Archive | March 2020

Sunken Cities: Egypt’s lost worlds

Mar28

Sunken Cities: Egypt’s lost worlds is the exhibition book from the British Museum‘s Sunken Cities exhibition. I went to the exhibition in 2016 and picked up the book in the sale somewhat later. It has been my breakfast book for the past couple of weeks. The ones with lots of photos take much less time to read.

The cities of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion were important trading and cultural centres on the Nile delta for hundreds of years. Then a series of disasters between 200BC and 800AD meant they were lost to the sea. A combination of rising sea levels (1.5m over the last 2000 years), earthquakes and liquifaction caused the cities to sink. Liquifaction is what happens when you build massive stone temples and colossal statues on water-logged clay. Eventually, it’s just going to collapse. Over the last twenty years there has been extensive underwater archaeology off the coast of Egypt to recover them and to understand how the inhabitants of the cities lived.

The book is beautifully presented and is full of the most amazing photography of the underwater excavations and the objects in situ. There’s a good chapter on the techniques of underwater archaeology and the challenges of working in this way. The book explores the mentions of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion in historical writings and gives some political context for the time the cities were thriving. Much of the book is photographs of objects and explanations that put them in context. It’s essentially the text that is on the labels when you go to the exhibition. Which for me is good, because I don’t really read the labels when I go to exhibitions. I just wander around and look at things and absorb the visuals. Occasionally I might read about something that particularly catches my eye, but mostly I get bored with shuffling along reading every single label. In book form, it’s much more accessible for me. It was nice too, to read the book with the memories of the lighting and sensory effects of the exhibition.

Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why

Mar23

Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck is an examination of the media treatment of female celebrities (mostly celebrities, always women) when they go off the rails. Starting from the contemporary examples of Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan (the book was published in 2016 but draws extensively from Doyle’s journalism over the preceding ten years) Doyle examines what might really be happening. The stories created by the media take the same narrative: somehow these women have broken the rules and deserve the judgemental, voyeuristic treatment meted out to them.

First Doyle puts the contemporary examples in a historical context by comparing them to treatment of similarly transgressive women such as Mary Wollenstonecraft, Charlotte Bronte and Billie Holliday. Women who have expressed their humanity by refusing to be nothing more than objects for men to project themselves on to are labelled as crazy and hysterical. All their genius and work is erased by a focus on their sexuality and emotionality. It is, of course, a double standard. Men who have behaved in exactly the same ways are rarely punished for it and Trainwreck provides a number of examples of men whose careers have flourished despite addiction, or mental illness, or even merely expressing grief and anger.

What is it that we are supposed to learn from these examples? They perform the same function as girls in folklore such as Red Riding Hood, showing the dangers that will befall us if we stray from the path. The impossible, conflicting standards women are supposed to maintain are policed by the fear of what will happen when we stop trying to comply. When we speak up instead of remaining silenced.

This is a powerful, erudite and informed critical analysis of a pervasive part of our culture written in an entertaining and accessible way. It will make you re-think how you feel about the women dragged through the press and maybe have more compassion for them. Read it and allow it to make you angry.

The Bear and the Serpent

Mar18

The Bear and the Serpent is book 2 of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Echoes of the Fall series. Maniye now has three shapes she can step into and, with the aid of her champion form, has learned to work with all of them. The power structures in the north are shifting and re-aligning and Maniye finds herself the leader of a warband of misfits and outcasts, amongst them her natural father Takes Iron. She doesn’t really know how to handle this or where she fits in, so she takes her band south with Asmander so he can fight in the civil war.

Meanwhile, Loud Thunder is trying to draw together all the peoples of the North to meet the threat that the world faces: the plague people, who have no animal souls, and the strange capacity to destroy the human side of person. Anyone who meets them or is struck by their bullets finds themselves trapped in their animal soul, unable to step and unable to communicate. There are more clues that the plague people are the peoples from the Shadows of the Apt series and I am fascinated to see how the two connect. Loud Thunder’s struggles with the representatives of all the tribes he has gathered together are undermined by his unrequited romantic obsession and his lack of confidence in himself. Eventually he overcomes his insecurities and leads the tribes in an attack that pushes the plague people back into the sea. It is done at great cost and with the sense that they will come back stronger and the tribes will not win next time.

There is a real danger that this blog is going to become an Adrian Tchaikovsky fansite. Once again, I found myself completely absorbed. This is a middle book in a series of three and often middle books don’t resolve anything in the story as they are busy setting up book three. In The Bear and the Serpent Asmander’s story is resolved. He finds a way between the twins at war that ends the conflict and faces up to his manipulative father. But the plague people are in the south too. The Bear and the Serpent is brilliantly balanced between telling a complete story within the novel and forming the middle act in a trilogy. It is very accomplished. I can’t wait to read book three.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

Mar13

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers is about a crew of space tunnellers who are offered the biggest job they’ve ever had: to travel to the edge of civilized space to a small, uninhabited planet that is pretty much entirely made up of the fuel used to power spacecraft and tunnel their way back. The trip to the planet takes about a year and creating the tunnel will reduce that trip to a day.

This is very much a character driven novel and the bulk of it is spent on the year travelling to the small angry planet and using that as a vehicle to explore ideas about relationships. Those relationships are personal, cultural and societal. The crew is multi-species and the relationships are multi-dimensional; interspecies, same-sex, human-AI, friendship, sexual and romantic. There are a lot of ideas in the book about gender, sexuality, sentience and love. Mostly they are handled well, creatively and vividly realised, and it is refreshing to read sci-fi that is actually addressing the possibilities of connection rather than just treating contemporary norms around relationships as though they are biologically determined (and therefore unchangeable) rather than cultural.

On the larger scale, there are ideas about how people fit into societies and the tension between collectivism and individualism. This is in the background and provides context for the personal relationships. There are themes about conflicts between and within cultural groups and when the crew reach the small angry plant, we see big politics at play that reflect colonial histories and current world dynamics. Some of this is less well handled than the personal relationships.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet was a little slow for my tastes. There’s a bit of action at the end when the crew are attacked when they start to tunnel but most of the book is about people relating to each other. It’s worth a read for the ideas explored in it and those who prefer more character-driven fiction may well enjoy it more than I did.

Blue Moon

Mar8

There have been twenty four Jack Reacher books. Amazingly, I’m still not bored. Amazing because I have a fairly low tolerance for this kind of character-based series and usually give up after three or four.

In Blue Moon, Jack Reacher gets himself in the middle of a territorial war between two organized crime gangs on behalf of an elderly couple who are in debt paying for their daughter’s medical bills. The daughter has cancer and was screwed out of her insurance by her feckless entrepreneur boss who ran off with millions and left his employees with nothing.

Blue Moon is darker than previous Jack Reacher books, with a level of violence and a body count some way in excess of the norm. Other reviewers on Goodreads have said that the plot is inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, a plot that’s been used many times over, most notably in A Fistful of Dollars. Which maybe drives the perceived change in Reacher’s character, but I think there’s something else going on which gives a bit more credit to Lee Child. In the last installment, Past Tense (which I read last year but didn’t review), Reacher went back to the town his father was from and decides to research his family history. He discovers his father, who he thought was called Stan, was William Reacher, who stole the identity of his cousin Stan Reacher and joined the marines after beating someone to death. Everything Jack Reacher thought he knew about who his father was is called into question. The style of the Reacher books doesn’t allow for a lot of internal monologue and the character of Jack Reacher is one given more to action than emotional processing. It makes sense to me that the next Reacher adventure might see him in a darker place: less all-American hero saving the little people from bad guys and more using violence as an expression of his emotional state. I’m interested to see where it goes in book twenty five.

Eye of the Tiger

Mar3

The Eye of the Tiger is an account of the trips of the wildlife artist and environmentalist Pollyanna Pickering and her photographer and business partner Anna-Louise Pickering to India in search of tigers. There were two trips, one in the late 1980s and the next ten years later. The first expedition was to Nagarahole National Park and Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Wildlife Park to look for wild tigers and then to visit tigers rescued from a UK circus and rehomed in India. The second expedition was to visit a Project Tiger reserve and included trips to Rajasthan and the foothills of the Himalayas.

The book is based on the journals of Anna-Louise Pickering and includes sketches, photographs and paintings from both authors. There are a few recipes. The trips are described in a very natural way. Not every day is covered and there are many days when there are no tigers to be seen anywhere. But there are several moments when tigers are close and visible. The final sighting is very dramatic and vividly expressed.

Tigers are beautiful creatures. There conservation doesn’t just preserve the existence of these incredible beings; when an apex predator is flourishing it indicates that the habitat and food chain is in good health. Ensuring the survival of the tiger ensures the success of many other species. The book provides a lot of information about the work of the Born Free Foundation and Project Tiger and the challenges faced from poaching and habitat loss.

Pollyanna Pickering’s art is stunning and books are lovely in themselves. The photos and art are gorgeously presented in a well designed book that is easy to read and easy to just look at for hours.

Pandas next, I think.