Northern Lights

By Philip Pullman

The first in Pullman's "Dark Materials" trilogy, this book was made into a film recently, starring Michelle Pfeiffer as the evil person, which I haven't seen but I think I will get on on DVD so I can take a look. I liked it! I know, I know, it's one of those books for "young adults", but those young adult books are still some of my favourites. And, they're also quite easy to read because they aren't trying to be all post-modern or redefine the novel or anything.

The story is set in another kind of alternate reality world, a bit 19th century but where humans are born with "daemons", who seem to be little spirits that are attached to you for ever and can change their form to look like different animals. Cool - I want one!! I wouldn't mind a little mousie companion that could change into a tiger when I was cranky. (That is, they can keep changing until you hit puberty, when they decide on one form and stay that way. Apparently, the servant classes tend to have dogs as daemons. Who knew the class system and speciest stereotypes could even persist into fictional alternate realities??). Lyra is our young heroine, a bit of a bossy tomboy type growing up in an Oxford College. True to the best "young adult" fiction, Lyra has no parents around to bug her - only a bunch of Oxford dons. However, someone out there is kidnapping children, and soon Lyra is caught up in a gripping adventure. Liked it a lot - apparently there has been a lot of hoo-hah about this series because it is seen to be criticising the Church. I dunno, it didn't really occur to me while I was reading it, but then it wouldn't, would it??

Must buy the next in the series...only the edition with the nice linocut-style illustrations like above, though...oh yes, have to note that the wicked woman in this book has a daemon who takes the form of - a golden monkey!! (Ha HA!!! I told youse all they were trouble...).

Rating: 8 out of 10

She (2006)

By H Rider Haggard
I have a vague memory of seeing the film of this book, probably from when I was about 12, something about a woman stepping into a pillar of blue light and shrivelling up into a very old woman. How could I not want to read the book?? So, finally I got around to it.

Written by the same author who wrote King Solomon’s Mines and other tales of derring-do, She sees our heroes, Holly (a bloke, not very attractive, by his own admission, about 40-odd, the narrator of our story) and his adopted son Leo (very attractive, twenty-five, not quite as brainy and wise as Holly) travelling to deepest darkest Africa in search of a legendary race of people (the Amahagger) and their legendary Queen, Ayesha, who is said to have lived for thousands of years on the wild plains of Kôr. (This is the titular “She”, always italicised and short for “She-who-must-be-obeyed”; yes, this is where Rumpole got it from).

Our heroes know about all of this because of the writings on a ancient potsherd and various other bits and pieces left to Leo by his birth father, all contained in a locked chest with strict instructions not to open it before Leo’s 25th birthday. (And in true Victorian fashion, they even stop to have a cup of tea before opening it – obviously those Victorians would have passed the delayed gratification marshmallow test with flying colours, but I fear those Victorian adventurers could have waited so long for the second marshmallow that the original marshmallow would have rotted away, if such a thing is possible. I mean, imagine if the delayed gratification tester went out of the room and got hit by a bus? They might have waited for ever! Certainly the Victorian adventurer would never survive in a modern movie version of such events).

Anyway, Leo is apparently descended from Kallikrates, an ancient Greek priest loved by She but (mysteriously) also murdered by her. I think we can all see where this is going, can’t we? So Holly and Leo struggle through wild seas, fever-filled swamps and fight off dastardly natives (who speak Arabic, interestingly enough, which when translated into English for our benefit, contains lots of “thees” and “thous” and "didst thy knowests" and so on, which I must say was a little tiresome) who would kill them by putting a large red-hot cooking pot on their head, before eating them for tea, in order to find She and (supposedly) avenge Kallikrates death. Amazingly, it turns out that Leo is the exact image of Kallikrates!! Who would have thunk it??

This book is interesting in that Ayesha is not presented as evil – both men fall in love with her, although Holly concedes it might be because she is so amazingly beautiful and nothing to do with her brain, which is in pretty good shape, it must be said. (Ayesha holds her own in lots of philosophical discussions about right and wrong, good and evil, life vs. death and so on). In fact, Ayesha reminded me a lot of Akasha, Anne Rice’s Queen of the Dead – a two-thousand-year-old babe with a brain, neither truly good or bad, but wrapped up in her own desires. I wonder if Rice may have been influenced by Haggard? Anyway, call me Alisha from now on, obviously this style of name has got something going for it.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Call for the Dead (2003)

By John Le Carre
A story involving Le Carre’s famous hero, George Smiley, the ultimate spy. Set around the same era as the James Bond novels (Cold War), but so much more interesting – probably because George Smiley has much more depth than Bondy, and because it’s a book it doesn’t matter so much that he’s a bit podgy and sweats a lot.

Smiley interviews an MP who’s been accused of having Communist sympathies – and the same man turns up dead the next day, apparently having killed himself after his talk with Smiley. There’s a scandal, and Smiley senses he’s about to be made the sacrificial lamb. Then someone tries to kill him and all sorts of other exciting things happen.

This is spying as I had always imagined it, with people sending each other coded messages on postcards and swapping secret documents in music cases at the theatre. Why is this so much more suspenseful than the shark attacks and voodoo magic of James Bond? Perhaps because it is easier to feel empathy with poor, sad, tired George Smiley.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Lost in a Good Book (2003)

By Jasper Fforde
The second in the Thursday Next series, this book lives up to the high standards set by the first. Thursday finds herself somewhat of a celebrity after the events of The Eyre Affair, she is happily married and expecting a kiddywinkle in several months – but then things go a bit weird. Her husband is “eradicated” by the ChronoGuard and the evil Goliath Corporation, and she discovers that there is a police network that acts within works of fiction, that has decided to bring her up on charges for changing the ending of Jane Eyre. (The trial scene is particularly good – Thursday and her lawyer have the misfortune to draw the magistrate from Kafka’s The Castle to oversee her trial).

It’s great to discover a new favourite author. I am looking forward to the third book in the series, which is apparently due out any time now.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10

Prester John (2003)

By John Buchan
I got a bit confused reading this book because I kept getting mixed up between the author’s name and the name of one of the main protagonists. Too many Johns – what was the author thinking??

Most famous for his novel The thirty-nine steps, which has been made into a movie several times, this book sees our young hero, David Crawfurd, travelling to Blauwildebeestfontein (yes, that’s right, Blauwildebeestfontein – Monty Python couldn’t have done better if they tried) in sort of deepest darkest colonial Africa, in order to sell lots of foodstuffs and other goods to all those intellectually challenged natives. Not surprisingly, our hero runs afoul of a native uprising, in particular the compelling and powerful figure of the black minister John Laputa, who claims to be the incarnation of an ancient African hero, Prester John. Also, of course, there are large amounts of diamonds around – apparently one of the worst things you could do at the time was to engage in “IDB”, which is something to do with the illegal sale and purchase of diamonds, but I didn’t quite manage to figure out what “IDB” stood for at any time during the book.

This book is so well written, and an excellent adventure story – it is just peculiar to read now because of its obvious racism, which I guess was typical of the era (1910-ish). The most peculiar thing is, though, that it’s almost as if Buchan wrote it deliberately so that the reader would see through Crawfurd’s xenophobia and sympathise with the Africans’ point of view. The “anti-hero” himself, Prester John, is much admired by the hero, for his strength, his education, his integrity and his ability to inspire and lead the people of Africa into war with the European settlers. If someone now was trying to write a book about that time, and therefore trying to “infuse” the text with contemporary views, this is the way it would sound.

Rating: 8 out of 10

The War of the Worlds (2005)

The War of the Worlds
By HG Wells

I grew up listening to the 1975 rock opera of “The War of the Worlds”, co-written by someone from The Moody Blues and featuring the voice of Richard Burton as hero-voiceover man. It was one of my favourite pieces of music in the whole world, along with “Carmina Burana” by Karl Orff. (Yes, my mother was worried). So, which is better – the book, or the 1970s rock opera?? The rock opera. No wait a minute, of course I didn’t mean that…the book, the book is better, of course, it’s the book. But the rock opera will always hold a special place in my heart…

Still it was peculiar reading the book knowing the words to the rock opera nearly off by heart – bits of sentences would lapse into Richard Burton voiceover and synthesisers in my head and then lapse back into my imaginary 1890s voiceover, which made it a bit of a disjointed reading experience. The rock opera was quite clever at pulling out Wells’ really striking sentences though. I will have to go and see the film now and find out if they used any of the original text – I hope not, because I really don’t want to have Tom Cruise voiceover in my head as well.

Interesting to compare the differences between 1895 and 1975 though – in the book the main character is married (i.e. does not have a girlfriend called Carrie living in London with her Dad), there is no “Beth” who is the pastor’s female companion (I think they must have decided they needed at least one chick in the rock opera so they made her up), the whole section with the Parson is much more “Lord of the Flies” than I expected, and the aliens do not run around going “Ooohhhlaaaaaa!” (spelt “Ulla”) like they do in the rock opera. (There are a few Ullas at the end of the book when the Martians are feeling a bit poorly). The aliens still get killed by “minute, invisible bacteria” though – oh dang, I just gave away the ending!

It was also interesting reading this book in today’s climate of terrorist attacks and live media coverage. Back in 1895, when the book was written, Martians could attack Woking and it would take a few days for the news to reach London, all communication was by telegram, and even then no one really believed it. (MARTIANS LANDED STOP SEND REINFORCEMENTS STOP). The hero and his wife escape on a horse and cart. People learn all their news from the papers. (Golly the hero reads a lot of papers – including the St James’ Gazette!). Not being from 1895 and therefore unable to check matters of accuracy, the book seemed a surprisingly realistic account of how an alien invasion may have progressed at the time, and I’m not surprised it fooled some people when it was broadcast as a radio show a few decades later.

Still, I’m very glad to find out that Wells was not responsible for the line (on discovering one of the Martian attack machines has headed off to London) “London! I hadn’t dreamed there could be danger to Carrie and her father so many miles away!” which struck me as a stupid thing to say even when I was 10 because after all they’ve already made it from Mars.

The 1890s make themselves felt in other ways, as demonstrated by the following excerpt: And before we judge them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought…upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. I’m not sure which was the more startling assertion – that the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were “like” humans, or that a war of extermination was waged – it’s not often you hear of that part of our history actually called a war, or even that there was a conscious effort to kill the Aboriginals, and it is particularly unexpected in a nineteenth-century text.

Rating: 8 out of 10
A book to read because it is interesting, rather than because it is emotionally involving.

Jason King (2005)

By Robert Miall
Unfortunately this novel, based on the early 1970s television series of the same name, does not quite make it into the “so bad it’s good” category – no, this novel is just bad. Jason King is a novelist, man-about-town and 007 James Bond-type character, complete with the necessary misogyny but with much more facial hair. King has to solve two mysteries in this book, both highly unlikely scenarios but never mind – the first to do with a clever bunch of crooks that can outwit Scotland Yard’s supercomputer (amazing what those 70s supercomputers could do!); the second a murder mystery to which King appears to have some kind of psychic connection. (Don’t worry, it turns out to be subliminal messages).

It really is very bad. SO bad. But it does have some classic lines…if only there were a few more – it would have scored higher. Try some of these on for size:

If either girl had slipped on the hard-packed snow she could effortlessly have saved herself by grabbing the nearest tuft of King’s sideburns.

The blonde was chattering, shaking her head admiringly to and fro. The redhead simply clung to King, shaking the contents of her sweater admirably to and fro.

The world, thought Jason, was filling up with women who not only did men’s jobs for men’s rates of pay, but insisted on equality in everything else…you were supposed to pass them at the desk or workbench without glancing at their legs...even an appreciative eyebrow should be kept quiescent.

Magic. And what a spunkrat he is!!! (See cover illustration).

Rating: 4 out of 10
It’s not very long or hard to read, so you may as well…just read the first page at least, go on…