wot i red on my hols by alan robson (perduellio et conjuratio)

Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

Other Worlds Than These by Stephen King and Peter Straub is the third and final novel in their Talisman series. Since Peter Straub died in 2022 he clearly wasn’t very involved in the actual writing of this book, but he and Stephen King did (briefly) discuss the plot of the novel before he died. His name certainly belongs on the cover, but nevertheless the book is much more a Stephen King novel than it is a Peter Straub story…

Despite this being the third novel of a trilogy, you really don’t need to have read the first two books in order to enjoy it – Stephen King has done a superb job of seamlessly incorporating the necessary background material into the story without interrupting the flow of the narrative with stifling infodumps and so it works perfectly as a stand alone story.

Jack Sawyer, who we first met as a teenager in The Talisman is now 57. His life is largely confined to Mid-World these days – he was shot through the heart at the end of Black House and if he ever returns to what he thinks of as America-side he will quickly sicken and die as his heart wound catches up with him. He lives fairly aimlessly from day to day under the command of a rather childish despot who he refers to – privately – as The Big Kahuna and publicly as Governor Youngblood.

The Governor sends Jack on a mission. There are rumours of something called The Great Gorge, a mysterious area of "growing danger" (whatever that might mean) on the other side of the blasted lands. The Governor wants Jack to find out just what the thing is and what danger it might possibly present.

Meanwhile, on America-side, two teenagers who regard themselves as reincarnations of (real life) serial killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate have been leaving a swathe of bodies throughout Nebraska. Their influence is spreading like an infestation through the teenagers of Mid-World. Massacres are soon the order of the day…

The bulk of the book is a page-turningly brilliant and inventive story as Jack Sawyer, flipping backwards and forwards between America-side and Mid-World, gradually comes to understand just what is going on. There is indeed a serious existential danger posed by the Starkweather clones and by their connection with whatever underlies the Gorge. But once that danger has been explored, understood and defined, once the last plotty ‘i’ is dotted and the last story ‘t’ is crossed Jack fully understands just what he has to do in order to address the peril. At that point the pace slows down, the invention flags and the last section of the story is a mind-numbingly dull and repetitive slog as Jack and his companions (his ka-tet) inch their way to the final confrontation.

Along the way, a lot of uneasy parallels are drawn between Jack’s quest and the earlier travails of Roland Deschain, the Gunslinger himself. Jack fiercely rejects the idea that he is a reincarnation of Roland, but it can’t be wholly ignored. We are deep inside Dark Tower territory here and the novel is definitely a drawing together and a re-examination of the Dark Tower themes as well as being the capstone of the talisman stories. But quite honestly, you could say something similar about almost everything that Stephen King has ever written.

* * * *

As We Fall Through Time is a new novel by Claire North and it may well be the very best time travel story I’ve ever read.

We quickly learn that there is only one rule for time travellers – do not create a paradox. Paradoxes are anomalies – they open rifts in time which can be quite destructive and which threaten the regular playing out of the (for want of a better phrase) historical plan. Such bumpy bits can sometimes be smoothed out, if the anomaly is small enough, by using amarantines to close the rift and return things to stability. Amarantines are paradoxical objects born of (timey-wimey) contradictions and belonging neither here nor there. But time travellers are also humans, and like all of us they make mistakes. It’s impossible not to give in to the temptation to nudge history one way or another. And so there are always consequences to live with or die by. Often the result is an amarantine.

Looked at objectively, time travellers are themselves paradoxes, living amarantines if you like, born from blips in time. For example, perhaps their father was delayed longer than he should have been on his way home from the pub and so they were never conceived, a hanky-panky opportunity lost to a chance conversation that lasted just a little bit too long. How will their lives play out now? Because their very existence is a matter of such small chances, itself a paradox unborn, their very appearance and gender can and will change as circumstances require.

Cal may or may not have been born some time in the late sixteenth century. As a teenager, he was conscripted to fight for his lord and in a moment of extremis in 1607, started to fall through time. His chronological ambiguity allows him to travel in time using the objects around him which exist both "now" and "then" and which therefore serve to bind those points together. Obviously static objects make the best anchor points for these journeys – walls, buildings and monuments have a pleasing longevity and utility.

In the early nineteenth century Cal falls in love with Olivier, a soldier of revolutionary France. Because of his (sometimes her) love for Olivier, Cal adjusts things a little so that Olivier doesn’t die in the desert when Napoleon invades Egypt and he doesn’t die at the battle of Borodino when Napoleon invades Russia. The paradoxes pile up and suddenly Olivier has never existed anywhere or anywhen – indeed he spends much of the novel never having existed at all, which makes many of his conversations with Cal paradoxical in themselves.

Meanwhile, Fadimatu, a time travelling friend of Cal’s is horrified to come across her own murdered and mummified body on public display in a museum in Seoul in 2018. Fadimatu does not know how she died, who killed her, where she was killed or when or why she was killed. She has no memory of the event because it hasn’t happened to her "yet" (whatever that might mean) but clearly she would like to find out. She appeals to Cal for help.

Cal "soon" learns that there is a paradox growing out of control in 2207. Amarantines can slow down its growth but so far they have been unable to close it down. Its tendrils reach backwards (and presumably forwards as well) and threaten to unravel everything. It may well have been a (but not necessarily the) cause of Olivier’s non-existence and of Fadimatu’s murder, so Cal is well motivated to try to take care of it. In his attempts to do so he re-establishes an acquaintance with Bede, an old friend and also an old enemy, a grey eminence obsessed with the generation and collection of amarantines which is why Cal has kept his distance. He regards Bede as being too dangerous, a significant threat to his own well being.

All this is being watched by (and at times narrated by) a mysterious ghost (or ghosts) who has (have) a vested interest in the outcome.

Now the plates have been set spinning and all Claire North has to do next is to make sure that none of them fall and shatter while she spins them faster and faster as we approach the finish (or maybe the start) of the story.

The blurb sums it up nicely: In the beginning, the world will end. This is the story of what happens next.

Bad Deeds is the sequel to A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering (which I reviewed last month). Despite being a sequel, it works perfectly well as a stand alone story. Al, from the previous book, is now calling himself Alex, but don’t worry, it’s still not his real name. Very little about Alex is real…

Alex, Em, Elle, and Jonny have given up their lives of crime and have set themselves up as a legitimate business offering security consultations and penetration testing. Business is going well and things are looking rosy until Alex’s emotional immaturity gets in the way. Em, his (sort of) girl friend finally gives up on him and ends their relationship. This leads directly to his expulsion from the firm and for good measure, they throw him out of their communal house as well. Suddenly homeless, jobless and penniless, Alex decides to sift through the folder of jobs that the firm turned down, looking for something he can pick up as a nice little earner without stepping on any of their collective toes. Before you can ask What’s My Password? Alex finds himself recruited to spy on a high-flying business executive. Of course it all goes pear shaped, and round about the time that Alex ends up in custody and discovers that the person who recruited him has denied all knowledge of engaging his services, he begins to suspect that maybe his old firm had been quite right to have turned the job down in the first place. But it’s too late for regrets now and before long Alex, Em, Elle and Jonny are forced into hiding both physically and technologically. Jonny, a man who would cheerfully implant silicon chips in his own skull if he thought it would enhance his connectivity, finds these restrictions particularly difficult. Hilarity ensues.

Clearly there is only one thing for Alex and his friends to do. They must travel to the far north of Scotland to find out why a young man fell off a cliff and died. When you put it like that, how else could they possibly find out what is going on?

* * * *

Terry Deary claims to have written 351 books, but you can take that claim with a bit of a pinch of salt because by the time you read this review he will probably have written at least a hundred more.

He is perhaps best known for his Horrible Histories books, an on-going series of humorous presentations of historical facts which he began to write in 1993. Deary’s publishers originally asked him to write a joke book with a history theme. Deary set out to oblige, but quickly found that when he looked more closely at the historical facts they were often much more interesting and generally much funnier than the jokes he was trying to fit around them – provided that you squinted at them properly of course. So instead of a joke book about historical facts he ended up writing a historical fact book that had a few jokes in it. He claims that this approach represents a new genre, and who knows, he may well be right. Certainly the ones that I’ve read are very, very funny as well as being stuffed full of impressively arcane erudition – Terry Deary’s historical knowledge is both broad and deep, as it would have to be to make such an idea work as well as it does.

A History of the World in Ten Wars does exactly what it says on the tin. It discusses the history of the whole world from the time of the ancient Greeks up until round about now, and it illustrates that history by using ten significant wars as its touchstones.

War, you may ask yourself, what is it good for? Absolutely something, surely, or clearly we wouldn't keep doing it so often. And if we look more closely we will find that wars are the reason why the ancient Greeks finally decided to band together after fighting each other for centuries in favour of starting to fight other people instead. Look what that decision did for the culture of the whole of the Western world!

Wars are also the reason why teabags were invented, and what could be a more important invention than that?

Along the way, the book also clears up a few misconceptions – Napoleon's invasion of Russia was not defeated by the freezing Russian winter, but rather by an unusual summer heatwave. And of course the so-called World wars that defined the twentieth century were really just one very long war with a break for half-time.

More seriously, the theme of the book shows clearly that throughout the ages, somewhere in the world pretty much every generation has found itself faced the same awkward questions: Am I willing to fight for my way of life? How can I come up with something the enemy hasn’t thought of? And the important one that people often forget to ask: is there a way of solving this amicably? These are very hard questions and often they have no answers. The results are usually tragic.

I consider myself to be a very lucky person. Because of where and when I was born I am a member of (probably) one of the only generations that never had to ask or answer any of those questions. I am very grateful for that lucky chance.

But in the meantime, let’s just have a laugh at what went before. It’s the best medicine, after all.

A History of Britain in Ten Enemies does much the same sort of thing, but it narrows the focus a bit and just concentrates on the efforts of ten people(s) to conquer Britain. Some of them succeeded, some of them failed. Heigh ho.

All the usual culprits are discussed – no real surprises there – and the reasons for their successes and failures turn out to be surprisingly fruitful topics for discussion. Julius Caesar was one of the early failures. He came, he saw and he didn’t conquer. As Nigel Molesworth almost said, that just proved that he was weeny, weedy and weaky. It would be almost a century before the Emperor Claudius came back and did the job properly.

Probably the most successful invader was William the Bastard from Normandy, also nicknamed the Conqueror, because he was rather good at conquering. Everybody who tried invading after him failed miserably. William was the last one to get it right. His success hinged around his victory at the Battle of Hastings, 1066. The British were led by one King Harold who is popularly supposed to have lost the battle when he died from a surfeit of arrows in his eye. The book has a long discussion about the veracity (or lack of it) of this claim. The battle is (sort of) documented in the Bayeux Tapestry (which isn’t a tapestry at all, it’s an embroidery) and it certainly depicts the event, but one has to wonder – and Terry Deary does indeed wonder long and hard and in great detail. I find the idea of arrows in the eye to be a particularly sensitive topic since I have to have regular injections directly into both of my eyeballs as a treatment for age-related macular degeneration. Consequently I found myself forced to read this section of the book with my eyeballs crossed for safety and protection.

One particularly delightful (and horrible) bit of history about William the Bastard actually happened long after he died. His funeral was a bit delayed so that everyone who was anyone would have a chance to attend. By the time the funeral service was well under way William’s corpse had been rotting in his coffin for quite some time and the pressure built up inside him by the processes of decay caused his body to explode, showering the congregation with fermenting bits of old Bill. I did not learn this wonderful little tidbit from Terry Deary’s book. Oddly, he makes no mention of it (unless I blinked and missed it). I learned it from my history teacher at school when I was eleven years old, some time in the early 1960s. The idea behind Horrible Histories is not perhaps as new and original as Terry Deary likes to think it is…

There’s an old joke about about the peasants (being) revolting. If there’s one thing that Terry Deary can never resist, it’s an old joke and Revolting – A Riotous History examines how the underdogs of history sometimes got fed up with knowing their place and tried to do something abut it.

Revolutions don’t take place in isolation. The book explores both its causes and its effects. The driving forces behind attempts to overthrow the current regime are, generally speaking, concerns about money, freedom, slavery, revenge, protest, deception, prejudice, work and injustice. Stir the pot to mix the ingredients well and bring to the boil. Simmer for a few years, light the blue touch paper and stand well back.

Terry Deary pulls no punches – it’s all very well to say that Spartacus (every one of him) just wanted to go home and see his mum, but why did he want that so much? His Roman masters brought his rebellion on themselves and it’s not clear that they learned much from it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the people on the top always look after their own and the working people on the bottom are always revolting in some way, shape or form. Screw you, Jack. I’m all right. (Or, to put it another way, I’m sorted^TM – thus spake Christopher Luxon, Prime Minister of New Zealand, a man who deeply despises the unsorted...). Sometimes the result of all this dissatisfaction is that the status quo gets overturned. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss?

What makes this examination of revolution so endlessly fascinating is the manner in which Deary draws close comparisons between his historical examples and the people and events of modern times. It’s all very relevant and accessible. Do we never learn anything from the lessons of history? The text would suggest that we don’t.

The book really is just a little bit more than a light-hearted way to teach yourself about some very dark-hearted things, though it is that as well.

* * * *

Pretty much everybody in New Zealand knows someone who worked on the Lord of the Rings movies. It was a massive and transformational project and LOTR (as the fans lovingly refer to it) is undeniably part of our cultural DNA. The films belong to New Zealand in a way that can only be felt in the gut. So how did it all happen?

In There and Back Again Sam Moore presents what he calls an unofficial oral history of the making of the movies. Twenty five years after all the tumult and the shouting died he has returned to interview the cast and crew and to let them recall in tranquillity their memories of how it all came to be and how it all worked out in the end.

In all honesty, there were no great revelations or hidden truths exposed in the interviews. After all, the extended edition DVDs contain a wealth of documentary material. I actually own two sets of the extended edition DVDs because a year or so after the release of the first set, a new set was released with (very slightly) different documentaries on it.

Nevertheless there are one or two new things revealed in the book that I’ve not seen documented anywhere else, some trivial, some less so. For example Weta special effects artist Jamie Beswarick claims that Christopher Lee had his "nose bone" removed and that Lee could therefore "press his nose flat across his face." I’d love to see a photo of that, but I doubt that one exists. Lee was a very private person…

More seriously, in September 2001 Al Qaeda terrorists crashed aeroplanes into the World Trade Centre in New York, completely destroying the twin towers that made up the bulk of the centre. America went into a cultural shock from which it still hasn’t fully recovered. Peter Jackson – and New Line – were about to release the second of the LOTR films when the attack happened. The film, of course, was called The Two Towers and a certain hysterical demographic in America began foaming at the mouth, calling the title tasteless, offensive and morally repugnant. They demanded that the title be changed. For a time it was quite a controversial storm in a (very tiny) teacup. I was pleased to learn from Sam Moore’s book that neither Peter Jackson nor New Line ever paid any attention to those nonsensical demands and they never considered or even discussed changing the title. It simply wasn’t an option. I was pleased to see, albeit in retrospect, that common sense won out over hysteria.

There and Back Again is a pleasant book, an enjoyable book and for some people, I suppose it might even be an informative book. But really it adds very little to the mountain of documentary material that already exists.

Nevertheless, I’m sure that completists like me will fall upon it with glad cries of glee. Because it’s about us.