J. Burnley, ed. Penguin Modern Stories 1 (1969)

  J. Burnley, ed. Penguin Modern Stories 1 (1969) The date says it all: very mid-20th century “serious literature.” I read the first two stories by William Sansom, both rather depressing tales of people finding scraps of self-esteem in the midst of small defeats and smaller victories. The next tales, by Jean Rhys, begin in the same mode and mood, and I haven’t read them yet, and probably never will. David Plante’s stories (which I skimmed) are “experimental” in that self-conscious way that asks you to admire technique above content or insight. Malamud’s story concerns a father-son conflict of some sort (I skimmed it, too), typical again of the mid-20th century, when honest description of the dysfunctions of real families was considered brave.
     I suppose the 1950s and 60s were the last decade in which “educated” people took literature seriously as signs and signposts. This book, the first of a series that as far as I know never had a second, testifies to the belief that words on a page matter. They do, but discussion of their importance almost always misses the mark. In Julian Symons Bloody Murder, which I’m re-reading, I found a reference to F R Leavis; Symons accepts Leavis’s assumption that a story’s moral thesis is the criterion of its value. The stories in this collection all have value in the Leavisite sense, and that’s what makes them almost unreadable now. Leavis was wrong (Symons’ book is one of a number that disassemble Leavis’s heritage for our edification), and these stories demonstrate why. They are well written, the characters are well-observed, the pacing is just right, the insight into life’s little ironies is just so, and so on. But reading them feels like taking medicine. *½ (2003)

Gordon Dickson. The Alien Way (1965)

     Gordon Dickson. The Alien Way (1965) A first contact novel that seems to be one of Dickson’s early attempts. I suspect it was written well before 1965. Contact is made through “virus-sized mechanisms” that “infect” the aliens, and through a “collapsed space” channel that links the alien and the human directly. I didn’t finish this book. Its premise is intriguing enough, but the writing and characterisation are too clumsy to give much pleasure. The technology is inconsistent; surely a science that can build collapsed space drives and virus-sized devices can build high-powered miniature computers and store petabytes of data in a few sugar-lump sized cubes of collapsed space. The aliens, the Ruml, are a bear-like warrior race with a strong sense of honour (they have computers, by the way). They are in some ways prototypes for the Dorsai, in whom Dickson developed the warrior ethos so convincingly. I may pick up this book again some time this summer, but at present it will remain unfinished. ** (2003)
     Update 2013: I didn't finish the book, have tried it a couple of times since, but never got past the first 30 pages or so.

Agatha Christie. Towards Zero in The Mousetrap and Other Plays (1978)

     Agatha Christie. Towards Zero in The Mousetrap and Other Plays (1978) Adapted from the novel of the same name, the play moves briskly through the plot. The characters are well enough defined for good actors to give them credibility, even though their speech is not well-differentiated (Christie’s dialogue is true to class, but only vaguely evokes the individual). The stage directions are for a director, not a reader, and so they interfere; I have a hard time with “moves above table,” etc.
     Apparently amateur drama groups love Christie plays, and one can see why. They are “stagey”, though usually not in the bad sense of that word. Christie liked dramatic endings to scenes; she loves to drop the curtain on a plot point. Even the endings depend on a few lines of dialogue and action in the last two minutes or so. Her plays don’t wind down, they end with a bang. I don’t especially like a play that has a punch line, but many people do. Her plays for the most part are box office successes. Christie also likes realistic sets, “natural” props, and so on, and takes great care in describing them. In other words, they are the kinds of plays that people who like a good story will enjoy; but I doubt I would like them much; they are weak theatre. I can’t imagine these plays working on a bare stage, but it might be fun to try. As for the stories themselves: the scripts make it even clearer that Christie had a strong sentimental streak in her. These plays are romantic love stories with crime as the spoiler of true love’s deserved happiness.
     It’s also clear that she had an essentially dramatic imagination. Her novels rely a great deal on dialogue. This makes transposition into video easy, and often the video does a better job of presenting the story than Christie’s prose does. Or so it seems to me.
     I skimmed a couple of the other plays, but didn’t find them attractive reading. ** (2003)

Dorothy Sayers and Jill P. Walsh. Thrones, Dominions (1998)

     Dorothy Sayers and Jill P. Walsh. Thrones, Dominions (1998) Based on notes and drafts by Sayers of a novel she had planned and begun to write, this is a well done imitation of the Sayers style and form. Walsh has caught the Sayers adoration of Wimsey and her idealisation of his marriage with Harriet very well, perhaps to the point of gentle satire. The puzzle is satisfying, although the reader knows the perpetrator quite early on; but that’s common with Sayers, who was not much concerned with teasing the reader with red herrings until the denouement (except in Five Red Herrings, but even there, the murderer’s identity is fairly clear well before the end).
     The pleasure in this book comes from the characters, especially Wimsey and Harriet, and Walsh also shows a nice talent for social comedy. There are times when it seems she’s more interested in that than in the mystery, but Sayers’ notes justify her emphasis. Sayers planned the novel as having two main subjects, and Harriet and Peter’s adjustment to each other as husband and wife was to be one of them. Peter’s family should perhaps have been given more prominence; I think Sayers would have done that. But I suppose the publishers had some say I the length of the book. Considering the way Sayers expanded Gaudy Night and Nine Tailors into novels with a mystery element, Walsh would have been justified in insisting on a longer book.
     As it is, the marriage is charming. It clearly represents Sayers’ ideals, and certainly Walsh’s too, for she does these scenes so nicely. The Sayers reticence is there, but also the hint at passion unbounded and thoroughly enjoyed. Although the dialogue sometimes becomes a little precious, that’s Sayers' style, and Walsh is a sympathetic imitator of her prototype (whom, she says, she has admired since reading Gaudy Night in her early teens, a time when romantic novels and poetry can have a lasting effect). She must have read the couple of short stories of Wimsey as a married man and father very carefully.
     I found the puzzle well enough handled, though I would have liked to have seen the Wimsey-Parker relationship developed more; they are brothers-in-law, after all, not merely colleagues in detection. And Harriet and Mary will be excellent friends; I think more scenes between them would have added to the book, especially since Harriet isn’t sure she wants children at first. I guess I’m saying I could have read a book twice the length quite happily; I didn’t want it to end. Sayers usually wrote a lovely mix of social comedy, romantic love story, and adventure romance, and Walsh is an excellent pupil; I must look up her own published work.
     Sayers is very like Austen in her eye for the absurdities of social convention, but like Austen she also acknowledges the power of these conventions to cause real unhappiness. And like Austen, she believes that common sense, a disciplined heart, courtesy, kindness, and a strong moral sense will carry one through the worst of times. Also like Austen, Sayers rewards her heroes and heroines with great connubial happiness. It may be a fairy tale; but in real life, too, people can live happily ever after, or at least aspire to that state, and from time to time achieve it. **** (2003)

Charles Osborne. Agatha Christie: Her Life and Crimes (1999)

     Charles Osborne. Agatha Christie: Her Life and Crimes (1999) Cutesy title for a catalogue raisonnee of Christie's works with notes on her life. Osborne is probably most reliable on the bibliography, since he corrects some errors by other authors, and his notes on Christie’s life give one a painless overview. The glimpses of her relationship with Mallowan are worth having; they seem to have had an exceptionally happy life together. Osborne gives complete lists of the plays and movies based on Christie’s books, but although he mentions the TV adaptations regularly in the text, he supplies no list of those. He himself has “adapted” two of Christie’s plays into novels; I’ve read one, Black Coffee, and it’s rather badly done. Christie, with all her faults, was able to create a mood or atmosphere in addition to the dialogue, and that’s what Osborne can’t do. Worth a read to remind one of the books, and worth keeping as a reference.** (2003)

Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel Prizes

The Ig Nobel prizes are given yearly for oddball and strange research, the kind that answers questions that have caused brief puzzlement or annoyance. Such as Why is it so hard to walk with a full cup of coffee (or bowl of soup) without spilling it?

You will find the answers to these and other questions here, the website of Improbable Research. Not only fun, but Educational!

W. R. Maples and M. Browning, M. Dead Men do Tell Tales (1994)

     W. R. Maples and M. Browning, M. Dead Men do Tell Tales (1994) A forensic anthropologist’s memoirs. Maples doesn’t acknowledge Browning’s role in the writing, so it’s not clear how they collaborated. Maples begins with a summary of his life, and ends with a plea for more resources for forensic anthropology. In between he tells tales of his more interesting or horrific cases in more or less chronological order. While I believe his claim that he finds it emotionally easy to look at remains, it’s clear from his editorial comments that he can well imagine the agony of the victims whose final moments he can read in their bones.
     He has no pity for murderers (at one point he calls reference to an abused childhood “the latest excuse”). He’s a “Christian”, and like most fundamentalists believes in capital punishment. He also as a justifiable pride in his professional skills, and admires the men who taught him his craft. He helped identify Pizarro’s remains, and the bones of the Tsar’s family excavated from a bog near Ekaterinburg. An ongoing project is the identification of American soldiers’ remains recovered from Vietnam and other places, a task that he says will come to an end as identification of the pitifully small collections of remains becomes impossible. An interesting read, and must reading for any current crime writer, I think. He mentions that licking a suspected bone fragment will differentiate it from rock, something that Peter has also told me. I will be sending this book to him. *** (2003)

Ellis Peters. A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. (1965)

   Ellis Peters. A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. (1965) Reprinted in 1988, this is clearly an early work by Peters, who is better known these days for her Brother Cadfael stories. This book is more of a romance with a mystery element than a true police procedural, which the superscription “Detective Inspector Felse investigates” leads one to expect. An eighteenth century tomb is opened, and two bodies are found in it, while the expected C18 corpse is missing. So there are three mysteries: who killed the newest body, who is the other dead man, and where is the missing squire? All three are satisfactorily resolved, and along the way Peters provides us with family secrets revealed, a couple of love stories, miscellaneous treasure, and so on. The whole thing is fun, Peters is a very inventive writer, and her characters are well drawn, while her love stories tend to towards the sentimental. In her Cadfael mysteries she also indulges her taste for sentimental romantic love, but her focus on the detection is better, and her incidental background and back stories are better controlled. She has the knack of creating a believable fictional world, in other words, which makes this book worth reading. **-½ (2003)

Bill Hayes. Steam Trains of the World (1981)

     Bill Hayes. Steam Trains of the World (1981) The title’s a misnomer, since most of the book deals with England. True, English engineers pioneered the railways, and railway practice around the world bears the signs of English dominance in the early development of rail. But a book with “world” in it title should have more than half of its pages devoted to railways outside of the British Isles. I read the captions, and the few paragraphs of text. The book has the usual selection of old pictures, and the captions display a reasonably thorough and accurate knowledge, especially of British railways. But a few silly mistakes about US railways cast doubt about the reliability of the information about other ones. Still, it’s a nice book, and some of the photographs are spectacular. A good basic resource for the middle grades, so long as the student doesn’t pay too much attention to the “interesting” trivia, where the mistakes show up. ** (2003)

Steven Pinker. Words and Rules (1999)

     Steven Pinker. Words and Rules (1999) Pinker explain and supports his thesis, which is that language is structured in two ways: it consists of words, and there are rules that govern their structure and combination. His evidence consists of experiments that show people perform differently in various language tasks depending on whether the words are regular or irregular in inflection. Work with people who speak uninflected languages show similar differences performance, but related to syntax (eg, the insertion of syntactic markers).
     He makes his case, but since he writes for the non-specialist, the book is very light on actual data. I would like to see more tables, even statistical graphs. Nevertheless, the book is important, since it provides hard data supporting the common and intuitive conviction that language does indeed consist of parts, and that grammar is the rules of how these parts are put together to make meaningful utterances. Along the way, it also provides data in support of the hypothesis that language is a separate system, and not merely a side effect of humans’ general learning ability (or “intelligence”). The Chomskyan Thesis gets more and more support as time goes on. The book also provides support for the conviction that behaviouristic explanations for language learning and behaviour are incomplete. If responses could in fact be shaped without pre-wired internal processing, then damage to the brain would not impair language skills as it in fact does, nor would we find that specific language deficits run in families (and if we construct a family tree, the distribution of afflicted family members would not be the kind we associate with dominant genes or gene-clusters). That is, language behaviours are shaped with insufficient stimuli. In other words, language behaviours pre-exist in generalised form, and the environment gives them their specific shape. **-½ (2003)

Model Railroad Planning 2003

     Model Railroad Planning 2003 (Kalmbach Publishing) The theme this year was book-case layouts, micro-layouts, if you will. As always, Iain Rice leads off with a lovely and ingenious design. He devises a layout consisting of a box with hinged ends that fold up and over. This doubles the available length to six feet, and within that he does his usual magic with a small station, yard, and cluster of industries. His designs work well not so much because of their structure (he uses simple and oft-used track arrangements), but in his ability to see the whole layout, and sketch it so that we see it too. His designs have personality and atmosphere. His work is worth study because he designs complete layouts, not mere track plans. The other contributions to the theme are also very good, but lack the total concept that Rice provides.
     The other articles range from a story of a mushroom plan that squishes 240' of mainline into a garage; a large but very conventional point to point layout based on the L≠ an example of light-box layout design based on a Parry Sound area lumber line; a weird seven-layer N scale layout that encircles a bay-windowed dining room (whose owners use it two or three times a year for dining); a long narrow oval based on Kentucky coal haulers; and the usual little bits and pieces.
     This issue of Model Railroad Planning and Great Model Railroads 2003 show that there are only a few basic track plans. It’s not the track plan that makes a layout great, it’s a clear concept based both on prototype practice and the builder’s preferences. The oddities (such as the round and round layout in a dining room) merely underline this. And the attempts to extend mainlines (and so increase operation) by building multi-deck layouts, have at best limited success. It also helps to be somewhat obsessive. ** to *** (2003)

Witold Rybczynski. One Good Turn (2000)

     Witold Rybczynski. One Good Turn (2000) An extended essay on the origins of the screw driver and the screw. This is the only Western device not also invented independently elsewhere in the world. Rybczynski writes gracefully, and lets the discussion flow and ramble in the same way his researches did. The result is a pleasant and informative read, which among other things reminds us that the many of the most significant features of our civilisation are ignored because they are ubiquitous. The screw and screw driver have made manufacture of all kinds possible; and the screw-making machine was one of the earliest examples of industrialisation, which is marked not so much by the proliferation of power driven machinery as by the transfer of control of the work piece from the human hand to the machine. Skills come to inhere in the machine, not in the worker, a fact that has had huge consequences socially as well as economically. But Rybczynski does not explore these implications of his little book. He contents himself with tracing the development of a most useful device, and some related ones. He leaves the rumination upon consequences to the reader. *** (2003)