wot i red on my hols by alan robson (rigidas pratum)

Midwinter Chills

Prelude to Space was Arthur C. Clarke’s very first novel. He wrote it in 1947 and it was published in 1951. As the title implies, it’s about the people, places and technologies that lie behind the first attempt to explore outer space, Specifically it concerns a project for sending someone to the moon. In 1947 that was wild speculation of course, but by the time I was old enough to read the novel, the real life space race was in full swing, the details of the Apollo programme were well known and, of course, in 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did actually walk on the moon. Clearly by that time the novel could only be thought of as quaint and outdated, having been completely overtaken by events. Probably it would be laughably inaccurate as well. Consequently I never bothered to read the novel. It all seemed rather pointless.

I was, of course, completely wrong in all my assumptions. I finally read the novel for the first time this month and I was absolutely bowled over by it. Certainly Clarke gets the engineering details (mostly) wrong, though not as wrong as you might expect. The physics involved in launching a mission to the moon is well understood, and physics defines engineering – engineering is only applied physics after all. Consequently Clarke gets the engineering principles of the mission exactly right even if he gets some of the implementation details wrong. Strong parallels can still usefully be drawn between the technical descriptions in the novel and the actual details of the Apollo programme itself.

But something as complicated as a flight to the moon cannot happen without a huge administrative infrastructure to back it up. It takes the efforts of many thousands of people working away behind the scenes to coordinate a mission of this complexity and here again Clarke gets everything exactly right – he invented a fictional NASA decades before the real NASA was any more than a gleam in the eyes of a tiny group of enthusiasts.

The novel itself is actually much more about the people, the personalities and the behind the scenes efforts than it is about the engineering and the technology (lectures about nuts and bolts quickly become boring) and here too Clarke gets everything exactly right. Consequently Prelude to Space is just as insightful, just as thoughtful, just as prescient and just as profound in its definition of the human condition as it was all those years ago when it first appeared in print. And that is why it can still be read with enormous pleasure today even though time has rendered all its surface trappings obsolete.

Critics often complain that Clarke’s prose is flat and dull and that his characters are constructed out of one dimensional cardboard. I have never agreed with this position. His major characters are all avatars of Arthur C. Clarke himself, a person who the author clearly understands perfectly. So to me the viewpoint characters in his novels always appear to be well rounded and perfectly personified on the page. Additionally, I feel rather strongly that his prose sparkles superbly well. It is ironic and sprinkled with a dry, sly, wry and witty cynicism that often makes his observations extremely funny – the jokes seldom make you laugh out loud, but they never fail to inspire a smile of recognition at their hidden truths. Unfortunately critics don’t do irony at all well, and witty cynicism seems always to fall into their deaf ears. I think that’s a shame, the critics are missing so much.

Consider, for example, a scene in Prelude to Space where the crew of the space mission are made to undergo a psychiatric examination. Clarke tells us (tongue firmly in his cheek) that the psychiatrists are testing the crew to see if they are normal and if they are normal, whether or not anything can be done about it. It’s just a throwaway line, but nevertheless it encapsulates a deep truth that only really became clear many years later during the Apollo programme itself.

The Apollo astronauts all had to undergo psychiatric examinations of course, and the attitudes of both the astronauts themselves and of their psychiatrists corresponds exactly to the attitudes displayed in Clarke’s witty little vignette. Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 command module pilot, records in his autobiography that in one afternoon session with the psychiatrist he solemnly asked the psychiatrist if he was supposed to use the same personality that he’d used in the morning session, or could he use a different one? He also tells us that he was given a Rorschach Inkblot Test and when he was presented with a completely blank, white card to interpret he told the examiner that it was a picture of nineteen polar bears fornicating in a snowdrift. All these comments strike me as being very Clarkean indeed.

But my very favourite joke in Prelude to Space is the moment when a character, suffering under extreme stress, "...cursed fluently in three languages and four religions...". That one actually did make me laugh out loud with delight, and I chuckled all over again as I typed it here.

Some time after the publication of what many regarded as his magnum opus (the novel Rendezvous with Rama) Clarke announced his retirement from writing. Unfortunately his muse refused to let him retire and a steady trickle of novels continued to appear, much to his annoyance. I enjoyed a brief correspondence with Clarke in the late 1970s and in 1978 he sent me a postcard from Sri Lanka (where he lived). On one side was a picture of Sigiriya Rock, a Sri Lankan landmark, and on the other side Clarke told me that this was the location of what would be his final(!) novel The Fountains of Paradise. I still have that postcard, it’s one of my proudest possessions.

And of course more novels kept appearing. As each one was published Clarke began referring to it, with a certain weariness, as being his latest last novel. His ironic, cynical wit worked just as amusingly in real life as it did in his books. His actually final final novel was The Last Theorem, completed for him by Frederik Pohl after Clarke became too ill to write (but not too ill to edit the prose that Pohl wrote on his behalf). It was published in 2008, the same year that Clarke himself died.

Now that I’ve finally read Prelude to Space, it occurs to me that I’ve read every word of fiction and (almost) every word of non-fiction that Arthur C. Clarke ever published. This makes me sad. I think perhaps it’s time to start a massive re-read. I’m sure I must have missed some of the jokes the first time round.

* * * *

Elly Griffiths is best known as a writer of rather entertaining detective novels. However her new book Frozen People suggests that she is changing her literary direction. It is a science fictional time travel story combined (of course) with a detective novel. And it’s really rather good…

Ali (short for Alisoun – yes, that’s how she spells it and the spelling is important to the plot) Dawson is a detective who investigates cold cases. She likes to joke that the cases are so cold that they are frozen, hence the book’s title, of course. The true meaning of the joke only becomes clear when it is explained that Ali actually solves her cases by travelling back in time to when the crime actually occurred. Investigating the crime in situ as it happens gives her a much better chance of solving it successfully when she returns to the here and now.

Isaac Templeton, a high ranking government minister, is researching his family history. He has some concerns about Cain Templeton, his great-great-grandfather who, back in 1850, was accused of the murder of three women. He was never actually brought to trial, and the murders were never solved. Templeton wants them solved and he brings pressure to bear upon the police to investigate this cold and frozen case..

Ali works with a small team of people in present day (2023) London. There’s an Italian physicist who has been nicknamed Jones because her real name is too difficult to pronounce. She is the person who first discovered how to travel through time. There’s also an IT expert, and two detectives, Ali herself and a colleague. Ali draws the short straw and she is sent back to 1850 where she arrives at the Hawk St house of Cain Templeton just as the body of one of one of the murdered women is discovered – that’s the convenience of time travel for you!

She potters around a bit gathering evidence, but then she finds herself stranded. For some reason her portal back to 2023 doesn’t work for her any more. I won’t tell you the reason why it doesn’t work because the reason is actually a very important plot point. To say any more would be too much of a spoiler.

Because she can’t get back to 2023, Ali ends up being invited to stay in Templeton’s house. She hopes that up in 2023 her team are looking for some way to bring her back home, but in the mean time she continues with her investigation. She comes across mention of a curious gentlemen’s club known as The Collectors to which Cain Templeton belongs. It is rumoured that membership of the club requires the killing of a woman. Hmmm...

Ali eventually manages to return to 2023 where she finds the department in turmoil. Isaac Templeton has been murdered and Ali’s son Finn is the chief suspect. It appears that Ali’s trip to the past may have been a direct cause of Isaac’s murder in the present. The game’s afoot, and before matters are (mostly) resolved, there will be two more deaths, one in each timeline, each connected with the other by Ali’s own investigations both then and now.

The plot is satisfyingly complex and the inherent paradoxes of time travel are beautifully handled. But where the novel really comes into its own is with its magnificent invocation of daily life in the London of 1850. The sights, sounds, and smells (particularly the smells!) of London in 1850 are brought brilliantly to life. It’s worth reading the book just for the extremely detailed – and noisesome – descriptions of exactly how people went to the toilet in 1850. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

It is clear that Frozen People is just the first novel of what will eventually become a series. It is certainly a complete and satisfying read in its own right but by the end of the story we are left in no doubt that Ali still has work to do. The historical record shows that she will be (has been?) involved in events that will take place (have taken place) in 1853...

My only real complaint, and it’s not that much of one, is that Elly Griffiths tried too hard to justify her time travel technology. At various points in the story she has her Italian physicist Jones describe the principles involved in travelling through time. Cue several paragraphs of utterly illiterate pseudo-scientific gibberish. I really wish these paragraphs had been deleted by the editor. They add nothing to the plot – indeed, it could be argued that they even detract from it. I would have been quite happy to accept time travel as a given for the sake of the story. I don’t need the mechanism to be "justified"…

So read those bits of the book with your eyes closed. The rest of the story more than makes up for them.

* * * *

Anger is an Energy is the autobiography of John Lydon. You might well ask yourself who is John Lydon and why would I want to read about him? But when I tell you that once upon a time John Lydon called himself Johnny Rotten, perhaps the pieces might start to fall into place.

I was never a huge fan of punk music but at a time when British rock was metamorphosing into incestuous bands of ex-public schoolboys who were saying more and more about less and less at greater and greater length the sheer raw power and energy of punk’s anarchic simplicity cut through the pretensions like a hot knife through butter.

I saw the Sex Pistols perform on the television several times. I even saw the infamous interview with Bill Grundy where Grundy, pissed out of his brain, encouraged the Pistols to say something outrageous. Eventually he goaded them into (reluctantly) saying a few rude words live on national TV thereby simultaneously cementing their career and completely destroying his own.

I actually bought the Sex Pistols’ (one and only) album Never Mind the Bollocks and I can still listen to it with pleasure. It really is a little gem.

I never much cared for Johnny Rotten himself. He always came across as a bit of a dick, a loud-mouthed ignorant lout with an enormous chip on his shoulder. He hated everybody equally.

However his autobiography has made me revise my opinion of him quite a lot. He is anything but ignorant. He’s been a voracious reader all his life long and he also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of music. He’s quite happy to spend pages talking about how Dostoevsky’s novels relate to his own upbringing and then to segue from there into a deeply intellectual discussion about the musical influences on the material performed by the band Slade, a band for which he has an enormous fondness. He managed to score himself six O-level and three A-level GCE’s; which is no small intellectual feat in itself. He deserves a lot of respect for that alone.

But none of that stops him from being a dick. It just means that he can (and does) defend his sometimes outrageous statements with a fierce intellectual rigour.

There’s no doubt that he had a hard life. He fell sick with meningitis when he was seven – probably he caught it from the rat urine that saturated the slum where his family lived. He was in hospital in a coma for six months and when he awoke from the coma he had lost the power of speech and he had also lost most of his memories as well. When his parents came to visit him in hospital he didn’t remember or recognize them. When they told him they were his parents he just shrugged. Having no evidence to the contrary, he had to believe them. It can’t have been a pleasant time for any of them…

Lydon’s autobiography is really there for the sake of self justification. It’s a 500 page scream of insistence that he should be allowed to do and say any damn thing he wants to do and say because life owes him a living after his miserable upbringing and because, in his own mind anyway, he produces superlative music. Neither point of view is terribly convincing despite the mass of detail that he uses to bolster his opinions. It just means that he recognizes his own anti-social habits and he feels a need to defend them.

The most moving chapters in the book, and those quite firmly anchored to the man behind the mask, are the ones concerning his close and devoted relationship with his wife Nora. It is clear that he loves her to bits, and it is these chapters that confirm there really is a (slightly cuddly) human being inside the loutish, anarchic facade that he presents to the world. If you can break through the very hard shell with which he surrounds himself you might find someone charming, someone to like, and possibly even to admire for his insight. Does that make him a living contradiction in terms? No more so than for anybody else. He’s just a bit louder about it than most and a bit more intolerant.

Shrug.

* * * *

From 1901 to 1956 one family provided all the chief executioners in the United Kingdom. Henry Pierrepoint, his brother Thomas and Thomas’ son Albert were all, at one time or another, appointed to be ar the head of the list of British executioners. One other family, the Billingtons, had briefly had a father and son on the list towards the end of the nineteenth century, but no other family had ever dominated the list like the Pierrepoints did. Steve Fielding’s book Pierrepoint: A Family of Executioners tells their story…

The book opens with a rather harrowing and cold blooded description of the gallows and how the execution procedure works.

The [execution] chamber is a small room and the trap occupies a large part of the floor. The trap is  formed of two hinged leaves held in position from below by bolts which are withdrawn when the lever is pulled allowing the leaves to drop on their hinges. Above the trap a rope of a standard length is attached to a strong chain which is fitted to the overhead beam in such a way that it can be raised and lowered and secured at any desired height by means of a cotter [pin] slipped into one of the links and [through] a bracket fixed on the beam. This enables the length of chain to be adjusted to make the drop accord with the weight and height of the prisoner…

On the morning of the execution a final check of the equipment is carried out. The rope is coiled, fitted to the chain, and secured in position by a piece of pack thread which will be broken by the weight of the prisoner when he drops.

…the executioner enters the cell and pinions the prisoner’s arms behind his back, and two officers lead him to the scaffold and place him directly across the division of the trap on a spot previously marked with chalk. The assistant executioner pinions the legs, while the executioner puts a white cap over [the prisoner’s] head and fits the noose around his neck with the knot drawn tight on the left lower jaw where it is held in position by a sliding ring. The executioner then pulls the lever.

The prisoner drops through the trapdoor, the noose throws his head backwards and his neck snaps. Death is instantaneous.

The noose itself is formed by threading one end of the rope through a brass eyelet woven into the other end of the rope. The complexly knotted hangman’s noose seen in a million Hollywood movies was never used in British executions.

To be perfectly frank, much of Fielding’s book is rather dull. It consists mainly of a list of executions carried out by one or another of the Pierrepoints together with a brief discussion of the crime for which the prisoner is being executed. Fielding also always makes certain to tell us the exact length of the drop that each prisoner was given, as if we really care. All that that amount of detail does is prove that Fielding has spent many happy hours poring over the official records of every execution that took place in Britain in the twentieth century. But the sheer tedium of scrutinizing this list also confirms that the execution protocol in Britain was fast, routine, efficient and as humane as an execution can possibly be. Of the many hundreds of executions carried out by the Pierrepoints, almost none had any drama associated with them and even on the very, very few occasions when something went wrong the executioner was always able to cope with it and bring the execution to a successful conclusion. No condemned prisoner ever suffered unnecessarily in any execution carried out in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century. The Pierrepoints (and their assistants) were very good at what they did.

Fielding’s book is often quite superficial. It contains very few insights into the character of the executioners themselves (though every so often Fielding does manage to pull a surprisingly informative rabbit out of his hat). In all honesty, Albert Pierrepoint’s own autobiography Executioner Pierrepoint, published in 1974 and long out of print, (good luck tracking down a copy) has a lot more to say about what motivates an executioner and what, if anything may ultimately disillusion him than Fielding's book manages to convey.

Nevertheless, Fielding’s book does have its merits and it really is worth putting up with the boring bits for the sake of the occasional nuggets of gold.

The bulk of the book concerns itself with Albert’s career. He was the most prolific executioner in the family. It was his proud boast that he had carried out more judicial sentences of death than any other executioner in any British archive or record. That’s quite an achievement. The total number of executions that Albert carried out has never been officially confirmed and the total is also somewhat blurred because of the large (though sometimes ill-defined) number of Nazi war criminals that he executed after the Nuremberg trials, but there is a general agreement that he executed somewhere between 400 and 500 people. The total is almost certainly much closer to the latter figure than to the former.

During World War II Albert was sometimes called upon to execute American servicemen who had been condemned to death by their own military tribunals. The British authorities point blank refused to allow the Americans to carry out the executions themselves because their method of hanging was regarded as cruel and inhumane. Unlike the British method which used a variable length drop based on the height and weight of the prisoner causing instant death from a broken neck, the American method always gave a standard drop of only five feet. Furthermore, the Americans used a rather silly looking curly-whirly knot on their noose, the so-called "hangman’s knot" which greatly constricted the movement of the noose and seldom threw the head backwards hard enough to break the neck. The combination of both these things meant that almost invariably, the prisoner strangled to death slowly and very, very painfully at the end of the noose for twenty minutes or more. That was simply not allowed to happen in the UK and the authorities put their foot down firmly. The hangings would be carried out by a British executioner.

But there was one aspect of the American execution protocol that the British could not control because it was only indirectly connected to the execution itself. Once the prisoner was placed on the scaffold with the noose around his neck he was required to stand there for a considerable amount of time while the details of his crime and of his sentence of death was read out loud to him. A chaplain then said a prayer for him, and he was asked if he had any last words to say. If the chaplain was over enthusiastic, the prisoner could be left standing on the scaffold waiting to die for half an hour or more. Can you imagine the mental turmoil and suffering such a wait must have caused the prisoner? It gives me nightmares to think about it. Talk about a cruel and unusual punishment.

Albert recorded his disgust at what he felt amounted to the torture of a condemned prisoner. He saw no point to it. Once death is inevitable, he felt that it was important to have the process over and done with as quickly as possible. From the moment he opened to door of the condemned cell to the moment that the prisoner hung dead at the of the rope was generally only a matter of seconds. Once, when he had a particularly compliant prisoner, only seven seconds elapsed from start to finish. Albert was justifiably proud of that record.

Albert had a bizarre little habit. Just before he left to execute the prisoner he would light a cigar, puff on it briefly, and place it in an ashtray. Then he would set off to perform the execution. Afterwards he would return to his cigar, which was (always) still burning, and he would smoke it to completion. He measured the success of the execution by how much of the cigar’s tobacco had been consumed while he was away. It was never very much...

Albert Pierrepoint resigned from the list of executioners in 1956. Ostensibly he resigned because of a dispute about the fees owed to him, but it seems likely that this was just an excuse. He had become increasingly disillusioned with the usefulness of executions as a deterrent pour encourager les autres and he began to regard them as being little more than a vicious retribution by the state, serving no other purpose than revenge. And what’s the point in that? Not much at all, really.

Albert came to believe quite strongly that none of the executions he carried out had had any deterrent effect at all. Quite the reverse in fact – once he found himself having to hang a close personal friend, a man with whom he had shared drinks and songs in the pub they frequented together, a man who was very well aware of just what it was that Albert did. Nevertheless that man still went out and committed a murder. The execution of his friend affected Albert deeply and it was the beginning of the end for him. Add to that the fact that the early 1950s were marred by a series of controversial executions that were not only unpopular with the public at large, they were also almost certainly (and completely certainly in one case) the executions of innocent people. The writing was clearly on the wall.

By the time he resigned, Albert was seriously starting to question the things that he had spent his life trying to achieve. He must have felt very, very conflicted. You can almost pity him...

The last executions in the UK took place in 1964. Capital punishment was suspended in 1965. It was finally abolished completely in 1969. Albert Pierrepoint died in 1992. He was 87 years old.