Uncharitably, one could call this a well-wrought snuff tale.
It is in fact many things. A look at the brutality and violence that fear, poverty and ignorance engender. A look at the lengths the helpless will go to to feel some sense of agency. An outline of the types of torture, disfigurement and punishment that were applied by so-called God-fearing men (and probably still are in some places). A fantasy about witches, but one that avoids the expected tropes. A look at male versus female ‘power’. A love story (or two). One could argue it may be too short to contain everything the author is trying to do. It certainly has no lack of descriptions (and inferences) of brutal behaviour, including sexual violence and incest.
It is (in brief) the story of the hunting down of witches and papists in Stuart England, and the punishments meted out to them. Its presentation of the brutality of the times is unflinching. Often in a book the violence is cartoonish and you can disregard it. Here, it is the opposite. It is clumsy yet vicious, it is matter-of-fact yet beyond the pale, and you cannot even pretend it didn’t happen this way.
Note, if this were a movie, it would be R18+, and is certainly not suitable for kids or the squeamish, or people who are likely to be kept awake when their mind replays horrible visions from what they’ve read or seen.
The writing is on the whole very good. Not all the arresting images are brutal — some are admirable figures of speech, evocative conjurings, subtle delineations of character (after all, one can skilfully and subtly describe a crude, venal or ignorant character).
It is interesting to think how lowly regarded a book covering much the same territory but written in a pulpy, exploitative style would be.
It’s quite good, but that does not mean it’s for everyone.
The volume is undated, though it notes that the novel was first published in 1956 by Ace books, and is copyright A. A. Wyu, Inc., which should be A. A. Wyn, I think.
This is typical 50s SF adventure. A generation starship is inhabited by a manufactured society, designed by the people who sent if off. People are educated to believe that 40 is old — and so they should not be shocked if 40-year-old people happen to tend to die, when in fact it is a secret police unit that is killing them. Why? Because we need a population of vibrant, young people, and we need rapid turnover to allow continual breeding.
This is an adventure novel. Fights, betrayals, romances, escapes, ambitious underlings; they all jostle through the book. Is it great literature? No. The writing is suited to the goal — fast-paced action, no purple prose, existential agonising or poetic descriptions.
Is it a good book? Well, the characterisation is minimal, stereotypes abound, women have little agency and are talked down to — in short, it is a typical sci-fi novel of the 50s, and typical of the ones that are long forgotten. Obviously it is a bit dated in some ways, but I was in the mood for an easy read, something I did not have to ponder over or puzzle out, and I got it. Probably best not to think too hard about whether the society posited would really function, best to allow the plot, which is what the book is all about, to carry you along and drop you out at the much-as-we-might-have-expected ending.
Because this book is really fodder, meant to be read, enjoyed and replaced with another, similar one, it is good that it is relatively brief. You’ll have a pretty good idea of the broad outlines of how it is going to be resolved by the time the pieces are all on the board, so you don’t want to have to plough through 300 more pages when you know (more or less, especially if you make the mistake of reading the back cover and inside blurb) what’s going to happen — but 50 more is fine.
What can I say? Not a ‘great book’, but it suited me at the time of reading.
There is really only one thing wrong with Peter Cook: so farewell then (the untold life of Peter C00k), and it is the title.
This should really be called My Life With Peter Cook. Because it is the autobiography of his first wife, though focusing on the years of their marriage, not a biography of Cook. As a result, he is a huge presence in the book, but not the centre of it. Wendy is the centre. This is not a bad thing, except that it may not meet readers’ expectations, and I think this is reflected in reviews on GoodReads and places like it. Hence my comments about the title (though it’s easy enough to see why the title was chosen — Peter is why you buy the book).
It is actually a quite interesting book.
Why?
Exactly because Peter is why you buy the book. It is a fascinating glimpse of being at the edge of great fame. Wendy met an incredible range of people (I won’t bother to mention all the names), but few were there specifically to see her. She chose (or convinced herself) to be the support person, cooking amazing food, decorating houses, raising children. But all the time she was aware that Peter was why she was there. Peter paid the bills, Peter opened the doors, and Peter shut the doors and sometimes refused the pay the bills..
One thing it does I think better than other material I’ve read about Cook is evoke the way it was to live, rather than perform or build a career. The book is not about acting and writing, it’s about dinner parties and finding houses and trying to find meaning in a life built around someone else — someone who often had other things, including women, on his mind. We get stories of infidelity on both sides, a lot of pages trying to work out what made Cook the way he was, and quite a bit of gardening and at least one useful recipe. Dudley Moore comes out quite well, if equally unsure about what he wanted from life, and it’s hard not to think that he would have liked to keep working with Cook, but simply could not and was smart enough to get out.
Wendy wonders what she could have done differently, tries to justify affairs, paints thumbnail portraits of their many acquaintances, and generally does a very nice job of placing Cook’s work as a comic in the context of the times and of his family.
He comes across as unmoored — as a man who did not really know how to be happy. Restlessness was a strength early on, but once security and fame had been achieved, the restlessness remained but the goals that directed it vanished, one suspects. Now and again in later years, when he was moved — directed — he could do great work. The impetus might come from criticism (he famously wrote ‘Entirely a matter for you’ in response to a comment that the show he was doing was tired and lacked bite), or a simple desire to exert himself, to prove something. But that did not happen regularly; for example, he at one time desperately hoped he would be employed to do an advertising campaign because then he would not have to work for a year — his ambition was to not have to work. I guess it’s a fine line between being able to do just what you want, and doing nothing. Constraints are essential, I think. And he had few, either coming from outside or from inside.
The book includes her opinion that Cook chose darkness. That is one I largely agree with. Derek and Clive (which she does not mention, it happening after their timer together) is not two men hilariously busting through stilted conventions, as some have written. It’s two men mumbling rude words and hunting around in the filth, largely unsuccessfully, for jokes. I mean, it did break barriers (and it is remarkable just how far from the upright 50s Cook had come by the mid-70s), but for what? I don’t mind that that stuff is rude; I mind that it is mostly not funny. Cook was smart enough he could have become a Swift for our times. He chose otherwise, and I hope he had fun.
Don’t read this book if you want Peter at the centre. If you’re interested in fame as a thing, the 60s as a time, Beyond the Fringe and the satire boom as a phenomenon, and how people cope or fail to cope when their lives are entwined with such things, then it’s worth a look.
It is essentially Wendy’s life with Peter Cook, not a life of Peter Cook.
Oh, and I wish it had more dates. Often I was wondering what year we were up to, then the book would mention the John or Bobby Kennedy assassination, say, or the Cuban missile crisis, and that would locate it in time for a few pages.
Subtitled ‘a new history of the German people’, A mighty fortress begins with the Alemmani and other tribes and their interactions with Rome, and ends with reunification and the fall of the Berlin wall.
The book lays out German history in good depth for its length – after all, it’s the kind of topic that could expand to fill a bookshelf – and makes good, logical, chronological sense. Some aspects seem a little thin to me – where was ‘the wonder of the world’? Otto the Great? But this is hardly fair. I always feel that the further back into the past one goes the briefer coverage it gets. Sure, this is partly lack of known detail, but I wonder if there is an unchallenged assumption that the closer we get to today the more interesting things become; which is not true for me. A quarter of the way through the book we have covered three-quarters of the time span. The three centuries before Luther seem almost elided compared with those after.
But these are small complaints. The book is highly readable, picks out the most crucial events, and presents a very coherent narrative of the development of a complex, important and impressive nation.
At the same time, it does not assume too much knowledge – no need to be a European history scholar to follow it. A useful text for someone who wants to know more than is given in a typical brief European or world history, but is not yet ready for more academic texts.
I really liked this book. I also think it is a good book, which is of course not the same thing. It’s lyrical, dreamlike, almost mythic at times, evocative and free of cliche. Stow’s prose is a times poetic (he was a poet), and his characters speak with directness and honesty real people don’t often use, and they do so to address issues — love, purpose, hope — that real people often avoid confronting. So while the town of Tourmaline is evoked with clarity and power, the book is not, on the whole, realist. Every town is full of people struggling to make sense of their life and their choices; in Tourmaline, they articulate that.
The plot? A man, almost dead from exposure in the desert, is brought into town by the monthly lorry that brings supplies. The town — a dozen people, perhaps, who hang on while the town decays — gather round to gawk, help, wonder or just observe. He heals. He says his name is Michael Random, which no-one believes but no-one questions. He says he is a water diviner — in a town that is desiccating day by day, year by year, that looks across a salt lake, whose oldest inhabitants (like our narrator) are the only ones who can remember it raining. He fascinates them. Each reacts to him, and to his effect on the others, in their own way.
The narration is unusual; first person, but… The story is told by the town policeman — but he narrates episodes for which he has only hearsay, invention or later reports. He admits as much. On the whole, it works very well.
The wider context — there is none, or very little. A somewhat odd author’s note tells us the story takes place in the future, making it, by some definitions, and a few little hints in the text that all is not well in the wider world, possibly a post-apocalyptic novel, though you would not call it science fiction. It may well be climate fiction — we can imagine the arid Tourmaline as what is left after the rain patterns move south (as they will in Australia) in a warming world.
In feel, the closest you might get is J G Ballard’s disaster novels, like The Drowned World or The Crystal World, where the protagonists embrace the strange new world and plough on into it (instead of running away) at the behest of some unexplained but oddly believable internal need.
I think this is a terrific Australian novel. Subject to its depiction of Indigenous Australians being acceptable to Indigenous Australians, which I cannot answer, I’d like to see it being much more widely known; at least as much as the works of Patrick White or Tim Winton.
On scholarly introductions, including a sort of review of Sense and sensibility
This edition was published in 2001 by Broadview Literary Texts, and is edited by Kathleen James-Cavan, who also provides an introduction and has assembled some useful appendixes.
To start at the very beginning; this book has a cover that tells you it was never aiming to be an impulse buy. It’s mainly the drab colours and the haircuts that are off-putting. This is a scholarly edition, so includes footnotes and some quite interesting appendixes that flesh out the notion of ‘sensibility’, and what the word meant in Austen’s time. We also get the 2 reviews of the novel that came out around the time is was published, a map of London showing where the various parties stayed, a brief outline of the types of transport used (what, for example, is a curricle?), some essays on the picturesque, and some poems of the kind the characters would have read. All useful.
The front cover of the Broadview 2001 edition
The introduction makes it clear that the novel is consciously playing against many types and clichés that would have been familiar to readers of its time, and are less so now. But of course the introduction cannot make us familiar with these texts. And therein lies the conundrum with scholarly introductions.
To read or not to read, that is the question.
The introduction will alert us to aspects of the book that might pass unnoticed otherwise. It can explain aspects of characters’ behaviour that are rooted in their time (eg because of inheritance laws) that might otherwise seem arbitrary or even perverse. At the same time, it can shape our expectations too much, not leave us open to simply engaging with the text. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A lot can be very, very dull. And what if it tells us something we don’t want to know? Sure, the plot is likely to contain few major surprises, but it can happen.
On balance, I think reading the introduction after reading the book is probably the best way to go for the casual reader. (This is a scholarly copy, but I am no scholar, I just picked it up as a reading copy second-hand because it was a good price and is a very well-made volume.) Otherwise my head just gets cluttered up with a little voice going ‘is this a parody of something’ ‘is this the bit that is supposed to relate to The rape of the lock?’ And I find I am a little more distanced from what I am reading.
Oh, what of the novel? Well, it’s all right I suppose. I find Marianne’s agonies tedious (though that is kind of the point Austen is making about self-indulgence in the name of ‘sensibility’), Edward Ferrars dull and unlikely as a love interest, the coincidences that drive the plot unconvincing and a couple of the villains amusing but rather straw-ish.
I suspect the book loses more by being taken out of its time than some of the author’s other works. It apparently includes parodies of other texts, and plays off expectations that readers of ‘novels of sensibility’ of the time would have held, but we (or at least I) don’t; one cannot be amused by a subversive narrative if one is ignorant of what is being subverted. It’s not Austen’s fault – it’s my ignorance, after all – but it does make the book less entertaining.
Some of these forays are recognisable; indeed, flagged quite clearly. Edward Ferrars says, “I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged … I know nothing of the picturesque.”
Austen is making fun of the language of the picturesque, and those who celebrate the wild, dirty and rugged without having to actual live in it. It rather reminds me of a Fred Dagg sketch by the wonderful and now sadly deceased John Clarke, in which Fred informs us that a real estate agent is the kind of person who’d call a spade a delightfully bucolic do-it-yourself opportunity (or something).
The movie scripted by and starring Emma Thompson (back in the mid-90s) strays a long way from the text, and does so to remedy some of these issues. It cuts heavily, as all movies must (rough rule is I believe a page to a minute, and most novels run to say 300 pages), makes Edward Ferrars more credible as a love interest for Elinor, deletes characters, moves words from one mouth to another and cuts out a lot of the coincidences (like Elinor meeting Robert Ferrars in a shop; from Austen, one would think there were only half a dozen families in London and about 4 shops). It also works harder to make Colonel Brandon the right guy to end up with Marianne, by which I mean the right guy as far as an audience grown up in the late 20th century is concerned. A movie in which the heroine chooses the prudent option twice her age while she’s on the rebound from both heartbreak and illness? It’s not exactly Thelma and Louise. Austen’s version is coherent with her aims and times, I hasten to add, but the movie had box office takings to consider. Adapting Sense and sensibility would have been a challenge because of these factors, and not holding closely to the book was a necessity.
On the whole, I would recommend the movie over the book. The book does have some good jokes in it, and to be honest I think they actually are zippier in the book – Mrs John Dashwood’s discussion with her husband about his intended generosity to his sisters, Mr Palmer’s ‘droll’ utterances, and a few other bits and pieces are well worth reading, but there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and chatting in parlours and agonising over letters to wade through to get there. The movie, it could be argued, is too Hollywood, but it clatters along nicely.
Austen published six novels. Three early ones (Northanger Abbey, Sense and sensibility and Pride and prejudice) and three later, more mature ones, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. For my money, this book is less fun than the other two early books and less convincing than Persuasion or Mansfield Park (I’ve not read Emma). Of the five I’ve read, it’s at the bottom of my list.
Starbridge
Jack Williamson and James Gunn
Sidgwick.& Jackson 1978
213 pages
Space opera. This is it, right in the middle. Great thewed soldier of fortune single-handedly (at first) takes on galactic empire and … much ensues. I first read this book many years ago, when fiction and SF were much newer to me, and I recall finding it a rollicking adventure. Now … it still rollicks, but I can see some issues.
The story revolves around Alan Horn and his attempts to avoid capture after the hired killing — for money — of a powerful man. (All but one of the powerful people are men, and the one exception is beautiful and falls for the hero.) (We also meet a Chinese gentleman whose portrayal might not quite gel with the 2010s.)
First, the prose. While here and there it rises to a height sufficient to describe the stunning vistas and galaxy-spanning civilisation that the book tries to evoke, all too often it is passive and flat. “The room was black.” Lots of passive sentences; the action is often inventive enough, but it does not leap off the page.
The book is essentially a long chase as Horn flees and flies and leaps through the tunnels that connect the worlds of the empire of Eron — the titular star bridges that circumvent the speed of light. The story moves fast, travelling through a series of exotic locations. Horn is a standard but sufficiently likeable hero. He is resourceful, lucky, and skilled. He is charismatic, intuitive and brave.
The book would make a decent movie “in the tradition of Starwars” (though of course the book came first).
The book uses a few devices — chapters are separated by what amount to explanatory extracts from the Encyclopaedia Galactica, and bracketing by an prologue and epilogue — and (a point of interest) it explicitly interrogates the idea of free will. Horn is tough, resourceful, strong — yet is he really in charge of his own fate?
So we have a story that is full of action, hits the requisite plot points of an underdog battling a mighty empire, and has a few more thoughtful ideas chucked in to deepen it. It all works pretty well, if (at least in broad terms) without too many surprises. The prose does let the book down. While it is perfectly serviceable, it is flat too often. Most of the metaphors are fine, but the mouse of tension nibbling at the corner of his mind (or whatever it was) did bunt me out of the story.
Good, solid space opera, 1953 style. I enjoyed it at a time when I did not feel like reading something serious.
Versace is an engaging writer, never short of an idea or a humorous aside. The two outstanding pieces here are ‘The Lighthouse at Cape Defeat’, which I first encountered in Aurealis, and the title story, which was new to me and shows off his penchant for steampunk, complete with smoked glass lenses, chuffing dirigibles and clockwork men. Both make full use of his ability to turn a nice metaphor and to create a fantasy world of which the story seems a real inhabitant, rather than a world that seems to exist just so the story can work.
Lengthy stories alternate with flash fiction — it works well. It’s almost impossible not to read the short one after the long one.
He’s distributing the ebook for nada, nix, nuttin’ over at his website; do yourself a favour.
DSPACE 