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Book Review: In Search of London

August 17, 2025 in book review | Leave a comment

In Search of London by H.V. Morton (1951) 440 p.

The rarest of things for me these days – a book I picked up in a second-hand bookstore (in this case Through the Looking Glass on Brunswick Street) on a whim and purchased after flicking through it a bit despite never having heard of the writer before. Apparently Morton was quite famous for his travel writing in his day, and he’s one of those early 20th century writers who has a breezily readable and even modern style.

I never thought of London in the 1950s as a particularly interesting place – more of a dreary black-and-white city sandwiched in between the dreadful thrill of World War II and the cultural revolution of the 1960s – but what In Search of London made me appreciate was just how much Londoners were still living in the shadow of the war and the Blitz: vast swathes of the city still in ruins, every single person except the smallest children having first-hand experience of war, rationing still in effect, and the general gnawing anxiety of the nascent Cold War hanging like a Sword of Damocles.

I glanced down at the people. Those over the age of forty had lived through two wars and had survived the Blitz. Boys and girls of sixteen and seventeen remembered no other London but a city of jagged ruins, of hob grates perched in the sunlight in shattered walls, of cellars draped with willow-herb and Canadian fleabane. This London, so heartbreaking to me, and still in a sense so incredible, is to them normal and commonplace.

That word “incredible” is useful one; I also recently read for the first time Lee Sandlin’s excellent long-form essay Losing the War, and noted with interest the passage in which he observes repeated phrases in the way contemporary war correspondents described events:

Hersey, like Pyle, calls the sound of a shell in flight “weird.” That word and its cognates recur countless times in American war reporting. The war was weird. Or it was haunted, or spectral, or uncanny, or supernatural. Battle zones were eerie; bomb craters were unearthly; even diplomatic conferences were strange and unreal.

This war – which marked the final end of many eras, and is the foundation stone of the modern world we live in today – feels so distant to us, and so important and so influential, that it’s impossible to see it as anything other than an immutable fact of history. Which of course it is; but that in turn makes it easy to forget that for those who lived it, it was just another case of history happening all the time, and happening around you, and perhaps feeling like something had gone wrong and this level of slaughter and destruction wasn’t supposed to be happening.

That’s probably a trite or stupid observation. But it was one which kept returning to my head throughout this entire book, which runs a pretty even keel between recounting History with a capital H – as Morton takes us through London’s grand parks and palaces, the museums and cathedrals, the execution of King Charles and the wives of Henry VIII, all those things which are basically as distant in time to him as they are to us – and the history of the Blitz, which for him and everyone around him is an ever-present recent memory. You come to see it as he does: how strange it is that this great city, capital of this sceptred isle, on which a foreign enemy had not set foot in a thousand years, could come – in your own lifetime – under powerful bombardment as the sky above became the enemy’s domain. You come to understand his use of that word “incredible” – simply not feasible or believable. In some ways it seems inevitable that all of history should lead up to that point, and in other ways, it still feels like some horrible mistake. Either way, everywhere in The Heart of London one has the sense of an ancient, beautiful, storied and majestic past, which was violently wrenched into the present by the industrial-scale 20th century war machine. Here, for example, Morton recalls a visit he paid to Westminster Abbey during the Blitz:

Returning to ground level, we made our way to the crypt, where I saw an unusual sight. This small stone chamber has a single squat pillar of red sandstone, from the centre of which spring the sixteen ribs that support the floor of the Chapter House above. The vestments for the next day’s services were carefully laid out – beautiful shimmering brocades with threads of gold and silver – and next to them, on four kitchen chairs, were laid out with military precision four firemen’s kits with gumboots, gas-proof clothing, gas masks and shrapnel helmets… As I groped my way to an almost invisible omnibus I thought how many strange things nine centuries have shown to Westminster Abbey. It has seen dead kings lying stripped to the waist in the glow of unbleached tapers; it has seen a Queen of England, Elizabeth Woodville, sitting “alone on the rushes all desolate and amazed,” seeking sanctuary from her enemies; it has seen pomp and pride and piety go marching down the centuries in company with greed and envy and treachery; it has even known one murder. During the War something entirely new happened to it, something that neither king nor abbot could have imagined. We called it A.R.P. or our own unhappy gift to history.

Visiting Piccadilly:

I am sure that few of the thousands of people who see these four streets every day know that their cellars are firmly planted in the London of Charles II. I remember during the last war – and during an air raid – having to go to a building at the Piccadilly end of Dover Street, now split up into dozens of separate shops and businesses, and on the way up my hand fell upon the magnificent broad handrail of the original staircase, standing there still, complete with its fat, twisted, typically Stuart balusters. It was an unexpected treasure to find in a building that gave no hint from the outside that its stairs had been trodden by men who had lived in the London of Charles and Nell Gwyn, Pepys, Evelyn and Wren; and the idea so delighted me that I stood there examining the balusters by the light of a cigarette-lighter until brought to my senses by the sound of an approaching V1.

Visiting the Monument to the Great Fire of London:

It was easy for complacent centuries like the Nineteenth, which knew no overwhelming disasters, to say that the Great Fire was a blessing because it swept out of existence a vast conglomeration of insanitary streets and made way for the cleaner brick-and-stone London of Stuart and later times; but we of today, who have seen so much that we loved go up in flames, are probably in a better position to feel sympathy for those of our forebears who suffered the tragedy of the Great Fire.

Visiting the Chelsea Pensioners:

It might have been thought that a veteran aged a hundred and one, who had survived many a dangerous campaign, would have been fairly safe from the King’s enemies in Chelsea Hospital, but this is an unusually dangerous world, and when a parachute mine floated down in 1941 it killed thirteen veterans, including one who had been born in 1840, the year of Queen Victoria’s marriage.

Watching the Trooping of the Colour:

There is something infinitely touching about military ceremonial, and I thought that an age which has endured two wars, and is talking about a third, ought not to be enjoying, as I and all those around me were enjoying, this bright burst of militarism. But, after all, I reflected, this was not war. War is a poor old lady hiding under the stairs, holding a beloved cat, while a young man thousands of feet above her in the sky, who has no hatred for her at all, who doesn’t even know she exists, is doing his best to kill her and destroy the street in which she lives.

Morton’s direct reflections and experiences bring the war, and the Blitz, and the manner in which London was laid waste, into the frame in a way which reminds us that not a single aspect of human life was unscathed by those great events, and that their direct effects lingered for many years and decades to come. It’s a book which touches on many aspects of London’s history, and he could have written a deeply engrossing book on these subjects at any time – indeed, it’s far from his only book on the city, and while reading this I also read The Heart of London, a collection of his newspaper columns from the early 1920s, which is out of copyright and available free on Project Gutenberg. But writing In Search of London around 1950 stamps it with the indelible mark of the Second World War – or, as Morton would put it, just ‘the War’ – and it’s all the better for it. A fascinating perspective from someone who was there for one of the most important of London’s many stories.

Book Review: Dark Sleeper

August 16, 2025 in book review | Leave a comment

Dark Sleeper by Jeffrey E. Barlough (1998) 484 p.

Strange Cargo was a book I frankly found a bit of a slog, but which was enlivened in the final quarter by a turn of events I hadn’t foreseen, but which I frustratingly couldn’t talk about in a review because they constitute spoilers. It made me enjoy the book enough that I bought the first two in the series (Strange Cargo being the third, though they’re stand-alones) in spite of the exorbitant price. I will recap the bullet points of this alternate history gaslamp fantasy, which the author has dubbed the ‘Western Lights’ series:

1. The Ice Age never ended; mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers still walk the earth; European history appears to have risen unimpeded, but people never crossed the Bering Strait to become Native Americans and the English settlements along what is (but is never explicitly said to be) the west coast of North America do not bear their real-world names;

2. A horrific cataclysm called “the sundering” occurred some hundred-and-fifty years ago, which wiped out most of the life on Earth, worsened the extant Ice Age, and has reduced the known world to a rainy and foggy string of cities along a wild coastline and mountainous hinterland (again, though this is never explicitly said, it’s roughly what would’ve been Seattle down to roughly what would’ve been southern California, with all the rest of the world reduced to an unknowable wasteland);

And the third factor, which I didn’t want to say about Strange Cargo but which I can do for Dark Sleeper because it’s front and centre from the first chapter:

3. The supernatural is in fact real.

It is a deeply Dickensian world, the sundering having frozen technological and social progress in amber, and I suppose it’s appropriate for the supernatural to be real since Dickens did in fact touch on the subject and provided us with many ghosts. The opening chapter of Dark Sleeper – itself a tribute to the foggy opening of Bleak House, though I admit I’ve never read that novel and only recognised it from the recent discourse – has a man encountering a walking and talking corpse in the misty, atmospheric late-night streets of the city of Salthead, which is only the beginning of the uncanny perils that bedevil the city. Soon sunken ships are rising from the deep; a ghost boy is spotted in a local inn; and our heroes Professor Titus Tiggs and his colleague Dr Daniel Dampe are drawn into an investigation of further paranormal, uncanny and downright weird events.

These books are Vibe Fiction. They very strongly carry a mood. They are foggy, misty, rainy, and cosy; they are about Victorian manners and social hierarchy, they are about fireplaces in studies and sitting rooms and pubs, they are about coach-rides to country manors and a spawling cast of peculiar characters or, very often, caricatures. They have a tremendously good sense of humour. They are not books in which to seek great narrative frisson or subtle emotional moments or even, ultimately, a coherent plot – the events of Dark Sleeper are resolved by an almost literal deus ex machina. But I enjoy them a lot, and if sinking into some wintry Dickensian Vibes with a touch of gaslamp fantasy and sabre-toothed tigers sounds appealing, I expect you’ll enjoy them too.

Rereading Discworld: A Hat Full of Sky

August 16, 2025 in rereading discworld | Leave a comment

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett (2004) 298 p.

The second Tiffany Aching book, in which Tiffany is collected by Miss Tick and taken away to be introduced to her new mistress, Miss Level, for whom she’ll serve an informal apprenticeship. Unbeknownst to either Miss Tick or Miss Level, as they leave behind the Chalk and head into the witch country of the Ramptop Mountains, Tiffany has already been dabbling in self-taught magic herself – and has attracted something dangerous in her wake.

One of the pleasures of reading the Tiffany Aching books is that I never did the first time round, so it’s like getting to read a classic Discworld novel for the first time. I find them difficult to review in that sense, because I can’t talk about how they do or don’t match my own memories, and instead find myself just enjoying them for their own sake. I can’t even be particularly critical of them because, at least in the case of these first two, they’re solidly good Discworld books that I would have enjoyed as much as the others if I’d happened to pick them up from my high school library back in 2005.

Pratchett’s books are… well, they are fun, but that’s not quite the word I’m looking for. They’re compelling. They’re readable. They take you along on a great story. Stephen King is perhaps the closest comparable contemporary writer in the match between how widely popular his books were and how much they encapsulated a good adventure story; how much I enjoy sitting there reading these stories by the light of my bedside lamp before I go to sleep. They have frisson, as seen here at the end of the chapter in which Tiffany and Miss Level arrive at her distant cottage in the heights of the mountains, landing at Miss Level’s makeshift candle-lit runway for her flying broomstick:

“Sorry about screaming and being sick,” Tiffany mumbled, tripping over one of the jars and knocking the candle out. She tried to make out anything in the dark, but her head was spinning. “Did you light these candles, Miss Level?”
“Yes. Let’s get inside, it’s getting chilly—” Miss Level began.
“Oh, by magic,” said Tiffany, still dizzy.
“Well, it can be done by magic, yes,” said Miss Level. “But I prefer matches, which are of course a lot less effort and quite magical in themselves, when you come to think about it.” She untied the suitcase from the stick and said: “Here we are, then! I do hope you’ll like it here!”
There was that cheerfulness again. Even when she felt sick and dizzy, and quite interested in knowing where the privy was as soon as possible, Tiffany still had ears that worked and a mind that, however much she tried, wouldn’t stop thinking. And it thought: That cheerfulness has got cracks around the edges. Something isn’t right here…

I also admired this passage, as Tiffany settles into the cottage: capturing the feeling of a child sent to an unfamiliar place, an elderly relative’s perhaps, old enough to understand why it’s necessary for them to go but young enough to feel suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed with the unfamiliarity of it all:

Her bedroom was a… nice room. Nice was a very good word. Everything had frills. Anything that could have a cover on it was covered. Some attempt had been made to make the room…jolly, as if being a bedroom was a jolly wonderful thing to be. Tiffany’s room back on the farm had a rag rug on the floor, a water jug and basin on a stand, a big wooden box for clothes, an ancient dolls’ house, and some old calico curtains, and that was pretty much it. On the farm, bedrooms were for shutting your eyes in.

The room had a chest of drawers. The contents of Tiffany’s suitcase filled one drawer easily.

…

At the bottom of her suitcase was a small box that Mr. Block, the farm’s carpenter, had made for her. He did not go in for delicate work, and it was quite heavy. In it, she kept…keepsakes. There was a piece of chalk with a fossil in it, which was quite rare, and her personal butter stamp (which showed a witch on a broomstick) in case she got a chance to make butter here, and a dobby stone, which was supposed to be lucky because it had a hole in it. (She’d been told that when she was seven, and had picked it up. She couldn’t quite see how the hole made it lucky, but since it had spent a lot of time in her pocket, and then safe and sound in the box, it probably was more fortunate than most stones, which got kicked around and run over by carts and so on.)

There was also a blue-and-yellow wrapper from an old packet of Jolly Sailor tobacco, and a buzzard feather, and an ancient flint arrowhead wrapped up carefully in a piece of sheep’s wool. There were plenty of these on the Chalk. The Nac Mac Feegle used them for spear points.

She lined these up neatly on the top of the chest of drawers, alongside her diary, but they didn’t make the place look more homey. They just looked lonely.

Tiffany is a smart child, but she’s still a child.

Another fine thing in A Hat Full of Sky, and a sign that Pratchett was still operating at the height of his powers, is Tiffany’s view of the other witches. We know that the rural parts of the Discworld are full of them, but our viewpoint thus far has been largely confined to the coven in the Witches arc, led by the indominatable Granny Weatherwax; A Hat Full of Sky is the first time we really closely get to see two others, Miss Tick and Miss Level, and it’s interesting to realise that many witches could charitably be described as being merely competent, in the same way that many of the rank-and-file officers of Sam Vimes’ City Watch are basically adequate but not up to scratch with the man himself – a comparison with policing which Pratchett in fact makes:

She’d come to witching later than most, being naturally qualified by reason of the two bodies, but she’d never been very happy about magic. In truth, most witches could get through their whole lives without having to do serious, undeniable magic (making shambles and curse nets and dream catchers didn’t really count, being rather more like arts and crafts, and most of the rest of it was practical medicine, common sense, and the ability to look stern in a pointy hat). But being a witch and wearing the big black hat was like being a policeman. People saw the uniform, not you. When the mad axeman was running down the street, you weren’t allowed to back away, muttering, “Could you find someone else? Actually, I mostly just do, you know, stray dogs and road safety. . . .” You were there, you had the hat, you did the job. That was a basic rule of witchery: It’s up to you.

Yet it’s also interesting to view Granny Weatherwax through the eyes of a peer (and Tiffany, while young, is undoubtedly her peer), because we’ve only ever seen this before through the eyes of Magrat (tinted with frustration and resentment) or Nanny Ogg (tinted with friendship and a general ebullience). Pratchett repeats a line a couple of times in Monstrous Regiment in which the protagonist Polly is reminded that other people are always looking back at you: that while you’re watching them and forming your opinion, they’re assessing you, too. This is not actually true of all people, as I’m sure Pratchett would agree, but it’s true of smart people. Tiffany and Granny are two very smart people, and while Tiffany is obviously the junior partner, being measured and appraised and judged by Granny, she’s also watching back:

“Perhaps you’ll call again sometimes,” she said, turning slowly and watching the cloak curve in the air. “It’s always very quiet here.”
“I should like that,” said Tiffany. “Shall I tell the bees before I come, so you can get the tea ready?”
For a moment Granny Weatherwax glared, and then the lines faded into a wry grin.
“Clever,” she said.
What’s inside you? Tiffany thought. Who are you really, in there? Did you want me to take your hat? You pretend to be the big bad wicked witch, and you’re not. You test people all the time, test, test, test, but you really want them to be clever enough to beat you. Because it must be hard, being the best. You’re not allowed to stop. You can only be beaten, and you’re too proud ever to lose. Pride! You’ve turned it into terrible strength, but it eats away at you. Are you afraid to laugh in case you hear an early cackle?

There is nothing new about this; Pratchett has always been clear about Granny’s flaws as a person, even though she’s (demonstrably and repeatedly) a hero. But it’s interesting to see her from Tiffany’s viewpoint, especially since while Granny is aware of her own flaws, Tiffany isn’t yet mature enough to be aware of hers; yet you can see here a creeping awareness of what Polly in Monstrous Regiment knew, and which Granny Weatherwax would too, which is that while everybody is always watching and judging, that is – like anything else – just an opinion, and that opinion need not unsteady you. You can just shrug and get on with things. That’s what witches have to do.

Next up is Going Postal.

Book Review: Strange Cargo

May 16, 2025 in book review | Leave a comment

Strange Cargo by Jeffrey E. Barlough (2002) 481 p.

A fascinating series that I was surprised I’d never heard of, since by the elevator pitch for these books would seem to be Extremely My Shit: meandering Dickensian novels which take place in an alternate world where the Ice Age never ended (but European culture appears to have arisen unimpeded) and, also, an unknown cataclysm speculated to be a volcano or asteroid impact has resulted in the global temperature plummeting further and civilisation being wiped out except for a string of cities along a narrow stretch of coastline, where it’s still socially and technologically the early 19th century.

Strange Cargo is the third in the Western Lights series (they’re all standalones) and involves three separate storylines: a family seeking out the mysterious beneficiary in their grandfather’s will, a woman seeking to rid herself of a cursed mirror, and a landowner tinkering with a mysterious experiment in his old coach-house. Barlough is clearly echoing the style of Dickens, particularly his willingness to illustrate every facet of his fictional world; there is no such thing as a “minor” character in Strange Cargo, because Barlough is willing to let every character he invents lead him down the garden path for multiple pages, which I must admit began to try my patience. But there’s also an element of Lovecraft and MR James in here, with ghosts and demons and visions and monsters, and it was as these elements truly came to the fore in the novel’s third act that I found my interest properly engaged and began to really enjoy it. I also suspect that the epic Dickensian cast-of-thousands style will be an acquired taste, in much the same way that I found the dense and unforgiving prose of Patrick O’Brian to be an acquired taste. Unfortunately only one of these books has an ebook edition, and most of them seem to be out of print, but I’ll keep a weather eye on Abebooks.

Hat tip to Goodreads user Mark Monday without whom I’d never have heard of this series. Also to this edition’s cover illustrator for an instantly classic example, in the time-honoured tradition of science fiction and fantasy, of depicting something that does not occur in the book at all.

Rereading Discworld: Monstrous Regiment

May 16, 2025 in rereading discworld | Leave a comment

Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett (2003) 352 p.
Discworld #31

I previously referred to Monstrous Regiment as a “late-in-the-game throwback to the series’ earlier days,” not because it’s madcap or silly or wildly creative, but for one very simple reason: it doesn’t take place in Ankh-Morpork or feature Ankh-Morpork-based characters travelling somewhere new. (At least not the main characters – Vimes sticks his nose in here and I would’ve preferred that he hadn’t.) It therefore reminds me of Pyramids or Small Gods, and indeed I think it’s the last book in the series that doesn’t slot into a larger arc.

But it’s not a throwback in any other sense. It’s one of Pratchett’s most political novels, coming perfectly on the heels of Night Watch, following young Polly Tonks in the backwards, North-Korea-esque nation of Borogravia, a mountainous backwater most well-known for its restrictive religion and warlike nature. Polly’s brother Paul (well-written as being autistic without ever using that word) has gone off to war and is missing in action; determined to find him, Polly cuts her hair, puts on a pair of breeches and signs up to the army herself in the hopes of finding him and bringing him home. After we get the measure of the other rag-tag and all obviously underage recruits whom she signs up alongside, it’s pretty clear the Borogravian army is on its last legs; it also becomes clear to Polly very early on in the novel that pretty much all of the other young lads are, like her, actually young lasses in disguise.

Monstrous Regiment was released in 2003, and when I read it as a fourteen-year-old boy I undoubtedly would’ve been thinking of the 1998 Disney film Mulan – not a film I’d ever actually seen, but one which had been popular and well-known enough that I would have assumed this was the basis of the trope. But of course Mulan was based on an old Chinese folk tale, and the notion of women joining the military by disguising themselves as a man dates back to antiquity in cultures all over the world. Many fans today view Monstrous Regiment as a trans story; I’m sure there’s a countering view that this was not what Pratchett intended and that he was merely referencing these old stories.

But the funny thing is that a change in our social mores doesn’t just change how we interpret old stories: it changes how we interpret the historical record, too, and many of these stories about women dressing up as men to join the army were true stories. In the same way that we now realise that the famous homosexual romps of the British Navy or British boarding schools weren’t (or at least weren’t entirely) just a case of thoroughly heterosexual lads falling back on what was available, it’s difficult not to look back at historical cross-dressers without thinking: oh… of course. This was recently and explicitly done well in Lev Grossman’s excellent Arthurian novel The Bright Sword, which I read but didn’t review earlier this year. Grossman creates several original Knights of the Round Table, and one of them, named Dinadan, has a backstory which reveals that he began life as a woman, but – through a bargain with the fairy folk – was trained in swordsmanship and escaped his miserable lot in life to ride out into the world identifying as a man and seeking a knighthood of Camelot. There are those who might say (and I will note I would strongly disagree with them even if Grossman didn’t write this so skilfully) this is a case of the author inserting a minority character into his fantasy novel as a sop to the zeitgeist; but instead it feels like a perfectly appropriate recognition of the fact that trans people have always existed, even if only a few of them were bold enough to transition by whatever means they could find.

I don’t think Pratchett is explicitly writing a trans text here – unlike Grossman’s Dinadan, Polly never expresses any unhappiness with being female, only with the fact that being female consigns her to being a second-class citizen – but it can absolutely be interpreted as one. In my review of Feet of Clay I wrote this:

Most interesting of all is the introduction of Cheery, a new dwarf officer who – although all dwarfs outwardly present as men (a trope of the fantasy genre dating back to Tolkien) – is in fact a woman, and now that she’s in the big cosmopolitan city feels she’s entitled to act like one. When Pratchett wrote Feet of Clay in the mid ‘90s this was doubtless intended and interpreted as a metaphor for closeted gay people; in 2018, it much more obviously lends itself to the analogy of trans people. I can’t quite recall whether I picked up on the satire at all as a young teenager, but of course I would have understood that the broader point, and the reason it can be applied to both the gay and trans rights movements, is universal: the desire of people to express their disapproved-of-but-harmless true selves in defiance of their own conservative culture, and the liberating atmosphere of a big city in which they’re finally afforded the freedom to do that.

I believe that holds here. I can entirely see why this is such a popular one of Pratchett’s novels in the trans community, even as I’m not sure any of the characters could reasonably be described as being trans, per se. But it’s undeniably a novel about the ludicrousness of sexism, of the gender binary, of the fact that all people should fundamentally be free to do whatever they please as long as it isn’t hurting anyone else.

The enemy wasn’t men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin’ stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid.

In the same way that Cheery’s subplot in Feet of Clay can be embraced as a trans storyline even if Pratchett didn’t originally write it as such, Monstrous Regiment can be embraced as a trans novel even if that wasn’t his direct intention. They’re both novels about breaking free of the gender roles society has forced upon you by an accident of birth, and if he was ahead of the curve on where society was at with regards to its trans citizens – certainly, as it transpires in 2025, where Britain was at with regards to its trans citizens – then that only goes to show what a universal message it is. One which, unfortunately, is still very much necessary.

Next up is the second Tiffany Aching book, Wintersmith.

Rereading Discworld: The Wee Free Men

May 16, 2025 in rereading discworld | Leave a comment

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett (2003) 352 p.
Discworld #30 (Tiffany Aching #1)

Like The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, this is a book which was described at the time as “a story of Discworld” and wasn’t included in the main numbering sequence, because Pratchett’s publisher wanted to promote it as YA. It’s the first of a series of YA Discworld novels featuring the young girl Tiffany Aching, who goes on to become a witch, and I believe as time went by the YA classification was dropped and they were published as general Discworld novels and retroactively added to the main sequence.

None of this really matters, except as a piece of trivia about the publishing industry and the fact that it means these books aren’t technically part of the my Discworld Re-Read, since I’ve never read them. Why that is I’m not sure. I read and enjoyed The Amazing Maurice at the time, so I wasn’t averse to reading what the publisher considered YA. (As noted in my review of that book, I don’t really see the difference aside from a child protagonist and slightly shorter length.) It’s possibly because the Wee Free Men themselves, whom we first met in Carpe Jugulum, I found (and still find) irritating more than amusing, and therefore didn’t read the first Aching book and thus didn’t read the rest.

So, yes, the Wee Free Men unsurprisingly features these rambunctious little “pictsies,” who show up around the same time that young Tiffany Aching encounters a strange monster down by the river and a witch named Miss Tick who has a talking toad as a familiar. Incidentally here’s a little throwaway line which tickled me just right:

“Can I operate the spring now?” said the toad.
“Yes,” said Miss Tick, her eyes still on Tiffany. “You can operate the spring.”
“I like operating the spring,” said the toad, crawling around to the back of the hat.

The first half of The Wee Free Men is rather slow-paced, revolving around Tiffany trying to find her brother (kidnapped by the fairies) and enlisting the help of the pictsies to do so, with lots of cartoonish slapstick pictsie nonsense. It’s the sort of stuff that has never really appealed to me in Pratchett’s writing, though I may be in the minority on that.

The second half, however, was really enjoyable, as Tiffany, the toad and Pictsies venture through a gateway into the world of the fairies. This is where The Wee Free Men becomes a classic magical adventure story of the type Pratchett can write really, really well, which are noticeable in the Death/Witches arcs but which he strayed away from later in the series in favour of the (equally compelling but noticeably different) Watch/industrial revolution arcs, which are much more grounded and political. Tiffany’s expedition into the illusory world of the “Queen” (similar to but probably not precisely the same “Queen” of the fairies in Lords and Ladies) is a page-turning adventure mixing horror with fantasy. The Queen’s fairy world is one of dreams, harvested from all over the real world and operating on the same sort of Alice in Wonderland illogic that we find in dreams, as we see when Tiffany comes across a clearing in a field full of people watching a man crack nuts with a sledgehammer:

There were lords and ladies, people in fine clothes and even a few shepherds. But some of them had a pieced-together look. They looked, in fact, like a picture book back in her bedroom.

It was made of thick card, worn raggedy-edged by generations of Aching children. Each page showed a character, and each was cut into four strips that could be turned over independently. The point of the whole thing was that a bored child could turn over parts of the pages and change the way the characters were dressed. You could end up with a soldier’s head on a baker’s chest wearing a maid’s dress and a farmer’s big boots.

Tiffany had never been bored enough. She considered that even things that spend their whole lives hanging from the underside of branches would never be bored enough to spend more than five seconds with that book.

The people around her looked either as though they’d been taken from that book, or had dressed for a fancy-dress party in the dark. One of two of them nodded to her as she passed, but didn’t seem surprised to see her.

And like a real dream, the sense of bizarreness overlays the lurking possibility that it might become a nightmare at any moment, the ludicrous turned terrifying:

Tiffany didn’t wait to see what else was going to happen. She grabbed her brother again, and ran away, down through the grass, past the strange figures looking round at the sound of the Queen’s anger.

Now shadows moved in the shadowless grasses. Some of the people—the joke people, the ones that looked like a flaps-on-the-pages picture book—changed shape and started to move after Tiffany and her screaming brother.

There’s also, of course, the general good stuff we used to get from the Witches arc about belief and justice and fairness, and indeed Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg show up near the end of the book, giving a strong indication that Tiffany’s story will become intertwined with theirs. As I said, I’m not sure why I skipped over this arc when I was younger, but I’m quite glad I have another four unread Discworld novels to check out now.

Next up is Monstrous Regiment, which I remember also being something of a late-in-the-game throwback to the series’ earlier days.

Rereading Discworld Index

Book Review: Clean Straw For Nothing

February 25, 2025 in book review | Leave a comment

Clean Straw For Nothing by George Johnston (1968) 303 p.

My Brother Jack is one of the great Australian novels, a semi-autobiographical account of writer George Johnston’s childhood and early adulthood, clearly drawn from the contours of his own life but still unmistakeably a novel. It’s a disappointment that the sequel, Clean Straw For Nothing, is far more bluntly inspired by his real life – usually to its self-indulgent detriment.

In the years following World War II Johnston and his second wife Charmain Clift moved from Australia to London and then to the Greek island of Hydra, living there for years among a flourishing bohemian community of expats – and so, of course, does My Brother Jack’s David Meredith, though it’s now very difficult to think of him as David Meredith and not as George Johnston. (This isn’t helped by the fact that the book jumps back and forth between London in the ‘50s, Greece in the early ‘60s and Sydney in the late ‘60s, and back and forth between first person and third person.) Jack himself is never once mentioned – he may well be dead for all Johnston cares – and the gulf between My Brother Jack and Clean Straw For Nothing is so vast that when a despondent Meredith/Johnston wanders down the banks of the Thames to gaze out at the Discovery, and recalls seeing her in Port Philip Bay back when he was a cub reporter in the Melbourne of the 1930s, it’s a shock to remember this is even the same person. There are sometimes streaks of the same theme that made My Brother Jack so interesting – namely, the sense of being Australian, of not belonging, of the cultural cringe and the reactionary patriotic shame at feeling the cultural cringe – but these are largely subsumed by the torrid psychodrama of Meredith/Johnston’s relationship with his adulterous wife.

It is of course possible I read something that was not intended in My Brother Jack. I thought Meredith’s cultural cringe was countered, in Johnston’s eyes, by Jack’s unashamed and unabashed straightforward, working class, patriotic she’ll-be-right contentedness at his place in the world; that it made Meredith aware of and ashamed by his own pretentiousness. Perhaps I was wrong, and this was not the intended reading, but at any rate with the character of Jack entirely removed there is no longer any implicit rebuke to Meredith/Johnston’s contempt for the country of his birth. Note, however, that in all the years he spends on Hydra, there is one (1) named Greek character, with whom Meredith/Johnston shares perhaps a couple of pages of dialogue at the tail end of the book. Meredith/Johnston’s search in Europe for something more meaningful than Australia’s self-interested material prosperity never seems to extend beyond his circle of heavy-drinking bohemian expats, but – unlike My Brother Jack – there is little if any sense the author is aware of this hypocrisy.

Clean Straw For Nothing is not a bad book, per se – Johnston retains his excellent prose style and it’s a pleasure to read on a technical level. But while My Brother Jack was a perfectly-crafted novel with an overarching theme, Clean Straw For Nothing is an awkward and disjointed exercise which wanders all over Johnston’s thoughts and has only the lightest coat of paint to cover up the fact that it’s a plain memoir – one which, to boot, covers a far less interesting period of his life than its predecessor.

Rereading Discworld: Night Watch

February 25, 2025 in book review, rereading discworld | Leave a comment

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett (2002) 422 p.

Many readers consider this to be Pratchett’s magnum opus – certainly I doubt any rankings of the Discworld series would place it outside the top five. It’s the culmination of the story of Sam Vimes, whose arc across the series is a rag-to-riches redemption narrative about a useless old drunk in a useless joke of a city watch who becomes a sober and serious man, a thoughtful detective, and a steady-handed administrator of a modern police force in a thriving city. All through the City Watch arc, as both Vimes and the Watch itself are propelled upwards, a small part in the back of his mind misses the old days: misses chasing thugs through the alleyways, misses sheltering from the rain in a doorway at three o’clock in the morning, misses the feel of the city streets beneath the worn-out cardboard soles of his cheap boots. One must, of course, be careful what one wishes for, because in the opening scenes of Night Watch Vimes is chasing the cop killer Carcer across the rooftops of Unseen University when a magical thunderstorm flings both Vimes and his quarry thirty years into the past, into the bad old days of the corrupt, underfunded and underpaid Night Watch, patrolling the streets of an impoverished Ankh-Morpork languishing under the tyrannical Lord Winder. Now Vimes has to track down Carcer, survive the violent revolution he knows is coming, teach his teenage self how to be a good cop, and find his way home. It’s a cracker of a set-up for a story and a perfect emotional culmination to the journey Vimes has been on across six books, as both a man and a policeman.

It’s also, I think, one of the least funny Discworld books, and I don’t say that as a criticism. The magical storm which propels Vimes into the past necessitates a few early scenes with the wizards of Unseen University, and there’s a fantastic slapstick moment involving Ridcully, a bathtub and his long-handled scrubbing brush. But once we get into the meat of the book, it’s probably the most Serious novel in the entire canon: a book about policing, politics, community, revolution and violence which has little mental space for humour. By the time Vimes is visiting the graveyard at the novel’s climax, the notion of cracking a joke would be like doing so at a funeral.

The working title of this novel was “The Nature of the Beast,” a phrase referenced a few times throughout, alluding to the violent nature at the heart of Vimes (and all men) which he keeps contained – useful when unleashed, but ultimately something that must be muzzled, lest one end up like Carcer and his ilk. (Just as Vimes rejoins the Night Watch of his youth, the sociopathic Carcer find himself thriving as a recruit to Lord Winder’s secret police.) But Night Watch is a far better title, in my view: obviously tying in with the plot as Vimes literally returns to his old days (and to the Watch story arc’s initial two books) in the nocturnal half of a divided City Watch, with most of the book taking place in the hours after sunset and before sunrise. But it’s also a metaphorical title that leans back towards “The Nature of the Beast:” Vimes and his colleagues are the Night Watch, the watchers in the night and the watchers against the night, akin to George R.R. Martin’s Night’s Watch, akin to Colonel Jessup’s man on that wall, akin to Batman speeding off into the night while Gary Oldman says whatever he’s going on about at the conclusion of The Dark Knight. This does not actually ennoble them, and Pratchett (via Vimes) is very firm about the fact they they’ve mostly signed up for reasons as base as the steady paycheque or a uniform that’ll impress girls. When the military is called onto the streets there’s another aside about the common soldier, who’s generally just enlisted for “a bed and three square meals a day.” And when the grand revolution against Ankh-Morpork’s dictatorial government comes in the novel’s third act, and the Les Mis barriers go up in the streets, Vimes’ chief concern is not to lead the revolution but to keep the violence away from his precinct and preserve ordinary life as much as possible for the citizens under his watchful eye:

I wanted to keep a few streets safe. I just wanted to keep a handful of decent, silly people away from the dumb mobs and the mindless rebels and the idiot soldiery. I really, really hoped we could get away with it.

The “Night” in that sense is a metaphor. Vimes’ Watch is a watch against the darkness of man, the darkness of evil, and it’s all the more heroic for the fact that this darkness is not necessarily something grand or epochal, but the darkness that disrupts and upsets and oppresses the common people who are trying to get about their day-to-day business of raising their children and putting food on the table. It doesn’t matter whether the darkness is as small as a petty vandal or as enormous as a totalitarian government: the moral role of the Watch, however you conceive of that phrase, whether it’s an organised police force or Reg Shoe’s citizens’ committee, is to defend the common citizen against the darkness.

There is an argument – one which I’m sure many people on the 21st century internet will quite happily make – that this is a cop-out, a weak centrist opinion that it’s better to avoid rocking the boat and suffering some property damage than it is to risk things and stand up for freedom and overthrow a despotic government. Vimes is unquestionably a cynic about the revolution, telling one young revolutionary that they’re so named because “they always come round again – people die, and nothing changes,” and when the citizens’ committee in his area is drawing up their demands for truth, justice etc, Vimes says he wants a hard-boiled egg, because he believes he stands a chance of actually getting that. This is partly because Vimes has already lived through the revolution once before, seen that it failed, and also seen Ankh-Morpork become a freer and better place under Vetinari’s hand with no bloodshed necessary. (In one sense here, as with The Truth, Pratchett has written himself into a corner by spending two decades writing about Vetinari as a benevolent dictator.) But it’s also because Vimes is, more broadly, a suspicious cynic who knows the world is a place of infinite shades of grey and that there’s always more to things than meets the eye. Pratchett was never a police officer but he was a journalist, and clearly spent enough time around police officers to clock the mindset. It’s summed up well by Vimes in his perception of a police officer’s most common (if not fundamental) duty:

Keep the peace. That was the thing. People often failed to understand what that meant. You’d go to some life-threatening disturbance like a couple of neighbours scrapping in the street over who owned the hedge between their properties, and they’d both be bursting with aggrieved self-righteousness, both yelling, their wives would either be having a private scrap on the side or would have adjourned to a kitchen for a shared pot of tea and a chat, and they all expected you to sort it out. And they could never understand that it wasn’t your job. Sorting it out was a job for a good surveyor and a couple of lawyers, maybe. Your job was to quell the impulse to bang their stupid fat heads together, to ignore the affronted speeches of dodgy self-justification, to get them to stop shouting and to get them off the street. Once that had been achieved, your job was over. You weren’t some walking god, dispensing finely tuned natural justice. Your job was simply to bring back peace. Of course, if your few strict words didn’t work and Mr Smith subsequently clambered over the disputed hedge and stabbed Mr Jones to death with a pair of gardening shears, then you had a different job, sorting out the notorious Hedge Argument Murder. But at least it was one you were trained to do. People expected all kinds of things from coppers, but there was one thing that sooner or later they all wanted: make this not be happening.

Vimes and his loyal few at the Treacle Mine Road watch-house do not overthrow the tyrannical Lord Winder: that is accomplished, in both the original timeline he remembers and the alternate version he lives through in Night Watch, by the rich and powerful of Ankh-Morpork who turn a blind eye to Winder’s assassination and install another despot they find more pliable. (There, again, is the cynic’s view of the world.)

Was this actually Pratchett’s view? That fighting against tyranny is hopeless and you should just try to keep your head down? I don’t quite think so. It is again a little bit of a sense of writing yourself into a corner. Reg Shoe, for example, is (and always has been) Pratchett’s stand-in for late 20th century English revolutionary: the student communist raging against the System, the high-minded and self-important figure wilfully blind to the fact that he actually lives in a pretty decent society. It’s a figure common to British comedy – the most well-known version is the People’s Revolutionary Front of Judea in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but my mind always goes to Rick in The Young Ones – but the thing is the joke actually only works in contemporary Britain. Reg Shoe, on the other hand, lives in a society where the secret police can and do drag people off the street to be tortured.

That’s part of it; hewing to old jokes and established Discworld dynamics. But the other part of it is that this book is about Vimes. I don’t think Pratchett was making (or trying to make) an objective political or ethical argument in Night Watch. The revolution is the backdrop, and is important only inasmuch as it affects Vimes, who is, at the end of the day, a policeman; as Russ Allbery notes, that means he’s a small-c conservative defender of the status quo. He’s not about to ask anybody to sign up to the overthrow the government, but he will (and does) relieve his captain of command when an order is given to open fire on civilians, and he is ultimately forced to question his role as a dispenser of the government’s (i.e., the people’s) monopoly on legitimate violence.

Coppers liked to say that people shouldn’t take the law into their own hands, and they thought they knew what they meant. They were thinking about the normal times, and men who go round to sort out a neighbour with a club because his dog had crapped once too often on their doorstep. But at times like this, who did the law belong to? If it shouldn’t be in the hands of people, where the hell should it be? People who knew better? Then you got Winder and his pals, and how good was that?

Night Watch is ultimately not a book to answer that question, because Vimes himself does not have the answer. But he knows what his duty is as a copper, whether he’s the commander of the modern-day Watch or a sergeant on Treacle Mine Road thirty years ago: to protect the people, to keep the peace, and to stand watch in the night. Night Watch is a culmination of every part of Sam Vimes’ story that’s come before it, and in my view it’s the finest novel Pratchett ever wrote.

Next up is The Wee Free Men, the first of the Tiffany Aching young adult books – which also, interestingly, makes it the first Discworld book I’ve never read!

Re-reading Discworld Index

Top 6 Books of 2024

January 2, 2025 in uncategorized | Leave a comment

As always: the best books I read last year, not those that were released last year.

Depending on your device, this post may look hideously mangled, text running directly next to or even over the images – my apologies, but this is beyond my control and is occurring because WordPress is a dying platform that is no longer fit for purpose, and is more interested in pushing “AI” “assistance” than providing basic HTML editing functionality. If I blogged more than a handful of times a year I’d shift elsewhere, but given the broader enshittification of the internet it seems likely everywhere else is just as bad, so never mind! Read a book instead. Here are six good ones.

6. Arc Light

“If you mean the moral justification for it, I would point to the eight million Americans who have died or are dying from the grossly negligent safeguards you maintained over weapons aimed at my country. If you want the statement of a policy goal, I will say to disarm you of the nuclear arsenal of which you have proven untrustworthy custodians. But if you want a geopolitical analysis, Pavel, if you want an answer that the historians many years from now will write, it is because our two countries were bound to each other with a strange attraction, fascination mixed with mistrust. We were bound so closely for so long, war was never far away, and when it happened, we were strong, and you were weak. We win, you lose – that’s the way of it.”

In some ways extremely dumb and in some ways very well-written, this meticulously researched novel by Eric. L. Harry (whom you can tell without checking must have been a long-time national security wonk in Washington) is a classic early ‘90s Clancy-esque thriller about a nuclear war breaking out between the United States and a freshly post-Soviet Russia. It’s a fascinating time capsule of the 1990s, the film Crimson Tide being another great example, a time when it alarmingly seemed like forty decades of strategic doctrine around mutually-assured destruction between rational state actors might be about to fall apart in the face of Russia collapsing into a bunch of balkanised warlords. Good to know that all those nuclear warheads are still sitting there and Russia turned out to be a perfectly sane and reasonable actor on the world stage, then!

5. The Magus

I did not think about the future. In spite of what the doctor at the clinic had said I felt certain that the cure would fail. The pattern of destiny seemed clear: down and down, and down.
But then the mysteries began.

Ostensibly this is a novel about an intelligent but lower-class Ripley-esque twenty-something being lured to an idyllic Greek island to teach English to the local schoolchildren, while the real purpose of his time in the Aegean is the mysterious villa further down the coast, and the enigmatic old man who resides there. The Magus is the very definition of a psychological thriller, with the protagonist witnessing events which seem certain to have only a supernatural explanation – or perhaps it’s all a charade – or perhaps both these things are true, the first servicing the second, and there’s a deeper scheme at play? The novel definitively answers all these questions, possibly to its detriment; but in many ways it’s one of those novels that’s more about the vibes. John Fowles is a tremendously descriptive writer who perfectly captures the sense of an ancient, unspoiled island in the dry Greek summer: a land which to English eyes seems like a place out of time and space, an island where, perhaps, the impossible really is made possible.

4. Be Mine

“Where are you, Frank? I’m coming. I have something you’re going to like. Something very different and new.”

This is a bleak novel. It’s a difficult novel. Richard Ford introduced us to Frank Bascombe in 1986 as a thirty-something ex-husband and father grieving the premature death of his son, but as a man who could possibly still put the pieces of his life back together, which – more or less – he did. 2023’s Be Mine is a novel that reminds us that the security of our lives can still be pulled out from underneath us at any time: aged seventy-six, Frank’s second wife has left him, his relationship with his daughter on the other side of the country is frosty, his first wife and the mother of his children has died, and his surviving son has been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Be Mine, which I would fairly guess is going to be the last of the Bascombe books, is necessarily a novel about death, but it’s also – as always – a novel about life. Frank tackles his circumstances with his expected sense of introspection, folk wisdom, stoicism and aplomb. He is Frank Bascombe: suburban man, real estate agent, failed writer, decent neighbour, unfaithful husband, good father, observer of the human condition. He is an American. He is a human. He is a fictional character I’m glad to have known.

3. Rebecca

“There was never an accident.”

Sometimes you read a novel from a bygone era and the voice is uncannily modern. Rebecca is one of those novels, a story told from the perspective of a young woman enchanted by an older widower; a murder mystery in one sense, a psychological thriller in another, and a very English story about a grand old country house and the secrets it keeps. Daphne Du Maurier’s prose is so surprisingly contemporary that it feels like Rebecca could’ve been on a 21st century Booker shortlist, when in fact it was published in 1938. A deeply engaging novel that draws you in and carries you along all the way to its torrid end.

2. Young Lions

Across the Channel, Noah knew, no man could raise his voice thus, and across the Channel were the men who were finally going to go down in defeat. The world was not going to fall into their hands, but into the hands of the people who sat nodding, a little sleepily, perhaps, a little dully, before their ancient preacher. So long, Noah thought, as such voices could be raised in the world, stern, illogical and loving, so long might his own child live in confidence and hope…

World War II interests me more than it previously did, part of which is because I’m getting older and about to enter my Dad Era, I suppose, but also because as you get older and the world changes around you, you come to realise that history is still being written, and that if it the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice it is often only because it was bent that way by force. We unfortunately once again find ourselves living in interesting times, and freedom and justice and liberal democracy may not, as it turns out, have won a final victory. So as an older man you come back to look on an event which a million films and books and TV series and cartoons have rendered as more of a vibe or an aesthetic, and it feels almost absurd to think: this was a real thing which actually happened. I don’t just mean the brutal individual experiences of tens of millions of men, women and children, but the gargantuan state-level struggle for the future of humanity. Fascism versus freedom, liberty versus oppression, genocidal totalitarianism versus anything but that.

I first encountered Irwin Shaw reading his excellent short story Act of Faith in a New Yorker collection, a story in which a Jewish-American soldier in Europe uneasily considers the anti-Semitism of his own country. Young Lions follows three characters – a young Jewish GI, an older Anglo-Saxon GI, and a young Wehrmacht soldier – across the war, and while the Jewish character’s outsider status is certainly a factor, the novel is much more broadly about every aspect of life for these young men called to war. It reminded me strongly of The Caine Mutiny: an excellent World War II novel written by somebody who had been there, and seen it, and was acutely aware that even a titanic struggle for justice involves at its core human beings, and all the seemingly petty and ordinary aspects of their lives which they bring along with them.

1. My Brother Jack

“My brother Davy’s not the sort of bloke who ever let anyone down, you know.”

I thought this would be an obligatory eat-your-vegetables Australian classic, in all likelihood over-egged and over-emphasised by the class of boomers and Gen X-ers that still hold a vice-like grip on Australian cultural discourse. I couldn’t have been more wrong, and my expectation is ironic in retrospect, given that My Brother Jack is in large part about Australian cultural cringe and the strange and unattractive effect it has on the out-of-sorts young nerds who fall victim to it and imagine greener intellectual grass abroad. In addition to being a truly excellent novel about sense of self, family ties, national identity and much more, My Brother Jack is a brilliantly realised period piece of Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s: a city at turns glamourous and seedy, a city of dockside slums and Art Deco newspaper offices, a city of bohemian artists and unimaginative salesmen, a city the protagonist longs to escape but finds himself drawn back to. The final sentence, quoted above, is for my money the most heartbreaking in Australian literature. A remarkable literary accomplishment and one of the finest Australian novels ever written.

Book Review: The Sleeping Dragon

August 5, 2024 in book review | 1 comment

The Sleeping Dragon by Joel Rosenberg (1982) 232 p.

I read most of this series as a teenager and really enjoyed it. At some point years ago the Australian dollar was very strong and I was hoovering up second-hand books off Abebooks from Britain and the US like crazy, and snapped up this whole series but then never got around to re-reading it.

Rosenberg wrote it specifically as a thought experiment in how much it would suck to actually live in a “fantasy” world, so it’s ironic how fun and breezy it is to read. A group of all-American 1980s college students find themselves transported into the bodies of their characters in a vaguely Roman-era RPG world when it turns out their gamesmaster is an exiled wizard who launches them over for his own ends. One of them is speared in the gut and dies screaming within the first 24 hours, as a taste of how presciently grimdark this series is going to be.

There’s a ~Problematic~ attitude towards women that went over my head as a teenager but which is hard not to see now; not a misogyny, but more of a well-meaning yet oblivious sexism in which the feelings (let alone horrific ordeals) of the female characters are largely vehicles for the men’s character development. It’s not a dealbreaker but it is very, very “1980s SFF author.”

On the whole it’s good, readable fun. It’s also a bit of an odd one out – being the first book in the series it’s about the characters’ quest to return home, whereas the remainder of the series is about their acceptance that they’ll remain in the fantasy world and how they subsequently set about drastically changing it by kickstarting an industrial revolution. Which is much more interesting.