Pirateology

I'm still persevering with the Ballad of Desmond Kale. So far it's still about the difficulties faced in establishing the wool industry in New South Wales, yawn. This, strangely enough, is actually helpful to me in my work at the moment and I arguably could read it during office hours except I can't think of anything I'd like to do less. It's just a bit dull...

I can't work out why it's dull either. It's not as simple as that the characters are unlikeable. There's nothing really wrong with them. Some of them aren't partciularly pleasant, such as Stanton, a flogging magistrate and parson, greedy for land, who seems based on Samue Marsden. The book's quite rude about his pious self-delusions and sadistic pleasure in whipping people. I think it's just a bit ponderous, as if it's reaching to be funny in places but I'm finding it too heavy-handed. It's got "big serious book about Australian History" written all over it. Not that there's anything wrong with that: I'm just not really in the mood at the moment.

For something a bit different, we went to see the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie last week. It was a lot of fun with swashbuckling heroes, slimy sea monsters, lissome wenches and everyone's favourite pirate captain. Unfortunately, even though it was clearly not meant to be taken seriously, I annoyed my Beloved a VERY GREAT DEAL by complaining about the triple barrelled cannons on Davy Jones's ship that rotated 120 degrees after firing and then fired from the next barrel. "They wouldn't work!" I cried "Where are their runners? Who is lighting the flint? When did they load them up? All at once? Jack Aubrey would never allow that much powder to be loose at once in case he blew up the whole ship."

My Beloved very patiently responded by noting that it was A MAGIC SHIP.

I've since agreed to lay off the Patrick O'Brian books for a while.

Tanglewreck

So, the other week, I was in a reasonably local independent bookshop that I'd go to more often if it was open at the times I usually go past on the way to a pub, on a day when I was feeling a bit flush with funds, and I saw Jeanette Winterson's Tanglewreck for only $18. Strangely, nowhere on the cover or the front papers did it say "acclaimed feminist/lesbian author of Oranges are not the Only Fruit, The Power book, The Kiss, that book about the library with lots of Latin or any of those other books I've read without thinking I really understood them at all but enjoyed on at least one level because of the way I could let the language flow from my eye to my brain and just adore the magic of the imagery or rhythm and not really care that I can't tell what's going on in a strictly literal sense."

Nowhere did it say that. Importantly, it also didn't say "book for young readers" because I probably wouldn't have picked it up.

The friendly bookseller commented on how reasonably priced the book was and I said that was why I'd bought two books but she didn't ask me if I liked Ms Winterson. I confess I had moments of doubt, thinking maybe there were TWO authors with the same name published by Bloomsbury or maybe there was a slight difference in the spelling.

In any case, on Tuesday night, when I was stuck for something to read and thinking I'd like a slow book for a change, that would take a long time to read and that I could savour, I picked it up. After the first paragraph I realised that this in fact was by the same Ms Winterson as wrote all those other books.

But I read on and discovered that for once, I wasn't buried in poetic obscurity and I could FIND THE PLOT!! Unfortunately, that meant I read it really quickly and finished it the next day.

Tanglewreck is a beautifully written fairy tale-science fiction quest for young readers that reminded me of a combination of Neil Gaiman and Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials because it tells a compelling adventure story in a sensitive but unsentimental way. The central figure is Silver, an eleven-year-old girl who, at the beginning of the story, lives in an Elizabethan manse under the care of a crotchety aunt. England is plagued by time tornados, one of which stole her parents and sister away. What can Silver do to fix this?

Winterson, like Peter Ackroyd, seems to be in love with the history of London. She draws on the historical city for some of the more magical characters. Delightfully, a woolly mammoth lives in the world beneath the city.

Maybe I should go and read some reviews now and work out what I was meant to think of it...

At the moment I'm ploughing through The Ballad of Desmond Kale because the ABC is having a book club program on "this year's Miles Franklin Winner" next week. So far, it's an awful lot like The Nutmeg of Consoltation except without the ship. I'm sure I'll throw stuff at the telly if I manage to watch the show.

Set in Stone

On Tuesday I was home sick, completely exhausted by the demands of actually doing a day's work on Monday and a slight cold. In between naps and The West Wing on tape I read another book by that English thriller writer I was talking about the other week,
Robert Goddard, called Set in Stone.

It was rather good for a nice light breezy read that didn't make you feel like you were wasting your time completely. This one played with the haunted house and spy fiction genres in a way that kept me guessing all the way to the end. What worked really well with this one as well in Days without Number is that Goddard anchors his improbable plots with a mass of detail. We know what highway the characters are driving on and what train they're catching. We know what sort of flowers grow in the garden. These sound like real people living in real places. It gives them a lot of credibility and stops me from being able to stop reading.

Good fun.

Nutmeg of Consolation

I finished reading Patrick O'Brian's The Nutmeg of Consolation in which Captain Jack Aubrey, his friend Stephen Maturin and company travel to Sydney in about 1813.

It was about three times better than the previous one called The Thirteen Gun Salute which I didn't enjoy that much because it felt a bit formulaic. There was an unpleasantly egotistical envoy who treated his underlings badly. His behaviour saddened Jack who is always an exemplary leader of men. Now O'Brian has been there before in previous books where characters take credit for others' (usually Jack's) good deeds or turn out to be timorous in battle or delusional. Jack always treats his men well and inspires them to follow him. It's almost as if O'Brian was deliberately trying to write leadership manuals for boys (or students of MBAs). He probably was for all I know. And this annoying character is conveniently disposed of in a way I found a bit glib.

The Nutmeg on the other hand is charming because of the period detail that seems consistent with the television miniseries of my childhood (eg Against the Wind). The Rum Corps are shown as a pack of scoundrels. Old Sydney town is a dissolute and depressing place. Samuel Marsden and John Macarthur pop up.

Stephen also does lots of naturalistic investigations which seems very well observed. I think there are kangaroos in about Darling Harbour.

I thought I'd trapped O'Brian in a bit of internal inconsistency because at one point Stephen was lamenting how the last time he'd visited New Holland he'd only had time to collect a rather ordinary green parrot when I distinctly recalled a wombat being mentioned in a highly unconvincing manner. Later on however Jack said that there had been a wombat that ate his hat. No further details were used so I'm still not sure Patrick O'Brian knew what they were. And on page 296 of this edition, arguably he's mixed up between koalas and echidnas:

and we saw the emu, various kinds of kangaroo, the echidna - good Lord, the echdna! - the small fat grey anumal that sleeps high up in gum-trees and that very absurdly claims to be a bear, and a great many pf the parrot tribe....

But then he goes on at length with realistic description of stalking platypuses that made me forgive him completely.

I'm a bit worried about Jack actually. He's not in the best of health at the end of this book so I hope he picks up again in book number 15.

In praise of Paddy

Over at Sorrow at Sills Bend they're talking about setting up a Patrick White reading circle. This is in response to the brouhaha in a newspaper I've refused to read since their raha all the way with doulbleya coverage of the invasion of Iraq (which I was only reading in the first place because my boss made me) where someone submitted a chapter of a Patrick White book to publishers for consideration and none of them bought it. This made some point about the stupidity of publishers or something.

It did make me think about when I read his books and I've read almost everything except the ending of Voss and maybe The Tree of Man. This was entirely voluntary apart from A Fringe of Leaves which was on the reading list for ENG101 and I hated it (because I wasn't convinced by the cannibalism and couldn't understand why Mrs Fraser didn't seem happy to be rescued and there was a really gross bit about trying to make a poultice to draw out boils which made my 18 year old self go EWWWWWW!).

I read most of them when I was school, probably initially attracted by "Australia's only Nobel Prize winning author". That would have explained the first one one anyway (The Solid Mandala?) but not why I kept coming back. And I did because I found him fascinating. People in his books were not very nice at all; when they loved each other they were still mean. Nothing was straightforward. I remember the shivers of discomfort I would get when he described a particularly uncomfortable series of emotions or interactions. I'm thinking of in The Vivisectionist where the central character is such an utterly selfish prick that he destroys the life of his girlfriend. I have a vague recollection of her falling off a cliff in the bush and him painting a picture. This is probably muddled. And Mrs Fraser and her husband are described back in England in the distant past as fighting with invisible knives leaving scars that don't show. Or something.

And his writing is so very physical. I remember in The Solid Mandala how the simple brother loves driving the cart and delights in the sight and the smell of the horses pooing. And he describes landscape really well. The south of France felt as real in The Twyborn Affair as the Australian rural landscape did in everything else.

They're good books. Not easy books, not comfortable books, like those by David Malouf are a lot of the time. We should treasure them.

Gory Details, please!

The Thirteen Gun Salute ended with a cliffhanger of almighty proportions. Will Jack Aubrey rally his troops and recover from shipwreck or will he and several hundred souls be stranded for the rest of their days on an uncharted island in the South China Sea (which, fortunately, has both fresh water and some food available)??? I won't find out until I read the sequel, which I can't do until tonight.

I couldn't get to sleep after reading that final chapter, so I did what I've never done before: read the little essay included in the back of each book in this edition.

This was a brief autobiographical note by the authot, Patrick O'Brian. He came across very much as a man of his Brideshead Revisited generation as in a raging queen concealing more than he's explaining by describing his personal circumstances with EXTREME delicacy. (I could be misconstruing this entirely.)

But I was most struck by his description of an un-named illness that kept him confined to bed for great stretches of his childhood and out of active service in WWII but didn't prevent him from working in intelligence or messing about on boats. Maybe it's because I'm from Queensland, or maybe it's because I've read too many Who magazines or maybe just because we talk about this stuff these days, but I've been distracted all afternoon wondering if he had polio, TB, leukaemia, WHAT???

At a pinch I could argue that this might have affected his books but really it's just nosiness, isn't it?

Who stole the "dle"?

Don't know when it became all right to talk about the "Mid East". First few times I saw it, it was in a headline and I thought they might have just been saving space. Then it turned up in the body of stories - usually from american wire services.

Is this sort of like the opposite of the "Mid West"?

The verdict is in

A while ago I said I'd ask for a second opinion on Tom Holt's book about custard. I was worried that I might have been far too negative because I was jetlagged and I had to come back to work after fabulous holiday and it was surprisingly cold and I CAUGHT a cold as well.

Three weeks later, my mate said that she couldn't be bothered finishing the book. Even when she couldn't sleep last night, she preferred to stare at the ceiling. She thought it was "laboured" and said that it was trying to laugh at bureaucracy without really understanding it. The phrase "He's no Douglas Adams" was used. Then she went on to quote embarrassingly large slabs from the Hitchiker's Guide and Red Dwarf series(es?) in a way that made me glad my colleagues were mostly already at lunch. Can't have people thinking I'm some sort of sci-fi nerd, can we?

But Boys'-Own rollicking seafaring adventures are quite another kettle of fish! When I couldn't sleep last night after poor Edgar gasped his last on 24*, I devoured half of Patrick O'Brian's The Thirteen Gun Salute, in which Lucky Jack Aubrey is FINALLY restored to HM's Navy with the rank of captain and the seniority he would have had if he hadn't been so scurrilously disgraced. Interestingly, the ship's company is served with albatross with no ill-effect.

This is exactly the sort of book I hated when I was a teenager so it's a delight to find them now. There's only about another dozen or so. Hurrah!

* I'm not a 24 nerd either. Really. I didn't see most of the last season and I'm only watching about 30 minutes of the four hours** they're showing a week of the current season.

**I actually prefer it this way because the real time scenario was getting really tedious.

The Lambs of London

I just finished reading The Lambs of London, a fictionalised biography of Charles and Mary Lamb by the extremely prolific Peter Ackroyd. I'm tired just looking at that bilbiography.

It was a pleasant enough book but quite slight. To put it baldly: the Lambs are siblings with difficult family circumstances. They become friends with a chap who comes across some papers associated with Shakespeare. Thomas De Quincey pops up for a few drinks. Mary has some emotional trouble. The end.

Early nineteenth-century London is almost another character in the book, a landmark in every chapter, its streets populated with beggars and pickpockets. Characters wander around Southwark to look at the site of the Globe Theatre. They think about St Paul's and work in the East India Company House.

But this 'fiction' based on a selection of facts troubles me a bit because, unless you're an expert, it's hard to know what's true (or at least demonstrably based on the historical record) and what's made up. I remembered reading the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare when I was young and vaguely remembered that Mary was meant to be mad. Ackroyd uses this. De Quincey wrote a wonderfully clever ande extremely funny essay attributing the collapse of the Roman empire at least in part to their failure to invent breakfast. Strangely enough, this isn't mentioned but details from his Life as an English Opium Eater are used as background. I've never heard of William Ireland who talked about Shakespeare a lot and I don't know that it's worth finding out.

The writing is allusive. (There's some symbolism about these young Lambs sacrificing their youth and ambition for various reasons). There's a lot of Shakespearean pastiche which is nice. I certainly enjoyed it more than his book about Dr Dee which had a really awkward combination of 16th and 20th century plots. But I can't help wishing Anthony Burgess had written this book. For one thing, it would have been really funny.

Not quite time for an intervention

All I'm going to say about THAT final is just agree with
her.

My non-sport-watching colleagues are getting a bit over me complaining about how tired I am from staying up all night. Yesterday was particularly bad because I was unreasonably sad about the Zidane red card ending his illustrious career in disgrace.

As I wandered round looking despondent, a mate asked if I'd enjoyed the game and I talked about ZZ for about 20 seconds and she just said "Look, I don't actually know any of their names; I was just being polite. You soccer people are like cult members who've forgotten about the rest of us who talk about other stuff. Please come back. When you're ready to leave, we'll get a group together to support your transition back to the real world."

She was only half joking.

Look and Learn, Dan Brown

On Friday I took a day off work to do about 300 household things and relax a bit. Unfortunately I only got to do about 15 of those those things because I couldn't put down Robert Goddard's .Days without Number until I'd finished it. Luckily I wasn't so far gone I couldn't prioritise those 300 things so the cat got fed and I remembered to eat.

This is an unashamed potboiler with a complicated plot, several deaths and many potential villains. The Knights Templar and Holy Grail have important walk-on roles in a multi (inter?) generational secret that must be kept hidden at all costs.

From that it may sound like, yawn, a poor imitation of the most famous work by Dan Brown which I refuse to type because I still haven't forgiven myself for reading it. There's even an important plot point at Rosslyn Chapel and much discussion about conspiracy theories. But no! It's not an imitation. It was probably published at about the same time. The main difference is that this is decently written with well drawn characters, lots of literary descriptions of landscape and credible human interaactions (up to a point of course - it wouldn't be a thriller without some silliness).

So if you feel like wasting a day on a book, this one isn't bad.

Feng Shui Detective

I've almost finished reading The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics by the cross cultural expertNury Vittachi.

I bought it because the cover is shiny - not that I can find a picture of this edition on line. It tells the tale of the misadventures of FC Wong a senior Feng Shui practictioner who just wants to get on with milking money from wealthy clients but is bothered by violent vegan conspiracies.

So far, it's delightfully droll and apparently informative about Feng Shui and Indian astroplogy and the best way to drive in Shanghai. Am very excited to learn there are at least two others in the series! Hurrah!

Two minutes of magic

Am bleary-eyed this morning after my Beloved made me get up at 4.30 to watch Italy play Germany in the World Cup semi-final. I'd thought Germany would win with their home town advantage and having good players and not being nasty cheaters and all. But to my surprise, Germany couldn't get through the Italian defence and there were no goals in ordinary time. When it went to extra time, the commentators were already comparing the teams' performance at penalty shootouts. I don't know whether the German team were thinking ahead like this too but they certainly slowed down towards the end of extra time. I mean they seemed slower than the Italians or more tired. And then just when we thought it was impossible, with two minutes of extra time to go, Italy scored a beautiful goal. And then as we felt deja vu of seeing another country realise it was all over, the Italians scored again. Talk about rubbing salt into the wound!

Custard

I've been back for over a week now although it doesn't feel that long seeing we've still been watching every soccer game that's happening in Germany. I'm probably still too jetlagged to be here.

Germany has many beautiful bookshops. One on every street corner practically. Strangely enough, they are full of books written in German. The nerve of those foreingers!

I finished the book I brought on the plane over and I was reading my Beloved's book over his shoulder but it was dull. After a couple of days I started to have severe written word withdrawal. I compensated by buying every english language newspaper I found for exorbitant sums. I saved all the magazine and supplementy bits because I didn't want to think what might happen if I had to spend 24 hours on a plane without anything to read.

But then, on the very last day, we found a bookshop in Frankfurt with actual books written in English that weren't all by Dan Brown. Hurrah! And I bought Earth Wind Air and Custard by Tom Holt.

He is apparently a cross between Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. He talks about magic and goblins and changes in the space time continuum and custard. There's an awful lot of silliness but sadly, I didn't think it quite worked. The plot clunked along through about five twists too many. The protagonist kept being told he was a dill. (How amusing.) The jokes which weren't particularly funny were signalled so far in advance they might as well have had big red neon signs. Or maybe I felt this way because of the lack of oxygen in the plane and my overload of soccer... To be fair, I'll get a second opinion.