Height and Depth - the drowning of Dendale

Apologies to Tom Blackwell for lightly modifying his excellent photograph of Thruscross Reservoir under license
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Reginald Hill wrote the Dalziel and Pascoe novel 'On Beulah Height' in 1998 and it follows the mores and tropes of detective fiction of the time in dealing with the agony of murdered children in a fairly superficial, even entertaining, way. The Depth of this story is not so much in the detection (or having well rounded and flawed detectives which has subsequently become standard in the genre) as having a small glimpse into the child's eye view. This comes in two art forms. The folk tale monster hiding under a stone in Nina and the Nix and Mahler's songs for dead children Kindertotenlieder which (spoiler alert) the abused child wields as a weapon of revenge. Added to this is a sense of the isolated rural North England landscape drowned so that the masses of Manchester (or wherever) can pour it down the sink. As in Thruscross bodies, headstones and a sense of historical continuity are disrupted in the drowning of the fictional Dendale. So much is inevitable to enable the living to go on dying. Just a shame that Reginald Hill is now amongst them. 

PS. If you want to enjoy Hill without feeling the novel is overshadowed by the late great Warren Clarke's TV portrayal of Dalziel then I heartily recommend The Woodcutter of 2010. It will surprise you.

The Last Hundred Days of a Fictional Poet

Patrick McGuinness is an extraordinary man worthy of his own parade of big black cars and well-behaved bystanders waving flags and cheering. In this case it is Ceaușescu's regime and the fall of Communism in Romania that provide the emperor's new clothes and form the background to this well written and entertaining fact based fiction (if you'll forgive that description because it does read like a factual memoir). The writing is delicious in it's own right because of it's precision and grim faced humour. That's because McGuinness is really a poet. But you can't make a living as a poet. So by profession he is an academic. He presumably does this fiction lark as a semi-lucrative diversion. That's really annoying - that he can invade other people's memories, other people's countries and other people's professions and be so exquisitely expressive in all of them.

The old maths teacher tortoise drawling, stretching and fainting in coils

There's a lot of nonsense written about Lewis Carroll's Alice stories so I don't intend to add to it here. I recently re-read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the extended version in Alice's Adventures under Ground and Through the Looking Glass and probably enjoyed them less than you'd think so I have only a few simple observations.

There's a tendency to see Charles Dodgson's life through a contemporary looking glass whether that's unhealthy relationships with children or sixties drug induced psychedelia. This is, as I say, complete nonsense. 

What comes through most strongly in my reading is a profound other worldly imagination that is wild and wonderful and also curiously Victorian and moral in its outlook. Don't look here for deep characterisation - you won't find the inner turmoil of a modern psychological fantasy. So it is difficult to identify strongly with the characters, even, or especially, Alice. Dodgson's note about the stories is steeped in very conventional Christian feeling and sentiment. What he wanted to do was entertain and amaze small children. This he does mesmerically in concept and comes up with great images and some really natty one liners in dialogue which continue to amuse adults. In this regard these books contain strong visual imagery and some poetry. The facsimile edition show his own original illustrations which are just as good as the brilliant John Tenniel illustrations that we all know and love (and that I have attempted to match with the Duchess above).  But they ain't novels. They're just not.

Heroes and villains

Is your view of early flight a series of comical errors, as naive experiments that more often than not went wrong or as as a bunch of courageous and incredibly skilled individuals to whom we owe the fact that modern air travel is still a statistically safe way to swallow up huge distances quickly and efficiently?

Bill Bryson's One Summer America 1927 captures all aspects of this story from the downright stupid to the breathtakingly adventurous to the scandalously eye boggling. Did you have the American government down as committing mass murder on their own population - never mind others? Thought not. Read the section on prohibition. Al Capone and the bootleggers come out looking like public servants. I must admit the sexual exploits of Babe Ruth (or was it rounders, sorry baseball) got a little dull during the score reporting but that's a homage to Bill's Dad who was a sports journalist in Des Moines (after all someone had to be).

Star of the book is undoubtedly Charles Lindbergh. I can't say I got to understand him in any meaningful way because he is an extremely enigmatic figure who endured extreme fame, personal tragedy and political error of judgement in equal measure. But what a pilot. It's wrong, of course, to ascribe celebrity status to one individual amongst so many who tamed the skies and pushed flight into the twentieth and twenty first century. But then again this is what this book is about: an extraordinary moment in time with a whole cast of characters you really couldn't invent.

Unspeakable experiments

Yesterday I visited Uppark, the house where the young HG Wells' mother was Housekeeper and father was Gardener. This was no idyllic Upstairs Downstairs/Downton Abbey environment and Sarah was eventually dismissed for gossiping about the Featherstonhaugh family. Standing below ground level in the servants quarters with little windows above head height where you can occasionally glimpse the ankles of the rest of humanity you really get a sense of the unseen workers scurrying around in the tunnels to support a few lucky to be born into a different life. Read the young Bertie's Tono Bungay for more direct commentary on Uppark. But what interests me is how that social and moral conflict between two very different views of society is expressed in other contexts like the Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine and the men and beasts in this little horror show.

In some ways this story has dated less well than some (and he really was prolific) because it contains elements of Victorian style melodrama and fear of exotic unknown places where Johnny Foreigner got up to unspeakable things with the natives. But, of course, in other ways it is enormously prescient and raises all those issues of scientific, medical and biological advances and the balance of motivation and benefits. For those of you who haven't read it I won't add any spoilers here but it's a fun little potboiler and acts as an invitation to read some of his more obscure and less known stories many of which are out of copyright and freely available on the web.

The Invisible Man reads in parts like a penny dreadful Victorian newspaper report but there is no doubting Wells' ability to explore fantasy in an engaging realistic way by setting it in contemporary society. He captures the foibles of crowd behaviour but also the corrupting nature of power rested in a single individual.

The Time Machine is probably the best story of this set I read (I'll get around to War of the Worlds shortly). Although it is based around a single individual narrative voice again it contains enough room for a more episodic development and a look at different types of society in different times - both Victorian and fantasy future. There is even space for some post-apocalyptic descriptive dream-like passages. Whereas some of Wells' stories a bit slight, and you can see why they have the novella depth that appeals for film adaptations, the Time Machine is fully rounded in both forms. Which brings me back to Uppark. It is frightening to stand underground there, in the servants' quarters, and think of the people that devoted their working lives so that a lucky few could pass the time in vacuous indolence.

A seed contained within

I picked up Christian Cantrell's debut novel free on Kindle so I didn't have any great expectations but it was sci-fi. I love sci-fi. Don't I? Do you?

Initially I struggled with this book and it reminded me that good writing is highly readable in any genre and you should base your choices on that. I'm not really a great fan of genres anyway and would much rather bookshops were simply arranged alphabetically so that you could come across delightfully weird surprises in sci-fi and fantasy sandwiched between the ghostwritten 'autobiography' of a footballer and a guide to making chocolate crepes.

One reason I struggled until nearly half way through this book (and I always finish a book I've started) was some wilful description of technology for technology's sake (and I speak as a fellow geek). There was also too much focus on a smart ass male lead (and I speak as a fellow smart ass male) who was difficult to care about and consequently excluded the rounded development of other family members and group characters. Then there was the claustrophobia of the setting - a colony struggling to survive in a harsh alien environment which is fine as long as you introduce a dash of gallows humour and you can then feel comfortable in their company. 

But this book deceives on a number of levels and you have to take it in the context of it being a fairly short novel by a writer just starting out with further adventures of the "Children of Occam" already written which address pretty much all of the shortcomings of this debut. If you accept that, and you have a natural predilection for the genre, then this is definitely worth a look. Now many of us are living digitally you get to see the evolution of a writer online and that can be a satisfying progress to follow from the beginning. Also check out his Star Wars toy comics - it will help you in not taking it too seriously as high literature and to enjoy it for what it is - a fascinating idea imperfectly told.

Pride comes before and after a fall

The boys from Turin march out in some natty 1949 shorts. 

In this country the Busby Babes were famous for keeping Manchester United on the world football stage after an horrific plane crash robbed them of most of their talent. Outside of Italy fame has not been as kind to Il Grande Torino, the tactical pioneers of the beautiful game, who were tragically killed on their way back from playing a testimonial in Portugal. 

Amongst the fallen was their manager and coach Erno Egri Erbstein who survived the persecution of European Jews with outstanding courage and some nifty footwork of his own. This biography by Dominic Bliss goes under the slightly cumbersome title of "Erbstein: The triumph and tragedy of football's forgotten pioneer" and brings this era of football to life in a way that is just as relevant to sport, war and politics today. Plus... despite the blow by blow sequence of football scores... it's a rattling good yarn about community teamwork and the galvanising role of individual leadership, determination and flair.

The publisher is Blizzard Books who have a quarterly digital/print magazine specialising in football commentary and esoterica that amply shows football fans can be as erudite and interesting as any pub companion and probably have better jokes than most. The only thing that lets this publication down is the dreadful lack of proofreading that has led to so many typos and words running into each which can be distracting to pedants like me. I know one or two copy editors that are very reasonable cheap if you're interested.