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Recent reading
A rather mixed set of books from the library...
Witches of Lychford by Paul Cornell (2015). A novella about the town of Lychford, which lies in a supernaturally significant position in the Cotswolds and has an elaborate system of defences against incursions by hostile creatures from Beyond, maintained in secret for centuries; now a supermarket's attempt to build a new store in the town threatens to disrupt these defences and unleash chaos, and we follow the three 'witches'—the local eccentric old woman, antisocial and troubled; the new vicar, who's just moved back to Lychford while grieving her boyfriend's death in an accident she caused; and the vicar's former best friend, who used to be a committed atheist and now unaccountably runs a magic/witchy stuff shop. The writing is engaging, I liked all the main characters and there's a lot of good stuff there, but I found myself picking at the details. I'm not sure the worldbuilding holds up very well (there's some confusion about how big Lychford is; is it really plausible that no former building/expansion has ever threatened things to this extent before?; Cornell seems not to understand woodland history). It does that annoying 'plot twist tricks the reader' thing where the plot seems to be doing one thing, I the reader think it's pretty interesting and am ready to consider the ideas, and then it turns out to be actually a very different thing and all the apparent potential is lost.
The History of Mr Polly by H. G. Wells (1910). The life story of a man from the shopworking lower-middle classes from which Wells himself originated. Mr Polly is hemmed in, unsatisfied and generally depressed with life, and the shop he owns is heading for failure; the book spends some time showing How He Got Here, then continues with his deciding to take his own life; he fails in the attempt, and after that things get a bit more dramatic... There's a lot of historical interest there, but I was annoyed and distracted by the handling of gender, which without being egregiously terrible was a sort of constant background unpleasantness. Mr Polly is unhappily married, and his wife is treated more or less as part of the background detail of his life rather than as a person in her own right, and I kept thinking wouldn't the story be more interesting if it was about her. (I was also distracted by the way all the male characters address each other by the mysterious epithet 'O' Man'; I eventually figured out that this was short for 'old man', and nothing to do with the exclamation 'oh, man!'.) I've subsequently learnt a little about Wells's life which confirms he didn't treat women any better in real life than in fiction, and that and a scholarly introduction (to the Penguin Classics edition) which might have managed to be more sexist than the book itself have pretty thoroughly put me off reading anything else by him.
The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane (2012). 'Ways' in the sense of roads and paths; this book is about the author's experiences of following old paths in England, Scotland and various other places, on land and at sea, the history and meaning of paths and the people who have travelled them. It is very interesting, and Macfarlane can write beautifully, but the book has more of poetry and personal reflections and less of solid history and geography than I was hoping for, and it's the kind of poetic interpretation I haven't got the right sort of mind for, I think.
The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope (1894). All right then, having sampled Grünewald, let's see what Ruritania is all about... Yes, this book is much more what I was expecting; it is exactly the high-quality epitome of the swashbuckling adventure novel it has a reputation for being. The narrator, Rudolf Rassendyl, is a charming, idle English aristocratic twerp who—due to an unfortunate romantic affair in the eighteenth century—is distantly related to the ruling family of the German state of Ruritania. Travelling to Ruritania on a whim, he meets the soon-to-be-crowned King Rudolf, and the two discover that, for very distant cousins, they look uncannily alike. Then the king's evil half-brother Duke Michael drugs him with some doctored wine on the eve of the coronation! Oh no, think King Rudolf's loyal followers, the coronation can't possibly go ahead without the king! Unless... we had someone on hand who looks just like him, and could... stand in for him?... And things only complicate further from there. Tremendously good fun, and I enjoyed it very much. The gender roles, very much the old-fashioned chivalrous kind, let it down, and Rassendyl as narrator is so contemptuous of women that I found it hard to believe in his feelings for Flavia; the whole thing got a bit eye-rolling. Rassendyl also has a slashy enemy of the dashing-villain kind, Rupert of Hentzau, who is sadly too much of a sexual predator for me to want to ship him with anyone, but I can see the appeal. The book ends with a hilarious passage in which I may read that sequel at some point; I may also read K. J. Charles's The Henchmen of Zenda, which I gather is professionally published slash fic, although I don't know what pairing—but perhaps not Rassendyl/Rupert?
Witches of Lychford by Paul Cornell (2015). A novella about the town of Lychford, which lies in a supernaturally significant position in the Cotswolds and has an elaborate system of defences against incursions by hostile creatures from Beyond, maintained in secret for centuries; now a supermarket's attempt to build a new store in the town threatens to disrupt these defences and unleash chaos, and we follow the three 'witches'—the local eccentric old woman, antisocial and troubled; the new vicar, who's just moved back to Lychford while grieving her boyfriend's death in an accident she caused; and the vicar's former best friend, who used to be a committed atheist and now unaccountably runs a magic/witchy stuff shop. The writing is engaging, I liked all the main characters and there's a lot of good stuff there, but I found myself picking at the details. I'm not sure the worldbuilding holds up very well (there's some confusion about how big Lychford is; is it really plausible that no former building/expansion has ever threatened things to this extent before?; Cornell seems not to understand woodland history). It does that annoying 'plot twist tricks the reader' thing where the plot seems to be doing one thing, I the reader think it's pretty interesting and am ready to consider the ideas, and then it turns out to be actually a very different thing and all the apparent potential is lost.
The History of Mr Polly by H. G. Wells (1910). The life story of a man from the shopworking lower-middle classes from which Wells himself originated. Mr Polly is hemmed in, unsatisfied and generally depressed with life, and the shop he owns is heading for failure; the book spends some time showing How He Got Here, then continues with his deciding to take his own life; he fails in the attempt, and after that things get a bit more dramatic... There's a lot of historical interest there, but I was annoyed and distracted by the handling of gender, which without being egregiously terrible was a sort of constant background unpleasantness. Mr Polly is unhappily married, and his wife is treated more or less as part of the background detail of his life rather than as a person in her own right, and I kept thinking wouldn't the story be more interesting if it was about her. (I was also distracted by the way all the male characters address each other by the mysterious epithet 'O' Man'; I eventually figured out that this was short for 'old man', and nothing to do with the exclamation 'oh, man!'.) I've subsequently learnt a little about Wells's life which confirms he didn't treat women any better in real life than in fiction, and that and a scholarly introduction (to the Penguin Classics edition) which might have managed to be more sexist than the book itself have pretty thoroughly put me off reading anything else by him.
The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane (2012). 'Ways' in the sense of roads and paths; this book is about the author's experiences of following old paths in England, Scotland and various other places, on land and at sea, the history and meaning of paths and the people who have travelled them. It is very interesting, and Macfarlane can write beautifully, but the book has more of poetry and personal reflections and less of solid history and geography than I was hoping for, and it's the kind of poetic interpretation I haven't got the right sort of mind for, I think.
The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope (1894). All right then, having sampled Grünewald, let's see what Ruritania is all about... Yes, this book is much more what I was expecting; it is exactly the high-quality epitome of the swashbuckling adventure novel it has a reputation for being. The narrator, Rudolf Rassendyl, is a charming, idle English aristocratic twerp who—due to an unfortunate romantic affair in the eighteenth century—is distantly related to the ruling family of the German state of Ruritania. Travelling to Ruritania on a whim, he meets the soon-to-be-crowned King Rudolf, and the two discover that, for very distant cousins, they look uncannily alike. Then the king's evil half-brother Duke Michael drugs him with some doctored wine on the eve of the coronation! Oh no, think King Rudolf's loyal followers, the coronation can't possibly go ahead without the king! Unless... we had someone on hand who looks just like him, and could... stand in for him?... And things only complicate further from there. Tremendously good fun, and I enjoyed it very much. The gender roles, very much the old-fashioned chivalrous kind, let it down, and Rassendyl as narrator is so contemptuous of women that I found it hard to believe in his feelings for Flavia; the whole thing got a bit eye-rolling. Rassendyl also has a slashy enemy of the dashing-villain kind, Rupert of Hentzau, who is sadly too much of a sexual predator for me to want to ship him with anyone, but I can see the appeal. The book ends with a hilarious passage in which