined not to let the Times have a monopoly on the story), the effect this trip had on Morton and how it all tied in to the historical perspectives in his later books.

It's interesting to read that, while waiting to be sent out to fight in the war, Morton was stationed in Colchester and involved in some excavations of Roman finds there. This was also true of the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler. There's no mention of Wheeler in this book, or of Morton in Jacquetta Hawkes' biography of Wheeler, and perhaps they never overlapped in life. Yet it strikes me that these womanising rogues had a lot in common, and Wheeler had a similar way of making direct connections to the ancient past. During excavation of Maiden Castle in the 1930s, Wheeler's brilliant deductions about the stages of a Roman siege were informed by his own battlefield experience in the war. Yet I wonder if the two men would have been at cross purposes: Wheeler using modern experience to unpick the truth of history, Morton looking to the past to provide a modern fiction... I'll keep an eye out for references to Wheeler in Morton's books.

Bartholomew has an eye for wry humour, such as when he details a break-in at the office young Morton was renting with a friend so that Morton could write a novel and the friend a play. 

"The project petered out, before Morton had completed chapter one, when a burglar broke in and made off with the kettle, tea and biscuits, but disdained to steal the manuscripts." (p. 82)

We also quickly get a sense of Morton's character, his presence in any room. While I envy Bartholomew his wealth of evidence, I wonder how much he enjoyed the time spent with his subject. Morton's insecurities and womanising are exhausting from the off but the racism creeps up on the reader. True, his travel writing is full of caricatures - there are often salt-of-the-earth yokels or idiot Americans for his narrator to converse with - but Bartholomew is good at showing how often Morton plays against easy stereotypes and presents a more complex view... at least in his published writing. In private, he's often shockingly racist, continually sympathising with the Nazis during the war and then emigrating to South Africa just as the apartheid regime came in.

Bartholomew confronts this head on and at some length: 

"For him to to have persisted with a rosy view of fascism, long after others had seen the light, indicates more than naivety." (p. 172)

He also points out the contradictions in Morton's prejudice: this man who made his name celebrating England actually despised much of its people and ways of doing things. Morton sympathised with and admired the Nazis and assumed they'd win the war, and yet was also a dedicated leader of a Home Guard unit, expecting to die with his men in token, doomed resistance to the inevitable invasion.

There are other ironies, such as - "improbably", as Bartholomew says - when the Labour Party published a pamphlet by Morton, What I Saw in the Slums (1933), with a foreword by party leader George Lansbury. Bartholomew makes the case that George Orwell surely read this ahead of his own, better known, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and even argues that of the two, Morton is the more sensitive and egalitarian.

"Morton's own descriptions of women are just as powerful [as Orwell's], and are less patronising. He writes, for example, of women who strive to put a symbolic barrier between their home and the even more squalid street beyond, by whitening the doorstep: 'Thousands of horrid doorsteps, worn as thin as wafers in the centre, are whitened or raddled. Every time a door opens you see a woman cleaning something.' What I Saw in the Slums is an impressive little book." (p. 147)

Bartholomew is no less impressive. There's lots that's uncomfortable in Morton's life - or parallel lives - but the story is well told. Note to self: this is how it's done.

The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell

The winner of the 2020 Clarke Award for best science-fiction novel of the year is a sprawling epic, charting the lives of multiple generations in Kalingalinga, Zambia, from the arrival of British coloniser Percy M Clark on 8 May 1903.

"I set out for the drift five miles above the [Victoria] Falls, the port of entry into North-western Rhodesia. The Zambesi is at its deepest and narrowest here for hundreds of miles, so it's the handiest spot for 'drifting' a body across. At first it was called Sekute's Drift after a chief of the Leya. Then it was Clarke's Drift, after the first white settler, whom I soon met. No one knows when it became The Old Drift." (p. 4)

We follow the course of this settlement to some time in our own future, the world transformed by technology, the [HIV] Virus and [climate] Change.

For much of its 563 pages I was wondering how it qualified as science-fiction. There's an element of fantasy in the life of Sibilla (born 1939), the Italian girl-woman-grandmother who's entire body and face are covered in thick, fast-growing hair; Agnes (born 1943) plays tennis despite being blind; Matha (born 1948) weeps without stopping for decades, her eyelashes knitting together. Before that stage of her life, there's something delightful about the period in the mid-60s where Matha is an afronaut in the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, whose revolutionary aim is to beat the super-powers to the Moon.

"The ten-foot copper cylinder was propped on its end in the grass, listing peaceably, its bottom quarter singed black from pre-launch testing. The take-off had been disappointing from the point of view of spectacle - Cyclops I had only risen six feet before it crashed to the ground. The mukwa wood catapult he had been considering would not be powerful enough; the mulolo system, while ideal for training cadets to withstand weightlessness, would never swing far enough. Turbulent propulsion was the only way forward!" (p. 162)

It's an often very funny book, full of rascal characters dodging their way through life. In many cases they have little choice if they are to survive. Existence here is often brutal, with sudden, shocking moments of violence and loss and betrayal. Each chapter focuses on a different character's perspective, and we know from the family tree at the start that they - or their descendants - are to intertwine. There's a lot of mixture: of race and culture, of research and technology into people's everyday lives, of history seeping into present such as the effect that an old recording can have on succeeding generations.

In the last section of the book, we veer into more hard sf territory, with the populace encouraged to have "Beads" implanted in their hands, which give them access to the internet and an in-built torchlight, but also puts them at the mercy of their government and foreign pharmaceutical powers, and have racial / colonial undertones. Threads that have woven through much of the story come together: racism, technology, revolutionary politics, the ways we mark and amend our bodies with haircuts, tattoos, implants...

An earlier winner of the Clarke Award, Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones, annoyed me because its benign political future was, I felt, so lacking in detail - as if all that is required to create a utopia is well-meaning people in charge. The Old Drift offers a more complex, nuanced view full of unintended consequences and a sense of greater context - the lives of the people of Zambia affected by its history with Europe, present dealings with America and China, and an uncertain global future given dramatic changes in climate. The last pages, where a revolution kind of happens by accident, is exciting and scary and sci-fi, yet credible - I think because it embraces that chaos, the complexity of the mix, the uncertainty of outcome.

A brief coda then drops some bombshells. The voice who has spoken between each chapter is not what they seemed but - fittingly - something more complex and mixed-up. They tell us, abruptly, of the sudden death of one of the main characters, and of a son born into a new, uncertain world very different from all we've witnessed so far, we hope but not necessarily better. There's no sense of what his life might entail, just that life will, somehow, continue, all of this part of a far bigger picture, as we all slowly drift among the stars.

Tintin, by Herge

I’m struggling a bit with prose for grown-ups, so over the last month worked my way through The Adventures of Tintin, an eight-volume box-set of the boy reporter’s collected scrapes, including the early, rough Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and the unfinished Tintin and the Alph-Art but not including the especially racist and colonialist Tintin in the Congo from which even Herge distanced himself. (The book is available to buy separately.)

My parents still have a bunch of Tintin books that I shared with my brothers. In my head they were always more my younger brother’s but I’m surprised now to discover how few of them I’d read. Running gags, such as the telephone being put through to the butcher, or insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg outstaying his welcome, seemed completely new.

I was also surprised by how funny so much of it is, having thought of Tintin as the po-faced cousin of Asterix, to whom I was devoted. But there’s loads of often very funny slapstick here, whole sequences of panels passing without a word. I wonder what it owes to the comedy of silent film.

The pace is also striking. Written as a newspaper strip but reformatted for book versions, each story licks along at great speed, full of incident and twists. There are plenty of cliffhangers - though, as with so many adventure serials, many of them are undone by outrageous good fortune or sleight of hand on the part of the author. Still, it’s exciting and fun.

And it looks beautiful. Herge's clean line style with no shading and flat colours means that strips that are nearly 100 years old reproduce nicely, and look fantastic on shiny, good quality paper. The style suggests cartoon-faced people in an otherwise convincingly realised world - it's both daft comic strip and gritty realism at the same time. 

But also striking is the racist stuff. Even without Tintin in the Congo, there are plenty of crude racial and cultural stereotypes, perhaps the most jaw-dropping in The Broken Ear when Tintin blacks up. 

Having nominally bought the collection for my nine year-old son, I started to have second thoughts - and  I’m not the only one. On 10 June, just as I was reading this, Amol Rajan was on BBC News to talk about Gone With the Wind being removed from Netflix - just a day after he’d been on to talk about the more recent comedy Little Britain coming down from iPlayer.

“That is fraught with difficulty. Where does it stop? I'm reading Tintin with my son at the moment and an exhibition of tolerance it certainly is not. It reads like one long parade of racial cliches.” (Tweet by Amol Rajan, 10 June 2020)

He’s right, and there’s plenty here that made me uncomfortable - not least in those books that I'd read before without noticing this aspect. How strange, too, for a series of adventures for children to feature opium dens, slavery, alcoholism, kidnap and murder. I think Herge’s clean lines and flat colours, plus the slapstick stuff, are deceptive: Tintin’s a noble character in a world that is corrupt and cruel and dangerous.

Without wishing to excuse or downplay the racist depictions here, there’s clearly also an attempt to offer more nuance and counterpoint, such as in this sequence from The Blue Lotus where Tintin and his friend Chang try to dispel a few cultural myths.

I wonder how much of this is later revisionism. There’s clearly some of that going on. The jump in style between Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and the next book, Tintin in America, is so marked because the latter was redrawn. There’s evidence, too, that the revised books weren’t published in their original order. In Cigars of the Pharaohs, in volume 2 of this collection, Tintin is recognised because someone has a copy of Destination Moon, which is in volume 6.

(This also suggests that Tintin is a celebrity because of his adventures, and the accounts of them exist in his own world as colourful comic books, too.)

My guess is that this moment in King Ottaker’s Sceptre is also a later edit, perhaps after someone wrote in:

Anyway. There’s a notable shift in gear with The Crab With the Golden Claws, which feels more mature and better plotted, and introduces us to the brilliant Captain Archibald Haddock, a drunk old sea-dog with a heart of gold. Part of what makes this story feel epic is where it breaks the newspaper-strip format, with full and half-page panels. When these happen out in the desert, the effect is like suddenly going widescreen, the adventures directed by David Lean. Again, it’s a story about drug-smuggling and there are racial caricatures, but Tintin solves the mystery using pluck and intelligence rather than good fortune.

After the disappointing The Shooting Star (an odd one about an alien island that produces huge mushrooms), we’re onto what’s surely the classic pairing - The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure. I knew this one well and it’s a really good mystery, greatly helped by the focus on Captain Haddock. In Secret, we’re told the year is 1958 which came as a bit of a shock reading the adventures in sequence. Some 30 years have passed since Land of the Soviets and Tintin and his dog have not aged a day. It turns out that the original version of the strip was published between June 1942 and January 1943, so this is again another revision for the collected version. More than that, the stories have existed in a kind of timeless state. While Tintin in America mentioned Al Capone by name, we’ve had little sense of the real world. There has been no mention of the Second World War, the occupation of Tintin's native Belgium or that anything might have changed. I’ve since looked this up and see that The Crab With the Golden Claws was the first that Herge wrote while under occupation, and it’s tempting to try and see the gear-shift in the storytelling as some kind of response to real-world events. I’m not sure, but would like to know more.

Secret ends with Tintin directly addressing the reader to say the story is continued. Red Rackham’s Treasure begins with various suitors claiming to be descendants of the notorious pirate to get in on the treasure hunt. One of these, apparently as a sight gag, is a black man with very dark skin and big lips - so this kind of racist caricature isn’t only part of the early days of the series. On page 186 of my edition, we’re given the date Wednesday 23 July, suggesting this is still 1958.

There’s more continuity cock-up in The Seven Crystal Balls where we’re told of Bianca Castafiore that,

“she turns up in the oddest places: Syldavia, Borduria, the Red Sea… She seems to follows us around!” (p. 13)

But this is only the second time we’ve met her, and The Red Sea Sharks is in six books’ time. On the next page, General Alcazar seems to have met Haddock before, but Haddock wasn’t in that previous adventure at all. Land of Black Gold then features two more characters returning from previous books, and depends on a lot of coincidence. The books keep finding dramatic new locations round the world, but feel increasingly repetitive.

Then there’s something very different with Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. This strip originally began in 1950, well ahead of the Space Race, and it's fascinating that neither the US nor USSR are the first to get to the lunar surface. The rocket here is, apparently purposefully, reminiscent of the Nazi's V-2 rocket, even down to the distinctive red and white check. That surely makes Professor Calculus a comedy version of Von Braun. Again, there's no mention of Nazis, the shadow of occupation or the Cold War that followed - and was in the background as this story was written. Tintin is the first human to walk on the Moon but this extraordinary historic moment happens outside of time.

Herge took pains to get the details right, and it's fun to see a spacecraft built to accommodate the fact that its crew would all be knocked unconscious by G-force. The astronauts speculate about the formation of craters (we now know they're created by impacts), and land and drive huge, heavy vehicles on the lunar surface that would be far too massive and costly to get there. I was also taken by the science they actually conduct:

“EXTRACT FROM THE LOG BOOK BY PROFESSOR CALCULUS
4th June - 2150 hrs. (G.M.T.)
Wolff and I spent the day studying cosmic rays, and making astronomical observations. Our findings have been entered progressively in Special Record Books Nos. I and II. The Captain and Tintin have nearly finished assembling the [reconnaissance] tank.” (p. 98)

They set up an observatory and a theodolite, and drive round in an enormous tank. And then they discover a huge cave system. Surely, surely, the moment Tintin lets go his safety line and drops into the abyss to rescue Snowy is an influence on Doctor Who doing the same in the The Satan Pit (2006).

So much of this is jaw-dropping, remarkable and new. Really, my only problem with the Moon story is the villain, who returns from King Ottaker's Sceptre in a simple revenge plot, while a rival bunch of scientists eavesdrop on what Tintin is up to. It feels inconsequential.

Once they're back on Earth, Tintin is recognised as the first person to walk on the Moon in several of the books that follow. The Calculus Affair is set on Earth but feels no less huge given that Professor Calculus has - as well as all his technology for getting to the Moon - invented a super weapon. There's a chilling moment when we see a city destroyed, though it proves to be a model for demonstration purposes. Even so, this analogy for the Bomb is really effective. At one point, we also spot a book, "German Research in World War II", the first time the Tintin series references the conflict.

Tintin in Tibet (serialised 1958-59, book version 1960) seems quite similar to Nigel Kneale's Yeti stories - his TV play The Creature (1955) and the movie version The Abominable Snowman (1957) - and I wondered if Kneale had been an influence. Here, Tintin is on the trail of his friend Chang, last seen by us in The Blue Lotus - 15 books previously, and first published in the 1930s. Clearly, not so much time has passed for the two young friends. Tintin now seems to have a psychic ability, knowing innately that Chang is alive and in need of saving. Psychic powers seem permissible when he's among exotic natives.

The Castafiore Emerald is on a much smaller scale and set largely at Haddock's home, Marlinspike Hall. Haddock is not the most patient or progressive of people but is horrified by the treatment of a group of Travellers nearby and offers them land on which to camp. They are then suspected when Bianca Castafiore is robbed - playing into racial cliches. Yet Tintin maintains that the Travellers are innocent, even when evidence suggests otherwise. It's Herge trying to play against racist assumptions but there's no challenging of or comeuppance for the prejudiced authorities, and the Travellers leave without a word. The story's heart is in the right place but it's odd. The culprit turns out to be a bit of a joke, and there's little sense of the injustice done to the Travellers. In fact, a missing watch rather invites us to suspect them, too.

Flight 714 to Sydney involves the return of a whole load of friends and foes from previous books, and the plot reminded me a lot - and not in a good way - of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. There are more returning characters in Tintin and the Picaros, including characters not seen since all the way back in The Broken Ear. If that's not very original, the story is full of suspense - our heroes walking headlong into a gilded cage, and a great sequence at the end when they get caught up in a crowd as they race to save the Thompsons from execution.

Our last sight of Tintin is in a tiny panel at the top of the final page. We then hear him on the final row, a speech bubble snaking away to a departing aircraft. And that's it: a rather understated end to his adventures and a great shame. For all the repeated jokes and perils, and the myriad returning characters that are hard to keep track of, it's all still fun - and now and again really thrilling.

The collection ends with Herge's script and rough sketches for two-thirds of Tintin and Alph-Art. It's fascinating to see his process, and the difference between the roughest of rough sketches and the couple of examples or more carefully realised outlines. The story itself is quite different from what's gone before - involving a celebrity modern artist who makes sculptures based on the letters of the alphabet. But there's the usual runaround and chases, Tintin surviving various attempts to shoot him and blow him up. It's hard to judge without the last third. Would it have done something different?

I'm also amazed that it's not been completed officially, and that, like Asterix, there aren't new adventures of Tintin. For one thing, the movie suggested an openness to adaptation on the part of the licence-holders. There's surely a story in what Tintin did during the war years, or in what he's up to now.

But then I think part of Tintin's appeal, and the only possible response to the racism contained in the stories, is that he's a thing of the past.

ST: TNG 2.9 The Measure of a Man

This is the second of 12 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation recommended to me. The first one was 1.13 Datalore.

We begin 2.9 The Measure of a Man with a game of five-card stud, our heroes discussing the mechanics of poker as if they’ve never played before - at least not together. Like the stilted joke about sneezing last time, there’s something awkward and unnatural here. It’s not just the nerdy conversation, but also that I’ve seen the Bond movie Casino Royale where the poker game is full of tension and excitement. In Star Trek’s post-money utopia, this game has no stakes, an intellectual exercise without much feeling. The point of the scene is that Data doesn’t comprehend that he is being bluffed - he lacks the psychological insight that his neurotypical crewmates take for granted. It underlines his Difference.

Meanwhile, Picard is in a space cafe meeting an old flame he’s not seen in 10 years. Phillipa Louvois suspects that Picard would, “Like to bust a chair across my teeth,” and informs him - because he did not already know - that she was forced out of Star Fleet as a result of their last encounter. That was when she prosecuted him in the court martial following the loss of a ship called the Stargazer. She says now that she was just doing her duty, following the procedure when any ship is lost but Picard says she enjoyed it. Louvois calls Picard a “pompous ass”.

My sense from all this was that Louvois knew a younger, more reckless and perhaps even violent version of Picard, in line with the revelations of his past from 6.15 Tapestry (which I’ve seen). But looking up the details, the events on the Stargazer were played out in 1.9 The Battle (which I’ve not seen), and Picard was not only faultless but saved the lives of his crew. If we know that previous episode, we immediately take against Louvois here: she is prejudiced against Picard, rather than the wronged party. I was wrong, but I think the central wheeze of this episode depends a lot on how much we’ve seen of the series so far, especially how much we’ve warmed to Data.

The Enterprise is visited by Admiral Nakamura and, trailing in his wake, a cyberneticist called Bruce Maddox. I already knew Maddox from his appearance in Picard (where he’s played by another actor), but you wouldn’t think he was important in his first scene here, where he doesn’t even speak. That means it’s a surprise when we learn he and Data have history. Maddox is sneeringly antagonistic, not only disputing that Data is sentient but also now wanting to dismantle him. Who is this murderous racist - and why the hell does Admiral Nakamura nod along to his proposal? It’s shocking because we’ve grown to like Data as a regular character in the series: we have history with him, too. But it’s also shocking in the fiction of the series because Data has served with Star Fleet for 18 years, working up the ranks to his current position as Lieutenant Commander. In all that time, has no one really ever considered this serving officer’s status and rights as a person? Did it not get addressed when he signed up, or each time he was promoted, or at his regular appraisals? It’s a massive oversight by Star Fleet HR, who surely wouldn’t award promotion to a something they considered a machine.

As with 1.13 Datalore, there’s a telling thing in the use of pronouns, Maddox insisting - big old racist that he is - on referring to Data as “it”. The word objectifies Data, but it’s not clear how consciously Maddox is using it as a ploy to exert ownership and rob Data of the right to self-determination. The less threatening argument made by the admiral is that he respects Data and simply wants to reassign him/it to a new experimental project. But Maddox is vague about the risks involved and doesn’t seem particularly concerned that Data should survive. It’s chilling.

Yet Data then has to explain his objections to his captain (and friend) before Picard attempts to help him. When Picard goes to see Louvois, she also struggles to understand the problem: when Picard says that Data has rights, she responds, “All of this passion over a machine.” If this were a standalone drama, we might sympathise with that view but we’re 35 episodes into the series and we know and like Data - largely, I think, because actor Brent Spiner is so charismatic even playing a man with no emotions.

Meanwhile, Data is in his quarters packing to leave the Enterprise in what’s surely a case of constructive dismissal. Among his possessions are a 3D hologram of the late Tasha Yar - who was killed off in 1.22 Skin of Evil (I vaguely remember that one from its broadcast on BBC Two on 6 March 1991). The hologram effect is nicely done and I wondered if actress Denise Crosby had come back for it especially - but apparently not. The hologram is subtly deployed in the scene but important: the emotional connection we feel to Tasha, and to her relationship with Data, means that it’s even more of a violation when Maddox brusquely strides into Data’s room without asking - declining to afford even the most basic respect he would presumably show to any other serving officer. Again, Data says that Maddox’s experiment is dangerous - an existential threat to Data. Maddox counters that Data is a found object, the property of Star Fleet. His “life” is unimportant.

Picard gets Louvois to agree to a tribunal to judge whether Data is a person and therefore has rights. It’s astonishing that this question should even be asked of a long-serving and well-regarded officer. But then, ahem, I sat in on a recent tribunal where it seemed astonishing there was any question to be probed. Louvois agrees to the tribunal on condition that Riker acts as prosecution - just as she was once required to prosecute Picard. This is really odd. It’s some kind of revenge on Picard, or point-scoring, or proving a point. But Riker is Data’s friend, and Picard - as defence counsel - has a history with Louvois as the judge. It’s hardly impartial. I believe the phrase used by my learned friends is that it would open to challenge.

Yet I was hooked by what follows. There’s a spectacular moment as Riker builds his case and finds something he can use - Jonathan Frakes perfectly conveying without words his thrill and then his guilt. In the tribunal itself, it’s brilliantly horrible when Riker asks to remove Data’s arm as evidence that he’s not a person and then uses the off-switch from 1.13 Datalore to show he’s not a real boy. “Pinocchio is broken,” he says of the friend and crewmate slumped across the desk. “Its strings have been cut.” Note the pronoun, used to devastating effect.

There’s then a break in proceedings and Picard takes solace in the bar. Here, wise Guinan makes explicit what this story is about: removing Data’s personhood and replicating him will mean, “an army of Datas, all disposable, [so] you don't have to think about their welfare.” When she speaks of, “whole generations of disposable people,” Picard responds, “You’re talking about slavery.” Guinan denies it, though of course that’s the allusion. I think this is all sensitively done but Guinan then says this connection to slavery isn’t the issue anyway - and Picard seems to agree.

Back at the tribunal, Picard makes a case for Data’s personhood, using as evidence his possessions, his friendships, his intimate relations with the late Tasha Yar. In fact, Data doesn’t want to be drawn on that relationship having given Tasha his word not to speak of it. His loyalty and manners, all of this stuff, make a compelling case appealing to our emotions. But Picard then pivots to confront Maddox’s central argument that Data is not sentient and therefore can be treated as property rather than a person. As Picard argues, sentience is a difficult thing to define - I thought of Alan Turing’s imitation game, predicated on the idea that we assume intelligence on the part of people we talk to. There’s a good argument here: that Maddox should have to prove his own sentience before casting aspersions. But that’s not where Picard goes.

He argues that Data is the first of a new kind of android, one that Maddox and others seek to replicate. The judgment of this tribunal will define how all those androids are treated in the years to come. Picard makes the link to slavery explicit here: “Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him to servitude and slavery?” The point is not what Data is but the behaviour of Star Fleet and the precedent set for the treatment of a whole new class of life. Picard quotes from the the mission statement of the Enterprise - and the series, since it’s given at the start of each episode - is “to seek out new life and new civilisations.” So the discussion here is fundamental to Star Trek. It's not about Data specifically but a wider-reaching principle of tolerance and respect for the different. It is fundamentally wrong, Picard argues. to treat some others as if they matter less. Cor, I thought, that’s really something.

Two things still bother me. First, this determination so fundamental to the series and to the Federation’s future is made by one judge with a personal score to settle with the defending counsel, while the prosecutor she appointed is a good friend of the defendant - known to socialise with Data, such as in the opening scene of this episode. It would surely be easy for Maddox to demand a retrial with more objective participants. As they acknowledge here, he very nearly won the case. Rather than settling the matter, the fact that the question was even asked about Data’s personhood is unsettling.

Then there’s Louvois’s concluding remarks:

“We have all been dancing around the basic issue. Does Data have a soul? I don't know that he has. I don't know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself.”

Why bring in a spiritual dimension at all? It’s not the point Picard has made and puts the onus back on Data. It lets Star Fleet off the hook for treating him so badly by forcing him to go through this grisly business at all.

After the judgment, Data says he is still intrigued by Maddox’s research and may yet help him if they can mitigate the risks. Maddox is surprised by this gesture, admitting, “He’s remarkable.” That pronoun is important but it’s a shame our attention is drawn to it explicitly, as if the production team doubt that the sentience of their audience. The use of “he” suggests Maddox won’t be back demanding a retrial (and he's not seen again until Picard). Data and Riker are also reconciled, again the onus on Data to make it all okay when he's done nothing more than have the temerity to exist.

Then Picard and Louvois head off for drinks, reconciled themselves. It's a happy ending all round, the matter of Data’s personhood settled for good. Isn’t it?

Next episode: 3.16 The Offspring

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn

More than a decade ago, I was in the audience to see my clever friend Farah Mendlesohn interview Iain Banks. In preparation, Farah had read all his books again - the sci-fi and the non sci-fi - and was brilliant at spotting links and themes between them that seemed wholly original to me (I'd studied Banks as part of my MA and published a paper on his stuff in the academic journal Foundation). That evening was a perfect example of what I hanker for in criticism: diligent research to dig out something new.

Farah's new book The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein (2019) does the same thing: she picks carefully through everything Heinlein produced in a long and prolific career, and joins the dots between them. After an initial chapter of biography, there are sections devoted to: Heinlein's Narrative Arc; Technique; Rhetoric; Heinlein and Civic Society; Heinlein and the Civic Revolution; Racism, Anti-Racism and the Construction of Civic Society; The Right Ordering of Self; and Heinlein's Gendered Self.

I'd thought this might be a counterpoint to the description of Heinlein in Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding, which I so enjoyed last year (and reviewed for the Lancet Psychiatry). It is in some ways, but it's more a deep dig into the meaning and context of the work he produced. It's exemplary and exhaustive, often witty and insightful, packed with academic rigour in an engaging plain style. I like, too, that it's often very personal: Farah's own life experience informs her judgements and insights. If I struggled at times, it's simply because I don't know Heinlein's work very well. Farah has made me want to correct that, and then try her assessment again.

One thing in particular has really stayed me: a caveat in the preface that I think has much wider application to those of us who love old fictions of one sort or another:

"It is not terribly clear how much more influential Heinlein will become. The critical voices are getting louder, and although as a historian I frequently want critics to have a stronger sense of context ... we live now, in our context, and what was radical once we can recognise as problematic, and something to be argued against. For all I value Heinlein I do not require him to continue to be read or valued as contemporary fiction. Because I am a historian, discussing the really terrible Heinlein works can be enfolded into a discussion of his limitations (both rhetorical and political) and understood without serving as some kind of justification. As a historian, I am perfectly happy to know that I like Heinlein without feeling that it is essential that newcomers to science fiction need to read him," (pp. xii-xiii)

Noughts & Crosses, by Malorie Blackman

This, the first in a series of acclaimed young adult novels, is set in a segregated world very like our own but where white people are an oppressed underclass. 

I've seen something like this before. It was done in Fable, a 1965 episode of the BBC's anthology series, The Wednesday Play. There's also something of the same idea in MP Enoch Powell's notorious 1968 speech where he quoted one of his consituents - "a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman," according to Powell - who was convinced that, "In this country in fifteen or twenty years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."

Fable and that speech were responses to legislation on race relations being put through Parliament at the time, but Blackman's novel is less about specific policy as it is about showing how privilege and prejudice shape the way we see the world.

We alternate between chapters narrated by rich black girl Sephy, whose racist dad is high-up in the government, and chapters narrated by Sephy's friend Callum, who is white. At the start of the novel, Callum has - with Sephy's help - passed an exam to be allowed to go to school, where he'll be one of a handful of white students. On his first day, there are protests outside the school to prevent him getting in. We follow Sephy and Callum through their school days and beyond, as they become ever more politicised by the unjustice and cruelty of their world - and face inevitable doom. 

Blackman makes the unfolding tragedy utterly devastating. We often see the same event first through the eyes of one of our narrators, and then completely differently when viewed by the other. We understand their disagreements and fights from each perspective, and continually learn why other characters behave in what seem mean and spiteful ways. Most haunting, I think, are the handful of characters struggling against insurmountable odds to change, to improve, the system. 

Along the way, the plot covers alcoholism, terrorism, violence and totalitarianism - in appropriate terms for the young adult reader, but not shying away from the moral dilemmas or profound questions involved. Blackman unfolds the story in short, emotive chapters, the prose immediate and straight forward. But the simplicity is deceptive: this is a rich, powerful and affecting novel. It underlines, too, that half a century after that race relations legislation was passed, there is still a long way to go.

Astounding, by Alec Nevala-Lee

Astounding is extraordinary, a rich, incisive and constantly shocking history of the science-fiction magazine of the same name, and through it a biography of the "golden age" of SF told through the lives of four luminaries of the genre: John W Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and L Ron Hubbard.

I grew up devouring Asimov's stories and a fair bit of Heinlein, and wrote my MA dissertation on the claims made by Campbell and others about the quality - and value - of "real" science in SF. That was all a long time ago, but I thought I knew this story. Not a bit of it, it turns out. And some of my heroes were appalling people.

I'm going to write more about that in a review for someone else, so I'll be brief here. I really admired how Nevala-Lee involves women whose voices have otherwise been lost, reminding us of their presence and underlining their influence. Kay Tarrant, for example, was always at the next desk from Campbell when authors came to visit, so would have had a ring-side view of many of the battles described here. When she had a heart attack, we're told, it took five people to carry out the tasks she'd quietly got on with for decades. We get just an impression of her, but it's a strong one, and important.

The book is also unflinching about the shortcomings of authors - not just the four main subjects - and their sometimes downright awful behaviour. "Asimov, who described himself as a feminist, casually groped female fans for years," we're told (p. 12) - and he's the one who comes off best. But there's effort to understand if not condone them, and we can also glory in their work and their influence.

It's prompted me to read a bunch of Asimov's robot stories again, and I remembered robopsychologist Susan Calvin as a pioneering character - a competent, professional woman getting on with her high-level job. But I think that view must have come from Asimov himself, introducing the stories in his jokey, self-effacing way - as he remarks on his own progressive brilliance,

"You will note, by the way, that although most of the Susan Calvin stories were written at a time when male chauvinism was taken for granted in science fiction, Susan asks no favors and beats the men at their own game. To be sure, she remains sexually unfulfilled - but you can't have everything." - Isaac Asimov, The Complete Robot, p. 327.

I'm keen to look again at Heinlein, and have been eyeing The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein by my friend Farah Mendlesohn, perhaps (as a kind tweeter advised) after a read of the Expanded Universe collection.

The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla

This book of 21 essays is, in the words of the editor's note, "a document of what it means to be a person of colour now."

While "the universal experence is white", we're presented with "21 universal experiences: feelings of anger, displacement, defensiveness, curiousity, absurdity - we look at death, class, microaggression, popular culture, free movement, stake in society, lingual fracas, masculinity and more." It's insightful, funny, surprising and harrowing, and has got me thinking about my own assumptions and behaviour, that of the industry in which I work and society around me.

It's an excellent, wide-ranging book and I recommend it to anyone.

Tediously, I read it on the recommendation that it included something about the 1977 Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. What follows is some thoughts about that, though I'm still mulling it all over. (And you might like to watch my 2011 documentary related to this subject: "Race Against Time", included on the DVD of the 1972 story, The Mutants.)

Daniel York Loh's essay, "Kendo Nagasaki and Me", is about his response as a child to a particular wrestler on ITV's World of Sport, and the rare sight on mainstream TV in the 1970s of a "fellow 'oriental'" - as he puts it on p. 46. It's a heartfelt account, and he admits at the end that he may have muddled some of the historical details, but the point is not about the accuracy of his memory so much as what the relationship meant and still means to him.

Doctor Who - "my favourite TV programme in the world" (p. 52) - gets four and a bit paragraphs, an extended aside. Compared to today's version, the Doctor Who he grew up with "was populated almost entirely by white people ... For a remit with the whole of time and space as a pallette this is a bit crap frankly." He describes The Talons of Weng-Chiang as a,

"handsomely mounted Victorian Sax Rohmer homage", but with "one of the very worst examples of yellowface as a gang of silent, sinister and inscrutable (it's amazing how easily and often those words flow together) goons (the only appropriate description) appeared, led by an English actor called John Bennett sporting ridiculous false eyelids that looked like you could sit on them, skin made up yellower than a lump of cheese and speaking in a hopelessly mishmashed Chinese/Japanese hybrid accent that would had had Henry Higgins completely stumped. Not nearly so much as the fact that the BBC still carries a website page somewhere that heaps lavish praise on Mr Bennett's staggeringly silly turn, opining that, unless they knew, the viewer might be hard-pressed to tell that the English thesp wasn't in fact Chinese. Not unless they were under the impression that Chinese people had eyelids made from recycled skateboards and talked like Yoda in Star Wars when he's been on the ketamine, I think." (p. 53)

My immediate response to this is to want to defend the story - which I enjoy and admire in many respects - and Doctor Who more generally, and even the BBC. For one thing, that praise for Bennett, on an old part of the BBC website, is clearly labelled as a quotation from a book. And yet, on checking, it still says:

"John Bennett is faultless as the inscrutable Li H'sen Chang, and his performance and make-up are so convincing that it is difficult to believe that he is not actually Chinese."
Doctor Who - The Talons of Weng-Chiang: in detail

That it is quoted from a book is no excuse. The quotation is from Doctor Who - The Television Companion, first published in 1998 by BBC Books, the cover proclaiming in large letters that it was, "the official BBC guide to every TV story." That is pretty authoritative, and the website repeats the book's assessment of the story in full, without comment. The book was republished as recently as 2013, and though that wasn't by BBC Books and without the authority of being an "official" publication, it still shows that this isn't merely something from the distant past.

I don't mean to criticise the authors of the book or the editors of the website; I might well have written or quoted something similar without thought. That's the point: The Good Immigrant challenges bias and prejudice we might not even be aware of in ourselves, whatever our intentions and however much we want to believe that racism is something other, bad people do. It chimes with my recent reading of The Blunders of Our Governments. How do we address a white blindness we're not even aware of?

Criticism of The Talons of Weng-Chiang is not new, nor the defensive response. It's been argued that Doctor Who was better than other programmes made at the same time - but surely not all of them. And that doesn't negate the issues there anyway.

Or it is said the story itself critiques racist attitudes. Yes, this isn't simply Doctor Who trotting out the stereotypes of Sax Rohmer. For all Bennett's performance owes something to the version of Fu Manchu played by (the also white) Christopher Lee in the five films made in the 1960s, Chang is, ultimately, a rather sympathetic character, his motivation clear - the opposite of the "inscrutable". At the same time, the Doctor counters some of the prejudice shown by the Victorian Londoners in the story. But it's still bound up in racial and class-based assumptions, and the Doctor is visiting London anyway to educate his "savage" companion - an adjective with racist associations.

Or there's the argument that the BBC were required to only use actors who were members of Equity, which limited the number of Chinese or Chinese-descended actors who might have taken this particular role. That didn't mean there weren't any; I find myself imagining the story with Burt Kwuok playing Chang. But the casting of Bennett is also surely part of a - no doubt unconcious - tendency to have Chinese and East Asian characters played by actors of Jewish origin. Think also of Martin Miller as Kublai Khan in the 1964 Doctor Who story Marco Polo, or, more notably, Joseph Wiseman as Dr. No. Then recall the criticism above of villains who are,

"silent, sinister and inscrutable (it's amazing how easily and often those words flow together)".

There's also the cumulative effect when actors of particular ethnic backgrounds do not get the same opportunties as their white counterparts. They don't develop their skills, so they're seen as less able than their white counterparts, so they miss out on further work, so they don't develop their skills...

It remains an issue, as described by actor Paul Courtney Hyu, interviewed by Wei Ming Kam for "Beyond 'Good' Immigrants", another of the essays in the book. Hyu says that with so few opportunities for "East Asians" in film and TV in the UK, another actor, Elain Tan, has gone to America where she is "working her arse off."

But then Hyu addes "in a satisfied tone" an example of a UK show doing better than the rest:

"And she is the main person in our episode of Doctor Who [2015's Sleep No More]. So there are two Chinese in it, and she's got a Geordie accent, and pretty good too, I have to say. And I do my Yorkshire accent." (p.93)

As a Doctor Who fan, I take some pride in that - but also know it's a rare example.

Himesh Patel mentions, on p. 64, watching Doctor Who while a teenager - one of the things he followed closely with his (white) peers so as to fit in, while they showed no interest in Bollywood music or films.

Anyway, all this has got me thinking - informing my perspective on old episodes as I watch them on Twitch and research them for the various magazines I write for, and challenging some assumptions in the script I'm late on at the moment. An aspect of a character has just been revised because this book made me realise an aspect of my own blindess, and pointed the way to do better.