All was well

Stayed up until half two this morning to see off Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which the Doctor read all of on Saturday (due to the rising tides making it impossible to get to Mr Cornell’s 40th birthday party). Some spoilertastic thoughts follow, so come back when you’ve got to the end.

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For the first time, it’s not about another year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. With Harry now 17 and, as a grown-up, suddenly no longer protected by the safe-making magic of love, a whole world of baddies is out to get him – and anyone in the way.

It’s a gripping read, full of violence and excitement right from the beginning. In fact, two major characters are killed in the first action sequence and another is seriously wounded – a shocking, horrific start that sets up that no one is safe. I remember (but can’t attribute) a bit of writing advice that an audience will let you get away with killing all the people in a burning people so long as their pets escape… And the deaths and maimings keep coming.

It’s a brutal book with a high body count, and many of those killings are sudden and abrupt. Suddenly people we’ve come to know well over the last 10 years / seven books are just not there any more – but that’s true of the characters that survive, too. The ending is also rather abrupt, and bar the handful of classmates mentioned in the epilogue, we learn very little of what happens to people after the final battle. Presumably Hermione recalls her parents from Australia. Can we also assume that at some point in the 19 years Harry catches up with the Dursleys again?

This blunt despatch also means that you’re not always sure who you’ve just said goodbye to for good. When Hagrid is dragged off by spiders on page 520, I did think that was him done for – and hoist by his own hairy-legged petard.

In fact, a lot of the book is reported rather than seen, and even when there are big action sequences like Harry escaping Privet Drive or the Battle for Helms Deep Hogwarts, we follow Harry doing something else then later catch up on who didn’t survive. This means that while everybody else is fighting for their lives, we’re following Harry as he goes camping and looks for lucky charms. It’s not that these sequences don’t work, but it perhaps limits the book by having almost all of it told from Harry’s perspective, so that major events are given in reported speech as he catches up with friends.

It may also have to be like this is Harry’s not going to fight. The key thing about the book is that he doesn’t go to war while everyone else does, and it’s the fact that he won’t kill – that his trademark spell is to disarm not wound, that ultimately everything hinges on. It’s telling that he learns a lesson that, at his age, Dumbledore did not – that magical might is not right. After seven years at magical school, the most important thing Harry has learned is when not to use his powers.

Being the last one (and its ending makes that pretty definitive, too), Deathly Hallows revisits many of the characters and settings of previous books in one last farewell tour. We also visit for the first time the house where Harry’s parents were killed, and learn a great deal about the early lives of Dumbledore and Snape. The Dr was especially blubby about chapter 33, but then it was her favourite character being all noble and misunderstood. Which is all suitably goth.

Some of the things we’d predicted were right: about Snape, his real motivations, and Harry Potter’s mum; that R.A.B. was Sirius’s brother; that we’d see Ollivander again. Other things I was completely out on: I had the Hogwarts-hidden Horcrux as either Godric’s ruby-encrusted sword or the Mirror of Erised (artefacts set up in the first couple of books). I assumed either Ron or Hermione (or both) would die, while the Dr had Harry not making it to the last chapter. There were also wrong-feet as I read it: assuming Mad-Eye would return as a reanimated corpse, for example, and assuming we’d find out what that gateway from the end of Order of the Phoenix was all about.

There are some very good surprises – shock reveals of baddies and some major revelations about Harry and his world. It’s a while since I read anything that demanded I keep reading, especially at the end of chapters. There’s also some good closure to character and story arcs all the way along: Ron worrying about the plight of goblins; Mrs Weasley going to war; Neville being the hero.

Also key to the book as a whole is Harry now being an adult and standing on his own. By the end of the series, all the adults Harry once held in awe – his parents, his teachers, his enemies – are seen to be just as flawed and capable of great mistakes as he is.

I’m curious what kids will make of such a brutal and complex book, so lacking in the mad antics and laughs of Harry’s previous adventures.

And by my reckoning (though I’m sure many others have got there first), Harry’s from the class of ‘98, and the last chapter takes place in 2016.

Jehosophat, it is you!

At a little after noon the sky above Trafalgar Square is low and black and doomsday. A torrent of water heaves thick over the shoes of those daft enough to be out in it. Tourists stare balefully at what would clearly be the end of the world, if only it weren’t too dark to see.

(Funnily enough, only this morning I wrote the words “Intergalactic tourism was an unforgiving business.” And braved the Ragnarok weather to agree terms with the boss.)

Then, a minute later, there is sunshine and smiling and sausage sandwiches in the Harp. One colleague suggests that perhaps Mr Saxon had attempted to destroy all London (again), but not-his-brother must quickly have stopped him. I smile into my herbidaciously aromatic Lincolnshire.

And then, in one of those nice coincidences, my post-lunch work means I’m looking at this picture:

How to get rejected

The Guardian is carrying a story today about the author and the Austen plot that exposed publishers' pride and prejudice. Basically, David Lassman, whose own book keeps getting rejected then submitted to different publishers several works by Jane Austen with a few words swapped round. Funnily enough, no one wanted to publish them.

“David Baldock, director of the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, said he was amused and disheartened by the experiment. He added: ‘It's interesting that there are these filters that stop work getting through. Clearly clerks and office staff are rejecting these manuscripts offhand.’”

Steven Morris, The author and the Austen plot that exposed publishers' pride and prejudice, The Guardian, 19 July 2007.

This sort of experiment has been run before, and always with the same result. The conclusion seems to be that if the editorial staff can’t spot the great works of literature they shouldn’t be in their jobs. But having just read more than 1,000 2,500-word short stories for the How the Doctor changed my life competition, and with a great wealth of rejection letters of my own, I think this is hugely missing the point.

First, Lassman’s wheeze rather depends on editorial staff recognising the beginnings of classic novels. And while a devotee of Austen might know how each of them begins, it’s unfair to expect everyone to, just because they work in publishing. It’s not just presupposing that editorial staff have read particular books, but that also they recall specific passages from them.

Personally, I remember the gist of books and key moments in them. And the only first line I can think of right now is from The Dalek Invasion of Earth by Terrance Dicks. Rather than the beginnings, it’s incidents later on in great books that stay with me – stuff that happens to characters I’ve come to know and care for, drama and conflict that’s been earned as part of the story-telling process.

Lassman says he was prompted to test the publishers in this way by his own struggles to find a publisher for his own book. “I know it isn't a masterpiece,” he admits, “but I think it is publishable.”

Publishers aren’t looking for something publishable, they need to find books that will sell. And sell lots of copies. Publishing is an uneven and risky business, with great losses to be made. Even the largest houses can go under if they have a run of books that are merely “okay”. They depend for their survival on books that grab the attention, that surprise and excite the reader, stories that demand to be told.

It’s more likely, then, that the readers in Lassman’s case just went, “It’s a little familiar.” Indeed, Austen’s work has inspired and influenced books and other media for the last 200 years – Mills & Boon even have a line of Regency-period novels. So sending in something that’s reminiscent of Austen (because it is Austen) is going to seem very generic.

Publishing staff have got lots of unsolicited stuff to get through, as well as their work on commissioned and scheduled books. An editor might be tempted to check whether it’s not just copying-and-pasting from an original, but if you’ve already decided to reject it anyway, why would you even bother?

And it may be harsh to hear, “I’m not really bothered,” or “Haven’t we seen this before?” but in the end the editorial staff is not there to employ anyone with basic competence at scribbling. They’re there to pre-empt the response of readers – it’s the readers they serve, not the writers.

Friends and relations

We have been visited. First on Monday, J. arrived from Bath (and more usually the USA). She had not seen our flat before, nor our William Morris wallpaper and cat, and there was much catching up and gossip over good asparagus lunch. It was the first time J. had been so long away from her two year-old, so it was all quite something.

Once the Dr left with, I did washing up and working, and was on the phone with work things when I should have been collecting my South African cousin. N. and her friend S. are into the last leg of a European tour, and came to me having done Paris and Dijon and Venice and Rome (and also London and Cambridge). We did food and then, when their plans to meet up with other South Africans didn’t work out, took them to the Dolphin. We sat outside in the swish new garden, and pretended not to be freezing.

Yesterday was N’s 20th birthday, and I’d promised her and S. a tour. They’d already seen Buckingham Palace and Kensington Gardens, and we’d agreed we’d do museums if it got rainy but otherwise try to be outdoors. So…

Train to Victoria, tube to Embankment and then the Golden Jubilee pedestrian bridge (east side) over the river. Pointed out that the Embankment is a great big sewage pipe you can walk about on top of, and also Cleopatra’s Needle. By the time we reached the far side of the river, we were looking out for the Anthony Gormley figures stood iconically on rooftops.

Having pre-booked no-nonsense tickets, we were pretty quickly on to the London Eye, sharing our cabin with some very excited kids, keen to point out their estate. Tried to point out things of interest: Nelson’s Column and Downing Street, and the clock tower of St Pancras (made famous by H. Potter).

After that we followed the south bank past the new spangly Festival Hall, the National Film Theatre, the National Theatre and along past the shops and the Oxo Tower to the former Bankside Power Station. This is now Tate Modern, and we mooched around a free exhibition about Global Cities all round the world. N. got a bit weirded by a series of photos of her home town, just showing security warnings (see the Johannesburg section of Diversity).

Out into the sunshine again and across the Millennium Bridge and up the stairs to St Paul's cathedral. Didn’t get the Whispering Gallery to work, but we did clamber all the way to the top for some spectacular views. We were about as high up as we’d been on the Eye, only a lot more sweaty for it.

Had trouble making the low-ceilinged descent, and we moved pretty swiftly through the crypt and out to find a quick something for lunch. It threatened to rain as we ate, but the sun came out again as we headed down Cheapside. I pointed out the Church of St Mary le Bow, and explained about how it works with cockneys. Got sight of the Bank of England, then headed right to Cannon Street, passing the monument to the unknown wanker.

Made our way to the Monument commemorating the Great Fire of London in 1666, though the girls oddly declined the chance to climb to the top. Instead we carried on down river, weaving down between the old Billingsgate fish market and the old customs house, and then getting to walk round the perimeter of the Tower of London, getting up on to Tower Bridge and following it north to Tower Gateway station.

DLR’d through all the Docklands developments (passing the new Billingsgate before cutting through the inside of One Canada Square) to Island Gardens, a much more crowded journey than I’d expected to the girls didn’t get to sit at the front – which is the coolest thing. We looked out on the all the new high-rise developments with their expensive views of water, then got out at Island Gardens. Having enjoyed the view of Greenwich, south across the water, we took the foot tunnel (yes more steps), and emerged where the Cutty Sark isn’t.
Took them into the grounds of Wren’s old naval hospital (now the University of Greenwich), and to the bit of street used in Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility. We then headed across the road to the Maritime Museum, and had a look round the bits of the Queen’s House used in the same film, and the Orangery (where I got married). They had then had enough of climbing things, so we didn’t do the steep hill to the Royal Observatory, but crossed the line of longitude as we made our way to the pub. Took them to the Trafalgar (where I had my wedding reception). They drank Smirnoff Ice.

It was about four as we headed back along the river and got ourselves onto a slow boat back to Westminster. We sat out on deck, which was blowy but blue-skied. I pointed out the traffic-light tree just down from Westferry Circus, and good pubs like the Captain Kidd. From the stop at the Tower of London, one of the lightermen took over the commentary, explaining about bridges and buildings. I think my Top Facts were a little more accurate, but his jokes got bigger laughs.

Eventually got to Westminster Pier, and headed back down the Embankment where I got to point out one of my favourite statues: a pilot with broken angel’s wings, commemorating the Fleet Air Arm.

Took the western pedestrian bridge back over to Festival Hall, and met Nimbos for a couple of bottles of vino. Discussed options for the evening, and decided to head home for N. and S.’s first ever go at fish and chips, plus a call to parents. Ended up boozing and watching telly.

N. and S. left this morning – and sneakily left money to pay for yesterday, the minxes. I have washed and tidied but not entirely Dysoned. All in time for the Dr being back from speaking wisdom in Bristol tomorrow… And now, though it was reckoned we would finish work about half eight this evening, it looks like we’ll be here another hour at least… Ng.

I am not going to come quietly at all

Couldn’t be bothered to think of a birthday present for Codename Moose, so took him and Mrs Codename to see the new Harry Potter. Scary, funny and dripping with style, my one concern is how easy it’d be to follow without having read the book.

The no-nosed snake Lord Voldermort is back from being dead, but no one but Harry, Dumbledore and the surviving members of the Order of the Phoenix believe this can be true. The Ministry of Magic is so determined to quash the worrying rumours that they’ve provided a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher to Hogwarts. Dolores Umbridge will also bring some order to the school…

Imelda Staunton is brilliant as Umbridge, insipid and chilling by turns. She seems to be dressed like the Queen in the 50s, or even Mary Whitehouse (though I hear cries of anguish at my even trying to talk clothes).

There’s plenty of familiar faces in small roles – Lupin and Moody get a couple of lines each, and there’s Pettigrew in the photo of the Order. Helena Bonham-Carter is also nicely batty as Bellatrix Lestrange for the brief amount of time that we see her. (I got told off for giggling when she first appeared. Bonham-Carter being witchy is NOTHING like the Dr.) Ron, Hermione and Hagrid are all in it less, too – though I think that is sort of the theme.

The Dr and Mrs Codename were especially pleased by the washed and conditioned Sirius Black, while Moose and I were much impressed by the sod-the-Jedi fighting. General conclusion was that it’s the weakest of the books but made for a brilliant film. But there was a lot to take in and we want to see it again.

The Dr is signed-up to collect book 7 at midnight this coming Friday. I am more mature and not excited at all…

Blood, toil, sweat and tears

Some folks have asked eagerly – and not a little disturbingly – for details of the blood-dashed events of Wednesday. And I am reminded of Eric Blair thinking it interesting to be shot. But it’s also all a bit ICKY, even for me to recall, so other folks may prefer to look away.

No.

Really.

It.

Is.

Horrid.

Okedoke. I’ve had problem with this ‘ere former tooth since a heroic/damn stoopid (delete as applicable) altercation in a Northern public house. A hairy-palmed, ring-wearing local was bothered that I didn’t angle vowels the same as my comrades. At least, he singled me out of a group of students, rather than skelping in general. As we made to find somewhere else less shouting, he started waving his arms around. And with a lucky slap popped one of my back teeth. Blood spattered everywhere and, drooling gore, I watched one comrade in particular respond in kind. That was quite exciting.

The tooth, though, has needed some work ever since. It's been filled and looked at and stitched and root canalled. I’ve also enjoyed the draining of a sub-tooth abscess (that is, a great volcano of pus swelling inside the gum. Nice). This ongoing trouble threatened to weaken the whole jaw (so the dentists said) and was also a bit rank and icky.

So anyway, the tooth was a liability, and it’s not such a great surprise that I split it top-to-bottom amid deadline panic. It’s continued to splinter since my last report, and then there was something funny tasting in my mouth, so I trooped off to my appointment rather early. With all the calm and solemnity of Beaker from the Muppets.

The lovely dentist (weirdly, I hate going to the dentist with a terror like race memory, but I’ve always got on well with the dentists themselves) discussed what was going to be done, and also her theories about the forthcoming last Harry Potter. “You’ll feel pressure but not sharpness,” she said very pleasantly. “And I think ‘R.A.B.’ must be [SPOILER].”

Yes I felt the pressure. No, I felt no sharpness. But what pressure. She alternated between two sets of pliers and needed to hold on to my lower jaw as she heaved and waggled and wrenched. There’s something monstrously disturbing about the cracking of your own teeth and I could feel an apeish need to escape up the nearest tree. And then, pok! she’d yanked the thing out.

“We’ll just rinse out that taste,” she says, prodding a tube of lovely cool water into my numb and frothing mouth. I’m thinking that wasn’t so bad. Then she’s dabbing at my face where splashes of blood must have got me. But no. “There was an abscess behind the tooth,” she says. “And it sort of went everywhere.” Ick.

There’s then some more good news. Only the top part of the tooth came out. It’s crumbling, so she needs another go. You know I said I don’t like going to the dentist? Well, she’s swapping different terrifying tools and trying to staunch the bleeding because it makes it hard to see the remaining bits. And each drilling, poking, heaving, wrenching brings out just a tiny scrap more.

I’m watching these tiny splinters being added to the bloody, drooly mess on the tray to my side, thinking it makes for an impossible 3D puzzle, of the sort naughty children get for Christmas. I’m trying to remember how to breathe, aware that my legs and belly and, well all of me, is shaking like a Jibber Jabber. But eventually, a very long hour later, the deed is done and I quiver from my chair with a temporary denture in place. My instructions are not to spit, not to smoke, not to eat or drink nowt hot, and not to booze (waaah! on that last one). I also have to leave the strange acrylic tooth in place over night so my mouth will bruise around it.

Back home, I tried to watch some of the Ealing comedies received for my birthday (Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore! and Kind Hearts and Coronets), but brain wasn’t really functioning. The anaesthetic was not much replaced by Anadin, and the cat showed his sympathies with a great log of a fur ball. The Dr made me omelette and we Pottered a bit (film three and two chapters of book six). I think she’s quite delighted that I suddenly so old.

Nor did she grumble at my paltry efforts to sleep. I dreamt of Matthew and Davy being at the extraction waving their recording wossnames around. And Matthew asking if we could pull out another one to make sure he got it taped.

Tutored in the ways of righteousness

Mary and the Giant is one of a small number of non-sf books by sci-fi freak-boy Philip K Dick (author of the cray-zee tales that became Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly). Most of these “mainstream” efforts, including Mary, were published after his death in 1982 (just prior to the release of Blade Runner “introduced his vision to a wider audience” – as the biog in the back of the book says).

I first read Mary when I was 17, as part of a cache of the Dick Good Stuff bequeathed by a wise mate at college. I’d remembered it fondly, but on rereading it find how little of the plot I retained.

Mary Anne Reynolds is 20 years-old and living in a small town not far outside San Francisco. She’s bored and restless and a bit difficult, and looking for ways to escape. To begin with, it looks like the giant Black singer, Carleton Tweany, might be her way out. But when Tweany ditches her for another, married woman, Mary Anne’s best hope is the 58 year-old Joseph Schilling, who’s just opened a record shop in town…

Was a bit surprised about how little Tweany, the giant of the title, features – disappearing entirely for most of the latter half. It’s Schilling’s relationship with Mary that’s more important; his grooming her to work in the shop, to appreciate music, to want more from life. It’s through Schilling that we come to understand Mary, her irascibility and constant flight from commitment, even from those who want to help her.

“If she were let alone she would recover. If she had always been let alone she would not need to recover. He had been trained to be afraid; she had not invented her fear by herself, had not generated it or encouraged it or asked it to grow. Probably she did not know where it came from. And certainly she did not know how to get rid of it. She needed help, but it was not as simple as that; the desire to help her was no longer enough. Once, perhaps, it would have been. But too much time had passed, too much harm had been done. She could not believe even those who were on her side.”

Philip K Dick, Mary and the Giant, pp. 221-2.

But what I also think I missed the first time round was the constant tension and paranoia. Yes, there’s a murder attempt and a bloke gets killed, and there’s the casual, sexual violence threatened by Mary’s father. But there’s even threat in the quietest of moments: the stench of new paint in an otherwise perfect apartment; Mary’s ignorance among the experts on music; and the general horror that a white girl might choose to live in the “coloured neighbourhood” – a horror only Mary seems to miss. Seems, because it’s this wilful running into danger that Schilling slowly comes to comprehend.

It’s the paranoid tension that really makes the book something special, a vivid and enthralling read. But I think at 17 I maybe missed that aspect, and mistook her awkward restlessness for teenage despair at grown-ups.

Bread crumbs

O. gets cross if I don't blog too often, and I also find it useful to know where I have been. So:

On Saturday the Dr took me to Bristol as a belated and post-book birthday treatoid. We went to the Break the Chains exhibition, bought some mighty aspirin and taxied to B's house in Montpelier. After some tea and Pimms and Thandie Newton dying on stage for Lyverf, we fell into a pub and met O. and other chums. Good Moroccan food followed, and then we wussed out about 10 to head back to the posh hotel.

Swam in the morning, watched by classical Roman heads (most of them the same one) and ambling back from breakfast grinned at a blonde I sort of thought I knew. It was Jackie Tyler.

Slow train back to the smoke in the afternoon, where the dull ache of my jaw made reading and scribbling arduous. The Dr could not resist falling into Monsoon at Paddington, and then we trekked from one end of the station to the other in search of the Hammersmith and City line. Blimey, travelling at weekends is hard bloody work.

Arrived at the studio about 4 for the last bits and pick-ups of The Final Amendment - the last studio day under my producership. Dished out contracts and cheques to the exemplary cast (who will be announced in due course), and even got the Dr in a booth to play a small role as the producer's totty.

Had brought some fizz to mark the occasion, and we also fell into the pub. Monsterously slow bus back to Victoria because of the works outside Harvey Nichols, but m'self and m'colleague Joe Lidster discussed Who Are The Baddies and the beer inside me helped.

The Dr suggested we try to get through the first four Harry Potter films in time for the seeing the fifth one this Saturday (we're taking Codename and Mrs Moose because it's easier than thinking of a birthday present). Stuck on the first one on Sunday night and was boggled by how young are the children. It's a bit hit and miss in places, but a rather fun, easy entry to Hogwarts. Did Film 2 yesterday, and we're also three chapters from the end of Book 6 - me glad to get past the need to do rasping when reading out Dumbledore's bits. Impressed by all the complexities of plot and character, and how nicely Big Things are set up.

Am sat next to Pyschonomy today at work, who has been telling me about the madly sci-fi delights to come with Surface. The traditional discussion of Macs versus PCs, but I hold that Microsoft would not be nearly such the necessary evil if their sales teams were just not so pushy. The actual stuff the techno-bods are welding together are usually pretty splendid.

Have notes to write up about Orwell's essays, and stuff about song lyrics and explaining things in sci-fi. Will endeavour to get to them soon, and reboot the regular updates. But all the things I put off to finish the behemoth are coming back to bite me. Got things to write and pitch and finish. And, yes Dr, I will tidy the office.

You’re going to find it hard eating corn on the cob

My old man’s a doctor, he wears a doctor’s hat.

Well, he’s retired now. And it wasn’t really a hat so much as a head mirror. Which is, as everyone of course knows, a dead give-away that he was an otorhinolaryngologist. That is, a snot doctor.

As well as ear wax, halitosis and nosebleeds, the old man dealt with a lot of colds and flu. Which meant he wasn’t always sympathetic to us when we had sniffles. “It’s probably death,” he’d say as he threw together one of his Jeevesish toddies, “there’s a lot of it about.”

(Hot toddy for when you feel like someone’s stuffed a pillow up your nose: generous two-finger measure of whisky, the same of boiling water, a spoon of honey, a squeeze of lemon and don’t be standing up when you drink it.)

But much worse than the wry sarcasm was when he took your illness seriously. Like Jimmy Nesbitt blinking into Hyde he could gear-change into a terrifying and cool professional, there to conduct your passing. I well remember his enthusiasm for my appendectomy scar – a lovely bit of work, he thought. And though I was bruised all up my body (what with being delicate like a princess) he cooed at the pretty sunset shades. He was less impressed by the junior doctor having had three goes to get the drip into my arm. “You’ve got very prominent veins,” he said, eyeing my arms hungrily. “You could get nails into them.”

Anyway. This morning my dentist was similarly delighted with me. “Ooh,” she said with great excitement, “how have you managed that?”

I have had some pain in one of my back molars for the last few days, having been chewing my teeth to accompany the happy, contented dreams in which I am battered to death by giant and blank-paged copies of the Benny Inside Story. I thought maybe I’d bruised the gum line, or cracked some of the filling. No, I have fractured the whole tooth from top to bottom. That takes some doing, apparently. And it cannot be repaired.

So on Wednesday I’m having the thing wrenched out and then getting the bloody gap fitted for dentures. Have three months with that before we can even think about gold replacements and other gangster accoutrements. But I realise I won’t be able to have this ersatz nasher in a glass of water by the bed at night. The cat would only drink it.

Leafing

The Internet had caught word that I am giving up my crown as Handsome King of Benny. Eddie Robson had actually been in charge since Sunday, and I answer to him for the timely delivery of the rest of 2007's Benny goodness.

He has not yet suggested the fate of Kings in Slaine the Horned Comic - that after your brief stint in the comfy chair your people's play footie with your head.

Spent today catching up on things; Nobody's Children is ready to be laid out and I'm about three quarters through writing up my notes of Missing Adventures (which is mostly just about style). I've heard words and noise from forthcoming CDs and commissioned the next batch of pictures, and have also confirmed a cast for Sunday's recording session - which will be the last of my Bennys.

And on Thursday I shall be checking out a boozer for a leaving do.

I’ll see what I can do

Some years ago, I wrote my (not very good) MA dissertation about science-fiction being more fiction than science.

Yes, you might get a wheeze for a story by reading the news in New Scientist, but then your story is still all Made Up. Yes, sf writing worked out geostationary orbits and old Star Trek used things like mobile phones. But at the same time we don’t commute on inter-city travelators, nor drive atomic-powered motorbikes and flying cars. More’s the pity.

This cropped up recently when Michael Crichton’s State of Fear was lauded by those who profit from denying climate change. The book is about a conspiracy of leftie scientists who have dreamt this whole global warming thing up to get us to raise taxes. “See?” said those who would like this to be true. “See – it’s there in black and white. So leave the free market alone.”

Something is not true just because it is written down, especially when it is a story. Stories can include accurate details and philosophical truths, but they remain works of fiction, the worlds described in them entirely the creation of an author.

Science fiction sometimes claims otherwise because some of its authors care so much about the details; the description of, say, the engine on an atomic motorbike shows off lots of high-calibre research. But suppose we apply the same thinking to some other genre, where authors don’t need to rationalise the props. Because John Buchan describes trains and motorcars accurately in The 39 Steps, does it then follow that – as in the book – the Jews started World War One?

That would be silly. (Though I have spoken before about how it might have been a train what done it.)

Anyhow. With this in mind, what are we to make of Sixty Days & Counting, the latest from Kim Stanley Robinson and the last of trilogy about climate change and politics? Well, first off, the indicia make plain that, “This novel is entirely a work of fiction… Any resemblance to actual… events or localities is entirely coincidental.” It might well be a model with which to discuss the real world, but it is not the real world itself.

Just as Crichton assumes that climate change isn’t a reality, Robinson assumes that it is. The first book in the trilogy sees Washington DC suffering unprecedented floods, and that’s swiftly followed by freakish and extreme weather and whole countries disappearing. It’s iconic, science-fiction-movie stuff – and as Crichton’s heroes would have it, blatant scaremongering.

Robinson also has a not-entirely-likely device of a US President blogging quite freely on any matters that take his fancy. With 5 million responses to any particular post, his communications directorate is in unsurprising meltdown. But this allowed Robinson to make explicit points about our attitude to the environmental problem:

“People were asking: Is it too late or not? And it seemed like this:

If it isn’t too late, we don’t have to do anything.

On the other hand, if it is too late, we don’t have to do anything.

So either way, don’t do anything. That was the problem with that way of putting the question. What we came to realize was that it was a false problem and not a question of better or worse. It was more a question of, okay, how fast can we act? How much can we save? Those are the questions we should be asking.”

Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days & Counting, p. 330.

To explore these questions, Robinson has two sets of protagonists both linked to the new President who reappraise their contributions to society. Charlie wants to advise on policy but he’s also stay-at-home dad to two sons. Frank thinks happiness can be found in a (literally) aping a lifestyle more like our ancestors had on the savannah – running, throwing stones and living in treehouses. But in doing so, he’s caught up in a hi-tech and nasty intelligence scam – a paranoid conspiracy.

For all it’s ostensibly about the scientific community and the practical solutions to problems based on evidence, Robinson also works in a lot of magic stuff via some Buddhist monks. I felt the shadow of his earlier The Years of Rice and Salt, though here we’re never sure whether to take the grand destinies and reincarnation entirely seriously. But there is evidence – for all Charlie wants to deny it – that there are evil spirits at work. I liked a last sort-of twist about whether his son Joe is really possessed…

I guess, like a lot of Robinson’s work it’s about trying to live a more enlightened and elegant life. Seriously liberal families work out their carbon footprints and realise they need to move house, while specific scientific projects to trap carbon in fast-growing lichen are matched by more philosophical stuff.

“The Dalai Lama talks about the situation they find themselves in, ‘a difficult moment in history’ as he calls it, acknowledging this truth with a shrug. Reality is not easy; as a Tibetan this has been evident all his life; and yet all the more reason not to despair, or even lose one’s peace of mind. One has to focus on what one can do oneself, and then do that, he says. He says, ‘We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful, with our lives. Try to be at peace with yourself, and help others share that peace. If you contribute to other people’s happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life.’"

Ibid. p. 308.

But more importantly, I think whereas Crichton’s book seems to say “we can’t prove it’s happening so don’t anything”, Robinson’s point is “we shouldn’t just change our lives because of the weather.” I think both authors understand that combating climate change means radical changes to the economic models of modern society. And rather than being about scientific fact, their positions are defined by political instincts.

By the end of the book, President Phil is also hooked on Emerson.

“One day [the President] laughed, beating her to the punch: ‘By God he was radical! Here it is 1846, and he’s talking about what comes after they defeat slavery. Listen to this:
“Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances. Slavery and anti-slavery is the question of property and no property, rent and anti-rent; and anti-slavery dare not yet say that every man must do his own work. Yet that is at last the upshot.”’”

Ibid., p. 406.

Like Free the group

Finished and delivered the Inside Story of Benny at a little before 10 pm last night, having not exactly had a whole load of sleep or shaving for the last few days. As with all these things, people I’d been chasing have sent in a few little extras since, so it’ll get tweaked and polished as it’s set into Mr Alex Mallinson’s beautiful page templates. But it’s quarter of a millions words, jam-packed with top facts and detail, and one or two minor wars. And I am feeling all light and giddy.

Thanks to everyone who’s answered my questions, offered fanzines and books and pictures, or just let me go on about the terrifying monolithic deadline.

Got up not very early today, ate some strawberrys and watched the DVD extras on Robot (thanks sooo much to Millennium’s daddies for their profound generosity!). I’m particularly delighted by the comment from Terrance Dicks that Robert Holmes took on the script editing job of Doctor Who thinking, “Oh, how hard can it be?”

Right. Some bacon sarnies and some more DVDs, and then tomorrow I hurl myself into the next project. And so it goes on…

Benny and badgers

We race towards the finish line on the Benny Inside Story, though I am beginning to feel a little like Peter Davison in Castrovalva episode 2. With the pressure almost off my synapses are coming undone.

Still, the new DWM has a lovely plug for the book, and also announces details of The Pirate Loop, which I’ve not been able to talk about for months. And then, just when I feel a little good about life, I see the results of the readers’ poll.

Time Signature is bottom of 12 Doctor Who fictions; Benny takes the six bottom slots in the Other Big Finish audios – and it’s my Summer of Love that comes last.

And so back to the Inside Story and chapter 11, which details the mistakes I made last year.

Ho hum. We keep buggering on…

How the Doctor Changed My Life

The BBC's official Doctor Who website has announced the winner of our short story competition. Some other exciting news in there too.

Word from the coalface

After a great weekend's cutting and pasting - plus a few desperate fact-checking calls - the Inside Story of Bernice Summerfield currently stands at a whopping 76,205 word. So only 123,795 left to be done in the next 20 days. That's 6,189 per day, if any one is counting.

Sight of Alex Mallinson's beautiful cover helps to keep me going. And there's a whole bundle of Benny blurbs and pictures and news at the Big Finish website.

Off to Chelmsford tomorrow to speak to Big Finish's very first customer, and have appointments in posh clubs and Reigate. Just a teensy bit manic, so apologies for the pink, scary eyes. Am trying not to blink.

Never knowingly understood

After a long day’s transcribing yester-afternoon, I arrived in the pub about 9ish. Lots of fun drinking catch-up and I got to see folk I’ve not seen in ages – and to buy the birthdaying one some beer.

Amidst the shop talk was some stuff about semantics and how the foolish plebeian masses will use some words. Now, I generally have quaking rage and hellfire at snooty finger-pointing smugness of things like Never Mind the Full Stops, and had to buy the Dr a second copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves because the first one accidentally got written over, torn, thrown across the room and even an occasional bit stamped on.

I don’t really care if people are confused by semi-colons or slap apostrophes any old which ways. We all have our blindspots and which is worse; some wobbly punctuation or the institution of the monarchy? (Before you write in, that is a joke from Time Trumpet.)

But this is also my trade. And tedious etymological one-upmanship is moderately less annoying than listing Things That Are Wrong With Dr Who.

There were the usual chestnuts, like the difference between “infer” and “imply”, and how you’re “jealous” of something you possess and “envious” of something you don’t. Then there was people who say “quite amusing” when they mean “I didn’t actually laugh”. I also got to share that a teacher at my school insisted “knackered” was a naughty sexual swearword, and not slang to mean “exhausted like the old horse sent off to be dog food”.

A particular joy among my fellow mercenary hacks was people who claim to be “managers” but do their best to shirk any responsibility. And I dreamt up a handy definition, which I shall share with you now for free:

A manager manages people. If you don’t have underlings, you’re an administrator. (Not, I hasten to add, that that's a pejorative term or not a noble and fine profession.)

"Make her posh"

Nimbos had us round for bacon sarnies and beer last night, so we got to see The Family of Blood.

Cor. Just cor. One of us wept, one of us gaped in uncharacteristic silence and one of us texted Paul. Yet the rotter didn't smuggle in a reference to Bernice (the nice lady in the original book version which he created and who I'm now in charge of), or even of Wolsey (the cat Joan bequeathed her, and who I killed last year).

Anyway. After last week's interview with Paul Cornell from the archive, here's us again on 20 December 2005, for my article about companions for Doctor Who's Magazine:

ME: So, what can you tell us about Circular Time?

CORNELL: It's four short stories featuring the fifth Doctor and Nyssa, largely. But they scatter across the different kinds of story that Dr Who does. There's a historical, there's a weird one, there's a far future one and there's a kind of pastoral one. They're each set in a different season as is my want and they're sort of me having fun going back to my earliest days of fan fiction, sort of doing the kinds of stories I did back then. It's also because I so wanted to work with Peter Davision before I stopped doing this kind of stuff. It's just me playing around with stuff I haven't gone near since Goth Opera really.

ME: One of the things that's very telling about your work generally is that it's very character-based. We know that one of the things Russell said when he commissioned you for Father's Day was that he wanted the character depth that you put into your books. So are you similarly exploring somes sides of the characters we haven't seen before?

CORNELL: To some degree, yes. A lot of it was a desire to get back to the fifth Doctor's speech patterns, which I really adore. And to give Sarah Sutton something to do as Nyssa. That doesn't happen very often. Yes, there's character-based stuff in there. There's a nice little romance for Nyssa. There's some nice stand-up arguing between Davison and Isaac Newton. It's a very character-based set of stories. One of the things I think the new show has taught us all is that you can do a very good, complete Dr Who story in 42 minutes. So these four half-hours are all complete stories which I think certainly run as complete as four-part stories do.

ME: You say with Nyssa that's she's not always been very well served by material –

CORNELL: She doesn't get the service.

ME: Where do you begin with giving her something more?

CORNELL: Giving her humour is I think the starting place. I see no reason why that character shouldn't have a vein of wry humour, and that's a good place to start. Making the relationship between her and the Doctor much more one-to-one so that they have an ongoing relationship you can believe in. And giving them certain points of disagreement, a couple of flashpoints in there. There's a lot of threads that run through all four, and put together all four of them form a greater story again in character or thematic terms.

ME: You said making them believable. Another thing in your writing is that, for example with Bernice, she may be a space archaeologist but she's very real, very believable.

CORNELL: Cool.

ME: Similarly, in the commentary to Father's Day you're asking the actors how they prepare for something so unreal.

CORNELL: It does boggle me because... Sorry, I won't go on about that.

ME: The thing I found really interesting was Billie and Shaun's response, which was that there was something believable about the lines which they were given, even if the situation was very strange. Is that based on observation, or where does that come from?

CORNELL: Well, it's typical me, living with one foot either side of a particular fence. And this covers several different fences in my life. In this particular case it's about one half of me being a hard-core fundamentalist geek who doesn't give a damn really about the mainsteam audience and would like to present the most far-spun fantasy imaginable with very little connection to the real world, and having another half of me that very much wants to tell stories about people who live in the real world. Rather than doing those two things separately I always seem to do things that do them both at once. I think if there's one thing that my stories are about it's the effect on people of quite extreme fantasy circumstances. Certainly way back in the New Adventures, my New Adventures are full of ordinary people encountering very, very weird stuff.

ME: It's about the consequences of the stuff, but also how they're changed by it.

CORNELL: Absolutely. You cannot come back through the door and be the same person. It gives them a different insight into the world they're in.

ME: So is that where you come to with Nyssa: you try and develop her in some way, having something that happens that changes her?

CORNELL: The thing is with Nyssa, she's entirely from the fantasy end of the world. Certainly in the TV series she didn't really get attached into the actual world at all. Almost nothing for an actor to play in that part on TV. There's some nice fairy-princess stuff in Traken, but after that. At least Johnny Byrne gives her some stuff to do in Arc of Infinity, but you don't really learn much about her in doing it. There aren't any shades of grey there. Really this is having her live in a small village while the Dr plays cricket for one summer. The story covers the summer and what happens to her while he's having fun.

ME: On the depth and you don't really learn much about her, one of the things that Big Finish have done which is also in the new series is that companions have a history, and friends and family. In Big Finish we've met sisters and brothers... Pete really grounded Rose into something that was real and believable. How much more difficult is it to manage a story when you've got other character to deal with? Does it give you more perspectives, so it's easier to cut to somebody else, or does it actually make it very cluttered?

CORNELL: Um...

ME: I mean, how comfortable are you working from a shopping list of things that need to go into a story?

CORNELL: Every writer loves a shopping list. There's nothing worse - we're in cliche city here - than a blank sheet of paper. Genocide, misery, bus stations - there are lots of things worse than a blank sheet of paper. You can make a paper airplane out of a blank sheet of paper. But... every writer loves a shopping list, especially when it's a shopping list that somebody else has made out that's got lots of lovely presents for me on it.

ME: So for example when you have little Mickey in Father's Day, was that something which you were asked to do, or something you threw in for a laugh?

CORNELL: I think... I think that was Russell's idea. I find it very difficult to play "whose idea was what" through Father's Day because it's quite a long time ago and it's all so much a team game. He wasn't on the original shopping list, he would have been there once we got into it.

ME: There's a suggestion there that things are prefigured for his relationship with Rose beforehand.

CORNELL: Absolutely. There's the imprinting of the chicken thing.

ME: Another thing you say in the commentary about Pete and I've also heard you say about Benny is that they're based on people that you know.

CORNELL: Oh yeah, hugely.

ME: How much do you cut-and-paste from things you've heard and people you've seen to create a real character, and how much can you create something real by making it up?

CORNELL: I think the really difficult job as a writer is to create people who aren't you, who don't think like you and act like you. Obviously every character you write will have some degree of you in it, but it's where you get the other point of view from. Certainly I tend to cut-and-paste from people I know. Sometimes from people I know quite distantly, but often people I know very well. Writers whose characters are all them, sometimes it can work very well. Aaron Sorkin, all of his West Wing characters are different assets of his personality, but that just feels like a wonderful way in to a wonderful mind every week. In my own case, I don't think I've got that depth of ability and so need to find other voices.

ME: So do you find when you're talking to your mates in the pub or something that you'll think, "I'm having that!", or is it something that occurs to you later, when you're writing it and you think, "I remember that time that so and so..."?

CORNELL: It's very rarely individual lines. It's usually a vague impression of people. Do you think I've stolen some stuff from you, is that where this is going?

ME: No, no.

CORNELL: I'm trying to think of examples from Bernice.

ME: I've noticed from doing the Benny history that early on you say Benny is "you in a frock". Which gets very disturbing when Jason Kane is apparently Dave Stone.

CORNELL: I know, I know. And there's Justin running the Collection... But Benny is very close to my viewpoint character. So much so that I quite like the fact that so many voices have ruffled her up a bit since then.

ME: How much did writing for Benny change, or thinking of her, as a result of Lisa getting cast?

CORNELL: It's very hard to say. Lisa's voice infected me so quickly, I find it very hard to think of any primordial Benny that wasn't her. Certainly the Emma Thompson voice on top of me and my frock would be the primordial Benny but Lisa really nailed it.

ME: You've written for Benny since. Do you know find that you're writing for Lisa?

CORNELL: Very much so. In particular I think you'll find her speech patterns have changed a bit, because in Lisa's performance a lot of what she does is in wonderful hesitation. The points in Benny's sentence construction where she hesitates are very different now, I'm sure.

ME: How have things developed since Big Finish took on Benny? In many way, BF's ongoing work all comes from what they originally did with Benny. How much were you involved in setting up Benny's first stuff?

CORNELL: It's really complicated, and I think very apt for Bernice. I was, as always, very busy. I think it was about the time I first started working on Casualty. They asked em to adapt the books and I put forward Jac [Rayner] instead to do it. I think that changed the whole nature of what the range was going to be from an early point. Especially since Jac's voice really is not mine or Benny's at that point. I mean to say that... I'm trying to say something positive and appreciative which may already have sounded negative.

ME: It took it off in a new way.

CORNELL: Exactly. It added a new viewpoint to it.

ME: When they stopped adapting the books and came up with the Collection, how much were you involved in that? Was it just that they said, "this is what we're doing?"

CORNELL: To some degree. The relationship between me and Gary [Russell - who I've sinced succeeded] about Bernice has always been that if I feel I want to interfere, I can view every script, make suggestions and change things. I could pull the rug out from under them and give the licence to somebody else. But I've never felt the need to threaten that and I like the fact that it's something I can dive into, like doing Life During Wartime, and then dive out of again. I like the fact that it continues on without me.

ME: It has a life of it's own.

CORNELL: Exactly. And a life of it's own is very true to the spirit of the character. The purpose of Benny is one thing: a domestic observer character amongst cosmic vastness. Originally that was the cosmic vastness of a distant and alien Dr and now I would say it's the cosmic vastness of all of science fiction. Her brand of carry-on / absurd/ occasionally tragic life experience plays off always against what's happening in more spacey things currently.

ME: One of the things Big Finish is also very conscious of at the moment is that the guidelines for Dr Who have changed so that we have to be much more careful about suitability of content for a family audience and so on. As a natural progression from that, Benny has become much more adult. She now swears and its ruder. How much do you feel Benny works as a standalone, independent series and how much is it a Dr Who spin off?

CORNELL: It's not been a spin-off for a hell of a long time now. That's what I mean to say when I talk about a point of view as a format. She's got her own point of view which works whatever you play it off of. It certainly doesn't need to play off of Dr Who. In many ways it would be great if she could wander off into the Star Trek universe. Can you imagine?

ME: Actually I can.

CORNELL: It would be worth getting a licence just for a couple of months!

ME: Finally, then, if hypothetically Big Finish ever one day got Eccleston to do a series, we'd more than likely have to come up with a new companion who wasn't Rose. So what would she be like? If you were given that job...

CORNELL: Oh boy. I think I'm companioned out. Make her posh. That would be interesting.

ME: You don't feel that Charley is Rose-but-posh?

CORNELL: But Paul McGann is also. I think Charley would work quite well with Eccleston! Have the regeneration! "Do you want to come with me?" "No actually I don't. Take me home you lout."

Twice shy

Spent the weekend in Polop de la Marina, visiting the outlaws. Worked my way through the manuscript of Missing Adventures, which begins with Stepford-meets-Malory Towers and ends with a leisurely tennis match, and is all rather splendid in between. Now have to think of which bit of it we’re going to stick on the cover.

Oh, I know…

Anyway, as well as having the best placename since Penge, Polop is a small town just a bit out of Benidorm, surrounded by vast and craggy hills. One is meant to be in the shape of a sleeping lion. We didn’t venture too far, but climbed up to the cemetery at the top of the town where the best views awaited. We managed a quick swim in the Mediterranean and I asked correctly for eggs in the supermarket.

Being a cultured sort, the place reminded me of Picasso’s Resevoir Horta, which I liked so much when I first saw it projected in the upstairs room of the Art department at Peter Symonds.

Mostly, though, it was the small English bars where I didn’t have to mention my Spanish. And in the evenings a Spanish bar where a beer and a wine were merely €2.20. The pretty girl behind the bar laughed at my paltry grasp of the lingo, but agreed that the Brits’ karaoke across the square sounded like “los gatos”.

Also spent both nights being eaten by mosquitos, which shows just how tasty I am. The Dr and the outlaws were entirely untouched, while I’ve counted some 30 nibbles. And now they are itchy and blobby and throbbing, as if they might any time explode…

Harold, Saxon

Yesterday I enjoyed an excursion – my first full day off in some weeks. M’colleague M had promised some kind of day trip some 11 months, six days ago, and my next birthday fast threatened to lap him. Then he realised that because of a work thing he needed to do some reconnaissance; so helpfully killing both tasks with one stone, I was escorted down to Sussex.

On 14 October 1066 – even longer ago than my birthday – two armies met on a steep bit of hill and fought their way on to the national curriculum. Up top were the Anglo-Saxons, all knackered from a quick-march from the North. They looked down on a right bastard’s army – the descendant of kids’ telly’s King Rollo.

The Battle of Hastings (or, er, the Battle of Battle) was a right bloody affair. Bit shocked to discover that 7,000 people died there – three times the population of a big town from the time.

The English Heritage experience gives lots of gruesome detail, and the longer walk round helps you appreciate the main beats of the fighting. Harold is winning and the Normans run away, and some of Harold’s men chase them back down the hill. And then the Normans turn round and hack apart their pursuers, and William thinks, ‘Ooh, look – that worked.”

(In the pub later I recounted my analogy about the modern equivalent of Harold’s front-line.)

The pretty leisurely route round the field helped give a sense of the scale and practicalities. I remember being made to run up the hill as a kid, to see how the odds weighed against the conqueror. The estate is enclosed in fat greenery too, and you barely hear the busy road beyond the boundary. M’s another country boy living in the big city, and we wallowed in the verdant air. And sometimes the sun would bash through the light cloud and we found ourselves grinning giddily.

The last part of the tour, as you clamber up the gentle-seeming contours, debates the different ways King Harold died. Was he shot in the eye by arrow, or somewhere else in his body? Was he cut down by William’s assassins – who sliced off his head, his innards and a leg? And if there’s all this confusion, how come there’s a stone marking the spot where he fell?

Back at the top, the remains of the abbey and ice-house were teeming with schoolkids from abroad. We couldn’t guess the language in which they rabbited, and left them to climb over the bits of masonry that once held up the ceiling of the crypt.

The place stood for just a bit less than 500 years before Henry VIII thought monastic land better shared among his cronies. The only bit still standing was just an adjunct to the abbey – a huge single dormitory, the large rooms underneath boasting glorious vaulted ceilings, the ruins outside showing ambitious plumbing.

We were told how inconvenient the position was to build on – and that the monks originally tried to build somewhere else. But William, now the first of England, was insistent it be built where he’d won his kingdom. He cut people’s hands off for mentioning his illegitimacy, so it’s probably wise the monks did as he bade them.

There weren’t a lot of drawings of what the abbey would have looked like, and I’d assumed something reasonably modest and unassuming. I’ve been spoiled on majestic medieval building by growing up in Winchester – the great cathedral there makes these ruins seem small and paltry. Whereas the battlefield gave a practical sense of the fighting, I struggled to get a sense of the abbey – where it stood, where it pointed, how it big once had been.

Big yes, but how big? And thus how whopping was the conqueror’s sense of guilt?

Travers was really a Nazi

The Dr has a thing for travelogues from yesteryear, and somewhen I managed to find her Seven Years in Tibet. It’s a battered, well-thumbed second edition from 1953, with the price 3/ pencilled on the inside back cover, and a “Boots Booklovers’ Library” sticker on the front. The sort of book that looks like it might have had as many adventures as its author.

I read a different copy about a decade ago, having had my interest piqued by Earthling. Bowie’s own Seven Years in Tibet,

“coincided with a wave of high-profile American support for the country’s plight during the mid-1990s. Major motion pictures like Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet (a 1997 dramatization of Harrer’s memoir which had no direct connection with the Bowie track) made the subject Hollywood’s cause du jour.”

Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie, p. 138.

It begins as an escape story, unusual – at least as far as I’m concerned – because it’s teller is a German POW escaping English camps in India. We’re told that “the English took a sporting view of our bold [first] attempt” to escape (p.19). I like the swagger of the Germans’ next, more successful effort on 29 April 1944. They’re made up as Indians, with shaved heads and turbans, pretending to be a work party repairing the perimeter. (The posts setting out the barbed-wire fences were prone to attack by white ants.) In these brilliant disguises they just walk out of the camp with two colleagues in bored English uniform as escort.

“We attracted no attention and only stopped once, when the sergeant-major rode by the main gate on his bicycle. Our ‘officers’ chose that moment to inspect the wire closely. After that we passed out through the gate without causing the guard to bat an eyelid. It was comforting to see them saluting smartly and obviously suspicious of nobody. Our seventh man, Sattler, who had left his hut rather late, arrived after us. His face was black and he was swinging a tarpot energetically. The sentries let him through.”

Heinrich Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet (trans. Richard Graves), p.21 (my edition, not in the one linked to!).

Once over the border into Tibet, Harrer and his fellows struggle to get food, shelter or any kind of acceptance. Tibetans living near the border, he comes to understand, are not encouraged to help or trade with foreigners. There follows a vivid, Boy’s Own account of hardship. The Germans press on into the interior, with lively adventures outwitting local dignitaries who want them deported, and brigands who’ll take even their scant few possessions. We learn of the temperament of yaks and the customs of the caravans. Though there’s no capital punishment, convicted criminals can die from the brutal state ‘revenge’.

In the last third, the book becomes something else entirely. Harrer and one other, Aufschnaiter, reach the capital, Lhasa, and suddenly find themselves accepted, so long as they’re of use to the government. They stay in Lhasa for five whole years, which Harrer glosses over rather briskly (1947 passes in a flash). Their public works include a dam and a water fountain, and eventually Harrer becomes tutor to the Dalai Lama.

Kundun (as his family call him) is barely into his teens, a rather lonely but keenly intelligent boy. He’s fascinated by telescopes and the cinema, and at one point – with Harrer’s encouragement – even makes his own film:

“He had not, of course, had a huge choice of subjects. He had done a big sweeping landscape of the valley of Lhasa, which he turned much too fast. Then came a few under-lighted long-distance pictures of mounted noblemen and caravans passing through Shö. A close-up of his cook showed that he would have liked to take film portraits. The film he had shown me was absolutely his first attempt and had been made without instructions or help. When it was over he got me to announce through the microphone that the performance was over. He then opened the door leading into the theatre, told the abbots that he did not need them any more and dismissed them with a wave of his hand. It was again clear to me that here was no animated puppet, but a clear-cut individual will capable of imposing itself on others.”

Ibid., p. 251.

For something so briefly gone into, their friendship is warm and profound. By this time, there’s also an awareness of the political context, and Harrer reports on attempted coups, infighting and the growing threat from China. It’s not, it turns out, just a threat.

Oddly, we get very little on Harrer’s own background (bar his sporting achievements) and he hardly mentions the outcome of the war – which he discovers while in Tibet – or of the hardships being suffered back home. He and Aufschnaiter concede that they’ve little in the way of ties back home anyway. We get no sense of his own politics, other than the rallying cry for a free Tibet.

But I am not a bank

Today I have written the whole of a story (though I'd about 800 words in my notebook as of Saturday). It contains the words "pollotarian", "shoelace" and "off-switch". I think it more-or-less works.

Have also had the okay to write something else entirely; announcements as ever will follow. (This blog isn't for you to understand now, of course, but for me to look back on from the future. And not remember to what I was obliquely wittering.)

Now back to the entry on Eternity Weeps for the ever burgeoning Inside of Benny. Dreary wet weather has helped lots of work getting done on what for some people is a bank holiday. And tonight I'm being taken for curry.

Good job I can avoid electric distractions such as blogging and my 48 friends on Facebook.

Little Englishness

Watched Human Nature at a chum's house last night, and general consensus was hooray! - even from those who've not been wowed by New Show recently.

I've been busy writing about the book version, which features Benny instead of Martha. Going through my old notes, I found this interview with Paul Cornell from 21 June 2001. It was originally for my old website thing, Concrete Elephant, and CONTAINS HUGE SPOILERS for Cornell's book, Something More...

It’s a beautiful Midsummer’s day, and Paul Cornell has spent the afternoon drinking. He politely declines the offer of a pint, and goes for a diet coke instead. We duck downstairs to the Writer’s Bar, to ramble about his new science fiction novel, Something More, about his Doctor Who adventures and about... well, all sorts really. To get him started, Elephant has devised five cunning and incisive warm-up questions...

Me: Brussel sprouts – are they good or bad?

Cornell: Oh they’re horrid! One of the most awful inventions of mankind – you take a cabbage and compress it down to horrible smooth size... and the thing to start with isn’t that good. The only good cabbage is when it’s chopped up into really tiny pieces and served with seaweed in Chinese restaurants. Anything else that’s green and that shape is bad.

Me: Even when they’re cooked with bacon?

Cornell: Even! Even the bacon can’t make up for them.

Me: Okay. Favourite character from the Star Wars universe?

Cornell: Oh.... When I was a kid I was always a big... this is the progression from when I was a boy. Han Solo when I was a kid, Luke Skywalker now I’ve grown up.

Me: Do you dunk biscuits in tea?

Cornell: Yes.

Me: How old were you when you first fell in love?

Cornell: Sixteen.

Me: And what’s the best word in the English language?

Cornell: [Long pause]. That’s a bastard question. [More silence, and then, to the tape recorder...] There’s a long pause. [More silence].

Me: Should we move on and talk about the book?

Cornell: Yes! Please! [He giggles, which sounds a bit like Captain Pugwash]

Me: First thing that struck me about the book is the definite sense of place. Bath, Winchester, Chiswick, Blackheath – in fact, all the places I live, which was a bit spooky. It’s all terribly British. Or rather Home Counties, which puts it beside the traditions of English sci-fi; Wyndham, Wells... And yet it’s not set the-day-after-tomorrow. In fact, the key date is 1998. Were you conscious of creating an alternate history?

Cornell: To be honest, I always thought it was a little awkward having it set ‘next year’. The time presented is the time that I actually wrote it, and I was aware that by the time it came out that would be the past. It seemed odd to be writing a present day scenario that might be different by the time it was out. Y’know? I couldn’t just say it’s the present day, write it as the present day and then be caught up in events. So I decided ‘let’s just root it in history, let’s say this is 1998.’ It wasn’t so much an idea of an ‘alternate’ as just a desire to be honest, to keep the present as the present and to go on from there. Britishness... is very important to the whole thing of it. I’ve always wanted to write science fiction that would seem to be in the same kind of world as Kingsley Amis or Evelyn Waugh.

Me: One of the themes running through the book is history and memory – how people misremember the past, how they remember Britain.

Cornell: It’s about how shit history is basically, and how history is always limited and contained. Well, not always, actually. Since the end of the War, history has limited and contained who the British are. It’s interesting to note that during the Boer War, the stereotype throughout Europe of the English was that we were the passionate people who would laugh or cry at anything. And that’s shifted since then. That’s become, I suppose, the Italians. These supposed traditions of what the British are like, most of them are... like panto. Some of the traditions of pantomime were laid down in the 1970s. We always think things are ancient and they never bloody are. And that’s because we’re tied to the past. That particular war especially has been something that has anchored British history. Only now are we making efforts to let go of that, and Something More is about how terrible it would be if we could never let go of that, if our future was entirely determined by our history, by our past. If we could never get on to the rather wonderful, Dan Dare, one-world superstate that I envisage.

Me: You feel that the Second World War has set in stone the politics of today? An old argument is that with World War One, the reasons people went to war are no longer relevant, but the reasons we went to war in 1939 have become more relevant – race and identity.

Cornell: Yes, yes. But on the otherhand... we now celebrate our sporting victories with the theme tune from The Great Escape. That chant, ‘One world cup and two world wars’... Yeah, two world wars, what, fifty years ago? It’s like we’re stuck in a post-imperial loss. It’s like we’re never going to move away from that, never going to go beyond that, never going to redefine what Britishness is. We’re still waiting for a truly inclusive sense of what Britishness is. There’s been gestures towards it, but even this week, this month [with the race riots in Oldham] there’s still signs that we’re not actually getting it. We’re still lost in history.

Me: So is Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), the architect leader of the heroes, the rag-tag rebels in the book, is he your envisioning of what Britishness should be?

Cornell: Yes. He seems to me to be historically one of those odd Englishmen that pop up from time to time who have just got the whole universe at their command. Englishness does occasionally produce these extraordinarily liberal thinkers who seem to be able to break from the confining code that created them. If I wanted a beneficent deity to be looking over me, I’d want it to be Lutyens, especially since he dealt to admirably in his own life with a wife who was lost in a fog of spirituality which never connected to the real world. And here he was, building buildings in the real world, really good buildings, and expressing himself in a very solid, very concrete way. I think he had a kind of spirituality of his own which is attractive and very interesting. He’s my perfect dad.

Me: So there’s the real history of his opposition to spirituality, and then in your book, Lutyens is fighting a war against a resurrected, alien Jesus Christ from Outer Space.

Cornell: Oh, now you’re giving away the ending.

Me: Jesus is the villain of the piece.

Cornell: One of the things I really like is people who read this before they read the book will wonder ‘How the hell did they get there from the first few chapters?'. I don’t think Lutyens was opposed to spirituality, he was always very supportive of his wife.

Me: There’s a genuine struggle in the book between the means and ends approaches of the great war. The Grey Namer, Jesus, is very much looking towards the ends, drastic solutions whatever the cost. He’s going to destroy the planet Earth – or at least kill everyone on it.

Cornell: But for the best of reasons.

Me: Yes, for the best of reasons. Whereas Lutyens is opposed to that because his idea is that you look to the details. He looks at the pennies and lets the pounds look after themselves. His idea of what a spiritual life involves is having a nice house, with a garden, and going boating with his wife. As opposed to the grand designs. Is that something that you believe yourself?

Cornell: Again it’s that ancient... well it’s not ancient Britishness, it’s a conception of Britishness founded fifty years ago, that the little things are important and big ideologies are rather scary. I quite like that, but I think we’ve carried it just a bit too far. I think Lutyens would say moderation in all things as well, but what does that remind you of? That scones are more important than fascism? I think that this is my Doctor Who heritage showing through.

Me: There are a number of links through to your Doctor Who books. First of all, the emotional backdrop, the incredible sense of mourning, of the First World War is similar to parts of Human Nature. There’s the fact that Mary Poppins, a pop culture figure, comes forward as the Virgin Mary – a far more transcendental cultural icon – in the same way that Vic Reeves cameos in Love and War as the Trickster.

Cornell: Vic Reeves of course, is the Trickster. It’s Mary Poppins because I wanted people to get her straight away. Mary Poppins – that’s a scary movie. She’s all powerful. She’s an omnipotent deity who’s acting as a household familiar. It’s a very odd movie. And deeply English – that sense of the transcendant, coming down into your house and fitting in to the social mores of the time. Fluttering them about a bit, but it’s that wonderful English link between manners and the infinite.

Me: Cultural references play a funny role in the book. In the future, Empire of the Sun is the greatest film ever made.

Cornell: I’m glad you spotted that. Because it’s shifted. It’s Citizen Kane right now. And we kind of think that it must have always been Citizen Kane – but of course it wasn’t. It’s like it’s something that’s only happened to us in the last ten years.

Me: And the people of the future can quote Beatles songs and make reference to Winnie the Pooh, but Booth makes a comment about The Rocky Horror Show and nobody has any idea what he’s talking about. And, most importantly of all, nobody makes any reference to a man who travels round in a police box and saves people from monsters...

Cornell: Absolutely. Because what’s Paul Cornell going to do when he writes a mainstream novel? He’s going to put some kind of stupid Doctor Who reference in there. And I really didn’t want to do that. I don’t think that there’s a single in-joke. Is there?

Me: The only thing I could think of was that you have stately house that’s somewhere near Bath, with wild animals and a maze – and I immediately thought, ‘is that Longleat?’

Cornell: I think that kind of goes beyond an in-joke. I was thinking of a house called Castle Drago, which is a Lutyens house, was the map I used. It’s kind of Castle Drago in Longleat’s grounds. I’ve got really a strong mental imagery of those grounds, and I’ve always wanted to write something set in that area. What it is about Longleat to me is that when I was very little, you would walk through this incredibly well-kept-up stately home, past all these incredible angles. What I remember at Longleat as a kid is really solid angles of stone against a clear blue, empty sky. And you turn a corner, and there’s the TARDIS. As a kid, that’s magic here in the middle of this English manor. And there’s Lord Bath’s private maze which is only open every now and then, with his erotic murals inside. I never went to see those. I still never have. That was forbidden stuff in the maze. It’s not really, then, an in-joke as much as a deliberate setting.

“We have friends in the Universe. Their ambassador’s an Englishman. Everybody’s going to be filled with hope again. What a great Christmas present.”

Tony, the Prime Minister, p. 216.

Me: I was reading the book as the General Election was taking place, and here’s a book set in 1998 and the Prime Minister’s name is Tony. He’s never sign-posted as Tony Blair, MA Oxon, Leader of the Labour Party...

Cornell: I don’t think I name him –

Me: He is actually referred to as Tony.

Cornell: Oh right. Well it’s meant to be him obviously. I think I’m the only New Labour zealot I know. I just think that if people actually do appreciate something, when things fall right, then they should stand up and declare it. And the British are very bad at that. So this a New Labour science fiction novel, and the Prime Minister presented therein is by no means heroic, or saintly, but is nevertheless decent.

Me: He’s the first person to talk to Booth after he’s changed, rather than at him. He addresses him as a human being and asks his opinion -

Cornell: Because I actually think he would.

Me: - and Booth walks into a committee of experts, and gets the feeling that they’ve been carefully selected to be racially representative. Which obviously contrasts with the future where even people from different families are suspect, homosexuality is a capital offence... it’s a tremendous contrast where the world has fallen apart.

Cornell: Absolutely. It’s the two approaches isn’t it? Humans can continue down this road of Horlicks and inclusivity, which I think, thank God, we’re finally shifting to, with this second election victory in a row.

Me: A damning indictment by the British people of the Conservative Party’s efforts over the last five years.

Cornell: Oh yes. The average age – the average – of Tory Party members is 68. The average, for God’s sake. I wanted to say that what people call political correctness now is actually just the first step towards a real, different society, a different Britain. A Britain of the future, the kingdom. What the book is about, the future it presents, is a world where that doesn’t happen. Where we stand-off from Europe, and declare ourselves alone and live for an Empire that no longer exists, and thus keep on degenerating and degenerating into a bunch of warring tribes. I really wanted to portray in a country-British disaster way, Britain like Mozambique or one of those terrible places in Africa where there is no law, through purely economic struggle, through wars that never end. It’s a bit of an overreaction perhaps.

Me: In the book, the history of the families and the nation are addressed by a house with it’s own history. And the house’s haunted past is a moment when Booth turns his back on the backward-looking people and their confused ideas about Britishness.

“We are never going to get back to the Union Jack, to Britain, to one government over this island […]. We can’t start anything new, because we keep trying to build new things in the image of the old. We can’t get out of that mind-set. We are still too British, when there is not Britain to be British about.”

Booth Hawtrey, pp. 329-330.

That’s the starting point, and the resolution is to turn your back on history. The pivotal human action that causes everyone to forget their past, comes from Jane, who’s been this violent priest. It’s astonishing the barbarity her faith takes her to, but it’s actually her faith that takes them where no one else has succeeded. She’s able to turn back time.

Cornell: Paul nods enthusiastically. Yes.

Me: All of the way through the book, faith is problematic. Having made Jesus the villain –

Cornell: He’s the hero in my next one. No he is. I think if you look what happens in the whole span of the book, he is the villain certainly, but it’s like grace does win through. His actions turn out to be exactly right for the greater good, that the actions of the book create. It’s almost like the Trinity warring against itself, like his dad is up to something that he hasn’t quite got yet. It’s interesting comparing the two books – British Summertime [due 2002]. When I finished it, I became suddenly aware that a lot of the same things happen in British Summertime as do in Something More. We have hangings, a touch of paedophilia, a huge presence of Christ at the centre of the narrative, except that things are reversed. It’s like a mirror image of the first one, and none of this was conscious. It’s just that my brain seems to want to sort through these things again. And it’s another version of history going in a particular way. In the second case it’s an ecological disaster, and how the future might work out that way. The way to tie it back up in a knot, to bring it back to where it’s supposed to be, a sensation of grace working through history. I think it’s also a question of where I was at the time. Something More is a violent battle with faith – it’s me really kicking hard. And British Summertime’s a very faith-full book. Something More is, in the end, a Christian novel but you’d be hard-pressed to see it, and British Summertime is much more of a CS Lewis-on-acid thing. I’m told it might actually be blasphemous, but I’m not sure. Being married to a vicar is going to be interesting, if some of her congregation actually read Something More. Hopefully British Summertime will be around by that point to reassure them. It’s strange because both books I think are equally... British Summertime is nastier if anything, it pushes the characters further. It’s nice that from a kind of fanboy point of view... that they couldn’t possibly exist in the same world, in that the central character i.e. Jesus is a villain in one and a hero in the other [laughs].

Me: Maybe he was just having an off day.

Cornell: Maybe he was. An off life.

Me: You’ve now been a novelist, a paid novelist, for ten years. Early on you carved a niche of what your themes are, what the things you’re interested in are. Women priests –

Cornell: It’s odd isn’t it! When you say ‘carved’, it’s more like ‘randomly had’. I take a couple of steps back and see that there are things there that were never meant to be. I had no idea that these things would keep on recurring.

Me: As well as the novels, though, you’ve done a lot of television work. There was your own series, Wavelength, and two years ago your episode of Love in the Twentieth Century - an insight into masturbation. And now you’re writing what seems to be half of the next season of Casualty...

Cornell: [Laughing] I’m writing three out of forty. Nearly a tenth.

Me: Yes, well, my maths is a bit ropey. When you’re writing a Casualty episode, do you find yourself pitching, ‘Well, there’s this woman priest, and she’s having problems with Jesus. And there’s an alien...’

Cornell: Yes.... There’s a priest fighting with his faith in the first one. The characters I created for Casualty, Comfort, one of the paramedics, is a Catholic, and that's an issue that keeps coming back. I’m having the time of my life on Casualty – they’re giving me incredible freedom, incredible support. The ability to be free to write novels, and also the freedom to express oneself in an ongoing Saturday night primetime BBC1 series – ooh I’m so satisfied. So the same themes do come up albeit using their characters. The BBC has turned down many, many vicar shows from me. I’ve had comedy vicar shows, I’ve had drama vicar shows. I’ve got to the point where when I present my latest batch of wannabe drama proposals, people will say, ‘Now there aren’t any vicars in this, are there?’ And The Godfather, the book I’ve just adapted for a BBC pilot script – I don’t know if it’ll get filmed but I’ve just delivered the script. Today, actually – it’s very much about ‘my’ themes. I really loved it because it’s slap-bang in the middle of my territory. It’s about a horror novelist, a very rich horror novelist, a bestseller, who inherits, through bereavement, these two godchildren and has to take care of them. In a big, sprawling gothic house. He has to deal with grief and... there’s no spirituality. I may introduce a vicar somewhere along the line. But it’s right up my street.

Me: And is television and film somewhere you see your future? Is that the dream?

Cornell: Yes. I want to write a film. I want to write my Battle of Britain film. I’ve got a plan for that, and that may happen. I’ve got a spy novel on the ramp, and a magical fantasy trilogy about magic throughout the last century, the twentieth century. Witches in 1939, and they have a little cosy Great Escape style witches' coven.

Me: And haunt women vicars?

Cornell: Yes, there’ll probably be a vicar in there as well. I’m marrying a woman vicar! How much more into this can I get? It’d be wrong of me to just say that writing pays the bills. It doesn’t. I find real expression there as well, and I’m having the happiest time of my writing life. All of those future projects are of course subject to the whims of the future. In the back of the dust jacket on the hardback [of Something More], it says ‘Paul’s currently developing a series for Channel 4.’ Well I was when that came out. Nothing came of it. I must stop saying that on backflaps. But yeah, it’s a nice place to be at the moment, and [he fingers the dog-eared copy of Something More on the table] I’m desperately proud of it. When I was little, my brother who introduced my to science fiction, would lend me his Analogs. I suppose it’s an association of my brother and a deep Englishness, that I actually lived in a little English village and had all this wonderful stuff in cardboard boxes that he’d show me, his old sf models and things, that got me this big association between spaceyness and little Englishness. I’ve written about my brother already. He’s Peter Hutchings in Timewyrm: Revelation and Happy Endings. He’s an absolute duplicate of my brother, apart from the fact that he’s a mathematician and my brother’s an insurance broker. Anyway, now I’m wittering...

Me: A couple of year’s ago, the Doctor Who New Adventures were reviewed by Foundation – the British academic journal of sf – and you didn’t come across brilliantly. In fact, some kind fellow had to step in to refute the accusation of Doctor Who as ‘sf’s imbecile’.

Cornell: Yes, thank you. I didn’t, did I? Foundation was after science fiction in the New Adventures.

Me: It seemed to be after ‘grit’ – it didn’t like the ‘nice’ stories.

Cornell: There’s nothing worse than grit.

Me: Their favourite story was [Ben Aaronovitch’s] Transit – which shows exactly what their sensibilities were. Not that I’m dissing Transit.

Cornell: Well, I was going to say. They have a point. I think The Also People [Aaronovitch’s subsequent New Adventure] is better than Transit, in that it shows that that author can kick arse without grit. Indeed, without any gestures in the direction of darkness or horror. Just by talking about nice people having a nice time. I think grit is teenage. There’s an awful lot of pain in Something More and British Summertime. People looking for grit will find it, but I think that the important thing about grit is getting past it. It’s what gets in the way, it’s the problem, it’s not what the books are about. It’s what the books are about getting over.

Me: Something More is about people living in an utterly different, difficult, violent world. And some of the violent scenes are particularly nasty.

Cornell: Oh, some particularly horrible things happen to Booth.

Me: And you have Rebecca being buried alive and standing on tip-toe just so that she can breath... all sorts of horrible things. But the whole point is about people overcoming this.

Cornell: And the fact that condition that they’re after is peace and happiness and scones. And a society that can make scones. I think all my books are about pushing that and trying to get back to it. I think there are certain authors who indulge in grit who actually like it. Who want to be there and want their characters to be in it. Which always sits very difficult with Doctor Who... ‘difficult’ isn’t the right word. Can you put in a better word than ‘difficult’?

Me: It’s against the ethics of the series?

Cornell: Yeah, so anyway, that’s true of Who books. But free to write my own stuff, it’s about the victory over grit.

Me: So do you find the violence difficult to write?

Cornell: Horribly, no. I was a little upset by what I did to Rebecca, and I was wondering if this was some kind of sadistic thing. But then I realised I’d done far, far worse things to Booth. Booth being my hero, and being immortal of course, I can do him far more damage. But it’s about him being better at the end, it’s not about the damage.

“Things seemed to be different already. All the new growth. All the new systems. Anything that fell apart just got replaced by something better.”

The happy ending, p. 420.

We mug at each other for a bit. ‘I think that’s it,’ I say. 'Cool!’ enthuses Cornell. ‘Wonderful. Good stuff, nice questions.’ We head back upstairs for more drinks. Later, over pizza, he comes back to that question about the best word in the English language. If he has to choose a word, it’ll be something silly and onomatapaeic... like ‘plop’.