wot i red on my hols by alan robson (mundus arachnea)

More of the Same

In 2010 Robert Charles Wilson’s novel Julian Comstock was nominated for a Hugo award. The story is set in 22nd century America, a country which has devolved over time into an anti-Semitic, Christo-Fascist oligarchy known as the Dominion of Jesus Christ – though as is always the case with these kinds of institutions, Jesus himself would be appalled at the things the Dominion does in his name.

The Dominion is controlled by President Deklan Comstock. By now the Presidency has become a hereditary office and Deklan has strengthened his own position of power by ruthlessly eliminating his rival relatives. Specifically, in terms of the novel, he has arranged for the death of his own brother Bryce. However Bryce’s son Julian still remains at large, a very real threat to his power.

Julian is living in the rural western district of Athabaska. He has some power and influence in this remote area of the country because the Comstock name still carries some weight among the aristocracy. Nevertheless there are some fates that he cannot avoid. When Deklan introduces conscription in order to bolster the strength of his troops who are fighting the Dutch – actually more German (Deutsch) than true Netherlanders – in Labrador for control of the north-west passage, Julian is forced to flee in order to avoid the draft.

However a series of unfortunate misadventures sees him press-ganged into the army anyway. It seems that he cannot avoid his fate. He becomes a war hero and eventually leads a coup d'etat which deposes his uncle. Once in power, he reverses many of his uncle’s policies, upsetting the status quo of the Dominion by liberalising the censorship policies that denied people access to ideas from the earlier eras. Specifically he rehabilitates the philosophy of his hero Charles Darwin. Under the reign of his uncle, the authorities had ruthlessly suppressed Darwin’s ideas about evolution – the very notion of change was anathema to the Dominion, change being seen as a direct threat to its hold on power.

Julian also re-introduces a strict separation between the church and the state. Under the Dominion, church and state were perceived as being identical, two sides of exactly the same coin, and their separation was an unthinkable heresy because (again), that would weaken the Dominion’s hold on power. Dictators like Deklan Comstock are invariably pragmatists, cynically aware that when religion is important in the lives of the people and when the state itself can dictate exactly what the church is allowed to preach, then religion simply serves as yet another tool to consolidate the dictator’s position.

The Dominion also knew that the suppression of knowledge through direct censorship combined with little or no access to education (schools are few and far between in the Dominion) would necessarily produce a malleable, ignorant and largely illiterate population which would be much more likely to believe the "truths" that the state presented them with. And so again the state’s position would be strengthened. This too is something that Julian seeks to abolish – many of his own opinions derived directly from his reading of forbidden texts that had been excavated from pre-Dominion rubbish tips. He is very well aware of the power of literacy and he actively seeks to encourage it.

Do the attitudes taken by the Dominion start to sound a bit familiar to you?

The novel was written at a time when American political institutions were regarded as being robust and stable. By and large, the governance of the country was efficiently implemented and American politicians were perceived as being (relatively) sane, honest and competent. As a result, contemporary criticisms of the novel sometimes found the society that the story depicted to be rather unconvincing. You can’t get there from here, as the proverb has it. Perhaps that’s why it didn’t actually win the Hugo award that it was nominated for.

I first read the book in 2010 and I thoroughly enjoyed it on its own merits. It was a well told tale which had interesting things to say about the nature of power. It was clearly an extremely thoughtful meditation on the saying that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. In that respect I regarded it as a fascinating literary exercise, if nothing else. Re-reading it in 2025 in the light of the rapid and seemingly unstoppable disintegration into chaos and incompetence of most of the important administrative organs of the American state, it now seems to be all of this and very much more besides. Nowadays the novel strikes me as being alarmingly prescient. It seems more likely every day that the novel’s Dominion of Jesus Christ acts as a convincing metaphor that perfectly describes the dysfunctional reality that life in America is now beginning to devolve into. Scary stuff...

Either way, there is no doubt that Julian Comstock is an important novel in its own right. On the surface it tells an exciting tale which will often have you on the edge of your seat. Even if you aren’t interested in the novel’s sub-text, it still repays a close reading for the sake of the surface story alone. Everything else is, of course, a bonus, pure and not at all simple.

* * * *

I read Freida McFadden’s novel Dead Med because the blurb sounded intriguing. I’d never heard of the author, but I’m always happy to give a new writer a chance. I’m very pleased that I did so because I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and, on the strength of that feeling I immediately sought out more of her books. They too proved to be addictive page-turners. I may have to immerse myself more deeply in her work – though she has been so frighteningly productive that it’s quite a daunting prospect…

Dead Med is set in a medical school which has a rather bad reputation. Over the years, a lot of students have died from drug overdoses and it seems clear that someone is keeping the student body well supplied, though the exact distribution mechanism remains obscure, for the moment at least.

The story tells of a series of events that take place during the first term of a new academic year. We see the events of the term from the viewpoints of five students and one member of staff. They all know each other very well – the students study together under that staff member, and they are all part of the same anatomy class. Over the course of the term they work together on the dissection of a cadaver who, rather morbidly, they christen with the name Frank.

Heather feels quite overwhelmed by the pressure of study. She is young and naive. She is struggling with the course work and she is starting to question whether or not she’s really cut out to be a doctor. She shares accommodation with Rachel. Rachel doesn’t like Heather at all. She doesn’t like anatomy classes either. But that doesn’t matter – she is sleeping with the anatomy teacher. Hopefully that will get her through her exams.

Abe is a giant teddy bear of a man. He’s paying for his education by working part time at a clinic. He is immediately smitten by Heather and their relationship seems to be progressing well but it all falls apart when Heather visits him while he is taking a shower and she discovers his clothes on the bathroom floor covered in blood. It’s an excessive amount of blood, even for a medical student, and she doesn’t know what to make of it. Abe doesn’t help matters – he avoids talking about the subject and as a result Heather starts to avoid him. He is beginning to make her feel a bit uncomfortable.

Abe shares accommodation with Mason who is sexy, charming and filthy rich. His father is a world-famous cardiovascular surgeon who expects perfection from his son. Consequently Mason feels under a lot of pressure to succeed and he is not coping well with it. So it isn’t at all surprising that Mason soon starts to come apart at the seams and his behaviour becomes more and more irrational, culminating eventually in a bloody tragedy which, at one and the same time, solves the mystery of the school’s drug problem and opens the way for a much more sinister development.

Sasha is a quiet girl, studious and serious. Her family are Russian immigrants and she wants to make them proud by becoming an American doctor. She wants to be first in her class, but annoyingly she always finds herself coming second to Mason. Something needs to be done about that, and so she takes the necessary steps.

All these students are studying anatomy under the tutelage of Dr. Conlon. He is disabled and walks with a stick. He is starting to regret his relationship with Rachel...

It was the multiple points of view from which the story is told that got me hooked and which kept me reading. All of the characters experience the same events but none of them has sufficient information to understand exactly what is happening and why these events are taking place. Of course it all revolves around the central mysteries of who is supplying the drugs, why are they supplying them and why are so many students dying? None of the characters knows the whole story. All they ever see are fragments, and they seldom understand the real reasons that lie behind their experiences, though they have fooled themselves into thinking that they do. As the different narratives start to coalesce, the reader (and only the reader) finally starts to get a glimpse of what is really going on.,,

The novel is a tour de force of narrative structure. Its constant reinterpretation and the richness of each new narrative layer is truly astonishing, and I finished the story with a great big grin on my face. So that’s what’s really going on. Well I’ll go to the foot of our stairs!

The Boyfriend has two alternating story threads. One thread is set in the past and concerns the exploits of a young man known as Slug, who enjoys eating insects, and his friend Tom who we gradually come to realise might be a psychopath. Another thread is set in the present when a young woman called Sydney (sic!) is being stalked by an ex boyfriend. After one particularly unfortunate encounter with her ex she is rescued by a tall dark and handsome mystery man with whom she immediately falls head over heels in lust. Eventually the two narrative strands come together and as the body count starts to rise, Sydney finds herself in deeper and deeper trouble.

It has to be admitted, Sydney is her own worst enemy. If she had even a shred of common sense she’d never have found herself presented with such insoluble problems. But despite that, I couldn’t help feeling attracted to her. She has a lively perkiness that kept me reading despite the fact that she’s as dumb as a box of rocks. But even her perkiness eventually became a little bit wearing...

This is probably the least engrossing of the Freida McFadden novels that I have read and had I come across it first I might well have given up on her and not read any more simply because of Sydney’s painful, bone-headed stupidity. However I did keep going and I discovered that, to a large extent, the story does redeem itself. The back-story involving Tom and Slug is thoroughly engrossing, full of twists and turns and new insights that constantly redefine what you thought you knew about them. And finally there is an utterly unexpected twist at the end of the novel which shows everything in a brand new light. Both these aspects of the plot are demonstrably magnificent bits of authorial cleverness. It’s just a shame about Sydney. She’s definitely exactly the kind of idiot that the phrase idiot plot was specifically coined for.

However even though I’ve said that rather catty bit of faintly damning praise, I think I should point out that as soon as I finished reading The Boyfriend I immediately picked up and started to read The Housemaid. I’m very glad I did – it completely rehabilitated Freida McFadden for me. What an utterly brilliant book it is…

Millie has recently been released on parole from prison after serving a ten year sentence. She is living from hand to mouth in her car. This is very much a parole violation and Millie is terrified that her parole officer might find out. If she does, Millie will be back inside in much less than two shakes of a lamb’s tail. So when Nina Winchester offers her a job as a maid of all work, Millie jumps at the opportunity.

Nina is married to Andrew, a very rich and very handsome man indeed. They live in a fabulously large house which Millie cleans from top to bottom every day. She cooks all the family meals, catering carefully to Nina’s obsessively eccentric (though very fashionable) dietary demands. In between doing the household chores, she lives in a small attic room under the eaves of the house. Worryingly, the door to her room has its lock on the outside. That’s the first red flag…

Nina’s behaviour becomes progressively more unstable and erratic. She makes deliberate messes around the house, with no rhyme nor reason to them, and then she insists that Millie clears them up. Often she accuses Millie of having made the mess in the first place! She gives Millie explicit instructions to do this, that and the other thing and then erupts into vicious anger when she catches Millie doing the things that she now denies ever telling her to do. Millie just has to bite her tongue and take it – if she walks away from this job she will again be in violation of her parole, and that is an unbearable thought. More red flags…

The one compensation in this nightmare is that she finds herself growing ever closer to Nina’s husband Andrew. Eventually she allows Andrew to seduce her (not that she has to work very hard at it, given Nina’s poisonous personality) and events culminate with Andrew requiring Nina to leave his house. He and Millie then settle down to become a de facto couple.

And that’s when her troubles really start.

Millie has completely misunderstood the characters of both Nina and Andrew. Neither of them is at all what they seem to be. Each has a hidden agenda and Millie finds herself caught in a carefully baited trap. It isn’t long before Millie learns exactly why the lock on her attic room is on the outside of the door. But she is made of sterner stuff than anybody realises and the slow, steady and utterly terrifying revenge that she takes on the people who have driven her to such a desperate place is chilling in its viciousness.

If this novel doesn’t give you nightmares, then you aren’t human.

Before I read these three books, I had never heard of Freida McFadden. Since I’d enjoyed her novels so much, I went digging to find out more about her and rather to my surprise I discovered that she is actually a somewhat controversial figure, though I suspect that much of the controversy is somewhat artificial, being a product born of snobbery rather than being based on anything of any real significance.

It appears that there is something called BookTok. It is a sub-community of the social media platform TikTok which focuses on books and literature. Members of this sub-community, known as BookTokers, make videos reviewing, discussing, and even joking about the books that they read. Freida McFadden is very popular with the BookTokers and they praise her stories to the skies. That all sounds perfectly fair, right and proper to me.

Unfortunately a group of (so called) serious readers and/or critics have taken exception to this. These people appear to regard the BookTokers as shallow, intellectual lightweights, who are utterly incapable of appreciating "real" literature (there’s a PhD thesis topic for you – define real literature. Go on, I dare you!). Therefore, by definition, anything the BookTokers like must also be shallow and completely unworthy of the attention of the more mature literati.

For all I know that sneering judgement of the BookTokers may well have some merit. I’ve never seen a BookTok video and I have no intention of ever watching one, but based on my own reaction to Freida McFadden’s books I can’t help suspecting that the critics are being grossly unfair. I have read several (again, so called) reviews which assert that Freida’s plots are predictable, her characters are shallow and – worst accusation of all – that she is a plagiarist. One and all, the reviewers justify these calumnies by pointing sneeringly at BookTok videos.

So let me state, for the record, that I strongly disagree with all these statements. Freida’s plot twists and turns invariably took me by surprise and I found all of her characters (particularly the more insane ones!) to be well rounded, convincing and sometimes genuinely frightening (there but for the grace of God go I). And since not one of the critics who accused her of plagiarism was able to point to anything specific from which she might have copied her material I think it’s fair to assume that there is no truth whatsoever in the accusation. Certainly I could not detect anything in her books that seemed even vaguely related to anything else with which I was familiar.

Therefore, let me say quite unambiguously that I found Freida McFadden’s books to be enlightening, engrossing, brilliantly written and impossible to put down. I look forward to reading many more of them.

So there!

* * * *

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is widely renowned and respected as the inventor of the world wide web, something which has had an incredible influence on the lives of almost everybody in the world. His book This is for Everyone is an autobiographical memoir which tells the story of the web’s development.

Having now read the book, I must say that I am rather astonished that the web ever got off the ground in the first place. One thing that the book makes crystal clear is that Tim Berners-Lee is appallingly bad at explaining things. More often that not, he leaves his audience more befuddled than they were before he started. This is a fact that he freely admits, and the book contains several amusing anecdotes about him giving presentations on his ideas of how the web would work to rooms full of puzzled people whose questions at the end made it perfectly clear that they hadn’t understood a single word he’d said to them. There are several reasons for his inability to explain his ideas, some of which he discusses quite openly in the text.

He tends to think and speak in very abstract ways. There is seldom anything concrete in what he is saying and he spends far too much time concentrating on generalities and very little time on the corresponding specifics. Furthermore he omits far too many important steps in the flow of his logic – to him, statement A obviously implies conclusion Z and so he sees no point in stepping his audience through the intermediate statements C through to Y which do eventually lead logically and inexorably to Z, albeit perhaps in baby steps. Unfortunately ordinary mortals like you and me, lacking Sir Tim’s giant brain, really do need to have all these intermediate steps spelled out for us in detail before we can appreciate exactly what conclusion Z is really all about.

I listened to the audiobook version of the memoir which is read by Stephen Fry, who is a superb narrator. However some portions of the book, notably the introduction and the epilogue, actually feature the voice of Tim Berners-Lee himself and listening to him speak after spending some time in the company of Stephen Fry’s magnificently mellifluous and well rounded oratory, made me realise that there are also other impediments to understanding what Tim Berners-Lee is saying.

He mumbles and he speaks far too fast (particularly when he is excited by the ideas he is discussing). He puts the emphasis and stress in weird places and he swallows his vowels. All of these speech-distorting habits serve to further obscure whatever point it is that he is trying to make.

Fortunately for all of us, his complete failure to make anyone understand what on earth he was talking about, didn’t really matter. He programmed the first implementation of the world wide web all by himself, with no input from anybody else at all which meant, of course, that he didn’t really have to explain anything to anyone until it was finished. Perhaps that’s just as well…

He wrote the whole thing on a NeXT workstation, yet another one of Steve Jobs’ very clever inventions. Unfortunately it was a hideously expensive machine. Consequently very few of them were ever sold and so it gradually faded away into obscurity. I always thought that was a shame – I played with one of them once and I was very impressed with it.

It took Tim Berners-Lee some 9000 or so lines of Objective-C code to make his system work. This is really quite a small project, well within the capabilities of one person to manage. I’ve coded much larger (though conceptually much simpler) systems than that all by myself. And of course once he had something which he could actually demonstrate to his audiences the obscurity of his spoken (and written) words became less important. One click is worth a thousand thoughts.

The rest, as they say, is history…

Despite its title, I suspect that the book might not actually be for everyone. Certainly it is charming, amusing and packed with entertaining anecdata but nevertheless you will need a fair bit of background knowledge in order to appreciate what the book is really all about. And even then, you might fall short. Given the very abstract nature of Tim Berners-Lee’s thinking, you may never fully grasp the points that he is making. Nevertheless, the more you understand about computer operating systems (particularly unix-like operating systems) and the more you understand about networking architectures (particularly the tcp/ip protocols) the more you will get out of the narrative. Conversely, the less you know about these things the more obscure the text might sometimes seem to be in places. Caveat emptor.

But no matter what your level of technical expertise may be there is one thing about Tim Berners-Lee that nobody will have any difficulty at all in understanding. It is clear that the success of the web could very easily have turned Tim Berners-Lee into yet another tech-bro billionaire. But he deliberately turned his back on all that. Instead he insisted on putting his invention into the public domain because he recognised the immense benefit that it could be to all of humanity.  It’s always nice to find someone who is motivated by idealism rather than by money. They are seldom the ones who make it into the headlines (Tim Berners-Lee is one of the few exceptions to that rule) but nevertheless they are surprisingly commonly found in the history of the development of computer systems. All of the ones that I’ve had anything to do with I have found to be genuinely good people. I’ve met one or two of the other kind as well, the headline makers with bottomless wallets – without exception, they were all bellends.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee clearly has an unwavering dedication to the principle that the web should remain open, free, and equitable for everyone. To that end, he has spent most of his life attempting to implement this belief by persuading governments, companies, and individuals from across the world to participate in his vision on his terms. All of them, he believes, can and should have a vital role to play in sustaining the web. Call him an idealist and I won’t argue with you.

I admire him tremendously.