wot i red on my hols by alan robson (homo titanium)

Bionic Alan

It's official. I'm now bionic. Bullets bounce off me and I can leap tall building with a single bound. Well, the bullets bounce if they are fired at my brand new titanium hip and I leap the buildings if I remember to launch myself with my brand new titanium hip. Small values of bionic, perhaps. But hey! Bionic, right? I'm pretty much housebound for the moment while I convalesce from the operation. Jake the Dog is rather miffed at having to go for walks with Robin instead of with me. Mummy walks aren't nearly as good as daddy walks. Mummy has no idea which are the best sniffing trees, and she simply cannot tell an interesting clump of grass from a boring one. I’m good at both these things. After many years of operant conditioning, Jake has got me very well trained.

Unfortunately he's just going to have to put up with second best for a while. And anyway, my titanium hip is all his fault. If you took your dog for a 15k walk every day for eleven years, you'd probably need a new hip as well.

* * * *

Inferno is the third novel in Conn Iggulden’s Nero trilogy. Agrippina is now safely dead and nobody stands in Nero’s way any more. He is lord of all he surveys, the man in charge of the largest empire the world has ever seen, and it is all his, to do with as he pleases.

Iggulden shows us that to begin with Nero actually did a pretty good job – Rome’s welfare was important to him and he looked after the city well. But gradually his athletic and artistic side became more important to him than his political life and the governance of Rome suffered as a a result. All Nero really wanted to do was take part in chariot races, declaim his verses, accompany himself on the lyre, and act in plays.  He saw himself much more as an athlete, a poet and an actor than as an Emperor. He considered himself to be second to none in the performing arts and of course everyone around him agreed with him and praised his talent because he was the Emperor after all, and their lives were in his hands. The irony of this completely escaped him – but narcissists have never been very good at irony.

As far as I am aware, none of Nero’s verses have survived. Perhaps that in itself is a measure of how talented a poet he was...

Things came to a head for Nero in July 64AD when the Great Fire of Rome destroyed three quarters of the city.  Did Nero really fiddle (play his lyre) while Rome burned, as legend would have it? Who knows – but in the novel Conn Iggulden provides us with a convincing (and very dramatic) reason as to why he might have done so.

Following the fire, Nero declared himself Dictator in order to expedite the recovery from the disaster. This was perfectly legal, but also very unpopular with the ruling classes who found themselves largely sidelined as a result. Nero took the opportunity afforded to him by the fire and by his new powers to build his Domus Aurea on the ruins – a golden palace dedicated to himself and constructed of granite extensively decorated with gold leaf. The stuccoed ceilings were faced with semi-precious stones and ivory veneers, while the walls were frescoed. The expense of building it almost bankrupted the city. But that’s OK – all Nero had to do to recoup his costs was raise all the taxes to astronomical levels. Along the way he also devalued the Roman currency, which increased inflationary pressures for the very first time in the Empire's history. None of this made him particularly popular with his peers – quite the reverse in fact.

Some contemporary observers suggested that Nero might have deliberately started the Great Fire himself (or, more accurately, he might have caused it to be started, since he was actually out of the city when it began) in order to give himself the opportunity to build his egocentric palace but, in the novel at least, Nero actually blames the Christians for the destruction and uses that as an excuse to increase his persecution of the faith, devising more and more ingeniously painful mechanisms for putting Christians to death. Among the dead were Paul of Tarsus and Simon Peter, who Nero had crucified upside down.

In the years that followed the fire, Nero’s increasingly self-centred actions provoked more and more dissent. Conspiracies and revolts against his reign became more common. Eventually, in 68AD, Nero was forced to flee the city barely ahead of his pursuers. There was no escape for him now, and as his enemies closed in he committed suicide by cutting his own throat. He was not mourned.

And meanwhile, Vespasian was waiting in the wings...

Conn Iggulden’s trilogy about Nero stands head and shoulders above all his other books. It is his masterpiece. He has written many other notable historical novels, all of which I’ve greatly enjoyed. But none of them come close to the brilliance of the Nero books. What next for him, I wonder?

* * * *

When you go into hospital to have bits removed and other bits  installed, light reading is highly recommended. So I took with me Leigh Perry’s A Skeleton In The Family and its sequel The Skeleton Takes A Bow.

Georgia Thackery has a skeleton in her closet. His name is Sid and he’s been living with the Thackery family for more than thirty years, ever since he rescued Georgia from a perilous situation when she was only six years old.

Sid doesn’t get out much – people might get a little worried if they saw a skeleton wandering around the town. But when she was younger, Georgia made a point of taking him trick or treating on Halloween. Sid always enjoyed that, and Sid’s authenticity as a skeleton meant that Georgia inevitably scored a lot of candy. Everybody wins!

These days Georgia has a teenage daughter called Maddison (Maddie for short). For reasons that I quite fail to understand, Georgia has chosen to keep Sid’s existence secret from Maddie, which means that Sid has to spend a lot of time hiding in cupboards when Maddie is around. Fortunately by the end of the book Maddie and Sid have finally been introduced to each other and Maddie is just as much in love with him as her mother is. Everybody likes a happy ending.

Sid remembers nothing about his life before he became a skeleton. However during the course of the first novel it becomes necessary for Georgia and Sid to delve more deeply into Sid’s history and to try and determine just who he had been in his past life, and to find out why he was murdered and who murdered him – yes, he really was murdered. There’s a dent in his skull where he was hit with a blunt object and notches on one of his ribs where he was stabbed with a very sharp knife.

The usual rigmarole of a cosy mystery ensues. There are lots of red herrings to chase and sniff at disdainfully and, as always, it eventually turns out that the murderer is the one person you least expected it to be – indeed, the murderer is so unexpected that I actually had no memory of the character ever appearing at all in the earlier sections of the story. That’s just me not paying attention, of course, but it does indicate how minor a character the murderer is in the grand scheme of things. But that’s the way these kinds of stories always work. Leigh Perry isn’t breaking any rules.

What makes the whole thing so enormously entertaining is the never ending stream of bone jokes that Sid and Georgia are constantly coming up with. Well, that and the delightful conceit of an animated skeleton solving its (his?) own murder. I enjoyed every ridiculous word of it.

In the second novel, The Skeleton Takes A Bow, Maddie and Sid have become so close that Sid is actually appearing in Maddie’s school play. Or rather his skull is. He is playing Yorick in the school’s production of Hamlet and, of course, he plays the part to perfection. One evening, Maddie inadvertently leaves Sid’s skull sitting on a shelf in the props room and he overhears a murder taking place. Unfortunately he can’t see either the murderer or the murderee because he is facing the wrong way on the shelf. But he hears every grisly detail.

And so once again the game’s afoot. Georgia, Sid and Maddie have a new murder to solve. I’m sure you can guess how it all works out…

These kinds of stories work best when the characters’ social lives involve more than just the central mystery. It’s the bits of business around the daily grind that add interest and which flesh out the skeleton of the plot (no, I won’t apologise for the pun). Georgia’s family are lecturers at a university and the plot plays out against the sometimes extremely bizarre world of the American education system.

Georgia’s parents are tenured professors, but Georgia herself is only an adjunct. Her parents have job security, but Georgia does not. Adjuncts, it seems, are the lowest of the low on the academic totem pole. They have no job security, they have no office to call their own, and they are assigned the classes that the tenured professors don’t want to teach – the ones that take place at anti-social hours and/or which have more than their fair share of difficult students. Georgia spends a fair amount of time bemoaning her lot with, it seems to me, some justification.

As an aside, I must say that I feel some sympathy for the students at Georgia’s university. They all seem to be horribly overworked in the sense that they have to undertake the completion of a constant stream of assignments, exams and "quizzes", all of which have to be marked by Georgia and most of which seem to count towards the students’ final degree. They even get marks for their attendance at lectures, and they lose marks if they fail to attend! The poor things don’t seem to have any free time at all. Georgia herself is constantly complaining about the amount of time she has to spend marking her students’ essays and exams. But that’s her fault for handing them out in the first place of course.

This contrasts quite strongly with my own experience at university in the UK. The only things that counted towards my degree were the marks I got for the exams at the end of each academic year. Nobody cared whether or not I attended the lectures and the lecturers never gave out assignments. However we were organised into small informal study groups of about half a dozen students supervised by a tutor. The tutors would sometimes hand out the odd assignment as the mood took them. Organic chemistry tutors were especially prone to this kind of thing. "Somebody gives you a lump of coal. Work out a synthetic pathway to turn it into LSD. Calculate the theoretical yield. Will the process make you rich?". Organic chemists are like that…

My inorganic chemistry tutor once asked his tutorial group to write an essay about spectroscopy, a topic I found quite fascinating. I handed in 10,000 extremely well chosen words.. It took the tutor ages to read it and mark it. He told me it was an excellent piece of work and please don’t write anything that long ever again. Fortunately that was an easy promise for me to keep. I suspect I might have frightened him off because he completely stopped handing out essay topics after that, much to everyone’s relief.

Mostly we were left to our own devices. Of course we made sure to attend the lectures and of course we read our text books and of course we read around the subject in the library. We’d have been stupid not to. But it still gave us plenty of time to go down the pub and get blootered of an evening. Only in the final term leading up to the exams did the study pressures steadily mount, and those pressures were, of course, completely self-imposed. By and large I think we had a much easier time of it than Georgia’s students seem to have had, and our tutors and lecturers didn’t have nearly as much work to do as Georgia does.

In the first novel, as part of Georgia and Sid’s investigations into Sid’s background they find themselves deeply entangled with the university’s fraternities and sonorities. At least one major plot thread could not have taken place without the existence of those odd organisations.

The fraternities and sonorities are just plain weird, verging on the bizarre. They have absolutely no equivalent in my own academic experience. They are all named with various (arbitrary?) combinations of letters taken from the Greek alphabet and members describe themselves as living the Greek life (at least they do in these novels). The societies appear to be modelled on the European Masonic tradition and anyone who wishes to join ("pledges") must subject themselves to humiliating initiation rituals ("hazing") which may sometimes physically injure them or even, on rare occasions, kill them. Wikipedia has compiled a depressingly long list of fraternity hazing deaths. The last known hazing death occurred on 31st January 2026. Clearly the tradition is still going strong.

Why anybody would choose to put themselves through that kind of nonsense is beyond my understanding, but apparently fraternities and sonorities are thriving institutions with powerful moving and shaking tendrils that spread far and wide outside the immediate academic environment into the "real" world. Most odd.

All of these aspects of the stories are not only fascinating in themselves, but they also put some metaphorical flesh on to the bones of the investigation – doubly metaphorically in Sid’s case, of course.

All in all, these proved to be ideal books to read while big lumps of me were being sliced off and thrown away.

* * * *

When you are convalescing, there’s nothing like the presence of an old friend to cheer you up. And so I re-read Glide Path by Arthur C. Clarke for (probably) at least the twentieth time. The book is Clarke’s only non-SF novel and sometimes I wish I didn’t think that it might be his best novel, because its setting is quite untypical of his oeuvre.

The events of the story take place during the second world war and involve the development of Ground Controlled Approach (GCA) – sometimes called Ground Controlled Descent (GCD) – a radar based system for guiding planes down to a safe landing when the visibility was too poor for the usual visual approach. Clarke actually worked on the development of this system during his wartime service in the RAF so clearly the novel is at least semi-autobiographical.

I assume that the protagonist, Alan Bishop, is a thinly disguised version of Clarke himself, though some bits of the disguise are considerably thicker than others – there are aspects of Alan’s life that have no equivalent in Clarke’s life, and vice-versa.

Alan Bishop is the only son of an alcoholic widower, an old man who, before the war, made a precarious living taking tourists on sight-seeing rides around the coast in a battered old steamship. Eventually, when wartime Britain called for volunteers, Alan’s father took his boat to the French coast where he helped to evacuate the British troops from Dunkirk. His boat was sunk beneath him and he himself was awarded the George Medal for his bravery. That is some small consolation to take to his eventual grave when his drinking eventually caught up with him.

Clarke’s parents, on the other hand, were farmers who probably never saw the sea and who certainly couldn’t have driven a ship across it. Furthermore Clarke, unlike Alan Bishop, was not an only child – he had two brothers and a sister.

Alan Bishop is extremely heterosexual and the novel contains several very well written (and sometimes rather funny) sex scenes that are themselves quite important to the development of the plot. Clarke, on the gripping hand, was extremely homosexual at a time when that was a serious crime in the UK – it would not become legal until 1967, by which time Clarke himself was long gone from Britain’s shores. He emigrated to Sri Lanka in 1956 where he could live openly with his lover and where he could also indulge his passion for deep sea diving.

These discrepancies, for want of a better word, make it clear that in this book Arthur C. Clarke is doing exactly what novelists are supposed to do – he is making things up for the sake of the story and for the development of the characters. So it would not be wise to read too much into the parallels between the events of the novel and Clarke’s real life experiences of the development of GCA even though these parallels most certainly do exist. That’s a large part of the fascination of this book and teasing it out is what has kept me returning to the novel again and again over the years.

The book is not science fiction in any way shape or form, nevertheless it has a very science fictional feel to it because it is about the development of a technological solution to a real-world problem, and what could be more science fictional than that? Just because the problem and the solution are real rather than imaginary is actually a difference that really makes no difference at all.

The story is told in a very dry, very British and often very funny tone of voice that consists mostly of understatements and stiff upper lips. Surprisingly, that makes the characters’ struggles with their sometimes quite recalcitrant technology sound very insightful and convincing. Somehow the book is much more than the sum total of its parts which is yet another reason why I keep returning to it again and again. I always find something new in it.

* * * *

I’m getting quite good at clomping around the house on crutches doing Long John Silver impressions. I even ventured outside just the other day. I "walked" from the house to the end of the street and back again. It was actually quite exhausting because my leg is still very weak. But it’s early days yet…

Keep your eyes peeled. You might see me lurking in the corner of your room. Bionic, remember? Anything is possible.