One really thick one, two slightly slimmer.

Cultural musing
Matter, by Iain M Banks

Banks's science fiction stuff has been better than his mainstream for quite some time. Breaking loose from reality seems to improve his focus: the ideas are clearer, the characters more sharply drawn, the politics more coherent. I tend to pick up Iain Banks novels thinking "Please be good; please be good." When I pick up an Iain M Banks book I'm sure I'll enjoy it.
We're back in The Culture for this one — Banks's galaxy-spanning techno-utopia, run by artificial intelligences so the humans can get on with what they do best, which is have fun. But of course, loads of people having fun doesn't make for great fiction, so Banks focuses on The Culture's shadier side: Special Circumstances, the organisation which interferes, subtly or not so subtly, with more primitive civilisations to nudge them towards The Culture's view of enlightenment.
Much of the action here takes place away from The Culture, in a partly-mechanised, fully-militarised society on a Shellworld — a series of nested spheres, connected by huge elevator shafts, which were created aeons ago by a now-extinct race for some unknown purpose. A Special Circumstances advisor spent some time in this society some years ago, and as a result, the territorial war that's been raging for most of the king's adult life is almost over. But an unexpected event places the king's two sons in danger: the younger within the palace, where he is exposed to intrigue and power-politics; and the elder becoming a hunted man, fleeing to the surface of the world and beyond to track down the king's other child — a daughter, who herself left to join Special Circumstances as payment for its advice.
Flitting between the three storylines takes the book from hard SF to near-fantasy, which makes it not quite as engrossing as some of the other Culture stories or even the last Banks sf, the non-Culture The Algebraist. But all three stories have highlights: the elder prince's gradual realisation of his strengths and weaknesses, which culminate in a visit to an oppressive, high-gravity planet where a manufactured war is raging; the younger prince's involvement in an archeological dig at a brilliantly-described series of vast waterfalls; the Special Circumstances agent's enforced de-powering as she undertakes what should be a courtesy mission but becomes much more serious. The Shellworld, too, is a brilliant invention; each level is a planet to itself, illuminated by fixed and moving 'stars' on the ceiling, which is the underside of the level above, with the whole system under the supervision of a variety of species whose motives are not clear to each other or to the humans and others who live on the various levels.
Without giving away any plot points, it's fair to say that the end of the book is extremely startling, as what you thought the plot was about is completely stripped away, the big confrontation you were expecting never happens, and the forgotten history of the Shellworld takes centre stage. It feels a bit of a cheat, but the resulting action is gripping, and the gut-wrenching final scene has been haunting me for weeks.
Not up there with the best of The Culture, and it's not a short read — it's a breeze-block of a book which could easily stun a ferret, or even a badger — but it's an enjoyable, disturbing ride, and its central theme of outside influences manipulating other society's wars for their own ends is subtle, affecting and nastily relevant.


Local heroes
The Ghost Map, by Stephen Johnson

I work on Poland Street in Soho. If I stand at the door to my office building and look to my left, I can see a replica of a Victorian water-pump, a black-painted iron tube about three inches across and maybe four feet high, ending in a short spout. It should have a curved handle at the top, but this is missing. It commemorates a cholera epidemic, one of the most severe to hit the city, in 1854. The pump is notable because two local residents, Doctor John Snow and the Reverend Henry Whitehead, tracked down the source of the cholera to this particular pump. It was the first time that the cause of an infection had been tracked so precisely, at a time when there was no germ theory of infection; when the overwhelming consensus was that disease was caused primarily by bad smells; and when London was growing so rapidly that it had fatally outstripped its ability to deal with its own waste.
The pump was on what was then called Broad St, and the epidemic it caused must have been terrifying. A particularly virulent strain of cholera had contaminated the water in the Broad St well, which was previously known for having the best-tasting water in Soho. Over five days, it killed almost five hundred people, many of whom went from completely healthy to dead within 12 hours. In the end, almost a thousand people died. In less than a fortnight. There were so many dead that the hearses were queueing up. Anyone who could flee, did.
And in the middle of all that, John Snow, who had been building a reputation as a pioneering anaesthetist, was striding around, taking samples of the water from the well and making marks on a map of the area, showing that the cases were clustering around the Broad St pump. Henry Whitehead was talking to his parishioners, tracking the spread of the disease through human stories. The two men, taking considerable risks with their own health, stayed in Soho; Snow refining an old theory of his that cholera was water-borne, and connected with sewage, Whitehead looking after the masses of poor workers, mostly semi-skilled, who lived in the crowded warrens of Victorian Soho.
Johnson tells the story vividly and journalistically; the early parts of the book, detailing the effects and spread of the disease, are harrowing. Snow's struggle against the orthodoxy of the day and their belief that cholera was caused by a miasma, or foul gases, is a tricky one — we take germ theory so much for granted that their objections seem completely stupid.
After discussing the Broad St epidemic and its resolution, Johnson goes on to talk about its implications today. This is where it becomes really interesting. Snow's map-making is a direct ancestor of geo-tagging and the cutting edge integration of geographical information into other data-streams — something which I've written about a lot in the past year or so. He also talks about its implications in terms of terrorism and asymmetric warfare; how the design of cities can make them their own worst enemy, and an easy target, as London's evolution and spread, while also bottling people up in ever higher densities, made it easy for cholera to rip through the population. Meanwhile, with the world's population moving into cities at ever higher rates and many cities developing ad-hoc scavenger cultures for waste handling, much like Victorian London's, Johnson points out that one question is going to become increasingly important: What are we going to do with all this shit?


Her father's daughter, his father's son
The Ingenious Edgar Jones, by Elizabeth Garner

Elizabeth Garner is the daughter of Alan Garner, who is a genius. He's mainly known as a children's author, but his books, generally set around the part of Cheshire where his family has lived for hundreds of years, are utterly brilliant, bringing folklore, myth and history into the modern world and adding shadows to dark corners. His latest books, for adults, are stripped back and challenging, often told mostly in local dialects and switching between time periods; they often seem like the ghosts of stories and people, pulling at your sleeve and demanding your attention to something which is almost, but not quite, there on the page. If you haven't read any Alan Garner, have a look at The Stone Book Quartet, The Owl Service, and his two latest books, Strandloper and Thursbitch. His collection of lectures, articles and essays, The Voice That Thunders, is also fantastic and should be required reading for anyone interested in storytelling, education, archaeology or psychology.
So, no pressure then, Elizabeth.
Fortunately, Elizabeth is decidedly no slouch herself, and while her writing doesn't have the stone-and-iron clashing poetry of her dad's, she has a spare, clear style and a real gift for phrasemaking. I'm honestly not sure whether this is a children's book or not; it has a child protagonist, the eponymous Edgar, but the backdrop of the story, 19th century Oxford, is rooted in reality and the dark undercurrents of the city and the university run through the book like veins of ore in a mine.
See, this stuff is catching.
Edgar is a child prodigy — a craftsman and inventor, obsessed with making things, building devices and harnessing the power of materials. His parents, stolid college porter William and his increasingly isolated wife, Eleanor, don't understand Edgar: William wants him to be an educated man, a man of the university, but Edgar can't seem to learn to read. William can't understand his son; Edgar can't please his father; and Eleanor, caught between them, seeks solace in dressmaking, which gradually becomes a lucrative, but secret business. But Edgar loves William's telescope, and he loves to climb, and he loves to take things apart. His curiosity and hunger, along with a drive to become a person his father would respect, leads him to a series of apprenticeships, and a meeting with a university Professor, who is building a great museum of Natural History, and whose willingness to use people for his own ends comes to dominate the lives of all the Jones family.
What with the Oxford setting and the fable-like story, this is going to draw comparisons with Phillip Pullman. Garner is easily as good a writer as Pullman, and her philosophy is more subtle — I never felt I was being banged over the head with a message, as I did frequently in His Dark Materials, especially towards the end. The themes aren't quite as massive as Pullman's — the fate of the multiverse isn't at stake here — but it's no less ambitious, with the debates on evolution and psychology of the day brought neatly and vividly into the story. The descriptions of the city and its atmosphere are just as vivid, and seen through Edgar's eyes — eyes which don't always see everything, leading the reader to figure out exactly what's going on with the other characters. Throughout, Garner avoids the fantastic — everything here is grounded in reality, although some of the scenes, such as iron riggers riveting together the framework of a glass roof by flying on a sort of hang-glider, hanging from pulleys and steered by a rope-man on the ground, definitely have a tint of the fantastical. But at the end, the story veers beautifully into magical realism, sealing the fates of Edgar and his father.
Being an engineering writer, I was a complete sucker for this stuff. But it really is a lovely book; anyone who enjoyed Phillip Pullman, as well as those who were put off by the talking animals and angels and things, will enjoy it.

Still reading the big book of Romantic Scientists — almost at the end now — and well into what's shaping up to be an excellent book about whales. And I've got Sebastian Beaumont's second novel on order...

2009 - return of the reading mojo!

Lancashire, and some other places
Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North, by Stuart Maconie

The North, according to Maconie, starts at Crewe and goes up to the Scottish border. That's a lot of ground to cover. To be fair to Maconie, he does say that this is a personal journey, and you only have to listen to his accent (not difficult, pick any pop culture clips show at random and he'll be on it somewhere) to realise that this book is mostly going to be about Lancashire. A good third of it is west of the Pennines, and the rest of the North is squeezed in, not too successfully. Maconie's love of a good anecdote brings Wigan and Skelmersdale back into the passages about Yorkshire, County Durham et al with all the force of a meat pie in the face.
That's not to say that Pies is bad. It's a fun read, with interesting perspectives on Liverpool (not really Lancashire, more like New York), a stirring defense of George Orwell against charges of being patronising to poor Wiganers, and some sharp and insightful writing about Manchester (massive chip on its shoulder, but the absolute home and basis of socialist politics). As a child of the late 60s growing up in the shadow of Saddleworth Moor, he's particularly good on the Moors Murders, the flipside of Northern friendliness, where all your Mam's nagging about not talking to strangers had a cold and horrible reality, and childhood bogeymen were very real.
It doesn't pretend to be an exhaustive look at the North, and it isn't. Once away from the pies of Wigan and the black pudding frenzy of Bury, there are stereotypes aplenty and a lot of 'isn't this place lovely, and you'd hear a damn sight more about it if it were in the South'. He's also very fond of the phrase 'don't get me started on...'
That's OK, Stuart. I won't. But your brief bit of writing about the Lakes was fantastic, and I'd like to read a whole book on that, a bit easier on the wisecracks, please.
Maybe you have to be a Northerner to get the best out of this. Lancastrian would probably help, too. For anyone else, worth a look, but Bill Bryson does this stuff better.

Your mother should know
Coraline, by Neil Gaiman

Very late to the party here, and I feel guilty because not only have I had this for ages, it was a present. But better late than never, and I wanted to read it before the film came out.
There's a quote on the back cover blurb saying that it could knock the Alice books off their throne. Leaving aside the question of who puts books on a throne, this is complete bollocks. Lewis Carroll is in no danger of being eclipsed by Gaiman. Neither's Roald Dahl, for that matter. Or Alan Garner.
I don't think Gaiman himself would ever dream of putting himself into that category, but some of his fans are a funny lot. Coraline is a perfectly good bit of squirmy kids' horror, probably more horrifying for older readers, and Gaiman is a skillful storyteller. But he's a bit too nice for this. You never really feel that much is at stake here; you don't feel that there might not be a happy ending. It doesn't have the unhinged leaps of logic of Carroll, and it certainly doesn't have the spite, malice and glee of Dahl.
Still, perfectly good fun and a quick read - to work and back, and it's done. And Dave McKean's illustrations are lovely, too.

Road to Nowhere
Thirteen, by Sebastian Beaumont

Stephen Bardot, a Brighton taxi driver, depressed and despondent after the failure of an inherited business, drives himself into exhaustion on night shift after night shift. Ferrying around the distraught, violent, elderly or just plain drunk, he begins to enjoy the feeling of dislocation and the odd moments of connection with his passengers. Stephen finds himself uplifted by the positive attitude of a young, terminally ill woman from 13, Wish Road, and when she stops calling for lifts, he assumes the worst. But when he asks after her at the taxi office, he finds that something stranger is happening. Wish Road doesn't have a number 13. As Stephen tries to get his life back on track, he finds that other people are associated with the non-existent Thirteen; they appear and disappear seemingly at random, and some of them know a lot about him, but asking questions proves to be a bad idea. And when he decides that he wants out, the people from Thirteen have other ideas.
Well now, this is an interesting one. Full of ideas and oddly unsettling in places, it reminded me of those stories of strange shops that are never in the same place twice. Beaumont was a taxi-driver himself for a while, and a fair bit of Thirteen is made up from vignettes and observations from the driver's seat (quite like the sort of thing I'm trying to do with London Observations). But the slips into an alternative, puzzling world where time doesn't seem to work in a straight line, where personality and location become slippery, and where everybody knows your name even though you've never met them, are all well-done.
It's not a masterpiece; the dialogue is a bit clunky, as though Beaumont has thought very hard about what he wants his characters to say, but not so much about how they'd say it. The people from Thirteen are often more convincing than the 'real' people, although it's not precisely certain who's real and who isn't, and what makes a real person 'real' in the first place. There's a lot of this sort of ambiguity, which might annoy some people; personally, I like not being told every detail, and having something for my imagination to work on.
In an interview, Beaumont said that the book is an exploration of one man's psyche. It also works as a ghost story, as Stephen (definitely Beaumont's alter-ego) is a haunted man, but they aren't the usual sort of ghosts. If you're interested in the concept of haunting, you'll enjoy this. If you're the sort of person who gets spooked by odd-looking houses and things glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, it's also worth a look.
Beaumont's second novel, The Juggler, is out soon. I'll be looking for it.

Still on the go: a massive book about the scientists of the romantic era - currently reading about Humphrey Davy and his giggly experiments with nitrous oxide.

I haven't done this for a while. There's a reason for that.
All through last year, I had a terrible case of reader's block. I barely finished any books at all. At times, I didn't even have one on the go. This is very unlike me. Fortunately, the two books I did finish, The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Gentlemen of the Road — yes, both Michael Chabon — were brilliant, so at least I wasn't let down.
So, a rare thing for me: a new year's resolution. Read More Books. In order to do this, don't read the paper on the Tube; read a book. And keep an eye out for London Observations, of course.
It seems to have worked. Since going back to work after Christmas, I've finished three books. These bookblogging posts are partly to remind myself what books I've read, and partly to tell people about them; comments are welcome, as are 'if you liked that, have a look at this' suggestions.

( So, here's the current crop. )

I have emerged, blinking in the light, into a very quiet office. Almost everyone seems to have booked holiday, or pulled a sickie, and our wonderful IT department has closed the server down for maintenance so we can't do any work anyway.

So, Christmas.

I really ought to blog about lots of things, and will over the course of the week. Ukelele Orchestra (genius), Stephen Fry's panto (fun, but not as good as it should have been); Bruges (almost unbelievably beautiful; almost unbelievably cold, lots of photos). But I'll confine myself to telling you about one particular Christmas present. After remembering it being mentioned on QI as the source of a story so ridiculous it just had to be true, Andrea bought me Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics. It's the most unputdownable book of all time.

The story in question involves Gladys Elton who, while an inmate of the Haslemere Home for the Elderly in Great Yarmouth in 1960, decided to perform a striptease for her fellow inmates. She was 81 at the time. One poor gent died of a heart attack and five others were treated for shock. The following year, three more residents died after another inmate, 87-year-old Harry Meadows, dressed up as the Grim Reaper and tapped on the window of the dining room.

And that's one of the shorter entries. It's almost 700 pages long. There are lots of very, very strange people in there.

But the thing that makes it really unputdownable is the cross-referencing system. While everyone is listed by name, their deeds are also listed. And as you go through the book, something catches your eye which you just... have... to.. investigate.

Here's a few samples, taken completely at random.

Bishop, performing an act of fellatio on a newly-consecrated: see Cleveland, Barbara Villiers, Duchess of
Bomb inadvertantly detonated by pet Rottweiler: see Aristedes, Susan Mary
Crocodile in the Scottish borders, surprising appearance of: see Douglas-Home, William
Debauched when young by the Earl of Sandwich: see Ray, Martha
Drunks, nightmare: see Bernard, Jeffrey; Farson, Daniel; Reed, Oliver (there are a lot of cross-references for Oliver Reed)
Ferret called Sir Andrew Large, a defrauding: see Chaney, Sid
Fish, smuggling diamonds in frozen: see Richardson, Charlie
Sadomasochistic pornography in Europe, the most comprehensive library of: see Edinburgh, Prince Phillip, Duke Of (in the interest of fairness, the library belonged to his surrogate father, but his mother believed that she was having carnal relations with Jesus, and his uncle is probably the only king who died after being bitten by a monkey)
Who could resist that?

Just as a further taster, how about the story of Archbishop Lancelot Blackburne, priest, philanderer and pirate? 'Blackburne's behaviour was seldom of a standard to be expected of an archbishop,' the book says. 'In many respects, it was seldom of a standard to be expected of a pirate.' Among other things, he's said to have employed Dick Turpin. As a butler.

Speaking of butlers, how about "Butlers, levitating: see Greatrakes, Valentine"?

It sucks you in for hours. And there's probably an entry for that, too.