S. A. Wakefield. Bottersnikes and Gumbles (1967)

     S. A. Wakefield. Bottersnikes and Gumbles (1967) Bottersnikes are nasty, scale beasts with sharp teeth, and their ears turn red hot when they are angry (which is most of the time). Red-hot ears are useful for starting fires. They live in garbage dumps and are very, very lazy. This deprives them of the comforts of life, so they are very, very bad tempered. Gumbles are agreeable, soft and furry, and squishy. They giggle a lot, and live in the bush, where they chat, play games, soak up the sun, and do just enough work to feel comfortable. Bottersnikes want Gumbles to work for them, so they put them in jam tins. Gumbles occasionally get away from the Bottersnikes, but as soon as they get the giggles, they are helpless, and the Bottersnikes put them in jam tins again. And so on.
     This is a Puffin book, designed to make eight-year-olds giggle like Gumbles, I suppose. However, the premise promises more than it delivers. The humour is strained and contrived as often as not, and the stories don’t have much point. That’s probably why this book never had a sequel, and its characters never showed up on TV. The author is Australian. Maybe the book’s humour is too Aussie for me. * (2002)

Peggy Coyle, Peggy, ed. Faith of Our Fathers (1980)

     Peggy Coyle, Peggy, ed. Faith of Our Fathers (1980) Six women write about their fathers, all priests in Algoma Diocese. These men come across as focussed on their work, willing to accept all kinds of hardships, devout and dedicated priests, and more or less easy-going fathers. They also had a wide range of interests, worked hard establishing various programs for the youth in their community, and enjoyed life. The daughters all clearly loved their fathers, and don’t tell us much of the flaws they must have had, but concentrate on the kinds of anecdotes that every family accumulates about its members. A few personal remarks reveal the closeness of these pioneer families. The overall effect is one of impressive dedication to one’s lifework, and of men who gave more than they got from their communities.
     There are also a number of really funny stories, all of them true. The one that sticks in my mind is the one about a bride’s worth. After the wedding (which was a grand affair, with more than the usual number of flowers, decorations, and pretty dresses), the bridegroom asked the priest what he owed. “Whatever you think your bride is worth,” said Mr Balfour. The bridegroom dug in his pocket, and found fifty cents, which he handed over to the priest.
     Worth reading, and a useful and more than entertaining addition to anyone’s collection of local histories.*** (2002)

Ray Bradbury. S is for Space. (1968)

      Ray Bradbury. S is for Space. (1968) Bradbury was at one time a favourite of mine, but rereading these stories makes me wonder at my early taste. He over-writes, is all. When his style matches the story’s theme, the effect can be very good; but much of the time the style seems intended to add a significance that isn’t there, like the swelling chords of a banal piece of pop music. Or something like that.
     In any case, only a few of these stories satisfied me. The best is “The Million Year Picnic,” in which a family escapes from a nuclear war on Earth and settles on Mars. Bradbury’s style suits the mix of elegy and hope in this story perfectly. In fact, the Mars stories generally work better than most of the other stories, even though there’s no attempt to make them consistent with each other. Bradbury uses Mars as a fabulous new Frontier. The themes of new beginnings and escape from the evil old world are what really interest him, and Mars permits him to play effectively with them.
      “Zero Hour” I have in a dramatised version on tape; it’s much better as a radio play than a story. A couple other stories work the motif of the hidden invader, recognised too late – very Cold War.
     But Bradbury’s most persistent theme and motif is the Lost Past, or its variation, Lost Childhood. In one form or another, these show up in every story. One of the best, more a meditation in the form of a narrative than a story, is “The Trolley,” in which we take the last ride on a trolley about to be replaced by buses. Here, Bradbury’s fey and whimsical style is an almost perfect match for the nostalgia of the piece, which never quite descends into mawkish sentimentality, though a couple of times it comes close. * to ***-½ (2002)

Bertolt Brecht. The Threepenny Opera Transl.. By Desmond Vesey

     Bertolt Brecht. The Threepenny Opera Transl.. By Desmond Vesey (book) and Eric Bentley (lyrics). This is not the book that the Stratford (Ontario) company used. I have no idea how the different versions compare in terms of fidelity to the German; this one advertises itself as including every word of the German text. I’ll have to read The Beggar’s Opera now, for comparison. Anyhow, the script is fairly straightforward. Brecht’s insistence on spelling out his theme is rather irritating, he knocks you over the head with it. His use of “epic drama” techniques is also rather obtrusive; or rather, his “actor’s tips” about this feature in my opinion demonstrate that he didn’t really understand theatre very well. Recent scholarly work has shown that his scripts were in large part written by others.  Considering the obtuseness of his advice to actors and the virtues of the script, I can well believe it.
     Reading this script so soon after seeing the debacle at Stratford probably prevented my enjoying it. However, Bentley’s lyrics are not as good as the traditional ones. Mack the Knife especially suffers from what appears to be Bentley’s attempt to reproduce the German text. ** (2002)

Charlotte Vale Allen. Dream Train (1988)

     Charlotte Vale Allen Dream Train (1988) I’ve been collecting fiction with a railway theme or setting; this is the most recent one I’ve read. Joanna James, photographer, has a gig riding the Venice-Simplon-Orient-Express, the luxury train cruise that’s the remnant of the original Orient Express. The book is a romance presented as part travelogue and part quest.
     Joanna encounters a variety of people and situations. She makes friends that reflect and refract her character back to herself and so help her on her voyage of self-discovery. Memories of her dysfunctional family intersect with her responses to her new friends and acquaintances. She comes to terms with her family’s past, discovers that she can be her own person, and who that person is; and chooses the man that’s right for her. As in all proper quests, the goal is the integration of a broken personality, in this case the competent and highly skilled professional with the shy, self-effacing, injured and repressed child that never grew up. Simple plot, simple theme. The book is well written in a style a cut or two above cliché, the characters have the kind of depth we expect from a moderately serious TV mini-series, the train trip is wonderful.
     Marie said the book was superficial, and it is, but there are enough hints of depths below the surface to persuade us these people matter, at least while we are reading about them. The main characters are too good to be true, the darkness of the human heart is glimpsed on the periphery and throws only a few shadows, and the crises are triggered by external events, not by weaknesses or flaws of character. But in all these respects, the novel conforms to the demands of its genre, so why cavil at them? The book is above average of its kind. I enjoyed reading it. **-½

Charles Seife. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000)

     Charles Seife. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000) It looks like I read this last year, but I can’t remember. Re-reading it, it’s not hard to see why. While Seife provides lots of interesting information, and explains a good deal, his writing is at best workmanlike, and often sloppy. I suspect the sloppiness may be the effect of trying to “explain complex ideas in simple language,” but the result is often conceptual blurriness and even error. I found myself mentally rephrasing many of his statements. For example. He says that Cantor compared the size of rational and irrational numbers. He of course means the size of the sets of those numbers. Since he already explained what a set is, and uses a very clear metaphor to illustrate how one compares sets without actually counting, there’s no excuse for such sloppy language. He does have a knack for the illustrative metaphor: comparing sets is like asking everyone in a stadium to sit down, he says. If some seats are empty, then there are fewer people than seats. If there some people left standing, then vice versa. If there are no empty seats and no people standing, then the two sets match: they are the same size. Well, that’s very well done; so why the sloppy language a page or so later?
     Seife also occasionally uses a technical term without explaining it. For example, towards the end he talks of the heat death of the universe as the ultimate result of its continuing expansion. But in the next sentence he refers to this as death by ice (in contrast to the fiery death of the big crunch). How these two terminologies can be reconciled may be a mystery to him; it certainly will be a mystery to many readers.
     Seife’s understanding of history consists of conventional wisdom, which also occasionally misleads the reader. Overall, however, his philosophical points are well made, and the power of Zero to confound metaphysics and theology is clearly conveyed. The appendices illustrating several mathematical and logical arguments in detail are concise and clear. I like the one that uses the a=b, ab=a^2 etc proof that 1=0 (or 2=1) to show that Winston Churchill is a carrot.
     In short, this is an adequate introduction to a number of mathematical, physical, and philosophical problems and their solutions, with a good deal of pleasantly conveyed history along the way, and will do for a high school library. ** (2002)

Harry Turtledove. Departures (1993)

     Harry Turtledove. Departures (1993) A collection of “alternate history” stories, which I began in August, and mostly read in September, and finished on October 1, so I’m counting it as a September book. The eras range from ancient history to the far future. As with all such speculative sociology, the theories underlying the stories tend to be simplistic, but that doesn’t often detract from them as stories. After all, contemporary fiction suffers from the same deficiency. Plausibility does not depend on factual truth.
     Turtledove’s vision tends to be dark: history is driven by greed, hate, prejudice and sheer ignorance. Occasional glimmers of honour, truth and justice flicker fitfully here and there, but they are strictly personal virtues, not systemic attributes of a society. A couple of his stories are pure fantasy; the rest hew pretty closely to reality as we know it. One of his repeated notions is that Muhammad became a Christian monk, so that the Muslim world never came into being. The contrary vision, that Islam became the dominant culture of Europe, also informs several of his stories. An alternate worlds story takes us to a North America whose Revolutionary War was incomplete, and hence no unified polity ever emerged: a mish-mash of independent former colonies and states still tied to England, as well as aboriginal fiefdoms, has led to a state of perpetual warfare, and a very delayed Industrial Revolution.
     Like many pre-perestroika writers, Turtledove carefully use ethnic names to denote an “international” space culture. However, he does not assume that the Soviets will endure in their present form; his alternate future Russia breaks up into a re-established Czarist empire and a federation of reformed Soviet states.
     Not that it matters. Closer reflection shows that Turtledove uses the alternate history settings in otherwise very traditional ways. There are adventure romances, fantastic fables, hard-science mysteries, tall tales, and so on. Two stories comment on the role of the Jews in our world (Turtledove is a Jew) and both stories work very well, both as stories and as lessons. An amusing collection; I omitted one story that was getting tedious, but enjoyed the rest. ** to ***. (2002)