This is Miéville’s first short story collection. I’ve read all his novels: both King Rat which takes place in London, and the three Bas-Lag books. The stories in this book were closer to King Rat in style, except the last story (“The Tain”) which, even though it is set in London, reminded me of the gothic-spooky feeling of the Bas-Lag books.

Most of the stories turned out to be quite simple horror stories, which was a real disappointment to me. They’re not bad, as such, but neither are they anything special. I had expected the wild flights of fantasy, the strange worlds and strange ideas he has shown himself capable of. I thought King Rat was a first work, and that he’d left that style behind because he’d learned to write more interesting stuff. Apparently not.

And when I say “simple horror stories”, I really mean “simple”. Several of them were so predictable that the idea, the horrible thing, was obvious already after a few pages. (“Different Skies”: Man buys an antique stained-glass window. It starts scaring him. So of course it is a window onto a different time or world.) Some seemed to be written with the aim of being unpleasant, and nothing else. (“Familiar”: Witch makes a familiar out of scraps of his own flesh. The familiar scares and disgusts him, he throws it out, and it starts growing.)

About halfway through I gave up and started skimming through the stories, just to make sure that I didn’t miss any hidden gem among them. And it’s a good thing I didn’t put down the book before the end, because the one story that I read with real interest was the last and longest one, a novella titled “The Tain” that has also been published separately. Here, the mirrors of the world have opened and let through the things that were on the other side – the things we thought were our mirror images turn out to have lives of their own, and they really didn’t like being our slaves.

I get the impression that Miéville simply needs space in order to properly develop an idea, to really let loose his talent. The short story as a literary form is too short for this: he ends up reporting the idea, and nothing else.

Lots of reviews on the web disagree, and find the stories here diverse, deep, unsettling, and mysterious.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Before I discuss this book, I have to say that I am an atheist. There is a minute amount of agnosticism in me – I cannot be sure that there is no god – but I have encountered no reason to believe in one. My review of this book is strongly coloured by this view, as is every other review you will find on the Internet, positive or negative.

Despite (or maybe because of) my atheism, I find the question of religion very interesting. Why does religion exist? Why do other people believe? How is it possible to actually convert to a different religion – how can you decide to believe?

So I approached this book with curiosity and hoped for an intelligent discussion. I didn’t expect him to prove the non-existence of God (as you can’t really prove a negative) but hoped that he would presented a systematic and coherent overview of the arguments for and against. I was sorely disappointed. It’s not just a bad book, it is an atrocious book – because it works against its own stated goal of convincing people to leave religion. It really is preaching to the choir – I find it very hard to believe that anyone would come round to his point of view because of this book.

The God Delusion has two massive problems: its content and its voice. The book is a disorganised diatribe.

The content is difficult to summarise because it is somewhat unfocused. Dawkins attacks religion from every angle – why arguments for God’s existence are invalid, why we don’t need religion anyway, why religion is bad, etc. He might have done a better job if he had limited himself to fewer themes.

But that’s far from being the main problem with the content. A larger issue is Dawkins’s reliance of cheap rhetoric instead of reasoning. He much prefers anecdotes (“this religious person did this bad thing – isn’t religion bad?”) to actual arguments. He has the bad habit of appealing to randomly-chosen “authorities” such as Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein – but only on his side of the debate. I’m convinced that it would be possible to dig up equally famous Americans who are or were strongly Christian, but of course he doesn’t do that.

Where he does attempt to engage in actual argument, I get the impression that he doesn’t know much about religion or philosophy. He just has a loud voice and thinks that qualifies him to write a book about/against religion. I agree that one doesn’t need to be a theologist in order to have an opinion about religion – but in order to refute theologists’ arguments, one needs to know and understand those arguments. But when he sets out to debunk arguments for God’s existence, he makes sure to include and subsequently destroy the weakest ones. Attacking straw men, indeed.

His arguments and anecdotes are very focused on Christianity and to a lesser extent Islam. His chapter about “The ‘good’ book and the changing moral zeitgeist” is an egregious example, where he gleefully points out what a horrible source of moral guidance the Bible is. That may be an argument against Christianity but it is not an argument for either the non-existence of the god or the evils of religion in general.

The chapter titled “What’s wrong with religion” (which mostly talks about the violence that Christianity and Islam frequently lead to) makes the same mistake of focusing on specific religions rather than religion in general. The more valid point (faith as the antithesis of reason, “faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument”) gets very little attention. And of course all the good things that people have done in the name of their religions are ignored completely.

The content is also somewhat confusingly organised. I would have liked a clearer separation between discussing the likelihood of a religion (any one) having a point (i.e. God’s existence) and the desirability of having a religion. It is a book against religion from all angles – religion is false, religion is bad, religion leads to bad things. This is too broad an agenda, and these different threads are not kept apart sufficiently clearly.

The central thesis (if there is one) is further weakened by Dawkins’s frequent forays off-topic, whenever something particularly upsetting catches his eye. In a section supposedly discussing polytheism vs. monotheism, he suddenly rants about the “obscene… sums of tax-free money sucked in by churches”. There are several rants about other signs of how religion permeates American society, and how atheists are discriminated against.

Yet while the content might not convince, it does no actual harm to the atheist argument. But his tone of voice does. The whole message is delivered in an almost repulsive tone: obnoxious, raving, condescending. (The title is a good indicator of the general tone.) His introductory statement is “I shall not go out of my way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else”. Either he’s lying, or I’m glad I’ve never met him in person; based on this he must be the kind of man who throws mud on passers-by and flings insults at people he meets in the street, just because he can.

Whenever he has a choice between two words, he chooses the more offensive one. Introducing Jesus as an insipid milksop is not a good start if you want a Christian reader to actually listen seriously. And instead of refuting arguments he doesn’t agree with, he dismisses them as ludicrous, infantile, vacuous, silly, and so on. (He must have sat there with a thesaurus at hand.) If this is what an atheist sounds like, who would want to be one?

He does better in his more scientifically-oriented chapter on various possible “roots of religion”, where he discusses different darwinist hypotheses for how religion may have arisen. I would think it is because this is an area where he actually has some expertise.

There are only two points of his that I really cannot argue with. One is his opposition to giving religion special status in society, and protecting religious claims from all criticism. As he quotes Douglas Adams:

Religion… has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’

And Dawkins himself continues:

If the advocates of apartheid had their wits about them they would claim – for all I know truthfully – that allowing mixed races is against their religion. A good part of the opposition would respectfully tiptoe away. And it is no use claiming that this is an unfair parallel because apartheid has no rational justification. The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’.

The other (related) point is religious upbringing and education. He approaches the topic with his usual mixture of anecdote and passionate shouting, rather than rational argument, but I have to agree with his basic points. I think that schools should not be allowed to promote any religion, and I wish it was somehow possible to make sure that parents do not stuff their children’s heads full of superstition.

Dawkins:

I want everybody to flinch whenever we hear a phrase such as ‘Catholic child’ or ‘Muslim child’. Speak of a ‘child of Catholic parents’ if you like; but if you hear anybody speak of a ‘Catholic child’, stop them and politely point out that children are too young to know where they stand on such issues.

At Christmas-time one year my daily newspaper, the Independent, was looking for a seasonal image and found a heart-warmingly ecumenical one at a school nativity play. The Three Wise Men were played by, as the caption glowingly said, Shadbreet (a Sikh), Musharraf (a Muslim) and Adele (a Christian), all aged four. Charming? Heart-warming? No, it is not, it is neither; it is grotesque. […] Imagine an identical photograph, with the caption changed as follows: “Shadbreet (a Keynesian), Musharaff (a Monetarist) and Adele (a Marxist), all aged four.” Wouldn’t this be a candidate for irate letters of protest? It certainly should be.

Conclusion:
I am sorry I supported Dawkins by buying his book and wish I could have my money back.

If this was not enough, here are some other thorough reviews you may want to read:
Daylight Atheism attempts to summarise the book;
San Francisco Chronicle finds it fine and significant;
The Guardian cheers him on;
London Review of Books revels in pointing out Dawkins’s weakest arguments;
Prospect labels him “incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory”.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of stories about the fictional city of Ambergris. It’s not exactly a short story collection, because these are not traditional short stories / novellas. All the stories are very different in shape and style, and even in layout and typography.

The tone of the book is generally funny, but with dark overtones of horror (more apparent in some stories than in others). Ambergris has this creepy, melancholy, dark aura. There are vaguely evil dwarfs, dangerous fungi swamping the city, priests of strange religions, an alien threat possibly lurking beneath the surface of the city, and so on. And it seems to rain almost all the time.

In this spooky city, a few straightforwardly spooky tales take place: “Dradin, In Love” is a story of love tinged with madness; “The Cage” is a horror story; in “The Transformation of Martin Lake” (the best of them all) a crisis transforms a mediocre artist into a sublime one; etc.

But the book also contains an excerpt from a supposed “Guide to the early history of the city”, an amateur naturalist’s pompous tract about the famed freshwater squid of Ambergris (complete with bibliography), letters, etc. There is even a story about a delusional writer who tries to convince an Ambergrisian that he has in fact created Ambergris.

The various parts are all linked, but not strongly. It is not necessary to read all of them to enjoy them. Especially the four main stories would stand on their own, and indeed an earlier version only contained those: VanderMeeer has apparently added material to the book over time.

Some of these component parts are very well written, and “The Transformation of Martin Lake” has won (well-deserved) awards as a standalone book.

Other “stories” are really only interesting because of the background information they provide. Still others are just plain boring: padding inserted by a self-indulgent author, slowing the pace to a crawl. Who wants to trawl through 40 pages of made-up bibliography about squid studies, no matter how many clever nuggets of information the author has hidden there? I guess it’s supposed to give the impression that this is an entire world, of which we only see bits and pieces, but instead it gives a chaotic, jumbled impression.

It doesn’t help that some of the stories openly contradict each other, or that the chronology is very unclear. (Some stories seem to happen centuries later than others, but I might be wrong.) This confusion entirely intentional, of course, which brings me to my main gripe: the book is far too postmodernistically self-aware and self-referential. Too many footnotes, too many stories supposedly written by fictional Ambergrisian authors, stories that are supposed to highlight the vagueness of “truth” etc.

Critics, of course, love this kind of book, even hinting that you’re a bit dull if you don’t get it. “This beautifully written, virtually hallucinatory work isn’t for every taste, but connoisseurs of the finest in postmodern fantasy will find it enormously rewarding.” The book seems to be so highly regarded by other writers that their reviews ape the book’s form: here and here, for example. Well, in my world “hallucinatory” is generally not a compliment.

I found this book really frustrating. Several times I got stuck and was annoyed with it and had to leave it for a few days. It took me several weeks to get through it. And yet I didn’t want to give up, because there just might be more of those brilliant bits (and indeed there were).

So if you’re “a connoisseur of the finest in postmodern fantasy” or otherwise fond of postmodernist stuff, you’ll get lots of it here, and of good quality. Personally, I prefer more coherent and traditional writings. While this had some great parts, the whole was not satisfying.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Gina Ford is a phenomenon. Every parent in England will have heard of Gina Ford, and most will have a very firm opinion about her. The majority appear to be split into two opposing camps: one that loves her and one that hates her.

I looked at her The New Contented Little Baby Book before I’d heard about Gina, found the book terrible, and put it back on the shelf. Eric bought it because “everybody knows Gina Ford, so let’s see what all the hoopla is about”.

So what is the hoopla about? Her main point is that babies need routine. Things should be done in the same order and at the same time every day. A large part of the book (50 pages) is filled with detailed schedules setting out feeding and sleeping times with 5-minute precision. Another 30 pages are dedicated to discussing the different parts of the routine. This is supposedly “the secret to calm and confident parenting” (as the front cover blurb promises) and will lead to a contented baby.

This is the complete opposite of the “feed-on-demand, baby-knows-best” approach which seems to flourish in some places (notably among Swedish midwives, from what I read on Swedish parenting sites). In Sweden the common view seems to be that you shouldn’t meddle with small babies’ sleep rhythms but leave them to find their own rhythm. But I don’t see how a baby is supposed to figure out that night is for sleeping and day is for playing, if parents don’t teach this.

And the followers of each approach are often fully convinced that the others are mad, misled, and probably horrible parents. Gina’s book, therefore, gets very conflicting views from readers: of the 478 reviews on Amazon UK, 76% give it either 1 or 5 stars. Gina has even been compared to terrorists, and sued an online forum.

I started out reading The New Contented Little Baby Book mostly out of curiosity (and because it was there). I was inclined to discard much of the talk about routines. It just sounded ridiculous – and insensitive and unworkable. In the first few weeks I fed on demand, and Ingrid slept most of the time when she wasn’t eating. But then as she became more alert, I gradually felt the need for some more order, and started using a simple sleep-eat-play routine (i.e. doing things in that order, all the time) based on Tracy Hogg’s advice. I found it helpful, but at the same time it was hard to figure out how to adjust this as her sleep needs changed. And I was still spending a lot of my time guessing – is she tired? hungry? in pain? simply cranky?

I came to refer to Gina’s book more and more frequently for a more carefully considered routine. At first I was thinking to myself, “I can’t believe I am following this horrid book,” and yet I was gradually won over. Ingrid took well to having a routine, and I liked having one. It simply works very well for us. I have made a 180-degree turn: I now find Gina’s routines very helpful, and I am glad I have this book at hand. In our household we’re now on first-name basis with Gina: “Gina suggests…”

But I still can’t say that I like the book. I’ve got the hate-Gina and the love-Gina camps both right here inside my head, because the book manages to mix very good things with very bad ones.

This is what Gina gets right:

• I totally agree that having a routine is good and leads to more confident parenting. I find it much easier to read Ingrid’s signals when I can immediately exclude several reasons for crying. Ingrid never gets overtired; she is happy almost all the time and rarely cries without an easily discernible reason. And she definitely never cries for long (unless she is in pain because of reflux) because I can figure out what she needs, and help her.
• A routine makes it a lot easier to distinguish baby’s habits, and to tell chance from a changing habit. Because we do things at roughly the same time every day, I notice quite easily when Ingrid is able to stay up longer without bad effects, and when she is getting too much daytime sleep (because she is awake for a longish stretch during the night).
• A routine means that I know when Ingrid will sleep, which lets me plan my own day as well. (And it ensures that I get my daily feeds as well!) And since we have a well-functioning basic routine, I can adjust it when necessary to fit in outside activities.
• Gina provides not just a routine like some other books, but a routine that changes over time. There is guidance about which naps should get shorter, and which waking times longer? This is probably the most important and useful part of the book.
• Gina’s advice to limit daytime sleep by waking baby from naps was counterintuitive, but turned out very helpful. Ingrid learned the difference between day and night quite early, unlike some babies I read about.

This is what Gina gets wrong:

• She assumes that all babies and all mothers are the same. “Baby should eat x minutes on the first breast and y minutes on the second breast.” One day Ingrid may need 10 minutes for a feed, and the next day it takes 25. And this is just a single baby and a single pair of breasts! Imagine the variation, then, among millions of combinations of babies and breasts. A baby should eat until she is full.
• While she does say that her schedule is a guideline and should be adjusted as needed, the wording of the schedule flat-out contradicts this (“He needs a sleep of no longer than 45 minutes”) and there is hardly any advice in the book on how to adjust the schedule if you think it isn’t right for your baby. I get the impression she really means that the schedule should be strictly followed, but then everybody would get all upset, so she says (without much conviction) that it’s just a guideline.
• She pays too much attention to minute details and ignores more important questions. The schedule micromanages the day (down to telling you what to have for breakfast: “8am: try to have some cereal, toast and a drink no later than 8am”). But at the same time there’s no help for dealing with mishaps. If the baby woke up an hour early, do you stretch each nap a bit, or just the longest one, or do you put in an extra nap? You’re on your own there.
• The book commands instead of explaining. Why is this nap longer than that one? Why is the third nap dropped first? You can figure this out by experimentation and observation, or (more likely) see that it just works that way, but but more explanation would certainly be useful.
• She strongly discourages doing anything that upsets the routine, most of all getting out of the house. If you listened to her you wouldn’t even be able to go to the doctor, not to mention shopping or coffee mornings! Mothers need a life, too!
• Much of the book is written in an unpleasant tone which I found quite offputting. It’s all about “should” and “must” and “must not”: I picture a nurse in a starched white uniform who will not listen to anything you say. There is no joy. She is also far too fond of doling out guilt and disappointment: a baby should be able to do x at 3 months, and so on, and anything that goes wrong is because you haven’t done everything exactly as she says. As another reviewer put it:

  I would say that this book actually should come with […] a volume controll- to turn down Gina shouting at you for being a very bad parent.

• Finally I think the book is badly organised. It is hard to find the important bits, and even the schedules are not so easy to read. The book would definitely gain from a better editor.

As I said, I do find Gina’s advice helpful. But following it to the letter, as she insists, would be a nightmare. I’d need an alarm clock. My whole life would be taken up with her schedule. As it is now, we often deviate up to half an hour in either direction from the schedule, depending on what seems to be needed. Yet the only reason I can fiddle with the schedule (for example to fit in a swimming lesson at a time when Ingrid would normally be getting sleepy) is that we have a schedule to begin with. In order to break the rules, you first need to know what the rules are.

And Ingrid would most certainly not be contented with Gina’s standard routine. She has always needed more sleep and more food than Gina’s “average” baby. At the age of 3 months her routine most closely resembled what Gina suggested for a 2-month-old. At 3.5 months she still wakes up twice every night for feeds – and it’s not just snacking, she takes a proper meal. And she definitely cannot be just put down in her bed awake, in the dark, to fall asleep on her own.

Buy the book. Find the best bits and ignore the rest. Add a large dose of common sense, and relax about the schedule. Then Gina’s book truly is useful.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Shogun is a historical novel set in early 17th-century Japan, telling the story of one western man who ends up there by accident. The man is pilot John Blackthorne, known in Japanese as Anjin-san (anjin apparently means pilot), and the accident taking him there is quite literal, as his ship is wrecked just off the Japanese coast.

We follow his struggle to survive Japanese politics, as he gets involved in the complex and complicated relationships between “traditional” Japanese, Portuguese traders, Jesuits, Japanese Christians etc. This was certainly a tumultuous time in Japan, ending with a reunification of Japan, as well as a turning-inwards which severely restricted contact with the outside world, leading to centuries of seclusion.

The book is based on real historical events: there was a real English pilot and a real Japanese lord who reunified Japan, even though the names were different. Apparently it is retold somewhat inaccurately, which I cannot judge. I would guess that some simplifications were necessary in the 1970s (such as referring to chess instead of go). And heck, it’s a novel, fiction, so I don’t mind if some of the details are off.

It’s a romanticised adventure story with fair amounts of action and lots of intrigue, plus a bit of romance – reminds me of The Three Musketeers. (I wonder if it will stay popular for as long as Dumas’s books.) And just like the Musketeers, Shogun has more intrigues than I can keep track of. I find political intrigues hard to relate to, and can never keep the relationships straight – who is betraying whom, and who else knows about it, and who is trying to convince whom to switch sides.

Much of Anjin-san’s attention is understandably focused on Japanese / samurai culture, with its well-known components: feudalism, honour, the importance of birth and ancestors and kin (where a whole family can be killed for the father’s misdeeds), and a closeness to death. In great contrast to European culture at that time, there is great focus on politeness, cleanliness and harmony; indeed Europeans are seen as barbarians. But there were also other differences that I wasn’t really aware of: more freedom for women, more “rational” marital relationships allowing divorce and remarrying, and “eta”, a kind of untouchables who work with dead flesh: as tanners, executioners, gravediggers etc.

And of course Anjin-san in turn sees the Japanese as barbarians, too. He starts out feeling superior, seeing the Japanese as incomprehensible barbarians with no respect for human life. Yet he gradually becomes more and more Japanese – acquires honor, learns to appreciate harmony and cleanliness, develops self-control, loses his fear of death. Still, to the end he remains appalled by how easily the samurai can decide to kill.

While most of the book is from Anjin-san’s point of view, we also get to be inside the heads of other characters. It is fascinating to see how an action can be seen as totally barbaric by one side, and yet make complete sense to the other.

Blackthorne’s character is very believable and easy to sympathise with. He must have felt more alien than anyone could feel today: nowadays everybody is more exposed to other cultures than anyone would have been back then. And he had effectively no way of contacting home or family: a letter sent by ship would have taken years to get to England and back.

It’s harder for me to judge the Japanese characters, but they are certainly well depicted and deep.

Shogun is an utterly fascinating read, a fabulous book with really no significant shortcomings. It was hard to put down, and every time I did I longed to pick it up again. Despite its 1100 pages I was sad when it ended. I am sure it will be equally enjoyable next time I read it: there is so much in this book that it can be re-read numerous times. I hope Clavell’s other books are as good.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

In the first page, the first paragraph, we learn that there are “carers” and “donors”, but are not told what it means. There are pretty strong hints, though. We go on to hear Kathy, a carer in her 30s, tell about growing up in a boarding school in the countryside, and about her friendships with Ruth and Tommy. There are more hints that something is special about the children there, but not what. The meaning of “donors” is revealed a third of the way into the book, but we have to wait even longer to find out the real reason why the children are different, and how they are used.

The scary thing is uncovered so gradually that its full impact isn’t felt. Only in the end do you realise how scary that thing is that no one has mentioned out loud. It’s a spooky book, similar to A Handmaid’s Tale in feeling.

Throughout her childhood Kathy herself wonders about what is going on, but with no real urgency. Because we hear the story from her, we only know what she knows and what she finds important. That which is obvious to her when she is adult, is not revealed, but has to be read between the lines. The big picture is kept hidden; small things are shown with great detail.

Kathy and the other children never leave the school grounds while they are there. Neither does the story, and we learn almost nothing about the wider world. Instead Kathy tells about the children’s social life – the usual childhood cliques and conflicts, discovering relationships and sex. Kathy’s relationships with Tommy and Ruth occupy centre stage.

And when the children leave school, they remain / are kept apart from the world, looking at it with fascination but without understanding. For some strange reason they never try to get closer to it even then.

Perhaps it is because they never quite grow up. As their childhood is spent in a very small and confined world, exposed only to what their guardians allow and with very little interaction with other adults, they and their relationships remain childish. So does their motivation: being good, doing what you’re supposed to, comes naturally to them even to the very end. It almost goes too far: Kathy and the others seem placid, tepid. They almost appear unaware of the horror of their lives and what is done to them. No one questions their fate, rebels, or tries to run away. Is it all because they are afraid to find out too much? I found this rather unsatisfying.

This lack of life is also apparent in how Kathy tells her story. The reviewer in Slate (warning for plot spoilers!) observes:

The reluctance of Kathy H. and her pals to really confront what awaits them may account for the curious lack of physicality of Kathy’s descriptions of their life. Nobody eats anything much in this book, nobody smells anything. We don’t know much about what the main characters look like. Even the sex is oddly bloodless. But landscapes, buildings, and the weather are intensely present. It’s as if Kathy has invested a lot of her sense of self in things quite far away from her own body, and thus less likely to be injured.

The book is well-written and interesting, and I enjoyed reading it, but it ends up being vaguely unsatisfying. I found the foggy approach to storytelling kind of gimmicky: self-consciously clever, and a bit too clever for its own good. And the premise upon which it is all built does not really work; it is implausible, no matter how much one wants to make sense of it for the sake of the good writing.

And why, oh why do all reviews have to reveal so much of the plot? Here’s a particularly egregious example (from The Economist) – don’t read it if you haven’t read the book but plan to. The reviewer seems to be completely unaware of what s/he is doing:

As Kathy says: “I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves – about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside – but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant.”
For a long time, the reader feels the same confusion. And then, about halfway through the book, the truth begins to dawn.

And then, wham! the reviewer continues to tell us that important truth in its entirety, leaving the reader no chance to discover it halfway through the book. Argh.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

From the back cover (which is well-written, for once):

Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh; George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, then a writer: George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity.

Arthur is a famous Arthur whom you will certainly recognise after a while; you will never have heard of George before. (By the way, I really liked the way Arthur’s identity was slowly revealed, but most reviews sadly reveal it straight away. Luckily this is not essential for enjoying the book.)

The two men are very different. Energetic, confident, imaginative, always-active Arthur marries, has a kind of a love affair, and rises through society. Shy, impassive George has no friends and no wife, but he does have an unshakeable belief in reason and in the legal system, and he proudly works on a book titled “Railway Law for the ‘Man in the Train’: Chiefly Intended as a Guide for the Travelling Public on All Points Likely to Arise in Connection with the Railways”.

Their two lives run their separate courses, until after many years they intersect – for a relatively minor event in Arthur’s life, yet life-changing for George. That central event is a criminal trial for a vicious crime, where circumstantial evidence and subjective interpretations of one man’s looks and behavior are all that determine his innocence or guilt. The book is fictional, but the trial was real, and even led to important changes in the British judicial system.

The trial, as well as other, minor events, are used to convey the somewhat too obvious message of the book (from the back cover again):

… a profound and moving meditation on the fateful differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.

Personally I found this message a bit too heavy-handed, and likewise the discussion of racism and what it means to be English. But it does not take up too much space or attention.

Barnes has chosen an interesting structure for the book. The two lives are initially told as parallel stories, through alternating short sections that show how the two men grow up. Then we follow George for an intense and long chapter that brings us to the main event. After that attention turns to Arthur to trace his way to the point where the two meet. The middle section – where Arthur’s story is left aside for a long stretch – felt a bit long, and abandoning one of the lives for so long felt uncomfortable.

Despite following two lives for many decades, one of them a very active life, the book is not action-filled. Especially the first half proceeds at a slow pace, and it remains quiet and restrained even when it is at its most suspenseful. (How very English that is, and how suitable for a book that explores Englishness!) While some reviewers found the book too slow, even sluggish, I wasn’t bothered by this at all. The events are interesting, but ultimately secondary to the men themselves – their characters carry the whole story.

The slow pace also left me more time to enjoy the absorbing, intelligent, beautiful prose. Many sentences were worth savouring one by one. They all flow so naturally, yet stand out and almost ask to be read aloud, or at least re-read a few times.

I really, really enjoyed this book – it was a pleasure to read. I was sorry when it ended, and even sorrier to learn that Barnes’ other books are nothing like this one. I do hope he writes more like this in the future.

For other reviews that are more than just plot synopsis, try Salon, Gothamist (both of which contain significant spoilers) or Agony Column. (And what the heck is a book review doing in an Agony Column, anyway?)

Amazon UK; Amazon US.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is labelled as a retelling of Cinderella, set in 17th century Holland. And at a very superficial level, it is. There is a girl whose mother dies, whereupon her father remarries a woman with two daughters. The girl is unbelievably beautiful while her new stepsisters are ugly. She stays in the kitchen and does all the work around the house. And in the end they all go to a ball in a castle.

But reading it, it turns out that Cinderella is, at most, a vague inspiration. Despite describing various bizarre and curious events, the story really feels nothing like a fairy tale – it is more of a tragedy. It is raw and frank rather than beautiful, and at times quite cruel. There is no real happy ending. Beautiful people are not kinder than others; ugly stepsisters are not evil. Beauty does not lead to happiness. And there is no magic to solve all problems.

And unlike fairy tales, the focus of the book is not on events but the people. It is populated with a number of interesting characters, all of whom are far more complex than the fairy tale characters. Cinderella is not a poor victim but manipulative and whiny. The scheming stepmother is not villain but human, trying to provide for her children. Iris, the stepsister who is in the centre of the story, is no happier about getting Cinderella as a stepsister than Cinderella is about Iris.

All of the characters are very human, generally unsympathetic, and often surprisingly mean to each other. They are all blind (sometimes deliberately) to some aspects of their own lives and what is going on around them. Relationships between them are complex mixtures of love and hate, jealousy and joy. Though the book is less than 400 pages, all the main characters change and evolve: the girls grow up; adults around them mostly degrade.

Despite the mean characters and the unfortunate events that happen to them, the book itself is not unpleasant or depressing. It isn’t exactly fun, either, but it is definitely engrossing.

The one noticeable weakness of the book is its ending. The main story is wrapped in a meta-story, as if one of the sisters was remembering their childhood. This totally unnecessary technique leads to a very weak ending, where the sister simply summarizes what happened afterwards (instead of a “happily ever after”): “This is what happened to X. This is what happened to Y. This is what happened to Z.” It all feels very separate from the main story, as if it was glued on.

An unusual strength of the book is its cover. Well, “strength” is perhaps too strong a word… but it is a feature that I enjoyed. The cover depicts a complex scene with several things going on. Initially, it looks like this scene has nothing to do with anything that goes on in the book. Then something relatively unexpected happens in the book, which explains part of the cover. Having read this far in the book, I looked again at the cover, and more parts of it started to make some kind of sense. And then I couldn’t wait to find out if these things would actually happen, and when and how.

Altogether quite a readable and interesting book, quite different from most of what’s out there.

(Amazon US; Amazon UK.)

I saw the play Arcadia years ago… it must be 10 years at least. By now I remembered little of the story. I just had a very strong memory of finding it fabulous – one of the best plays I have ever seen. (I still think that.) My verdict after reading the play is that it’s simply brilliant.

Arcadia is set in a large country house in England, switching between 1809 and the present day. It is almost a kind of detective story: the present-day inhabitants and visitors are researching different aspects of what was going on in 1809. For example, one visitor, a garden historian, is interested in the transformation of the garden from a classical Capability Brown-style to a romantic “gothic” or “picturesque” style, complete with ruins and a hermitage. Another attempts to find proof that Lord Byron stayed in that house and was involved in a scandal or two. A third studies the dynamics of grouse populations, based on old records of game shot at the estate.

As they do this, the provide a sort of living commentary on the nature of truth and knowledge. They are all fitting together incomplete information. Sometimes they overlook pieces of information, because they see what they want to see. Other times, some of their unfounded guesses later turn out to be right.

Another central theme is the differences between the classical and the romantic world views – science vs. art; facts vs. intuition. Sometimes the two are in opposition, and sometimes one inevitably contains the other. But the play also contains discussions of garden history, thermodynamics, chaos theory, iterative processes etc. – all of them echoed in the events of the play.

The plot is impressively well-crafted. It’s not set of threads running in parallel, but rather a whole intricate web: almost everything touches everything else, and the ends are tied together very neatly. The story is very “tight”: no line is superfluous, and there is never a dull moment.

These ideas and the plot structure get a lot more attention than the characters. The characters do all have quite distinct personalities, and Stoppard gently shows us their loves, joys and frustrations. But in the end this play is far more intellectual rather than passionate. (There’s that classical vs romantic dichotomy again.) I got as much out of reading it, as I did from seeing it. (I couldn’t say that of Shakespeare in Love, the only other work by Stoppard that I’ve seen – although not read.)

To really enjoy this book, it needs to be read with great attention. While the book isn’t complicated as such, there are lots of things going on, and lots of small but important things are said and done. Ignore a detail, and you’ll miss a later joke. I read the first half twice and found it more rewarding the second time. (On the other hand, the book is only 130 pages, so it won’t take too long to read even with maximum attention.)

The language also rewards attentive reading. Stoppard is witty in a very pleasing way: the play is full of subtle jokes, puns, and double entendres. Yet it is all done with such grace and good judgement that there is never a feeling of forced jollity or excessive comedy.

To top it all off, Stoppard’s language is a joy to read. Every line is elegant; every phrase worth savouring. It’s hard to do describe it in a way that does it justice… and likewise hard to find a representative line to quote, because each one is so much better in its proper setting. Here is the very beginning of the play. Thomasina is the precocious 13-year-old daughter of the lady of the house; Septimus her tutor.

Thomasina: Septimus, what is carnal embrace?
Septimus: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.
Thomasina: Is that all?
Septimus: No… a shoulder of mutton, a haunch of venison well hugged, an embrace of grouse… caro, carnis; feminine; flesh.
Thomasina: Is it a sin?
Septimus: Not necessarily, my lady, but when carnal embrace is sinful it is a sin of the flesh, QED.

Mythago Wood is a highly-praised, award-winning fantastical novel, and it’s built on an interesting idea. Behind a man’s house, there is a small wood – I guess you could call it a magical wood – where archetypes and myths from mankind’s collective subconscious become real, and get physical form. For example, the myth of Robin Hood would give rise to an actual Robin Hood figure in the wood.

Holdstock then explores what happens when the myths in a man’s subconscious come to life, and start interacting with him. And what if he himself enters the wood, and becomes part of a myth?

An interesting idea, but hard to present as believable. Once you start thinking about it, you realise how untenable this is. What would this Robin Hood live on? How can he be Robin Hood without nobles to steal from, and peasants to give the spoils to? Does his entire world materialise? And how come his world doesn’t collide and conflict with the worlds of other myths who also exist in the wood? And so on.

The people in the book all accept this idea of myth-made-real far too easily. If I told you that my mind generated a real Robin Hood in the wood behind my house, how much time, and how much evidence, would you require before you believed me? More than one day and one person’s word, I think!

In other ways as well, the characters’ behaviour is often not entirely believable. Major changes in some characters’ behaviour are never quite explained – they “just happen” – and major decisions likewise “just happen” with little preparation or build-up. The characters seem to lack a real inner life, and simply feel flat and 2-dimensional.

The writing itself is also flat. Through much of the book, the language is stiff and cliched. People actually say things like “Oh my god, no!” (as I thought they only did in bad movies) and the book abounds in phrases such as “Then darkness began to close about me. My lips moved but I could utter no sound…”.

Holdstock shifts into a different gear for retelling some of the myths that live in the wood. He tells these in a simple, matter-of-fact manner, in the kind of voice that an old-time story-teller might use. And as a result, these myths are a lot more gripping than the rest of the book. Too bad he didn’t stick to this simplicity throughout the book.

All in all, the book was a bit of a disappointment to me. An interesting idea, as I said, and some intriguing developments of that idea, but neither the characters, nor the wood, nor the story never really come alive.