Swimming with Sharks

Oops, looks like I fell off the internet again.

I read >Sea Change by Robert Goddard the other week. This was a great read about dastardly political skulduggery and derring-do in eighteenth century England and parts of Europe.

Goddard tells a really complicated story about what happened to the secret account books of the South Sea Company, which collapsed disastrously embroiling most the great and good of the time in a bribery scandal. Many different people are on the trail of the book with murder in their hearts. Through it all, a hapless impecunious mapmaker struggles to keep his head and get the girl.

This was an utter delight: the sort of book I wish Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle had been. There's a dizzying cast of lords, earls and other titled bods but a helpful glossary at the back helps the reader keep track. Goddard clearly knows his stuff but doesn't beat you about the head with everything he's found out.

One of the more dangerous people chasing the book hither and yon worked for a parliamentary committee of inquiry. He was sent overseas armed (with arms and with powers of arrest) and able to demand full assistance from the diplomatic service. Let's hope Mrs Bishop desn't get ideas for using powers like that in her next committee inquiry.

Assuming she gets another inquiry after the election...

Speaking of which, both local candidates for the major parties were at our local fair in baby-kissing moods yesterday. Beloved and I looked at each other in horror and hurried Winnie home.

See Colleen, THAT'S how it should be done

Yesterday I finished Count Belisarius by Robert Graves. I hadn't read any of his books since I was at school and I have extremely dim recollections of the BBC miniseries of I, Claudius - I suspect Mum and Dad wavered between trying to send us to bed because there was a lot of murder and mayhem and letting us stay us because it was "educational". I certainly had the odd nightmare about Caligula for several months after that.

Anyway, Count Belisarius is the story of Belisarius, a general in the late Roman Empire who was most active in the time of the Emperor Justinian (who's famous for codifying Roman law and freight prices). The book was a longwinded collection of battles over a forty year career that went on a bit much about the fighting styles of the various oppenents and marching from here to here and building siege engines to take towns that ten years later would fall again. But you get that when it's a biography of a general I guess.

The rest of it was mixed up with a wonderful love story with his powerful wife Antonina, lively descriptions of imperial politics and, most challenging of all, the theological disputes of the time.

Graves tells the story from the point of view of a pagan Greek-educated slave of British origins. And this authorial voice is quite charming. It catches a lot of the tone of Plutarch's biographies by telling anecdotes from various stages of Belisarius's life to illustrate particular virtues or moral failings.

I know that there are really good sources for Belisarius's life (at one point the slave has much to say about how the official biography was vetted by the general's political enemies) but I don't have time to work out what's "true" and what Graves made up.

I actually don't think I need to. I felt like I was reading a real history of the period as told by a charming author. And I don't know that I'd enjoy the original sources any more than that.

This was so different to how I felt after ploughing through Colleen McCullough's unreadably dull Roman sagas. These beat you over the head with the weight of her "largest private library of Roman history" (on Norfolk island at least). She retold all of Tacitus's scurrilous gossip as truth and randomly made up a wife for Sulla just to add a bit of sex and drama to a pretty dramatic story. For someone who can write bodice rippers, it was amazing that she could make late Republican history so very BORING. Or at least more boring than the guys who were around at the time.

So thanks Robert. This almost makes up for The White Goddess.

The Poe Shadow

Worn out by another night of staring at the new shiny box, I stayed home today and finished The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. He wrote The Dante Club which was a rollicking murder mystery with real bearded men of letters trying to stop fictional murders. This was about a fictional young lawyer trying to find out what happened when the (real life) Edgar Allen Poe died mysteriously. He tries to find the model of Poe's fictional detectives to help solve the puzzle and he risks his considerable fortune and his position in society in this quest.

I didn't like it as much as the first book, at least partly because Pearl embraces the gothic horror of Poe's stories which I don't know that well and didn't like that much. But there's some good fun in trying to work out who's telling the truth and whether it matters in the end. There's also a lot of research into the real mystery behind the novel which the historical sources note at the end explains quite well.

But I like it a lot less after visiting Pearl's official website. I know these are vanity exercises designed to sell books (why else would the cover have an endorsement by Dan Brown?) but this is just a dumb thing to say:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution groups Pearl with Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers as adding to "the growing genre of novel being written nowadays -- the learned, challenging kind that does not condescend."

If there's anythhing these three writers have in common it'd be that they're American and their books are long. That's not necessarily a bad thing: I love Jonathon Franzen's complicated skewerings of society but the the one Powers book I've read was at least three times as long as it needed to be and incredibly pretentious.

All right, that's a massive overreaction to a tiny thing. But some days I'm surprised Greenpeace hasn't started campaigning for a UN declaration for saving trees by shortening books. The French would of course be the first to ratify but the Americans would probably see it as a threat to their way of life.

Last of the Christmas books

I really don't understand publishers sometimes. Why would you give a book the cover in picture one (an Old Masters painting of a voluptuous seminaked woman) when you could have the much more dynamic exciting, accurate, attractive and relevant cover in picture 2?

Cover one is the UK edition of The Ruby in her Navel by Barry Unsworth.I was given the Australian paperback with cover two for Christmas. Because it looked so pretty, I've been saving it up to read for five weeks. I don't think I would have looked forward to reading it if it had been in cover one. I might even have wrapped it in brown paper before taking it on the train.

The book is set in twelfth century Sicily shortly after the second Crusade where the Christians apparently did quite badly and looked like they were going to lose hold of the kingdoms established in the first Crusade. Many of them went to lick their wounds in Sicily where a Frankish king had been ruling over a racially mixed society for decades, carefully balancing the skills and interests of the Saracen (Arabic Moslem), Byzantine Greek, Italian, French and German populations. The book is about palace conspiracies to reduce the power and influence of the Saracens.

The main character is a fairly naive young Frank who wants to be a knight but works within a Saracen-dominated administrative office. People keep EXPLAINING the political situation to him in a way that's a bit didactic and is probably my major problem with the book. This is an amazingly alien world that does need some explaining (and Unsworth does a fabulous job of describing the physical environment), but the approach is heavy-handed at times.

There's also an extremely exotic Turkish dancer who introduces what sounds like bellydancing to the western world. Phwoar!!!

Cover 2 shows the elements of the plot with its pictures of a jousting knight and a dancing girl (with a tiny red dot in her navel. You probably can’t see that). It also looks like it’s designed to imitate a manuscript that might have been illuminated by someone living in a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic place like Sicily. Maybe it’s meant to be by a monk who grew up looking at Frankish knights but also understanding Arabic decoration. This just makes far far more sense as a cover than a pretty oil painting of a passive naked lady.

And at least cover 2 gives the woman a face.