Cloud Atlas

The last few days I have been a Simon Head-in-Air. If I remember rightly, this means I’m due to fall into a canal and drown. And the reason for this is Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s The Cloudspotter’s Guide. (For those who’ve not been keeping up, here’s what I thought of the novel Cloud Atlas.)

As you’d expect, it explains how to identify the main kinds of clouds. And reading it is like an epiphany – I find I’m looking up on the way to work, or while waiting for buses and trains. As Pretor-Pinney says, it’s a hobby you can take part in anywhere, and for as long or as little as you wish.

The nebulous nature of clouds means several share characteristics or even bits of the same name – alto, cirro, cumulo, nimbo, strato. I got even more list over which combinations merge into which other combinations, and then there’s the huge number of sub-species, features and effects. It’s no wonder the book comes complete with a cloudspotter’s diploma. (There are also copious plugs for the Cloud Appreciation Society, which the author founded.)

Mixed in with the scientific explanations and Latin etymology are a wealth of top facts. For example, I now know where the phrases “cloud nine” and “cloud cuckooland” come from. Yet, as well as the top facts, there’s far too many terrible jokes and asides which can get a little grating. Part of me wonders how much that stuff just pads it out, and how much the author or his editors feared scaring punters off with too much technicalia. The clutter of tangents and silly bits makes it harder to remember the clues to diagnosis. Of course, this is a book to carry with you and refer back to, but I’m a bit annoyed I don’t remember more as I went along.

The penultimate chapter is perhaps the most interesting, as it covers man-made clouds. First there’s the militaro-cloud technologies, as worked on by sci-fi writer Kurt Vonnegut’s brother Bernard. In the movie of the book I imagine him played by Andre Morrell (or his modern equivalent, which would be Ian McKellen). Anyway, back in the 1940s and 50s, Bernard K (not Bernard Kay. See, these asides are annoying!) studied how clouds formed, and that led to seeing if they could be influenced or controlled.

Soon the US Naval Weapons Center took over the funding of this research. According to Pretor-Pinney, this was because it was believed that the Russians were also investigating the same area – though he gives no evidence for this belief. I can’t help feeling it’s a good excuse to do stuff you want to do anyway. Can’t get permission to build atomic bombs, rocket to the moon or stock your museum with other people’s statues? Hell, just say, “But if we don’t, some foreigners will…”.

So what was the result of the militaro-clouds?

“Operational cloud seeding commenced on 20 May 1967 and continued for six years over parts of Laos, North Vietnam, South Vietnam and Cambodia, at an estimated annual cost of around $3.6 million a year. It is impossible to say whether it was really successful in increasing rainfall, since no systematic assessment of precipitation was made after the initial test phase, which itself could not be considered to be statistically rigorous.”

Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, p. 264.

Still, once the story got out that clouds were being developed as weapons, there was a bit of a rumpus. Some laws were passed to technically stamp out any further such projects. But, amazingly enough, the US has wriggled around its own legislation and Pretor-Pinney lists some unsettling developments.

More unsettling, though, is the second part of the same chapter, which addresses the clouds produced by plans. Condensation trails (or “contrails” if you wanna get with the lingo) have been the hot topic of debate for cloudies recently. There’d been some discussion anyway about how they influenced weather systems – affecting other clouds’ formation. And then, when US airplanes were grounded after 11 September 2001, eagle-eyed observers noticed that this pause seemed to have an affect on ground temperatures. Since then, it’s been shown that contrails “reduced ground temperatures during the day and raised them at night” (p. 274) – by as much a whole degree centigrade.

(Yes, that’s quite a lot.)

Pretor-Pinney is good at covering the different possible outcomes of this – it could add to global warming, it could lower temperatures – and also of the problems in trying to tackle it. Getting planes to fly lower would stop contrails forming, but would make them use up more fuel. So whichever way, the environment is shagged.

A little ironically, the final chapter sees Pretor-Pinney jetting off to the other side of the planet to see a cloud formation that’s also been seen over the English Channel. The “Morning Glory” is a miles-long tube of cloud that can clearly be seen cutting across the north of Australia in a wowing satellite image. Turns out that the place Pretor-Pinney goes to see it is Burketown, one of the dusty, ramshackle stop-offs on my brother’s trek across the outback.

Yes, he tells me, everyone talked about the “Morning Glory”. No, he admits, he wasn’t there at the right time to see it.

Ripper tearer slasher

You know what? I wouldn’t object to Angelina Jolie giving me the horn.

Last night, Codename Moose fulfilled his blood-oath and took me and the Dr to see Beowulf at the IMAX. He’d tried to get tickets over the weekend but it had all been fully booked. Last night was crowded, too – mostly with bright-eyed, slightly balding fellows around the age of 30. Many wore suits and had clearly come straight from proper jobs. But the general sense was that here was a film was aimed at those who never quite grew out of He-Man and Transformers. A film with fighting and monsters and perhaps a small hint of bare girl-flesh.

Which it is. Hooray!

There were a few women taggers on, looking mostly long-suffering as we waited to go in. The Dr admitted her bias against this rough and tumble Old English stuff, so thunderously barbaric compared to her helleno-classics. But I dared suggest that Beowulf might be a little less heavy handed than that other recent CGI-fest, Frank Miller’s 300.

Who would win out of the Geats and Spartans? Well, I don’t know, but whichever one lost would probably do it really well.

As in the Old English poem, a big scary monster called Grendel starts attacking a mead hall and eating the people inside. Then, from across the sea, comes Beowulf, young and bold and so impossibly cool he’ll fight Grendel with his bare hands…

It’s an impressive-looking movie, all the more so in IMAX 3D. The swooshy “camera” moves are all a bit reminiscent of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings – and obviously it’s easy to see other influences, which Tolkien nabbed from the original poem. But this is all on a much smaller scale than the War of the Ring. Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary’s script sets events almost exclusively in the same township – with Beowulf never going home. I’d argue this actually makes the world depicted bigger, because travelling any distance is so much more arduous and so man is more at the mercy of the elements. There’s no chance of a last-minute, wizard-led cavalry coming to the rescue.

The 3D is very exciting: blood drools down on us, monsters leap out at us, bare and toned bottoms look real. There’s a bit of a warm-up before the film to get you used to the 3D stuff. Examples of fish and dinosaurs and a trailer for The Polar Express help make you feel a bit less silly about the huge, 1980s-style glasses.

In general, the action sequences are much more involved than in the poem. Beowulf’s win against Grendel makes use of the eaves and a chain and a door, where in the poem he just keeps his grip. But these embellishments are needed to help tell the story visually, rather than via a narrator. They also give more dramatic pace than “they fought and Beowulf won”.

Only yesterday, Gaiman himself noted reviews being impressed by the faithfulness of the adaptation to the source material. The script sticks closely to the events as given in the poem, but also interweave the random fragments of plot into one cohesive story. They also give motivations to each of the characters, so there’s a bit more depth and sense underpinning all the fighting.

One example of this is explaining who Grendel is and why he’s attacking the mead hall. He’s a rather more sympathetic character than the monster in the poem, though he does come across a bit like a nuisance neighbour always complaining when your TV’s on too loud.

The language Grendel himself uses when speaking to his mum again suggests a closeness to the Old English original, and at one point they even squeeze in a bard singing Beowulf’s story just as it has been handed done since. It occurs to me that despite what’s been changed, we can still believe that the poem we know followed from these events – the storytellers and friends in Beowulf’s own lifetime are already embellishing their accounts.

The film also very deftly incorporates the tensions between pagan and Christian ideology over which critics have so come to blows. Anthony Hopkins’s Danish king won’t put his faith in the Roman god, but his young wife and other courtiers are seen wearing crucifixes. Without ever being intrusive, this becomes more telling in the last section of the film, where the older Beowulf and his demons seem like a relic from a previous age.

Gaiman’s post yesterday suggests the film has got the thumbs up from the one-true-God squad. But this is in response to the CAP thinking it “the most heinous culprit for stealing childhood from children ever made”. The gore is wet and vivid, and I can see that anyone expecting another Polar Express might be a little surprised. But, um, it’s a tale from the Dark Ages about a man who fights monsters… you betray your own ignorance by assuming this stuff’s just for kids. And Homer and fairy tales are full of sex and violence too. The Bowdlerised versions lose a great deal of sense of meaning.

Even then, for a film that’s essentially about three very gruesome fights, the sex and violence aren’t gratuitous. At the IMAX, Angelina Jolie stands 40-foot tall, in nothing but gold paint that’s falling off her. As she sashays about and makes gimps of us all, look carefully (as I did) and you just about get a hint of a nipple. She’s about as real a naked women as a Barbie. The ever more contrived efforts to keep Boewulf’s willy out of shot reminded me of an old Hale and Pace sketch (or, for younger readers, the opening of Austin Powers 2).

But this hardly detracts from a thrilling adventure, full of wit and detail. The Dr admitted her previous fears were unwarranted, and she quite liked Beowulf’s six-pack. Definitely recommend the IMAX version and the 3D specs (not just for the six-pack). And, as we tramped blinking down the long staircase after it was all over, Codename Moose and I spotted a poster… Transformers in 40-foot 3D!

My Doctor

Much excitement round at Nimbos’s last night as we ate pizza and watched Doctors Who. Delighted by the wealth of gags and continuity and it’s quite possible I might have squeed.

You can watch it and the making of at the BBC site for another six days. And also, obviously, then chip in some monies for the needy kids.

The Dr, my Dr, was entertained but felt less of an epiphany – though she’d not been feeling well all day. She expressed the opinion that it was fun but “one for the fans”. Hmm. There’s rather a lot of fans these days. 10.9 million viewers is more than one sixth of the whole population, and of a Friday evening some 45% of everyone watching telly was in our gang.

Also of much excitement was a delivery yesterday morning. Any post is proving to be something of an achievement these days, so the first batch of my author copies of Doctor Who and the Pirate Loop is particularly splendid. It will be available in all good bookshops from 27 December AND YOU WILL BUY IT.

Nature versus nurture

As followers of this blog might have noticed, I read – and probably write – a lot of trashy, melodramatic hokum. Adventures where the barest bones of character are slapped about by unlikely coincidence and bludgeoned by unsubtle shocks, all in the name of contriving cheap thrills. I like the fiendish plot twists and wily revelations, and that glorious epiphany that comes when an author gets it right; a book crammed full of the most outrageous zigzags, yet at the end you look back down a single, entirely straight, entirely inevitable corridor. This truly is the good stuff.

So it’s might seem puzzling that my notebook struggles to find anything positive to say about Tarzan of the Apes. Published in 1912, this is the first of a massive 26 volumes of Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The tonnage of that canon, let alone the countless movies and TV shows that followed, automatically suggests a quality of concept to transcend the pulpy, throwaway genre from which it sprang. There must be something special about Tarzan for him to join the elite of heroes who outlive their age, heroes like Holmes and Bond and, er, Summerfield.

Ahem.

But Tarzan is really a bit cock.

The first 100 pages are swiped from Kipling. A white baby is adopted by the nicer, more middle-class animals in the jungle, and grows up bald and vulnerable and picked on, but also wily and better with tools. Mowgli learns to use his brains and weapons against monkeys and a tiger, Tarzan against apes and a lion. Both stories get to remark on the human creature by showing how it fares in the wild.

Mowgli does all this in three short chapters. Tarzan pads it out to 100 pages. There’s an ape who everyone else lives in terror of, and Tarzan fights and kills it. There’s a lion who everyone else lives in terror of, and Tarzan fights and kills it. There’s a polar bear in a false beard and sunglasses who everyone lives in terror of, and… No, wait, that’s Lost, isn’t it?

As well as learning how to plunge a knife into rivals, and so taking charge of his small ape tribe, Tarzan is also a bit of an intellectual. He teaches himself to read English from a collection of books – though it becomes a plot point later that he doesn’t learn to speak it, and nor does he learn French. His reading teaches him that showing his bits is naughty, and he’s wearing a loincloth in time for the arrival of the love of his life.

Now, a certain amount of wild coincidence is to be expected in this kind of stuff, but Tarzan really takes the piss. Tarzan himself comes to be in this bit of Africa because of a mutiny on his parents’ ship. Twenty years later, once Tarzan’s bored of the apes he grew up with, an almost identical mutiny brings to exactly the same spot another small party of white folks – and one of them happens to be family. John Clayton has taken the title Lord Greystoke what with Tarzan having been out of the picture.

Yes, Tarzan is, deep down, an English lord of the highest order. He’s spent his whole life running about naked, mucking about with apes and having only a tangential understanding of civilisation and morality. So he’s probably from the Tory front bench. Ho ho.

Clayton’s part of a dangerous adventure involving treasure, and in his party are two doddery old professors who provide comic relief by bickering and wandering off lost. Archimedes Q Porter is a Professor Calculus type, and it turns out he’s rather been blackmailed into this adventure by a rich scoundrel back home in the States.

Obviously, what with the great risks involved in their adventure, Porter has brought along his young and beautiful daughter Jane – who has a thing for John Clayton. And obviously, the moment Tarzan sees her his loincloth is astir.

There then follows 100 pages of pretty silly stuff. The professors get lost and fail to notice when they’ve been rescued. Jane’s maidservant Esmeralda is not very much better an offensive Black stereotype than the cannibal savages who kidnap potential lunches. And there’s no end of hilarious mix-up because the sophisticated Westerners can’t believe that the nice man of mystery who leaves them polite notes can be the same tanned and handsome mute who carries them out of danger.

Jane finds herself falling for both the Tarzan who leaves her letters and the fit fella who picks her up. And it’s all the more complicated because she loves John Clayton, but is also promised to the villainous dude blackmailing her old man. There’s the potential for some good romantic quandaries but it comes out a muddled jumble.

I’m afraid I kept feeling that Burroughs was just making it up as he went along, and not making it up with much effort. It’s all a rather nonsensical runaround, not made any more palatable by the constant bloody harping on about the supremacy of Tarzan’s class and race.

“It was a stately and gallant little compliment performed with the grace and dignity of utter unconsciousness of self. It was the hall-mark of his aristocratic birth, the natural out-cropping of many generations of fine breeding, an hereditary instinct of graciousness which a lifetime of uncouth and savage training and environment could not eradicate […] Contact with this girl for half a day had left a very different Tarzan from the one on whom the morning’s sun had risen.

Now, in every fibre of his being, heredity spoke louder than training.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, p. 154.

I think what ultimately left me cold is that Tarzan is too boring a Superman (yes, in the DC Comics sense). He’s all muscles and handsomeness, and possessed of an innate moral sense, but since he so repetitively defeats his foes in but a single bound you never get any sense of real jeopardy.

But whereas Superman at least has the antics of Clark Kent to add some level of depth, Tarzan’s alter ego is even more boring. Newly taught French and rich from some manly tough gambling, Tarzan turns up in a suit and car – in the convenient nick of time to rescue Jane from a fire in Wisconsin. He fells the blackmailer and then nobly surrenders Jane to John Clayton, before heading back to his savage home in Africa. What a guy!

Yes, that he surrenders the girl is a great conclusion – just like it is at the end of Casablanca. But it doesn’t take much imagination to conclude that Jane will soon follow him back to the jungle, where he’ll be all tough and muscular and keep villains away, and they’ll read books in all different languages.

This effortless brilliance that comes from having blue blood is all too wearisome. Tellingly so, in fact; the successful versions of Tarzan on screen have played up his ignorance of the civilised world – think of Johnny Weissmuller enjoying a shower with his suit on. As it is, the Tarzan of the book reads like puerile wish-fulfilment, and I found myself wishing he’d screw something up – giving in to his animal instincts with Jane, or just falling out of a tree.

Perhaps though it’s not the book’s fault at all, and I am just seething with envy.

Searching questions

For your delight and entertainment, here are a few recent search terms that suffer people unto this blog.

• Beowulf kit off
  Regretably, there is no nudey CGI Ray Winstone here.
  
  
• Cabbage cleans
  David Essex explained this one; it's meant to clean the blood.
  
  
• Coterminosity
  Nobody else knows what it means either.
  
  
• Dawkins resurrection
  And on the third day, nothing happened.
  
  
• Dirty rascals
  Modern poetry's not-quite rhyme with "king of the castle".
  
  
• driver_unloaded_without_cancelling_pending_operations, this driver may be at fault: CDR4_2k.sys
  This one crops up quite a lot, which suggests DivX didn't just have sexual congress with my computer. The tart.
  
  
• Doctor for ladies
  Because you don't want to see the same man as your servants.
  
  
• English term for la vendetta
  That would be, er, "vendetta".
  
  
• Example of sentences with noun-verb-adverb-adjective
  Cats sleep quietly long.
  
  
• Get angry with mother sex
  What, sex triggered by being cross with your mum? Or getting angry because your mum is having sex? Be more specific!
  
  
• HOW DO YOU MAKE A DALEK?
  I like how the capitals suggest sudden urgency. DAMMIT, THE WAR STARTS ANY MINUTE.
  
  
• KBO + BOILER
  Pass.
  
  
• Mowgli beating
  Surely a euphemism.
  
  
• Old Norse mead bench
  What distinguishes a bench as "Old Norse" and "mead". Is it to with how many tough Vikings can squeeze on it?
  
  
• Popped gum abscess
  There's an image we all needed.
  
  
• Short stories about the main characters discovering their identities because of the antagonist
  I'd recommend "Imposter" by the late Philip K Dick.
  
  
• Valley of Jehosophat
  That bit of slatey Wales where Anthony Ainley hails the third Doctor.
  
  
• We’ve got lions
  The clincher in Kenya's national anthem.
  
  
• Why the Swiss army is rubbish
  The punchline to a foppish joke, no doubt mocking pen knives.
  
  
• You touch my tra la la
  Is that a euphemism for a mowgli?
  

My mates’ scribbling #1

A sizeable chunk of the stalagmite of wanna-read books are those by my colleagues and playmates. The loyal and supportive thing is to buy the things (even more so, in the case of School's Out, after a freebie copy had been swallowed up by the post). But actually, you know, reading them has been on hiatus.

(One chum was telling me just a while ago that he’s given up any pretence of keeping up with his mates’ stuff. It is easier and cheaper and probably less cruel than to keep on saying, “But I mean to.”)

But my current employment means a couple of hours commuting, which means I’m fast catching up. I’ve also just had this two-week stint extended to 21 December, so I’m afraid there’s going to be quite a lot more book posts to come. Sorry.

Robert Shearman’s Tiny Deaths is a collection of 14 short stories all on the subject of death. The final story, “Somewhere in a small room a little boy sat waiting”, is the only one I’d read before, when it appeared in the Benny anthology Life During Wartime, edited by Paul Cornell. (Alongside TWO stories of mine, because clearly I am best.)

In the context of Tiny Deaths, it’s a very different story. No longer is it implicit that the small boy in question is the half-doggy son of a space archaeologist, hidden away while the museum-on-a-planetoid that’s his home is invaded by space-Nazis. Instead, we only get things as he understands them, so there are hints of something happening that means he must be hidden, and that Mummy is somehow involved.

Reading it in this new context, I realised the story had no especially science-fiction elements to it. The events could almost be happening anywhere, any when – and it’s that universality that makes it so affecting. (Interestingly, to me anyway, Cornell gave me notes once that Benny stories should always be noticeably sci-fi.)

It’s tricky to discuss the rest of Tiny Deaths without spoiling it’s many wondrous surprises. Like a lot of Rob’s plays on stage and on Radio 4, there’s a prevailing bitter-sweetness to the stories, with wry comic detail punctuating the sense of loss. On the back cover, Martin Jarvis compares him to Douglas Adams, Alexei Sayle and Philip K Dick. I also thought of Alan Bennett.

The cover – a lovely thing of a Goth girl blowing bubbles that are also holes – is a great summing up of this light-touch melancholia. It occurs to me as I write this that she only needs an ankh and she could be Neil Gaiman’s fun, lively Death.

Often Rob’s characters are rather numb to the things happening to them – people who aren’t in love or aren’t grieving, or don’t quite understand all the fuss. This leads them to attempt to explain themselves, which is a good device for creating a skewed perspective. It also means that many of the stories have a dream-like quality.

Another thing that makes them dream-like is the strict adherence to the rules of fantasy. Like his celebrated Doctor Who work, Rob will start a story from some mad idea – everyone suddenly all being told how and when they’re going to die, or that Hell does not discriminate between its human souls and those of other animals. And having established this “novum” (which is what the clever academic Darko Suvin calls the weirdshit that’s crucial to sci-fi), he then explores its consequences on ordinary people.

As Douglas Adams famously said, the effect of following this weirdshit through is that an idea that’s initially silly and funny becomes something affecting, and moving, and scary. Stranger still, the mad ideas become somehow plausible, even convincing. By changing the rules of sacred stuff we yet take so for granted – how we die, how we grieve, how we are thought of afterward – Rob undermines our sureties. As a result, it’s an unsettling sequence, at once playful and profound.

Again, it’s difficult to describe this without giving anything away, and the stories are full of quite brilliant veerings off. But the titular story is a particular gem. It begins with a description of Jesus not as an ordinary person as such, but at least as one we feel we might almost have known. He’s good on scripture, the story explains, but not brilliant on practicalities.

“As his parents had said, somewhat ruefully, there was a lad who knew the value of everything and the cost of nothing […] He’d listen patiently as his disciples at the Last Supper tried to tot up the bill and work out how much everyone should put in – they should just split it thirteen ways Andrew had suggested, but Simon Peter pointed out that was all very well but he hadn’t had a starter, and Thomas went on to say that he had had a starter but it had only been olives, that was the cheapest thing on the menu, that hardly counted, in some restaurants they’d be thrown in gratis, it was hardly his fault this one didn’t. And Jesus would say nothing, just watch them indulgently, would wait until he was told what his contribution should be, and put in without further comment.”

Robert Shearman, “Tiny Deaths”, in, er, Tiny Deaths, pp. 175-6.

It’s a story that’s at once deliciously blasphemous and yet at the same time dares to give insight on what Jesus’ death means. There’s both something of The Last Temptation about it, yet also of Life of Brian.

And in struggling to explain what the book’s like, I realise I’m just listing other things I’ve loved. Which is about as a good a recommendation as you’re going to get.

The face of Beowulf

In lieu of rent, Codename Moose is due to take the Dr and I to see Beowulf in 3D at the Imax. I am a little excited about this and may have mentioned it to a few people. Sorry. (At least I didn’t need to be taken for a walk to calm down, like I did the afternoon before The Christmas Invasion.)

What’s not to like? There are monsters, Vikings, lots of big fights and too much violence for sexy Angelina Jolie. Who seems set to get her kit off in eye-popping CG. Cor!

That said, I only actually read Beowulf last week. The epic, Old English poem written sometime in the 400 years prior to the existing version of about 1000 AD has been recommended by all sorts of people over (blimey) the last three decades. But I think the main reason I’ve never quite got to it was I didn’t know where to start.

There are various different translations and things, and many of the people who’ve said “But you’ll love it!” have also warned “Be sure to read the right version.” And I’ve always neglected to make a note of which exactly one that is. There’s one by famous Seamus Heaney (whose bog poems I studied at A-level), and one by Julian Glover (who, top fact, was Justin Richards’s original model for Doctor Who’s brother Irving).

So a couple of weeks ago I asked Psychonomy, and he not only recommended but lent a rather nice edition by Kevin Crossley-Holland, which includes all kinds of notes, family trees, maps and explanations.

Beowulf is a young Geat – which is some kind of Dane – whose dad owes a favour to a bloke with a very nice painted hall. The trouble is, every time the bloke tries to have a party in this very nice painted hall, along comes the monstrous Grendel and carries off his guests. Grendel likes to eat people, and weapons don’t seem to touch him.

Beowulf is the Mr T of his day, and so helluva tough he takes on Grendel without a weapon. There’s a lot of gripping and then Grendel’s arm tears off. Grendel runs away and there is much rejoicing. Beowulf is given some treasure and some nice things to drink, and people tell stories.

But Grendel’s mother is not amused and comes to the painted hall that evening. She eats some people, so Beowulf tracks her back to a river of blood, goes swimming in this, finds he wounded Grendel and stabs him with a magic sword. The sword melts.

So far, so good. Not surprisingly, the style did remind me of Tolkein, what with the swords that have names and the legends of bravery. Oddly, about half way through we’re told that Beowulf wasn’t always the baddest dude around.

“He had been despised
for a long while, for the Geats saw no spark
of bravery in him, nor did their king deem him
worthy of much attention on the mead-bench;
people thought that he was a sluggard,
a feeble princeling. How fate changed,
changed completely for the glorious man!”

Kevin Crossley-Holland, The poetry of legend: classics of the medieval world – Beowulf, p. 110.

This comes a bit out of nowhere, to be honest. If we’d know it at the beginning, we might have seen some kind of character journey or moral development of our hero. As it is, the throwaway comment feels a bit tacked-on for no reason.

In fact, there’s a lot of stuff that feels tacked-on or inconsistent. And Crossley-Holland’s explanatory notes are good at giving some insight into the various fights Beowulf has inspired in historians. Partly, these scuffles are about the clues in the text which might tell us when Beowulf was first written. A reference to a King Offa might be the original author trying to lick bum of Offa, King of Mercia from 757-796 (yes, he of Offa’s Dyke).

But the historians seem most bothered by the intrusion of God. Beowulf is basically a brutish sort hero in a brutish story. The story rather assumes that life is one long series of bloody and bloody stupid battles, small pockets of neighbouring tribes smashing the shit out of each other whenever they’ve the chance.

Beowulf returns home from fighting two monsters and spends the next decades fighting his neighbours. He eventually becomes king of his people less because he’s such a brilliant slayer of monsters as that all the other candidates have been hacked to bits.

The ideology, or system of values, underpinning this seems to fit with other, non-Christian thingies of the period.

“’One thing I know never dies not changes,’ goes an Old Norse proverb: ‘the reputation of a dead man’; while the Anglo-Saxon poet who composed the elegiac poem ‘The Seafarer’ spoke of the inevitability of death by ‘illness or old age or the sword’s edge’ and exhorted each and every man to ‘strive, before leaves this world, to win the praise of those living after him’.”

Ibid., p. 31.

It’s a world of blood-oaths and warriors’ honour, where the fleeting delights of treasure and feasting are paramount because there’s so little joy in the world. And this doesn’t exactly square with Christian teaching, or the Christian spin on Beowulf and what he gets up to which peppers the narration.

As Crossley-Holland points out, the most jarring example of this is when Beowulf dies. In a bit that made me think, “Ooh, it’s Smaug!”, a dragon is accidentally wakened from where it had been sleeping on a heap of gold. It flies amok and kills lots of people, and old King Beowulf staggers out of retirement to take on one more monster.

There’s lot of warrior-moral stuff as Beowulf’s retainers run away, despite the fact that he gave them nice rings to wear in exchange for their loyalty. One young fellow stays true, and together the two of them defeat the Big Worm. In the process, the young fellow burns his hand and Beowulf is mortally wounded.

“Then the wise leader
tottered forward and slumped on a seat
by the barrow; he gazed at the work of giants,
saw how the ancient earthwork contained
stone arches supported by columns.”

Ibid., p. 126.

(We know, of course, that he’s looking not at the work of “giants” but of the Roman period. Though did the Romans make it to Denmark, and did they do much building? Or is it just that the English author of the original Beowulf had seen impressive things like Leeds? And again, isn’t it like Tolkein to have a land so rich in old bits of big masonry?)

Once Beowulf is dead, his young helper berates the other of the thanes who bravely ran away. They are, he says, bad knights and should give their rings back.

But the poem’s narrator then has a go at Beowulf too; he’s brought his end upon himself by being too keen on dragon gold. He should, of course, have put all his trust in the one, splendid God who looks after us all and not thought about vulgar stuff like treasure.

Which rather comes from nowhere. Beowulf fought the dragon because it had been killing people, and he only seems to notice the old gold after the dragon’s defeated. Up until that point, it felt a bit like Tennyson's Ulysses (because I have read more than one whole poem), where old Ulysses wants one last adventure before he goes and snuffs it.

Crossley-Holland seems to suggest that the debate consists of whether Beowulf is a Christian story or not. I think it’s both; a non-Christian story with some Christian bits tacked on. It’s like the teller is all excited by the fighting and the monsters, but every so often remembers to put in a word for Jesus.

This can make it a little inconsistent, and I’ve sympathy for those historians who struggle to fit the evidence so it’s either one way or the other. But these contradictions, these continuity errors, are an inevitable part of any long-sustained narrative.

Arthur Conan-Doyle, for example, gave James/John Watson two first names and two wives. The effect is even more peculiar when the long-running narrative is the work of many different authors. But we shall leave the debate about Sarah-Jane Smith being 13 in 1964 for another day.

Egypt in a hedge

On Saturday, I went to see Paul Cornell in Faringdon, about 17 miles out of Oxford. There was quite a lot of lager and a furious game of Spoof (where you have to guess the totals of everyone's 0-3). And the next morning, after a late but hearty breakfast and the minute's silence, I was taken for a quick gander round the local highlights.

We admired the spindly folly, which only got planning permission on the proviso that it also had a wood planted so people wouldn't actually see it. I took a picture of the statue called Egypt apparently "rescued" from the Crystal Palace.

Since I'm usually rubbish at taking photos, I'm really rather pleased with how this one came out. Especially since it was taken on my Sony Ericsson flip-phone. (I have looked to see what make it is, but it doesn't seem to say. "M2" seems to be the type of the battery. But is a black phone, with large friendly keys.)

My host then took me into the churchyard to see a cannonball lodged in the side of the wall. Gobber Cromwell apparently had a battery of guns placed where the folly now stands. Only the cannonball is not the relic of the civil wars - it was put there by some eminent Victorians to make the church more exciting.

Lover traitor hero spy

As I noted in last year’s post about Casino Royale (the novel), Commander James Bond of MI6 earned his licence in the Second World War. He compares war stories with a waiter, and was part of the Special Operations Executive – the real secret service which got up to all kinds of neat tricks and nastiness against the Nazis.

Author Ian Fleming had played a role in intelligence matters during the war, and was even named in a bit of misinformation about anti-submarine technologies in 1944. The chap responsible for morsing this lie to Germany was one Eddie Chapman. Chapman was a hugely accomplished double agent: the only British citizen to receive the Iron Cross, a pal of Noel Coward and Dennis Wheatley, and, according to one anonymous lady acquaintance, “an absolute shit”.

He’s the subject of Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag, on which I have just gorged. Cor, it’s a bit good. John le Carre is on the nose in his assessment (which is the reason I picked the book up):

“Superb. Meticulously researched, splendidly told, immensely entertaining and often very moving.”

Chapman was a small-time crook with a thing for explosives who found himself in a jail on Jersey when the Nazis took the island over. He avoids the labour and death camps by offering them use of his explosive skills, and is soon being trained as a German agent. He learns how to hide explosives in pieces of coal and there’s quite a lot on the different ways to make timers from watches and alarm clocks. We get insights into the mechanics of spy work and the ornate puns and anagrams of which the coders were so fond.

The Germans then parachute him into England. He doesn’t fasten his mask properly so nosebleeds down his suit; his pack is so big he gets wedged in the plane’s trapdoor when he tries to bail out, and one of the pilots has to give him a kick; and when he finally hits the ground, he gives himself up to the British.

What follows is a complex tangle of intrigues as the British debrief and then use the double-agent, all the time struggling with his amorality, his need for excitement and cash and loose women. Macintyre musters a huge wealth of newly declassified contemporary reports and more recent interviews to give a comprehensive picture of the man.

As Sir John Masterman, chair of the misinformation-making Twenty Committee noted of his charge,

“Certain persons … had a natural predilection to live in that curious world of espionage and deceit, and who attach themselves with equal facility to one side or the other, so long as their craving for adventure of a rather macabre type is satisfied.”

quoted in Ben Macintyre, Agent Zigzag, p. 71.

But it’s not just that Chapman is such a fascinating, charismatic snake. Macintyre also expertly guides us through the complexities of spy work, the conflicting hierarchies of British and German military and intelligence groups, and the real and perceived events of the war that Chapman reported on, lied about and affected. It is an extraordinary achievement that so richly detailed a study as this is so straightforwardly engaging. In explaining the context, Macintyre packs in a wealth of brilliant top facts and details.

“Between the extremes of collaboration and resistance, the majority of Norwegians maintained a sullen, insolent loathing for the German occupiers. As a mark of opposition many wore paperclips in their lapels. The paperclip is a Norwegian invention: the little twist of metal became a symbol of unity, a society binding together against oppression. Their anger blew cold in a series of small rebellions and acts of incivility. Waiters in restaurants would always serve their countrymen first; Norwegians would cross the street to avoid eye contact with a German and speak only in Norwegian; on buses no one would sit beside a German, even when the vehicle was jam-packed, a form of passive disobedience so infuriating to the Nazi occupiers that it became illegal to stand on a bus if a seat was available.”

Ibid., p. 228.

This wealth of detail means Macintyre can marry up the inconsistencies in people’s accounts with solid facts – and several times he can point out when Chapman lied through his teeth. He also makes us care about the people Chapman met and worked with, so that it’s as rewarding to find out about the post-war lives of Chapman’s guards and mentors as about his later scams.

If there’s any criticism at all, it’s that occasionally the descriptions are a little too overwrought – “the sun that poured through the dining-room window of the Hotel de la Plage formed a dazzling halo around the man sat opposite Betty Farmer” (p. 3).

It’s also interesting that one other of Chapman’s many acquaintances, called upon to as a character witness, was Terence Young. Young later directed the film Triple Cross, in which Christopher Plummer played Chapman – though Macintyre dismisses it as bearing “only a superficial relation to the truth. Chapman was disappointed by it” (p. 318).

But more famously, Young was director of the first two James Bond movies. Many have said that Sean Connery based his performance on Young. But in the cool, funny, sophisticated, adventure-loving rascal that is more Connery’s invention than Fleming’s, there’s clearly something pinched from Agent Zigzag.

Mike, it’s all an illusion

As a special treat, the Dr took me to Brixton last night to see “Elizabeth II”, also known as “The Golden Age”. We had to wait nearly 40 minutes for my pizza, and then discovered we’d been given tickets for the performance three hours previously. Once we’d got seats, the rat from Ratatouille asked if we’d kill a policeman, steal his helmet, shit in it and then send it to his widow. And there were the usual trailers for films that might be a bit like what we’d paid for – films with History and Proper Acting.

They ought to have trailered The Golden Compass, Beowulf and other adventures. Elizabeth is a glorious, good-looking, finely played whirl of national myth-making. But it’s also total baloney.

After the events of film one, we rejoin Elizabeth in 1588. She’s beginning to notice her age, looking sadly at her bits in the mirror. The various princes on offer as husbands are all a bit rubbish – though she does get rid of one of them just when they’re getting on. And then three things happen at once: the imprisoned, former Queen of Scotland seems to be planning something against her; Elizabeth’s brother-in-law the king of Spain seems to be planning something too; and there’s this dashing pirate just turned up with potatoes and good shit for smoking.

Like the first film, this creates a vivid world of huge castles and densely packed poverty. The use of so many period locations and the wealth of bosom-squashing costumes help convince us of a complex and real setting.

That said, it did also remind me quite a lot of The Lord of the Rings. Partly, the castles have the same Norman zigzags and arches pilfered for Middle Earth. But there were also several set-ups in which main characters stood moodily in the foreground, looking out over sprawling CGI. There’s a CGI forest being hacked down; there’s a CGI ocean on fire. There’s also lots of bits of cameras spinning around people, and stirring music over people just gazing.

More importantly, the intrigues of not-a-softy Walter and Elizabeth ride rough-shod through stuff that’s not just well known, it’s on the national curriculum. They don’t use the “heart and stomach of a concrete elephant” speech, and the defeat of the Armada seems to take place in the English Channel.

Yes, the film does make a thing about the queen getting on a bit; she is starting to get a few wrinkles. (Her bare bum still looks quite pert, though.) Yet in 1588 Elizabeth would have been 55 years-old (the same age, for example, as Bill Hartnell in November ’63). The film also concludes, as if it means something, that Philip II then died a mere 10 years later – just five in advance of Elizabeth. These things would both be less troubling if the film didn’t end by reminding us in big letters when it was Elizabeth got born and died.

Mary Queen of Scots was French and spoke with a French accent. She was executed a good four years before the Armada set sail, and when they raised her traitorous, severed head to the audience, it dropped from the wig and bounced across the floor. Though I can see that would have spoiled the effect the film went for.

It would have been good to at least have glimpsed her son, which would have prefigured the inevitable third movie. It would have been good to understand that Elizabeth had already spared Mary’s life; and that the Scottish wanted to kill her.

It was also odd how much this was a war with Spain, and not with the rest of (what the Elizabethan’s would have perceived as) the world. Philip II didn’t just have the Catholic church on his side; he was part of a vast sprawl of interconnecting families that pretty much ruled all of Europe.

Importantly, he’d also been married to Elizabeth’s elder half-sister, Bloody Mary. They married in Winchester Cathedral (I think one of the locations of the film, based on what seemed a familiar bit of cloister). Though English law didn’t acknowledge him as any kind of heir (he was not, in Mary’s lifetime, a king of England), this was also part of his claim.

It’s also important that England’s monarchy had been much fought over for more than a century until Elizabeth’s grandfather won the battle of Bosworth Field – just a century prior to the Armada. Without a husband, without an heir, Elizabeth left England with an uncertain future…

I did like the stuff about Elizabeth setting a precedent by executing a queen for crimes against the state. There’s a nice exchange with Walsingham, where he explains that kings and princes may be above such things as legalities, but the law is there to protect the people. The precedent Elizabeth sets by condemning Mary will fall on Mary’s grandson…

I also quite liked what they did with the hubris of holy war – there’s a rather nice bit of scarlet-robed priests tiptoeing away from Philip. But I’m not sure it really worked in the way I think it was meant: rather than Elizabeth’s tolerant, protestant humility being more on the side of the angels, it felt like two fingers to God.

This wasn’t helped by a silly contrivance, in which Elizabeth steps out into the drizzle in her nightie to watch the Armada from what I think is meant to be the white cliffs at Dover Tilbury. Yes, it contrasts her simple English humility with the pride of the Spanish, but she’s liable at least to catch a sniffle. And, when they then show the storm and great waves crashing against rocks, I thought for a moment she’d been swept into the sea. (Where a strong swimming pirate would be ready to rescue her.)

There’s also much made of a horse on a ship that’s then seen swimming in the water – which just reminded me of the flood-confused bloodhound towards the end of the Coens’ Oh Brother. A fine line exists between the profound and the stupid.

The Armada wasn’t just destroyed in the Channel, but had to make a slow journey round the whole of the British Isles, caught be more storms and wreckers and starvation. It was an arduous and ever more humiliating defeat, and there’s an argument that the enemy was defeated by the whole of Britain (and not just some brave pirates and their fire-ships). That would, surely, have worked better with the themes of the film.

There’s some tedious stuff about destiny and the rise and fall of great empires, which I assume was a call out to any Americans watching. The holy war against the infidel Brits (and their American allies) also seemed a bit too unsubtle. I don’t remember the first film being so crude about the links to today.

It also concludes with a rather desperate attempt to then claim the period that followed as the golden age. But England was still at war in Europe, and its future uncertain what Elizabeth not having an heir. And the killing of the Queen of Scots had set a precedent that would define the next century… I came away feeling that the film wanted it both ways, that 1588 was the best of times and the worst of times.

This stuff bothered me as we made our way home (on trains full of middle-aged punks who’d seen the Sex Pistols). It’s a good, enjoyable film but it didn’t need to be quite so much hokum.

Jonathan Ross’s review on Film 007 was effectively that it looks so wondrous and is played so well we shouldn’t worry about a little monkeying about with the history. There’s probably an argument that these tinkerings make the plot structure and character journeys more cohesive, in ways which Robert McKee might approve.

I imagined what I’d say to him in response, and an analogy he’d understand. It bothers me like the Joker killing Bruce Wayne’s parents in Batman. No, it doesn’t really matter that the films excise Joe Chill. But it adds a convenient portentousness to the relationship of the two lead characters if they’ve always been linked.

“This is a story,” it says, rather than, “this really happened.” The “truth” is good enough for the story, and you don’t make it any better by changing it. And by changing it, making it more explicitly a story, you’re implicitly saying, “These events don’t really matter…”

Damn puzzling bliss

I’ve spoken before about my concerns with writers’ biographies – that they tend to place too much emphasis on the Real Events and Real People who influenced a writer, denying the possibility that authors often Make It Up.

But there’s a flipside to this; the stories can influence the writer. Something you invent in your brain can then become something real. You might find yourself quoting one of your characters, or doing something that’s more them than you. Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle would apparently use phrases he’d created for Sherlock Holmes – “the game’s afoot” etc. And later in his life he even played the detective.

Arthur and George is a novelised version of Conan-Doyle’s first major investigation. Geroge Edalji has been in prison for three years for mutilating livestock. Conan-Doyle doesn’t just believe but he knows the man to be innocent; the mild-mannered, meek and myopic little solicitor could never do such a thing. But George, whose Dad was from India before he became a Church of England vicar, refuses to believe that the police and the jury may have been biased by the colour of his skin.

The book is not merely about this miscarriage of justice, the appeal and the search for the real culprit. Arthur and George don’t even meet for the first 300 pages. We follow their separate lives developing, from their earliest memories to the strange circumstances that ultimately have them collide. Along the way, we learn something of their view of the world, their expectations and aims. George, for example, has a rather serious, cartesian outlook that does not easily entertain fantasy.

“George finds himself increasingly preoccupied by the civil connection between passengers and the railway company. A passenger buys a ticket, and at that moment, with consideration given and received, a contract springs into being. But ask that passenger what kind of contract he or she has entered into, what obligations are laid upon the parties, what claim for compensation might be pursued against the railway company in case of lateness, breakdown or accident, and answer would come there none. This may not be the passenger’s fault: the ticket alludes to a contract, but its detailed terms are only displayed in certain main-line stations and at the offices of the railway company – and what busy traveller has the time to make a diversion and examine them? Even so, George marvels at how the British, who gave railways to the world, treat hem as a mere means of convenient transport, rather than as an intense nexus of multiple rights and responsibilities.”

Julian Barnes, Arthur and George, p. 70.

Barnes is good at creating distinct and convincing characters. Though sections are marked “Arthur” and “George” by turns (and occasionally given over to other characters), he flits between perspectives in adjacent paragraphs. This would confuse and irritate if done by a less-gifted author; it’s vexing to note that we never once lose track of whose eyes we’re looking through.

Of at least equal importance to the criminal mystery is the matter of life after death. We see Arthur’s first inclinations to and growing interest in the spiritist movement, and the final section of the book deals with a particular séance.

“What she makes of it is that her brother is confusing religion with his love of fixing things. He sees a problem – death – and he looks for a way of solving it: such is his nature.”

Ibid., p. 273.

Barnes touches on Conan-Doyle’s need to believe in the spirits, as much as his need to believe in honour and chivalry. It also alludes to a nation’s need to believe after the impact of World War One. At one point there are thousands of people in the Albert Hall, all desperate NOT to grieve.

This plot element doesn’t entirely connect to the horse-ripping stuff, other than in the general sense of protagonists struggling to find answers despite the weight of people’s ideological prejudice.

That’s not to say it doesn’t work. (There’s some good advice on writing sitcoms, that you can have two plot-lines running concurrently that don’t need to tie up together). It’s more that the book doesn't have the same neat and convenient structure as the stories Conan-Doyle himself wrote. He started with an ending and worked backwards. This is more rambling, and we’re not sure where it might take us.

What links Arthur and George then is that they both see a self-evident truth and are baffled that others do not share the view. With George it’s his innocence, with Arthur it’s Geroge’s case, his own noble behaviour and the truth of a soul’s survival after death.

Like quite a few writers I could mention, Doyle often can’t fathom that people might not agree with him; that they still might think differently after he’s explained it to them. He is a passionate and able ally to George, but George also finds him a little reckless and over-confident. Doyle only once considers that he might have acted wrongly (in his behaviour while conducting an affair), but soon dismisses the very possibility.

But we finish with George and his scepticism, despite the allure of what’s claimed. The book finishes on questions that have been asked all along. What do we know and how do we know it? And can we admit when we’re wrong?

Knowledge of all fonts

Despite the slings and arrows of outrage loosed by the Dr and Codename Moose, last night I watched Imagine. Many and various designers spoke of their love and their hate for the Swiss typeface Helvetica, which is now 50 years old. Every now and then they even said something intelligible.

The Dr stomped off to bed in the midst of yet another talking head talking as if from their bum. I persevered, with much muttering at the telly. The gist seemed to be that Helvetica’s a neutral typeface that will simply go with anything. It’s used for signs and shop windows and throughout the evil corporate world.

There was little effort to really explain why that might be, though. Instead the documentary seemed satisfied with arty creatives damning it just Good or Bad. They spoke of its politics – or rather it's apolitics, since this lusty old tart will write beside anything. And missed the pretty fundamental point that it is BECAUSE it goes with anything that it is so used.

The dudes spoke of “neutrality” which didn’t impose any additional meaning. Simple, straightforward letters suggest simple straightforwardness. It’s direct without being bossy, serious without being too formal, clear without being childish.

Helvetica is an unfussy typeface. There’s no fiddly serifed ends to the individual letters, no complexity of thick and thin strokes. The Os are simply round not clever ovals, and it all seems pretty straightforward. It’s usually got a lot of space around the individual letters, so (as one dude said) it’s more about the space than the letters. Still, they did then go on to show a whole load of squeezed-up examples without even noting the difference.

I suspect this simplicity means there’s less information in it for us to process as readers, which means we take in the meaning more quickly. This would be why it’s so good to use in warnings and shop windows.

This is where it matters what you’re trying to say with such letters. Warnings and shop windows must communicate a message in what may be no more than a glance. Understandably, that’s not the kind of attention many designers would hope for their creations. They want stuff that people gaze at and unpick for years and years to come.

But a contempt for a typeface that’s so readily readable is just a contempt for the reader. That was made especially obvious when one designer showed one piece of his work; he’d found an interview dull so laid it out in incomprehensible Wing Dings.

Oddly, the documentary seemed to assume that clarity was a modern invention – as if we’d had no legible typefaces before the 1950s. There was especially ranting from this commentator when they used the complex scrawl of the New York tube map to show how easy Helvetica is on the eye. Beck and Johnston did it better a whole bastard generation before.

Basically, then, the problem seems to be not a fault of the typeface (whose ubiquity proves its success) but that it is now a bit too common. But again there were no alternatives offered – my beloved, graceful Gill Sans is just one of many go-with-anything fonts.

But more, I think all these things depend on the unease compromise between form and function, between what something looks like and what it is for. And the documentary could never say anything of value when it entirely ignored the latter.

My guide for this evening’s festivities has put on her lipstick, which I suspect means it is time to go out now. We think we know where it is we are heading to, but a colleague says it sounds like the blonde leading the blond.

Sticker shift

I am currently writing a sticker-book. This is a first for me, and can be added to the great and peculiar range of things wrought that are not about time-travelling aliens (and so do not appear on my Wikipedia entry).

In so doing, I whizz with In-Design: APPLE+ E inserts an image; you warp the edges of the box with the oddly mono-buttonular mouse; then SHIFT + APPLE + ALT + E resizes the picture to fit the space. It's an odd fiddle to do it with one hand.

But this is not all that is a bit odd. For the first time in more than five years, I am working at the same place from Monday to Friday. I have two whole weeks of this extraordinary method, in which you finish what you're doing at 5.30 in the evening - whatever state it might be in - and then pick it up again at 9.30 the next morning.

My other commitments must fit around this unaccustomed routine. But I have been interviewed only this evening by Doctor Who's Magazine, and press on with bits of reading and annotation. Some other, less pressing commitments - some not-too-hastily due scribbling, speaking to the Dr and playing Scrabulous on Facebook - may fall a little behind.

Still, it helps that two birthdaying pals have overlapped their birthdays and are both in the same pub tomorrow. With distinct elegance, I can expend 50% less effort on each.

How ironic; I can't think of a title for this one

I have the signature of Nimbos to corroborate that what follows is my joke, and not at all that of Señor Will Howells.

Polly from Doctor Who's surname is ffey-Savatron.

Thank you.

Puritanical headwear

A long day yesterday in the fens, cobbling together research. There's this thing I've got in mind that needs me doing some reading. Got to the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon pretty much as it opened and made a lot of notes. The place is about the size of my living room, but free and crammed with useful things. And there's two whole portraits of... what it is I'm interested in. The helpful fellow behind the counter looked up some stuff for me, too. And on the way back to the station I had a quite nice pasty.

Train to Peterborough (where, annoyingly, I could have looked something else up; though I only realised that a couple of hours later), and then a long wait for a train to Ely. Lots of grumbling from lots of people with luggage who were late getting to Liverpool and Stansted.

M. joined me at Ely and we took the scenic route into town, along the river and through the jubilee gardens. Oliver Cromwell's old house is also the tourist infomation centre, a stripey old ex-pub now full of posh jams and chocolate. We paid the £4 each for a tour, and were narrated through wood-pannelled rooms with dwarf-sized interconnections. Made some more notes, watched a film about drainage narrated by John Craven, giggled in the "haunted" room and tried on lots of hats.

(M. took plenty more of me looking foolish, which I'll post when he bungs 'em over.)

We then poked our heads into Ely Cathedral, but thought it all too expensive to go further. Some school girls amused themselves with the floor-set labyrinth and M. explained that the cathedral's tower is the "lantern of the fens". John Craven's film had shown us how Ely used to be an island, and even as recently as 1947 suffered 100 square miles of flood.

Pottered down the high street, which set off alarms bells in me 'cos I grew up in a similar cosy market town. The same genteel, Georgian (I guess) buildings that are now Woolworths and Clinton Cards. Was just about to say that there didn't seem anything for the young folks when we spotted some teens looking bored outside the Spar.

Stopped off at the pub and then a slow journey back to London on a train with an ever-in-use loo. Thence to Nimbos for bacon sandwiches, 'cos we are so daring.

Head bone’s connected to the...

On Friday night, having spent the afternoon with young actors and Lance from Doctor Who, the Dr and I made our way to the Institute of Archaeology for a talk about some dead faces.

The authors of “Living images – Egyptian funerary portraits in the Petrie Museum” each spoke, giving context to the writing of the book and to the portraits themselves. The portraits were discovered while Flinders Petrie was looking for something else entirely. But he found a great cache of sarcophagi, each painted with their contents.

The sarcophagi in question are from the period when Egypt was governed by Romans (as seen in the TV show Rome). Which is also, of course, the Dr’s period and she loves the details in the faces. The Roman ex-pats couldn’t afford the gold opulence that was once lavished on mummified pharaohs, so a portrait was the next best thing. These portraits, and the grave goods found with them, give all kinds of clues about the Roman middle-classes – their clothes, jewellery, diets and lives.

Petrie’s interest, though, was in their use for phrenology. His notebooks detail how he eagerly reaped the shrunken heads of the mummies – as well as the portraits of them alive. Skull A, says his notes, goes with Portrait A.

Phrenology, and its emphasis on the supremacy of particular races based on the shape of their heads, is less in vogue today. This is because it is bonkers. Over the years, many museums and institutions have quietly returned or got shot of their less savoury human remains. The authors of the portraits book believed the skulls Petrie collected were long lost when they started writing their book. Only for them to turn up in a box at the V&A. Matching the skulls to the portraits gives a sense of how good the likenesses are.

The Dr, though, is still troubled by Petrie’s head-snatching antics. The Egyptians were keen on their heads, you see. Heads weren’t just where your brains were, but your heart and soul as well. (BBC Four’s recent repeat of Magnus Magnusson’s trip to the 1972 Tutankhamun exhibition included an ornate and uncomfy-looking head rest.) So removing the heads from the mummies is especially problematic.

This makes studying, displaying or even acknowledging the heads a little problematic, what with the new but relatively untested rules set down in the Human Tissues Act (2004) – which came into force last September.

It’s a complex and controversial topic, though I’m rather of the side of the late Sir Mortimer Wheeler.

“If you dig up a man with bowls and things all round him, like those people we dug up at the east end of Maiden Castle… They were dead, they’d been dead a long time and they were going to be dead a long time. They’re still dead. But round them were all sorts of possessions which were of interest to us. They helped us to put a little piece of our history into perspective which we otherwise wouldn’t have had, and so on. They enabled us to reconstruct the world and the history within which we lived. And I think that’s worthwhile. We do know harm to these poor chaps. When I’m dead you can did me up ten times. I won’t haunt you… much.”

Chronicle: Sir Mortimer (BBC Two, 1973)

And, glibly and probably wrongly, I forgive Petrie a lot for one very good joke. His notebooks include a sketch of the excavation, showing where the sarcophagi were recovered. And the building where he kept all the mummies heads is marked “Skullery”.

The goldfish bowl

One of the many questions asked by Jeremy Paxman in his book “The Political Animal” is what effect standing for Parliament has on the lives of your children. Living in the public eye, of being some kind of exemplar of proper living to the community, can affect every moment of a child’s life and colour any interaction they have with other people. Paxman gives the example of one spawn-of-MP who wrote to discourage other parents from standing.

I thought of this as I made my way through “The Enchanted Places”, an account of the real people and places that informed the writing of Winnie the Pooh, and of the impact the Pooh books had on those same people and places. It’s a rather meandering and melancholic book, and the saddest thing about it is that its author is a grown-up Christopher Robin.

Christopher Milne was 54 when he wrote the book, running a small bookshop where he felt both obliged and embarrassed about stocking his father’s books. He’s frank about not caring that his old toys were sold off to America, and told a family friend he had no interest in having back the letter he’d written her when he was 12.

Milne’s disquiet with the adventures of his alter-ego are complex, and must be teased from his accounts of the houses he lived in, of his nanny and of the parts of the wood where he played. It’s no help in sorting fiction from reality that the two are so intertwined. Photographs show the meticulous care EH Sheppard took to portray the Poohsticks Bridge correctly, as well as how accurately he depicted Christopher Robin’s girlish haircut and clothes. And Milne admits he couldn’t have been happier in his days playing at Cotchford Farm.

A shy boy, Milne still enjoyed taking part in the pageants and recordings where he had to perform as himself. But it’s his subsequent life, as a bullied and teased schoolboy, that seem to have taken their toll. He has inherited his parents’ attitude to the fan mail, requests and questions (his mother referred to this blanket non-response as “Wol”, since Wol says wisely that doing nothing is “the best thing”). The book, says Milne, might placate some of those who’ve written, and maybe explain why he will not respond.

There’s a strong sense that Milne has been victimised because of his childhood role in a fairy tale. He remains cross, after some forty years, that a journalist once fabricated his words to make him more precocious. He is annoyed that his own childhood and relationships are so picked over, and by the assumptions strangers make of him. He cluckingly tells of a visitor to his bookshop thrilled to see him writing, a thrill he punctures because he’s merely writing an invoice.

“If my father had a talent for writing, my mother had an un-talent. Why should people assume that I ought to have inherited the one rather than the other? If talents always dominated un-talents we should today be a world of Newtons, Shakespeares, Leonardos and saints. Blessed are the untalented!

“Writing (so it seems to me) is a combination of two separate skills: the ability to use words and the ability to create with words; rather in the way that building a house demands two separate skills, the bricklayer’s and the architect’s. A writer, in other words, is simultaneously a craftsman and a designer.”

Christopher Milne, The Enchanted Places, p. 135.

But Milne’s past is not only difficult because of the attention of strangers. His relationship with his father is cordial but guarded, and his own struggles to find a role for himself as an adult coincide with his father’s diminishing career. He says he’s unsure how much his parents sieved and edited the requests for appearances, but to a modern reader their attitude to all they put their son through seems at best naïve. He’s also guarded about exploring their thoughts and motives, admitting worry about what he might find.

Milne also seems to suggest that he disappointed his parents. He seems to have been an awkward and timid only child. His mother hoped he would marry the “Alice” who accompanied him to the changing of the guard in the poem – the same Alice to whom the book is dedicated. (There’s no reason given why he didn’t marry her.)

By the time he writes the book his parents have died and the old house and toys have been sold off. He doesn’t even mention the sale of film rights to Disney, or the peculiar film that resulted in which a posh boy somehow lives in a jungle with real (not stuffed toy) bears and tigers. (Which is especially odd, because that first film rather deftly makes it part of the plot that this is all happening inside a book... )

Often Milne is hazy on dates and details, so that things happen in a jumbly fog of upbringing. I found myself wishing a ghostwriter could have contributed a little basic research. There are just three sources: AA Milne’s own autobiography; a transcript of that single letter written by 12 year-old Christopher Robin; and his own memories as an adult. Milne resents the conjurings that surround his family’s life, based on guesses and speculation. But his loose and woolly reminiscences don’t exactly dispel any myths.

It struck me that rather than some insight into the writing process or the effect of childhood fame, this is a memoir of lost innocence, just as is “The House at Pooh Corner”. Milne himself argues that that book is as much about his father’s own childhood and loss as it is about his son’s. Both books tantalise adults with longing for those long-lost sunny days. Yet Christopher Robin’s own account – and despite its title – denies us the consolation that somewhere,

“a little boy and His bear will always be playing.”

Something must be done

I have blogged my enthusiasm for George Orwell before (his views of politics and the English language; his time in Spain during the civil war). And back when I was caught up in too much writing of my own, I said I’d been making notes on his essays.

The Penguin Books’ edition of Essays was first published in 1984, as part of a general celebration of Eric that fateful year. The content was snaffled from four previously published volumes of essays, journalism and letters published in the late sixties. Many of these works are now available on the Internet (indeed, that’s where I first read his “Politics and the English Langauge” (1946)).

There are chilling, insightful accounts of poverty from his time down and out in Paris, of attending a hanging and of being an ineffectual policeman in Burma. He writes about the wars he’s been involved in – on the front in Spain and in London during the Blitz. There are toads and sport and murder, politics and political figures. Yet the most striking thing about this selection is how much Orwell had to say about writing.

As well as “Politics and the English Language”, Orwell discusses his own motivation for writing, his own time in a second-hand bookshop and as a reviewer, and his plea to us all to buy more books on the basis of their cost relative to cigarettes. There are essays on the work of Dickens, Kipling, Arthur Koestler, Tolstoy, Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”, HG Wells, Wodehouse and WB Yeats. He also addresses more esoteric subjects: boys’ adventure weeklies, Habberton’s “Helen’s Babies”, Hornung’s “Raffles” books, the broadcast of poetry on the radio, governmental controls on writing, nonsense poetry, even the appeal of “good bad books”. Whatever his subjects, his work shows a broad and comprehensive reading, and a description of his own bookshelves proves his eclectic tastes.

It’s no surprise that there’s a strong political worldview underpinning much of his output. Orwell continually argues that good writing makes us care about the lot of the protagonists, and that this empathy with strangers must surely beg broader questions about our ways of life.

“[Dickens] is always preaching a sermon, and that is the final secret of his inventiveness. For you can only create if you can care. Types like Squeers and Micawber could not have been produced by a hack writer looking for something to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea.”

Orwell, “Charles Dickens”, in Essays, p. 75

But these essays are not just vehicles for his political ravings. Orwell is also good at showing his working, tying his ideas to his own practical, often gruelling, experience.

“[Kipling] is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so, but not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling has never been in a battle, but his vision of war is realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone if terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or what is happening except in his own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other troops, frequently run away.”

Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling”, ibid., p. 209.

Astute observations such as this, peppered by a wealth of top facts, make this a riveting and punchy read.

“The phrases and neologisms which we take over and use without remembering their origin do not always come from writers we admire. It is strange, for instance, to hear the Nazi broadcasters referring to the Russian soldiers as ‘robots’, thus unconsciously borrowing a word from a Czech democrat whom they would have killed if they could have lad hands on him.”

Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling”, ibid., p. 211.

In fact, the essays are proof of the manifesto put forward in “Politics and the English language”. The plain style of the prose makes his arguments and ideas simple to follow and engage with. He avoids clichés in favour of vivid, new images, some of which don’t half stick in the mind. For examples, there’s the wartime coalition government, and the problems of it having moral purpose beyond achieving victory.

“It is at best a government of compromise, with Churchill riding two horses like a circus acrobat.”

Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn”, ibid., p. 180.

Or there’s his description of a bathhouse for down-and-outs.

“It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed: the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of holes, held together with dirt.”

Orwell, “The Spike”, ibid., p. 8.

Note that his plain style is not devoid of any feeling or artistry, as some of his detractors have claimed. Orwell is all for clarity, but he’s also keen on the texture and depth of good writing.

“The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dicken’s writing is the unnecessary detail … The unmistakable Dickens touch, the thing nobody else would have thought of, is the baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it. How does this advance the story? The answer is that it doesn’t.”

Orwell, “Charles Dickens”, ibid., pp. 68-9.

As a whole then, the essays show Orwell testing, re-examining and putting into practice a literary rather than political manifesto. Yes, Orwell’s politics inform his reading (he critiques Marx as he applies him to Dickens). But there are also glimpses of his reading affecting his politics and work.

For example, his essay on the work of Arthur Koestler was written in September 1944, before he’d written a similar conclusion to 1984:

“[Koestler’s] Darkness at Noon describes the imprisonment and death of an Old Bolshevik, Rubashov, who first denies and ultimately confesses to crimes which he is well aware he has not committed. The grown-upness, the lack of surprise or denunciation, the pity and irony with which the story is told, show the advantage, when one is handling a theme of this kind, of being a European. The book reaches the stature of tragedy, whereas an English or American writer could at most have made it into a polemical tract.”

Orwell, “Arthur Koestler”, ibid., pp. 272-3.

That his reading shapes his own ideas is important, because for all Orwell is persuasive he is not dictatorial. He has a case to put in each essay, yet I was struck by how much he seemed to engage response, as if each were concluded with the words, “But what do you think?”

This dialogue of ideas is partly, I suspect, because by puzzling out what these other writers are up to, Orwell seeks to make sense of his own stuff. But the range of his reading and the consistency of depth he applies to high literature and low are not merely a mark of inquisitiveness. They suggest Orwell is searching high and low for answers to questions nobody’s asking. This is backed up in his more political writing with his dissatisfaction with both sides of the argument – whether they’re factions warring with weapons or in the popular press.

“Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old – generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently, two view-points are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another … The central problem – how to prevent power from being abused – remains unsolved.”

Orwell, “Charles Dickens”, ibid., pp. 47-8.

It is not just his dissatisfaction with the rigid (and petty) oppositions of party politics that struck a chord with me. It was also the realisation as I worked through the essays that Orwell’s radicalism wasn’t all it has been painted. Yes, he was a socialist, yes he fought for the communists in Spain, but it would be wrong to see him as a feverish revolutionary campaigning to tear down English institutions.

Perhaps his motives are best shown in “Such, such were the joys”, which undermines the vision of public school as some very heaven idyll. Orwell seems taken by the history and traditions of his own school, but speaks of endemic injustices, where boys are treated and punished differently depending on the wealth of their parents. He’s still perplexed and livid about the unfairness of being punished for things he hadn’t done or – in the case of bedwetting – that he had no control over.

We can follow this early sense of fair play into his accounts of a hanging or the shooting of an elephant, where he cannot see the sense behind the official response, and rails against acting solely to satisfy the baser cravings of the mob. It’s especially important that his anger is in part directed at his own complicity. This keen sense of justice for all, whatever their circumstances, also explains why he would become a vagabond to expose the misery of the poor.

How does this affect his assessment of other writers? Orwell applies the same innate sense of fair play to the politics implicit in writing. He critiques the worldviews expressed by the writers, and explores how they themselves address need and inequality. Yet he doesn’t just dismiss someone for being ignorant of the world around them – his defence of Wodehouse being a case in point. His sympathies are as all-embracing as the breadth of his reading. He enjoys light comedy and boys’ own “shockers”. He approves of poetry and propaganda. What he loves is work that provokes a response, than excites and engages as it entertains. And what concerns him is activity that does not engage with or empathise with other points of view, and that ultimately forces its meaning.

“It is not merely that ‘power corrupts’: so also do the ways of attaining power. Therefore, all efforts to regenerate society by violent means lead to the cellars of the OGPU, Lenin leads to Stalin, and would have come to resemble Stalin if he had happened to survive.”

Orwell, “Arthur Koestler”, ibid., p. 274.

"It's all Cornell's fault"

The new Doctor Who site Tardis Travels has posted up an interview with me. Leslie McMurtry grills me about the Doctor Who short story competition (from back when I was sifting through the entries) and about writing in general.

Construction maximus

I’ve made a start on the great stalagmite of books assigned as “quite like to read”. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was one I picked up for the train back from Sheffield, having heard so many fine things about it – winner of a Richard and Judy award, shortlisted for the Booker and blogged about by Phil.

It held me captivated from start to finish, the straightforward prose style drawing you into a complex and enigmatic epic that well deserves its praise. I’m still trying to puzzle it all out…

As my well-informed readers will know (though I didn’t ‘till I started to read it), the book tells six distinct stories, set over several hundred years. Each story stars an archetypal character, and though each of these reminded me of other books I’d read, Mitchell’s ability to give them distinct voices and to turn their lives upside down makes for thrilling reading.

It’s fiddly to explain, but each of the first five stories is cut short in an abrupt cliffhanger, and concluded later on. The structure, to use the A-level labelling of rhymes in poetry, goes A1, B1, C1, D1, E1, F, E2, D2, C2, B2, A2.

Story A is told by Adam Ewing, an American scholar exploring the Chatham Islands in the early nineteenth century. In some respects, this reminded me of Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers – with the naïve narrator similarly giving the reader more insight to his voyage than he himself comprehends. It also covers similar ground about native populations being wiped out.

Ewing’s exploration includes him stumbling through the roof of some kind of primitive shrine. My immediate thought, having seen from the book’s blurb that we’d be visiting the future, was that this was some alien spaceship… But Ewing vows to keep the place secret so that his shipmates don’t exploit the discovery. And as he sets out again to sea with them, he’s suddenly taken sick. And then –

We’re left hanging in the middle of a sentence.

Story B begins some hundred years later, and thousands of miles to the west. Robert Frobisher writes to his friend (and lover) Sixsmith about his adventures in Belgium. Frobisher has been cast out by his wealthy father and is making his own roguish way – just ahead of a wake of unpaid bills and scandals. He’s a very different character to Ewing, with a voice so distinct that it makes for striking contrast.

Mitchell himself acknowledges that “certain scenes in Robert Frobisher’s letters owe debts of inspiration to Delius: As I Knew Him by Eric Fenby (Icon Books, 1966; originally G Bell & Sons, 1936).” We follow Frobisher as he ingratiates himself with an elderly, syphilitic composer, bedding the man’s wife at the same time as helping him finish a number of late compositions.

What links Frobisher to Ewing is not immediately clear – there’s no apparent plot, theme or structure to link them. They could not be any more different. But as Frobisher scours his host’s exemplary library for items he might sell, he stumbles across the first half of Ewing’s story, the half that we’ve just read.

(The only insight we get from this is Frobisher pointing out what we’ve only begun to suspect: that Ewing’s “sickness” is an attempted murder.)

Story C is a “shocker” in short bursts of chapters, the book’s only third-person account. Luisa Rey is the daughter of a famous war correspondent, struggling to follow in his footsteps. She’s chasing a story about the local nuclear plant and an internal report damning its safety. And in doing so, she meets an old scientist called Sixsmith – forty years after Robert Frobisher wrote to him.

Again, it’s a very different story to what has gone before, told in a distinct and fast-paced style. It mentions Watergate itself, but the all-pervading moral decay reminded me much more of Chinatown (a seventies film for all it’s a period piece).

Luisa Rey isn’t just linked to the previous story because she reads Sixsmith’s letters. She’s also got the same comet-shaped birthmark, and it’s strongly suggested that she might have been Frobisher in a previous life. The Guardian review suggests that the six characters in the book are all reincarnations of the same person (a trick done previously in Kim Stanley Robsinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt).

But that’s not the case; indeed the next protagonist pooh-poohs the idea. Only Luisa and Frobisher are explicitly linked this way, which adds a haunting aspect to the pot-boiling thriller. The third person telling also means we can leave the first part of Luisa’s story on a particularly nail-biting cliff…

Story D is set in the present day, with the flamboyant Timothy Cavendish reaping the whirlwind that follows his publishing the memoirs of a London gangster. Cavendish is an acerbic story-teller, and his tale features some great and unexpected twists. The observant scorn of contemporary mores – as well as the way it keeps pulling the rug out from under us – is a little reminiscent of Alexei Sayle, but that is no bad thing. To speak more would spoil its surprises.

Story E is told by Sonmi~451, a clone bred to work in a fast-food franchise in not-too-future Korea. The battery existence Sonmi has only ever known is punctured by a sudden epiphany, and we learn she’s been intellectually augmented as part of a revolutionary experiment. A pawn in the cruel games of this society’s elite, her story is at once a thriller, a satire of rampant consumerism and of Communism, and a play on Soylent Green.

The middle story is the only one not split in two. Zachry’s spelling, punctuation and post-apocalyptic world reminded me of Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker. At first it seems the sophisticated visitor come to review Zachry’s island is just studying comparative savages. As the story continues we get hints of how much has changed since Sonmi’s time. I only realised towards the end we were in the same group of islands that Ewing explored in Story A. By Zachry’s time, the white settlers who wiped out the savages are living no less enlightened lives…

After Zachry, we go back to each of the five previous narrators for closure, each in turn. Knowing the future, and having had hints of the endings to come (Cavendish, for example, concludes Story D2 by spoiling the end of C2), adds an extra suspense to this second half. But it becomes clear that the links between the stories are not so obvious as reincarnation or some other great plot revelation.

Frobisher is, for example, no longer just an engaging rapscallion – his adventures also have something to say about the nature and value of our existence.

“People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semi-solids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it’ll no longer function.”

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, p. 489.

Since the book’s chronological “story” (as distinct from the structure by which it is told) starts and ends in the same group of islands, it seems this is a history of the rise and fall of enlightenment, as understood by the west. There’s a case for the conquerors having become the conquered, of the world of technology and genetic engineering hanged with a rope of its own making.

There’s also a sense of the characters being broadly divided into two groups: those who fight to benefit themselves, and those who fight to benefit others. This informs earlier events in the book, putting bullying, corruption and rampant sex in an epic historical context.

But it is Ewing’s final thoughts as he finishes his journey that bind the myriad happenings and themes. Without giving too much away about any of the stories, his conclusion is that we – as individuals, as a species – can only reap what we first ourselves sow.

There are other things (some listed on the book’s Wikipedia entry): the difference a peaceable individual can make; they way we are remembered. These people are so vividly alive in their own stories, and long-dead in everyone else’s.

Most of all, these individual lives are all engaging enough reading. But taken together, they are transcendent.