Or: How We Found The Bishop’s Bird Stump At Last

Bantam Books, 1998, 493 p.

I usually like Willis stories – my review of Bellwether is here – but this, the latest in her Oxford Time Travel tales, was something of a struggle to complete. There is a payoff towards the end but that is around 450 pages in so it’€™s a long time acoming.

The book starts promisingly enough with a scene set in Coventry Cathedral in 1940 during the air raid that destroyed it but too quickly descends into whimsy. Willis’s sympathy with and obvious affection for the material from which she derived her title – Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) – not to mention comic novels and detective fiction of the 1930s, has led her to utilise a series of stock characters none of whom spring to life on the page. There is an omniscient butler, a susceptible vicar, a medium, a convinced spiritualist, an absent minded professor, a put upon maid. The character of Tocelyn (Tossie) is as irritating as her diminutive implies, her initial love interest, Terence, merely a device, his dog Cyril an annoyance. The only character with a whiff of verisimilitude, Elizabeth Bittner, wife of the last bishop of Coventry, barely makes an appearance – though she is essential to the story.

The narrator, Ned Henry, a time traveller from the mid twenty-first century, has been tasked by the overbearing Lady Shrapnell (no prizes for guessing a literary antecedent there) to ascertain whether something called the bishop’€™s bird stump was present in the cathedral when it was burned down as she wishes to have her replica cathedral, being built in Oxford, correct in every detail. Cue much toing and froing, time-lag induced by too many jumps, incongruities in the time stream, talk of “€œslippage”€ on the jumps and various discussions on historical events such as the Battles of Hastings and Waterloo and in particular the first RAF raid on Berlin in 1940.

Willis is renowned for her introductions at award ceremonies where she will be seemingly about to get to the point before making a digression. This is fine at such an occasion provided it does not drag on but she overdoes it here. At novel length it becomes ever more wearing the more the technique is employed.

Willis’€™s fascination with UK history has been evident since The Doomsday Book but her grasp of British usage is shaky to say the least. To be fair I was reading a US edition so the US spellings and terms such as “€œrailroad”€ and “€œties”€ for sleepers etc I could go with but when it comes to dialogue surely there is a duty to reflect the setting. Here we have innumerable instances of characters saying “gotten,” a Victorian lady – and a butler – use “€œmomentarily”€ when they mean “in a moment,”€ frequent absences of “€œand”€ in phrases like “€œgo tell”€ plus no-one in Britain ever says “€œall tuckered out.”€ And surely even in the US those flowers are not known as gladiolas?

Overall the tone of To Say Nothing of the Dog was too uneven, the light-hearted elements not in synch with the more serious elements of the story. It was easy to read though.

From the car park:-

It’s obviously undergoing refurbishment just now so I couldn’t get near the rear.

The left edge here is most interesting. I wish I could have got the doors in the photo but I was leaning over a cemetery wall.

I was in Alloa last week and found this beauty of an Art Deco building. It’s an absolute belter.

Wonderful rounded deco end pillars and canopy frontage here and the glazing hasn’t been destroyed. The building’s rendering is in need of attention though. This is what at first looked to be the rear of the building.

The left corner in the above photo.

This is the side of the building, to the left in the above photo. Note the blue/green brickwork on the uppermost windows and the typical 30s glazing. Nice balcony too. Pity about the satellite dish!

This is what I had come on first, though. The gable end has a nice curve and the projecting bay is good too.

Note the jazzy glazing here on the upper part of the lower floor windows. I couldn’t get far back enough to get the whole building in. My camera was also starting to become dodgy. I couldn’t get a focus on the cartouche at the roofline and the exposure isn’t right. This part is occupied by Skills Development, Scotland.

This is to the left of the previous photo. Buick’s is a hardware shop.

Full circle. The Buick’s Hardware extension bit detracts somewhat.

Little, Brown, 2012, 357 p.

Stewart Gilmour returns to his hometown, Stonemouth, somewhere in North East Scotland, to attend a funeral after a five year absence occasioned by two-timing his fiancé, Ellie, the daughter of a prominent local crime boss. The tone is set from the first as he awaits a hard man on the parapet of the suspension bridge that looms large over the town to check his reappearance will not be too unwelcome. The subsequent resumption of old friendships and acquaintances reads true – especially with Gilmour’s once best friend Ferg – as does the evocation of the claustrophobia of life in small to medium sized towns but perhaps less convincing are the threads where Gilmour seeks to unravel the circumstances surrounding the revelation of his dalliance with the “delightful Anjelica” which caused him to flee to London five years before and the fall from the bridge of Ellie’s brother which took place in the interim.

The ongoing narrative is structured over the weekend leading up to the funeral but is interspersed with Gilmour’s memories of earlier times. At one point he reflects on the delights or otherwise of the Scottish wedding reception, with its exhausting and interminable Scottish Country Dances (though the narrative renders the exuberant vocalisation that never fails to accompany these as “yee-hoooch” when it’s actually more like “hee-yeugh.”) There is also a musing on the process by which the world came to be dominated by the values of money and big business and a critique on the sort of selfishness advocated by Ayn Rand.

Though there are moments of light-heartedness and a couple of good jokes the sense of menace is never far away and the story unrolls steadily towards the violent dénouement demanded by the set up and treatment. And it is, after all, a Banks novel: a fact of which the reader is always conscious. Echoes of The Crow Road, Complicity, Whit and The Steep Approach to Garbadale are never far away. And Banks did allow one of his characters to say, “Amn’t I?” (Hurray.)

Stonemouth is accomplished and very readable. Most of the characters (hard men and gangsters apart) are engaging, if sometimes annoying, and pleasingly complex.

SFL Div 1, The Rock, 15/9/12.

Again I wasn’t there but on the face of it this is an improvement. We didn’t lose our customary three goals.

But we’re still on course for a goal difference of -108. And very few goals scored.

I didn’t expect a result from this one though.

We can always hope for something to turn up. But if it doesn’t soon we’ll need to get used to being known as Dumbarton nil.

I was in Alloa last week and spotted this law firm.

I didn’t know Alloa was quite so wild!

Ah me. Does anyone else remember the delights of Lift Off With Ayshea? This was a late 60s late afternoon ITV pop programme which didn’t feature only hits and was presented by Ayshea Brough, also known as Ayesha, one of the first women of Asian heritage to present a British TV programme.

From the date of release of the first song here it may have been the earlier Discotheque – on which Ayshea also appeared – where I first caught sight of Elton John (a hirsute, fleece-jacketed, very young looking Elton John) for he did first record under that name in the 60s. But I remember him as being introduced by Ayesha.

This was Elton’s second single, the haunting Lady Samantha, which got a fair amount of radio airplay but apparently sold only 4,000 copies.

I have searched in vain for the relevant clip – even for a reasonably good version of the song. The closest I came was this live recording of a BBC radio session.

Elton John: Lady Samantha

Elton’s subsequent song It’s Me That You Need I liked even better. I didn’t manage to get hold of either of them till a few years later when both songs were on the reverse of the 1972 single Honky Cat (which I bought purely for these.)

Elton John: It’s Me That You Need

I hear former Cabinet Minister Jack Straw in response to yesterday’s report on the Hillsborough disaster has referred to the culture of impunity in the police under the Thatcher government, a culture encouraged as they wanted the police to be a partisan force. Norman Tebbit – that government’s “semi-house-trained polecat” (in Michael Foot‘s phrase) – has responded to Straw’s remarks by calling them very, very silly.

Straw seems to have touched a nerve there don’t you think? Tebbit’s is hardly a measured comment. It’s also a deliberate attempt to minimise the effect of Straw’s charge – which has a great deal of substance.

To anyone who, like me, lived in a mining area in the 1980s it was obvious that the police force was partisan. Not only did stories of police officers brandishing banknotes at striking miners through the windows of police vans abound, I was several times prevented from going about my lawful business by a policeman peremptorily directing me back the way I had come. And this was nowhere near an actual coal mine, merely on roads that coal carrying lorries might be intending to use.

It was equally obvious that the then government wanted the police on side. One of their first acts was to ensure that the police got a large pay rise (while the rest of the public services were to endure cuts or freezes.)

And Thatcher herself not only saw the miners as an enemy, she saw football supporters in that light too, or if not an enemy, certainly as undesirables.

Is it any wonder the Yorkshire Police thought that they could get away with distorting the truth of Hillsborough? Football fans, especially in England, more especially from Liverpool, were at the time treated with contempt.

Far from Straw’s remarks being very, very silly, it is Tebbit’s which deserve that label.

Pan, 2006, 307p.

This is a collection of Miéville’€™s shorter fiction culled from various previous publications, with some original to this book.

Looking for Jake. After an unspecified disaster has depopulated London an unnamed narrator goes looking for his missing friend Jake. The very Art Deco Gaumont State cinema in Kilburn is given several mentions and an image of it appears on the book’s cover. See also the picture at the end of this post.

In Foundation a First Gulf War veteran haunted by his experiences there is known as a house whisperer because he talks to buildings. Their foundations talk back.

The Ball Room, a story written along with Emma Bircham and Max Schaefer, has the eponymous play area of a furniture warehouse not entirely dissimilar from IKEA cause its clientele to experience strange and compulsive goings on.

Reports of Certain Events in London is a typographical riot of fonts, scripts, reports, “handwritten”€ letters, interpolations and transcribed pamphlets and employs an unusual framing device. Narrator “€œChina Miéville” inadvertently opens a package delivered to his address but intended for a Charles Melville and finds himself fascinated by the contents – the proceedings of a group devoted to tracking the shifting location of, and combats between, London’€™s feral houses.

Familiar has a witch making a familiar out of a mixture of his own body fluids. It disgusts him and he gets rid of it but it comes back to haunt him. Ho-hum.

Entry Taken From a Medical Encyclopædia is errr…. an entry from a medical encyclopædia. Complete with footnotes and references. The infection described is caused by pronouncing a word in a certain way, which thus propagates itself in the victim’s brain.

In Details a young boy takes food every week from his mother to an old woman who keeps herself close, in the dark, barely opening her door before snatching the food, closing it again and getting him to read to her. She once saw something nasty, not in the woodshed, but in the details of a brick wall. She has been hiding from the patterns out to get her ever since.

Go Between sees a man receive from a mysterious organisation messages concealed inside his purchases. He fails to deliver the final one and wonders if he did the right thing.

An old man buys himself a seventieth birthday present, an old window with stained glass. He discovers he can see Different Skies through it, but there are potential horrors on the other side.

An End to Hunger has a genius computer programmer infuriated by the eponymous charity’€™s campaign. He works to expose its sponsors’ hypocrisies. They don’€™t like it.

In ‘€˜Tis the Season Christmas and its accompanying paraphernalia have been privatized. Yuleco owns the rights and so Christmas^TM, Santa^TM, Mistletoe^TM, Rudolph^TM etc are all under licence – even tinsel is illegal without one, never mind a tree. An unnamed father has won a prize to Yuleco’s official party. On the way there he and his daughter get caught up in the anti-privatisation protests. Slight, in a fun way. I just hope it doesn’€™t give anybody in power any ideas.

Jack in Miéville€’s city of New Crobuzon, familiar from Perdido Street Station and The Scar, is a Remade. Altered as a punishment – feathered wings for arms or oily gears for innards and skin changed, or otherwise bizarrely surgically changed – Remades are looked down upon by the “normal”€ citizens. Jack Half-A-Prayer fights the system, standing up for the underprivileged. The city can tolerate so much as a release valve – but Jack goes too far.

On The Way To The Front is a graphic short story illustrated by Liam Sharp which would take longer to describe than it did to read. The reproduction is in black ink and might have benefited from colour (which would obviously have been too expensive.)

The Tain is much the longest story in the collection, a novella set in the aftermath of Earth’s invasion by the creatures who live behind mirrors, the Tain of the title. A Londoner is strangely immune to their attentions and sets out to parley with their leader. One of the Tain is also a viewpoint character. Not your usual alien encounter story.

While not every story hits the mark, as a whole the collection illustrates Miéville’€™s range and writing ability. It also highlights his fascination with London and his recurring theme of otherness, the not-quite-identical.

And here is the majestic (in that monolithic, Stalinist kind of way) Gaumont State Cinema.

FIFA World Cup Qualifier: Europe, Group A. Hampden Park, 11/9/12.

Brazil 2014? You’re having a laugh.

Again I only saw the highlights but compared to Macedonia – a team fifty below us in the FIFA rankings – we looked sluggish and lacking in confidence.

They moved the ball about slickly and with purpose, we like headless chickens. In short they appeared to know what they were about and we didn’t.

Two games in and looks like we’ll be lucky to avoid coming bottom of the group; except that Wales seem to be even worse. (Then again that’s the sort of situation where they’re likely to jump up and bite us.)

Oh, and by the way, when did Macedonia lose the FYR tag?