bunn

I kept seeing people recommending this Second World War novel, about a British agent (Scottish!) and her English pilot in occupied France. Eventually, I buckled to the power of suggestion and came by a copy. Then it sat on my 'to read' shelf for ages without quite managing to pull me in. Yesterday, I finally got around to it - and got sucked in with a sort of loud SCHLOOP noise like something going horribly wrong with plumbing. I read the whole thing pretty much at one sitting.

The premise is that it's 1943, and the agent, Queenie, has been captured. The Gestapo have been torturing her (rather more torture description than I prefer to read in general, but I never felt that it tipped over into being gratuitous or self-indulgent) - and she's writing down everything she knows about the British War Effort.

For some reason, she is writing it in the form of a story told from the point of view of the female pilot who flew her to France. Queenie is an aristocratic scion of an old Scottish family, the pilot is heir to modest wealth from the new motor cycle industry, and the story is really about how they have become friends.

( Seriously, read this bit only if you have already read the book. It's a really good and enjoyable book but if you read this first it will spoil it. )
It was a bloody good book though.

A tenet of my belief is that there is no situation which cannot be interpreted in or illuminated by the light of
1) Le Guin
2) Le Carré
3) Scott Adam's Dilbert cartoons
4) and occasionally Tolkien.

It's a somewhat eclectic set of reference works for life, I am aware...

( On this occasion, I am reminded of this useful scene from Le Carré's 'Call for the Dead'. )

I did finish Bride of the Spear in the end instead of pitching it into the charity shop pile. (And OMG, look at that cover on Amazon.  My copy does not have that cover.  I nearly fell over laughing when I googled it just now.)   And goodness me, she almost won me back as a loyal reader.  Almost...

 Owain of Rheged comes good and rides heroically in a Theoden-like manner to the help of Pict-besieged Bamburgh!  Loyalties are confused because the king of Lothian has some Pict followers who look at everything from a matrilinear perspective, whereas the British are patrilinear, and although everyone knows this, it's still hard for them to understand each other!  Healing happens not just with 'herbs' which magically make everything better -  but with specific, named herbs with specific properties! And the healer is very conscious of all the stuff she can't fix, and the difficulty of measuring an accurate dose!

(This is probably the kind of thing where many people will be thinking 'who cares!' but I do love heroic rescues and accidental cultural mixups and accurate herb-descriptions.)

I can't remember feeling this conflicted about a set of books... probably ever.    If only the characterisation /plotting was different!  I love the worldbuilding so much, but...

Kathleen Herbert wrote a selection of fascinating academic books about interesting topics - Women in Early English Society, Lost Gods of England, English Heroic Legends. All of these are topics where the available evidence is, like the books, a bit slim, but she packs what information there is in and they make a nice change from the usual endless ecclesiastical stuff that fills books about Anglo Saxon England.

So, when I discovered she had also written some historical novels set in seventh century Northumbria and Mercia, I was really keen to read them. These are : Queen of the Lightning, and the sequel, Ghost in the Sunlight.
( Apparently I had a very great deal to say about these rather obscure books. )

By far the most popular version of the story of 'The Hobbit' is the version loosely translated from the Thain's Book copy of the Red Book of Westmarch by Professor JRR Tolkien in the mid-20th century.  Professor Tolkien was of course an entertaining writer with a strong grasp of the Old Westron sources for the late Third Age period, but it is most unfortunate that his translation, riddled as it is with pro-Gondorian sentiment, has taken such a firm hold of the popular imagination that the other sources - not available in convenient English translation - have been forgotten.  

The "Thain's Book" translation is often read by non-specialists in the period as a complete and accurate description of events at the end of the Third Age.  More accurately, it should be considered as a group of sometimes self-contradictory sources, none of which survive in the original.  This group of texts had at least three authors, one of whom later admitted he had lied in his original account, and later amended it.   The material has certainly been recopied and 'corrected' several times by much later writers.  It occasionally deals with matters, such as the history of the dwarf-kingdoms and the political organisation of Northern Rhovanion, of which none of the original authors had much understanding or experience. 

In this context, it is pleasing to discover that the recent movie based on the life of Bilbo Baggins (or Mad Baggins, as he is usually referred to in later Westron sources originating from the Shire)  has called on material beyond Professor Tolkien's English translations.  I believe this to include material available until recently only in Khuzdul, and now of course, translated into modern Croatian as the nearest equivalent modern European language. I also noted elements of a version of the legend that to my knowledge, is preserved only in material written in the most obscure dialects of Sindarin, and now held in the archives office in Machynlleth.   

The sources for this period that originate from outside the Shire are of course also problematic in many ways.  Like the Thain's book, they are often self-contradictory, particularly on the important but almost undocumented area of Dwarf military organisation and economic development. Source preservation has been poor, particularly in the case of the document that is thought to be Balin's personal diary, available today only in the most fragmentary and puzzling form.  Re-copying has added errors, particularly to the Khuzdul sources which are notoriously difficult to transcribe quickly or accurately.  The Sindarin material probably glamorises life in Rivendell and accentuates the military power of the Sindarin-Noldorin remnant living there - but it may still be more accurate than the Shire-version, which was very clearly written by a hobbit who had at that time no grasp at all of any of the Elvish languages. 

None the less, such attention to detail is most unexpected in a movie made for the entertainment of the masses, and deserves to be recognised and commended.  I look forward eagerly to the planned future works, and particularly to the release of the full bibliography. 

I have been reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel for what feels like months and months, and have finally come to the end.  I can't say it's not a bit of a relief.   The story was well told, and Thomas Cromwell at least came over as an engaging character, with his hidden doubts and alarming efficiency and unexpected kindnesses.  And it was a memorable book, there were many images that stuck in my head.     But two things stopped me really enjoying the reading.

1) Use of pronouns.  I know this is a really pedantic and annoying niggle, but I just could not get past the way the author wrote about her protagonist Cromwell.  She wrote as though it was a first-person narrative, everything seen through Cromwell's eyes and thoughts - but in the third person. 

But the problem with this is that if one writes 'Norfolk walked across the room.  I opened the door' then it is immediately clear to the mind's eye who is walking, and who is opening the door.    If you just do a global search and replace on 'I' and put in 'he' instead, rather than writing the sentence with names in the third person - then suddenly I, as the reader, am constantly slamming my head into scenes where I can't quite work out who is doing what.   It made for a very slow read, because I was constantly going back and re-re-reading so I could visualise what was going on.  Looking at other reviews, I see many people were also bothered by the inconsistent punctuation - this didn't bother me as much.  I can live with erratic punctuation for effect, but I just could not sail past the use of pronouns. 

2) And this is an entirely personal one: I just cannot bring myself to care that much about the Tudors - particularly fat spoiled Henry and his many wives.  I don't know why.   I was hoping this book would manage to kindle more of an interest, but no. I keep trying to read stuff set in the Tudor period and it never quite works for me.  My interest in British monarchy just seems to peter out with the Wars of the Roses.

This morning I and the hounds walked from the top of Kit Hill down into the village of Kelly Bray,

( Read more... )
In other news, Perl Cat has an ear infection,
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I got a third of a way through Sutcliff's 'Bonnie Dundee' when,
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This week I have had to buy
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I can't remember if I posted before about the sutcliff-swap fanwork exchange.  Or indeed if anyone reading this who doesn't already know about it is likely to be interested in it. But on the offchance, I shall tell you that it has happened!

And suddenly there is a pile of Sutcliff fanfic and art here : http://archiveofourown.org/collections/sutcliff_swap2012/works  and I haven't seen one item yet that isn't full of interesting ideas and strikingly well executed,( Read more... )

All the works are from the ninth century or earlier, which reflects my Sutcliff reading so far too - she does Roman and post-Roman Britain so well, I'd originally intended to stick to those (and read at least some of the other authors on my to-read shelf).   But philmophlegm has been shopping and has bought me a pile of her later works, so it looks like I am going to read ALL the Sutcliffs... 

In the new pile:

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I thought this blog post by Jane Alexander about publishers and the market for books (fiction primarily I think) might be of interest to some of the people on my flist who are in the process of producing books, and for that matter to those of us that buy them.

(I quite like Jane, I came across her on Twitter and blagged a promotional Harry Potter Dobby toy off her, which Oldies Club then sold very profitably on Ebay. :-))

1) Mowed the tiny front lawnlets
( ... gardening )


2) Went for a walk from Bere Ferrers down to the Tamar with my mother and her dogs.   Very muddy fields, tiny baby calves, falling sun reflecting across the river.   Saw an egret. 

3) Tried to paint another Derbyshire landscape for Eagle BB.  
( ...whinging )


4) Sent in enquiry about a couple of lurchers, hoping that one of them may be suitable for me to adopt.  

5) Bills. Car service, car insurance, vet bills, arrrg.  :-(  

6) Watched Top Gear about the end of the Saab car manufacturer.  
( ... Saab )


7) Watched Being Human. Just a bit too depressing. May give up watching.  Annie is so bloody naive suddenly, and it's just a bit irritating. Surely she wasn't quite this thick always?  And the casual killing without any real regret to it is a bit icky, it now seems that from being aspirational, ordinary humanity is just unimportant collateral damage. 

8) Finished reading Ishi in Two Worlds by Theodora Kroeber, mother of Ursula Le Guin.  
( History of USA : SO GRIM )