The Solitary Bee

Knit The City

2011-12-04T10:33:00.000-08:00

Knitting, as the old song has it*; what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

I was forced to knit as a small child at school. I embarked on a scarf (or was it a sock?) but after a few rows it went all wonky and I cast aside my yarn and needles in disgust, feeling that I'd been taught a valuable lesson; knitting is rubbish, and if you want a scarf you should go to a shop and buy one that someone else has knitted: they knit so that we don't have to.

How different it could all have been if only Knit The City had been available in the craft classes of my youth. It makes knitting look fun and exciting, and it's written by a masked guerilla knitter, so it would probably have gone down really well with the mainly Trotskyite primary school teachers of the early '70s.

Knit the City records the exploits of a group of 'yarnstormers', devoted to the art of 'enhancing a public place or object with graffitti knitting'. The first examples featured in the book are simple-looking stripey tubes, much like the leg-warmers of yesteryear, which appear mysteriously on lamp-posts, sign-post poles and bicycle cross-bars, each adorned with a tag bearing Deadly Knitshade's evocative logo:

Plarchie and friend.

As more yarnstormers arrive to swell the ranks of DK's woolly posse the knits become more complex and ambitious. In a tunnel beneath Waterloo station a knitted spider lurks in its knitted web, surrounded by struggling knitted captives. The rusty gates of the deserted Strand Station disgorge a host of knitted ghouls on Hallowe'en. Deep in the Natural History Museum strange woolly specimens appear; a knitted Slender Snipe Eel, some knitted squid, and a gigantic orange kraken knitted out of supermarket carrier bags, Squidius knittius giganticus plasticus, or Plarchie for short.

A herd of hand-made sheep hurries along the handrail of London Bridge, and knitted cherubim with carefully-positioned felt fig-leaves hang around at Piccadilly Circus on Valentine's Day. In Parliament Square, a whole phone box gets the yarnstorm treatment.

The yarnstormer's adventures are all retold here in a winning and whimsical style, with plenty of full-colour photographs. It's like a coffee table book for people with really small coffee tables, and would make an excellent present for anyone who likes knitting or graffitti, or knitting and graffitti, or public art that isn't all about Meaningful Stuff , or who just fancies a chuckle. At the back there are step-by step step guides to knitting your own squid and sheep, but if it's actual knitting patterns you're after you should probably also look at Stitch London, by Deadly Knitshade's close friend and confidante Lauren O'Farrell, which is equally well-illustrated but heavier on the knit-on-purl-one stuff and will teach you how to knit traditional British bobbies, Big Ben, and Her Majesty The Queen, plus corgis. (Alan Titchmarsh liked it too, but don't let that put you off.)

Knitting will never look the same again.

Philip Reeve

Knit the City is published by Summersdale and you can buy it HERE. Go on. You know you want to.

* I may not be recalling the lyrics with perfect accuracy, but I'm sure it was something along these lines.

Cyber Circus

2011-12-03T04:29:00.000-08:00

I don't suppose I would ever have read Kim Lakin-Smith's Cyber Circus if I hadn't met its lovely author at BristolCon this autumn, because I had seen it described here and there as 'Steampunk', and assumed it would be yet more alternate-Victoriana japes, of which I've read (and written) enough. Actually it's something far richer and rarer.

According to the subtitle at the start of Chapter One, Cyber Circus is set in 1937 in a place called Sore Earth. That date, and the fact that the Sore Earthers' agricultural boo-boos have reduced their topsoil to dust, suggests that the story evolved out of reflections on the Dustbowl (a suggestion confirmed by the earlier short story Black Sunday, reprinted at the back of this volume), while the book's vision of carnival life carries faint echoes of Tod Brownings Freaks and Daniel P Mannix's Memoirs of a Sword Swallower. But there any connection with our reality ends. This is not any 1937 we recognise, and Sore Earth isn't some parallel Oklahoma but a fully fledged fantasy world with its own loosely-sketched geography, history and fauna. Above it cruises 'Cyber Circus', a bizarre, bio-engineered, living dirigible carrying a strange crew of mutants and outcasts. The towns at which they stop to stage their shows have a whiff of the wild west about them - scabby mining outposts ruled by violent men and inhabited by the sort of people who'd have been kicked out of Deadwood for being too scruffy and sweary. Several different nations are mentioned, all unfamiliar. As far as I could tell, Sore Earth could be another planet, albeit one with retro fashion-sense. At times, with its cast of whores, misfits and former soldiers the thing it resembled most was a darker-hearted Firefly.

Kim Lakin-Smith's prose is both stripped-down and florid, shot through with gnarly hard-boiled dialogue and vivid imagery. It takes a little getting used to, but it's well worth the effort. I admired the uncompromising freakishness of her freaks - the bioluminescent heroine and the hero with his cybernetic eye are quite ordinary compared to the pig man, the feral wolf girl and the scuttler children - and the empathy she makes us feel for them, strange and ugly as they might seem at first meeting. She has the courage, too, to make her characters unlikeable - spiky, ill-tempered, selfish, cowardly - and yet still sympathetic. The story moves fast and takes some curious twists and turns on its way to a dramatic final showdown.

So Cyber Circus is definitely some kind of 'punk': violent, grungy, transgressive and bristling with attitude. Compared with it, most Steampunk that I've read needs to be reclassified as 'Steam-Easy-Listening' or Steam-Middle-of-the-Road'. But actually trying to pin down books like this to a particular sub-genre is just geeky stamp-collecting: Steampunk? Deiselpunk? New Weird? Who cares? There are only two kinds of Sci-Fi/Fantasy books: good and bad. Cyber Circus is one of the good ones.

Philip Reeve.

Cyber Circus is published by Newcon Press, price £9.99 pb, and is available from their website.

You can meet Kim Lakin-Smith (and me!) in person at the Kitschies 'Steampunk Christmas' event on the 8th December at Blackwell's Bookshop, Charing Cross Road, London.

Nelson

2011-11-29T09:10:00.000-08:00

Nelson is a new comics anthology from Blank Slate Books, in which 54 leading UK comics artists come together to tell one 250 page story, following a character called Nell Baker from her birth in 1968 to the present day. Each artist gets to write and draw one four page chapter, telling the events of a single day in a particular year, and gradually building up not only the story of Nell's life but a portrait of Britain over the last 43 years. The story is basically social realist, but the styles of artwork vary widely...

Although the book is based on an original idea by Rob Davies (and co-edited by him and Woodrow Phoenix) the individual artists seem to have been pretty much responsible for the events described in each segment. This makes the tone very changeable, one minute funny, the next sad, sometimes just downright puzzling. Things that look as if they're going to be important plot elements in one chapter are ignored in the next, but may surface again ten or twenty years on. And this is A Good Thing, because it makes Nelson feel like a real life, packed with random moments, odd encounters and curious coincidences.

Rob Davies

Inevitably, as with any anthology, there were some contributors whose work appealed to me more than others, but that's just a matter of personal taste. I really liked John McNaught's almost wordless 3 pages, filling us in on what Nell's absent dad is up to in 1993, and also the way that Simon Gane, in the 1992 chapter, picks up and runs with something that Sarah McIntyre left hanging way back in 1973. Gary Northfield and Jamie Smart bring a lovely sense of fun and anarchy to Nell's pre-school years.

Jamie Smart

The period detail is nicely handled: here and there historical events intrude into the story (the moon landing, the miners' strike of '84) but mostly it's the background details of clothes, cars, adverts etc which anchor each episode in its particular year. I'm only two years older than Nell, and the depictions of the '70s and '80s rang true to me. (Interestingly there's no mention of the Falklands War, nor of the Great Storm of 1987, which used to be a regular feature in stories about the '80s, standing for the collapse of Thatcherism and all sorts of Important Stuff.)

Ellen Lindner

As the story moves towards the present day, however, the treatment of real events becomes less subtle and moments of historical importance start to barge their way into the foreground. (9/11! The London Tube Bombings! The Great Icelandic Volcano Sneeze!) I don't think that's a reflection on the people who wrote and drew the later chapters, but rather a sign of how difficult it is to write about the present and the recent past. The '70s and '80s are far enough away now that we can see what they were about, but it's sometimes hard to make out more recent years through the thickets of headlines.

Simon Gane

There's also a slight tendency to miserablism in the later chapters. The young Nell is a comics fan (Luke Pearson's chapter includes a lovely panel of her gazing at a rack filled with all the comics of my childhood, the Dandy, the Beano, The Victor, the Beezer, Krazy, Battle...) and as she comes of age and heads off to art college I started to think that we were seeing the coming-of-age story of a comics artist. But things don't work out for Nell; real life gets in the way, and her ambitions seem to fade away. It's odd that when you bring together 54 of this country's most talented and hard working artists, all of whom have succeeded in making a name for themselves in comics, they end up telling a story of artistic failure. It smacks of the bleak worldview that runs through a lot of British movies and high-end TV dramas , and I suspect it comes from a feeling that in order to be thought Serious a story needs to be A Bit Depressing.

Not too depressing in this case, though, because the lively drawings and ever-changing styles are always a treat, and when one author takes the story in a glum direction there's usually another along shortly who'll have something funny or heartwarming happen instead. And some of the darker elements, like one character's descent into homelessness, are handled very well; sad and thought provoking without being mawkish or preachy.

At the end Rob Davies, who penned the first chapter, takes over again to deliver a wry ending which doesn't trouble itself with the big events of 2011 but concentrates instead on the stuff that's really important; friendship; family; memory. It all adds up to a fantastic communal achievement, and deserves to be widely read.

Nelson costs £18.99 (or £24.99 for the de-luxe hardback edition) and should be available wherever good comics are sold, or direct from Blank Slate. All profits go to Shelter, the Housing and Homelessness charity. (I should probably point out that it's not suitable for children.)

'The Recollection'

2011-11-14T04:22:00.000-08:00

By Philip Reeve

I loved Science Fiction when I was a teenager, and sometimes since I've gone looking for books that would recapture that Sense o' Wonder from the stories I read then. Having been away from the genre (at least in its written form) for the best part of thirty years, however, it's difficult to know where to start. I sometimes get the feeling that I fancy reading a good, old-fashioned, planet-hopping Space Opera, but when I look in the bookshops I'm confronted with books that are a) twice the length of Anna Karenina, b) episodes in on-going series, c) based on aspects of physics so arcane that I can't begin to understand them or d) all of the above. I tend to start such books with enthusiasm, then lose interest around a third of the way in and skip to the end (still, they're better than all the fat fantasy novels people have recommended to me recently; I don't even skip to the end of those, just abandon them half-read in hotel rooms).

Anyway, you can imagine my cries of delight when I came home from BristolCon with a copy of The Recollection by Gareth L Powell and discovered that it's exactly the sort of book which got me reading SF in the first place. It has more planets, spaceships and mind-stretching Sci-Fi concepts than you could shake a stick at, it's a stand-alone story, and it's only 300 pages long.

Unusually for a tale of galaxy-spanning space brouhaha, it begins in Bethnal Green, where down-on-his-luck artist and gambler Ed Rico is being threatened with violence by some of the people he owes money to. Within a few pages, however, strangeness intrudes into the story, in the form of mysterious arches which begin to appear all over the world. They are portals to who-knows-where, and Ed's brother Verne vanishes through one of them, conveniently situated on the down escalator at Holborn tube station.

Following him through a series of such arches, Ed and his sister-in-law find themselves travelling across a series of alien worlds, eventually arriving in a future where humanity has spread across space using technology back-engineered from the arches themselves. His story interweaves with that of space pilot Kat Abdulov, whose rusty starship, the Ameline, has much in common with the Millennium Falcon, the Serenity and that one in M John Harrison's The Centauri Device whose name I forget.

In fact, M John Harrison is the author I was most often reminded of while reading The Recollection. The way the story moves between modern London and far future space echoes Harrison's Light, Gareth L Powell's spaceports, like Harrison's, are dingy and litter-strewn, and like Mr Harrison, he has a way with names: Strauli Quay, the Bubble Belt, Vertebrae Beach... (There's also a chapter called Ragged-Ass Drive Signature, surely a prog-rock album waiting to happen.) But M John Harrison novels, while reliably brilliant, are intellectually dense and fill the reader with a draining sense of ennui (I was out of sorts for weeks after I finished Nova Swing). The Recollection is more upbeat, and although a terrible threat to the universe eventually arrives to link the two halves of the story, the book's overall feeling is one of optimism and well-crafted fun.

On the whole I preferred the first half of the book to the second, but I don't really mean that as a criticism: I almost always prefer beginnings to endings. The final chapters reveal the characters' destinies and explain some of the book's mysteries, but I do hate destinies, and mysteries are much more fun than explanations. In the end, though, I was left wanting more, which is probably the best thing you can say about a story, and a nice change from all those fat novels I mentioned earlier, which left me wanting less. The Recollection leaves room for sequels, and if there is one I shall read it, but Mr Powell has already announced his next novel with Solaris, and it doesn't appear to be connected to this one. That's good, I think, and the sign of an author with ideas to spare. On the cover of The Recollection Paul Cornell predicts that 'Gareth Powell is going to be a major voice in SF'. I suspect he's right.

The Recollection is published by Solaris Books, and is available from all the usual places, including Amazon.co.uk Or download it from the Rebellion store.

Agatha Parrot and the Floating Head

2011-09-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Bee has had a long old summer break, mostly because I couldn't find anything much I wanted to write about. But I can't not review Agatha Parrot and the Floating Head, can I? It's the first in a new series by Kjartan Poskitt (although according to the title page it's actually by A. Parrot herself, and Poskitt has just 'typed it out neatly'.)

Naturally this isn't going to be a very objective review, since I've been working with Kjartan on his Murderous Maths and Urgum the Axeman books for years, and I think he's a genius. So if you want objectivity you'll have to beetle off to Amazon or somewhere and see what people are saying about it there - but oh, look - they love it too!

Format-wise, Agatha Parrot is reminiscent of Andy Stanton's superb Mr Gum series: there's just a small chunk of text on each page (which makes it an appealing book for reluctant readers as well as everybody else.) There's another similarity to Mr Gum: both series are illustrated by David Tazzyman, whose spindly, deceptively child-like drawings add greatly to the fun. Poskitt's humour is subtler than Andy Stanton's, though, and there's no magical malarkey involved; Agatha's adventures may be a tad unlikely, but they belong firmly in the Real World.

The story is simple and packed with good jokes, and I won't spoil it by going into details. It doesn't matter too much anyway, since what really makes the book special is Agatha's first-person narration; bubbly, excitable, packed with odd asides and dodgy grammar. I'm old enough to be reminded (in the best possible way) of Ronald Searle and Geoffrey Willans's Molesworth books, but Poskitt is the father of four daughters and I'm sure Agatha's voice comes largely from his first-hand knowledge of the workings of small girls' minds. (Woo! Go Poskitt! WE LOVE POSKITT!)

Unusually, perhaps, this is a book about girls that boys will be happy to read as well. My son is nine and doesn't much like girls or books, but he whizzed through Agatha Parrot, enjoyed it thoroughly, and wants to know if there will be more.

I'm happy to say that there will: the next one is called Agatha Parrot and the Mushroom Boy and will be out in February 2012.

(Small round of applause for Poskitt clap clap all right don't overdo it.)

Here's Kjartan Poskitt posing with Sarah McIntyre at the Edinburgh Festival.
(He's the one on the left. ) Read more on Sarah's BLOG,
which is where I swiped the photo from...

Agatha Parrot and the Floating Head is published by Egmont Books.

A Conversation with Toby Frost

2011-07-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

Ten Thousand Cheers for the Internet! Now when we find new authors whose books we enjoy, we needn't just sit patiently waiting for them to write the next one: oh no, we track them down on Facebook and bombard them with impertinent questions*. By way of example, Philip Reeve has been talking to Toby Frost, author of the Space Captain Smith series of sci-fi comedies.

*Not that I mind if you want to track me down on Facebook - in fact, I encourage it. PR..

PR: Since my own books are marketed to children, and half the people reading this may be school librarians, I ought to kick off by pointing out that the Space Captain Smith series aren't childrens books; they contain sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, and also a great many references and in-jokes which will probably whip straight over the heads of the Youth of Today. I noticed nods to dozens of influences I remember from my own teenage years, from Blade Runner and Alien to Kate Bush, Kenneth Williams and JG Ballard (and what a supergroup they would have made!) I think I even spotted a line from Excalibur. Can I take it that you did your growing up in the seventies and eighties too?

TF: Yes, I was born in the late seventies, so that’s where a lot of the references come from. Good work spotting Excalibur, by the way. I love that film.

PR: I think I owe my whole career to it: it led me to all the other versions of King Arthur, to Tennyson and Eliot, the Pre-Raphaelites, the symbolists - it's what I had instead of university! I saw it so many times when it was released that I think the whole screenplay is engraved line-for-line on my memory. Anyway, how did you come to write Space Captain Smith?

TF: Smith wasn’t my first novel, but it’s the first I got published. It was actually a diversion I wrote while writing some longer stories (serious ones!) set in a fantasy world inspired by Leonardo’s drawings, a sort of clockwork Renaissance. One day I happened to be talking to a friend who was reading HG Wells. We got joking about the idea of Victorians conquering the moon and demanding gin from its baffled inhabitants, and it all went (downhill) from there. Smith slowly changed from a set of sketches to a full novel, and then I had this idea about tea... Finding a publisher is, unless you’re immensely lucky and writing about vampires, very difficult. I actually sent my manuscript to Myrmidon, my publishers, before I entered a competition in The Telegraph to send in the first 1000 words of a novel. I got to the last 50 entries, which helped my application to Myrmidon very much. Basically, anything you can point to that shows you know your stuff helps. How did you get published?

PR: A similar process, I suppose. I tinkered around with various versions of Mortal Engines all through the 1990s, and sent it off to lots of literary agents who weren't remotely interested. Then I showed it to Scholastic, for whom I'd done some illustration work. One of their editors, Liz Cross, liked it, and encouraged me to re-write it as a children's novel. Were there any other writers who were particular influences on the development of your style?

TF: Whenever people ask me about my comedic influences I tend to mention George Orwell and Raymond Chandler. Perhaps not the best joke-tellers, but they both perfected the difficult trick of saying very intelligent things in an unaffected way that packs all the more weight for its simplicity (actually, now I think about it, their styles both get parodied in the novels, along with H P Lovecraft). I’ve always liked comedy that can say stupid things cleverly, or be clever about stupid things, and I always think Blackadder is a great example of that. There’s one episode where they’re being pursued by a mad bishop who wields a red-hot poker, and suddenly Percy starts to quote Richard II by Shakespeare. Then Blackadder childishly insults him and makes a joke about poo. Great stuff!

PR: Personally, I have a slight aversion to double entendres and blue jokes. I think it goes back to my early teens when the only TV in the house was in the living room and I had to endure the awful frosty disapproval of my mum if I was watching Not The Nine O'Clock News or Kenny Everett and they got a bit risqué. I'm sensing you have no such qualms?

TF: As far as jokes are concerned I’ve cut about two out of my drafts for being too vulgar and tasteless (and a fair few more for being too rubbish). I didn’t consider child-friendliness when I wrote the novels: I always saw them as 12+ in terms of cinema ratings, and probably 13-15 or so reading-age wise. But it depends how you define bad taste: vulgarity of the farts-and-burping sort doesn’t both me too much, where as mocking the afflicted is cheap. For all their crassness, cowardice, promiscuity and homicidal mania, the main characters are a pretty decent bunch. When it comes down to it, they’re alright. Even Carveth isn’t really cowardly – she’s just sane. Not that I’d hold them up as role models as such...

PR: Most 'Steampunk' books which deal with the British Empire seem to do so in order to denounce it, but your books seem more Ealing Comedy than Steampunk, and your future British Space Empire is basically benign, championing freedom and the common man against totalitarian foes. It's also full of odd little affectionate details of British life like Airfix kits and branches of Debenhams. Do you hanker for a return to decency, tea-drinking and stiff upper lips?

TF: As regards the (First!) British Empire, and its portrayal, I agree that it inevitably casts a long shadow. I really had a choice as to whether to make the Imperialists evil and callous or just a bit silly, and I felt that the former had been done to death and would make the books too sour to be the jolly, Biggles-style adventures that they are. Also I think it’s more interesting to talk about imperialists who sincerely believe they are doing good: that attitude permeates the space empire, even down to the fact that Smith’s huge revolver is called a Civiliser. That to me is far more interesting than a simple “Empires are evil” statement – and has more potential for comedy. Of course, it helps that the Ghasts and Yull are infinitely worse than the people they want to replace. Pretty much anything is better than being ruled by (ie murdered by) Number 1 or the Greater Galactic Happiness and Friendship Collective. And anyway, you can’t really rule people like Suruk with a rod of iron. They’d just take it off you and bash you with it.

Do I hanker for a return for tea, decency and stiff upper lips? Yes, although not a literal return with everything that entails . Although the past has always been worse than the present for almost everyone, it’s hard not to feel that something hasn’t been lost along the way – an idea of how we ought to be more than something we actually were. Sometimes I wonder if we don’t indulge ourselves too much in public, or that we put up with too much nonsense from people who like sounding off (unlike this particular rant. I’m much less of a reactionary than I probably sound). Anyway, I think there is something quite distinct about being British, a positive set of values beyond just a rather woolly sense of tolerance. I’ve certainly heard steampunks talk about trying to reclaim those values, chief among them politeness. Good on them!

I think one of the main problems with steampunk is that it can actually be difficult to find new things to say. If you’re not careful, you can end up shuffling a very small pack of cards until it all feels a bit like Cluedo: this time round it’s Charles Babbage versus Captain Nemo, and on the next shuffle, Holmes and Grace Darling will be fighting the Martians (both of which I’d happily read. Especially the latter). I like steampunk very much, but I think it needs to be approached carefully to avoid being defined out of existence. It’s actually one of the things I like most about Mortal Engines: although the setting is totally original, that crucial steampunk sense of home-made, one-off technology is still there.

PR: Ooh, I'd definitely read the Grace Darling one: I had quite a major crush on her when I was about seven ( they did her life story on Blue Peter). And I know exactly what you mean about Steampunk - although actually it seems to have become such a vague term that I don't really think it means much any more. I was relieved at how un-steampunk Smith is. I also thought the characters were unusually well-rounded for a comic novel. Where did Smith, Carveth, and Suruk the Slayer spring from?

TF: I always wanted the Smith books to be properly worked-out: that the world, however bizarre, would have its own logic and wouldn’t be just slapstick. While I like all the jokes, of course, I also intended the stories to stand as novels in their own right. I think that’s why I tried to make the characters rounded, and also why there is actual death. I also think it gives the stories a bit more weight. The main characters are in part parodies of stereotypes (explorer, noble warrior etc) and are foils for one another, but I always wanted them to be more developed than that. Sending them on adventures with each other makes them round each other out, too. Strange as it sounds, given that he’s a headhunting, war-obsessed alien monster, I wanted Suruk’s homecoming in Didcot to be a little poignant as well as absurd. In a funny way you find you owe it to your characters. (Please tell me I’m not alone in this!)

PR: I don't think you are! Suruk is an utterly likeable character, despite the whole head-hunting alien monster thing. And I found the friendship between him and Smith (and him and Carveth, in a way) to be oddly touching. I think that's what makes the books, for me, ultimately more satisfying than things like Blackadder, where all the characters are basically villains or idiots. They are also war stories, and despite all the comedy there is a very convincing sense of danger in the combat scenes - Carveth's fear at going into battle is very well portrayed. Do you have a 'serious' adventure story waiting to be written?

TF: I do have a serious novel: it’s an almost complete redraft of the clockwork Renaissance story, and I’m very proud of it. Basically, it’s a revenge drama about a woman returning to a city to kill a gangster who left her for dead. However, the gangster is now a wealthy merchant, and things become more complicated as, in her quest for revenge, the heroine is drawn into the efforts of various feuding nobles to seize the throne and ends up almost as a power in her own right. I loved writing it, but it’s proved hard to find a publisher as yet. It’s got the makings of a trilogy, but I’ll clear the first hurdle of getting the first story published before anything like that!

PR: Good luck, and thanks very much for doing this interview!

You can find more about Toby and his books at www.spacecaptainsmith.com.

Space Captain Smith

2011-06-05T03:56:00.000-07:00

By Toby Frost
Reviewed by Philip Reeve

Most of the books which the Bee has recommended recently have been aimed at children, so please note that Toby Frost's Space Captain Smith isn't, containing as it does industrial quantities of smut and innuendo.

Space Captain Smith is set in the 25th Century in a region of space dominated by the 'Great Powers' of Earth, including a revived British Empire keen to export cricket, tea and fair play to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. This suggests that the book will be wedged firmly in the 'Steampunk' cul-de-sac, an impression which is strengthened by Angelo Rinaldi's splendid cover artwork, itself a spoof of the current UK covers for George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series .

In fact I was surprised by how un-Steampunk Space Captain Smith is: it's true that Smith wears a red tunic, carries a service revolver and prides himself on his well-waxed moustache, but the cultural references are mostly contemporary (his ship's android pilot rather worryingly consults a Haynes manual before take-off) and Smith's muddleheaded but basically decent form of Englishness seems more 1950s than Nineteenth Century. The technology is purest sci-fi, with no actual steam involved, although Smith's ship suffers from a bent cam-shaft at one point. The story is also dotted with parodies of movies like Blade Runner, The Matrix and A Clockwork Orange, further diluting the Steampunk aesthetic. (This is a Good Thing: I like my Steampunk diluted to almost homeopathic levels these days.)

The plot is brisk and workmanlike: Isambard Smith (who isn't a Flashman-style cad at all, but a rather dim, well-meaning, upper class twit) is sent to fetch a woman named Rhianna Mitchell from the hippy-ish space habitat of New Francisco, which is under threat from the fascist ant-men of the Ghast Empire. His ramshackle spacecraft the John Pym is piloted by runaway android Polly Carveth, and also along for the ride is Smith's old friend Suruk the Slayer, a Predator-like alien warrior obsessed with collecting skulls and much given to saying things like, "Moons have passed since last we met, battles fought and enemies fallen. At the bridge of Anrag I took fifteen heads..." How he became Smith's friend is never explained, but it's lucky for us that he did, since his cheerful psychopathy makes him the book's most memorable character, and the source of many of its best jokes.

The three central characters are all likeable and well-drawn, so it doesn't matter that everyone else is basically a charicature. The planets which our heroes visit all seem to have been terraformed according to national stereotype; there's a gloomy post-Russian world full of rotting concrete tower blocks, and a Dixieland bayou planet ruled by 'The Republic of Eden', which basically represents all the things Brits hate about the U.S - religious fundamentalism, gung-ho military types and fat people in pastel leisure suits. (There is a rival 'United Free States of America' which remains off-stage in this book - presumably they stand for Rock'n'Roll, Seinfeld and HBO dramas.) New Francisco is full of health food shops and meditation groups, while British-ruled planets tend to have names like Didcot and New Dorchester. There's also a planet of cyberpunks who dress like characters from The Matrix (one lady is described as 'wearing tight shiny things, as if hit by bin-liners in a wind-tunnel') and a rainy world modelled on Blade Runner ("Go to a Different Off-World Colony!" suggests the advertising blimp drifting over the mean streets).

These brief movie parodies are all jolly enough in a Mad Magazine way, but I found them a bit obvious; Toby Frost's own world was more interesting, and I wanted to get back to it. I far preferred the subtler references ("Aliens could look like anything," says a character who has obviously watched Star Trek, "They might look just like us except for some extra bits on their heads...")

I was also a bit put off by the almost ceaseless innuendo. I know that the double entendre is part of a long tradition in British comedy, from Max Miller and saucy seaside postcards through the Carry On films and TV shows like 'Allo 'Allo, but, let's be honest, all those things were rubbish. Sexual innuendo was only ever funny because it had a shock value in a society where sex itself could not be mentioned. We no longer live in such a society, so lines about 'being taken up the bayou' etc. etc. are just a lazy substitute for humour; the empty husks of gags our grandparents might have sniggered at. There are times when Space Captain Smith swerves dangerously close to becoming a sort of Carry On Stainless Steel Rat.

Humour is always a hit-and-miss affair, however, and Toby Frost's jokes work far more often than they fail. He's often very funny, and, more importantly, he can write. His book is at its best when it stops frantically referencing other things and is just itself: the action scenes in particular are surprisingly gripping and well handled, and the universe he has created, for all its deliberate silliness, has a certain hand-made logic of its own.

Space Captain Smith probably won't change your life, but it's not meant to. It delivers some good gags wrapped up in a story that will keep you turning the pages, and it might brighten up a wet weekend, or while away a train journey: I'm always pleased to find a book that does that. There are already two sequels, God Emperor of Didcot and Wrath of the Lemming Men, and I shall be ordering both of them as soon as I've posted this. Three cheers for the British Space Empire!

Toby Frost's Space Captain Smith website, including some downloadable short stories, is here.

Cowboy Jess

2011-05-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

Reviewed by Philip Reeve

I have to declare an interest here: Cowboy Jess is dedicated to my son Sam, and Geraldine McCaughrean is one of my all-time favourite authors (I doubt that I would have ever got around to writing my own novels at all if I hadn't read Fire's Astonishment and Vainglory).

She is best known for her magnificent children's novels, which include The White Darkness, A Little Lower Than The Angels, Plundering paradise, Stop The Train and, most recently, Pull Out All The Stops, and she also finds time to operate a secondary career as a re-teller of myths, legends and literary classics.

Cowboy Jess and its sequel, Cowboy Jess Saddles Up, fit neatly between these two strands. Short books, aimed at a slightly younger age-group than the full length novels, and packed with what the children's book world calls 'boy appeal', they revisit the American west of Stop The Train in stories of almost mythic simplicity. The Wild West backdrop is sketched in convincingly, and the landscapes are wonderful, but historical accuracy isn't an issue here: this is the legendary West of John Ford movies and schoolyard games of cowboys and injuns: Cowboy Jess himself might as well be Theseus, or King Arthur. He is discovered on page one as a baby, curled up asleep in a coonskin hat between the wheel tracks where a wagon train has passed. His upbringing by the kindly folks of a newly-founded frontier town is dealt with briskly in the first few pages, and pretty soon he's old enough to sign on as a cowboy at the local ranch. The problems which face him are quickly overcome by bravery, good nature and quick thinking, and in the course of the first book he captures a horse thief, saves the stage-coach from bandits and befriends a Lakota girl, Sweet Rain.

He also acquires a magnificent black horse named Destiny, who reminded me slightly of the old Champion, the Wonder Horse TV shows, which were still being repeated on Saturday mornings when I was Sam's age. I can't remember much about them now except for the theme tune ("Champierrrnnnnnnnnn, the Wonder Horse...") and the fact that the excitement promised by the title sequence (all indians, stage-coaches and galloping horses) was never really delivered by the show itself. The Cowboy Jess books avoid this pitfall with carefree ease; they are all indians, stagecoaches and galloping horses. For older readers they may not have the same depth or scope of Geraldine McCaughrean's longer books, (and clearly aren't meant to) but they are still well worth reading, if only so that we can marvel at her nimble storytelling and the brilliance of her language (at one point, when dawn breaks after a night on the range, she describes a band of light appearing along the horizon 'as if the sky was lifting its hat to a lady'). For boys and girls who love adventure they are just about perfect. Order them now and encourage a bit of half term/summer holiday reading.

Cowboy Jess and Cowboy Jess saddles Up are both published by Orion, RRP £4.99

Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks

2011-05-28T04:46:00.000-07:00

Review by Philip Reeve.

Last year I reviewed Those Magnificent Men, Brian Mitchell and Joseph Nixon's brilliant little play about Alcock and Brown, which used the story of those pioneer aviators to explore history, the nature of fame, and the recent trend for using real-life figures as the basis for plays which explore history and the nature of fame. Their latest work, Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks, which premiered on Wednesday night as part of the Brighton Festival, takes a similar approach. With two small chairs and two large actors, it recreates the period from 1972 to 1988 when British Saturday afternoon TV schedules were dominated by scenes like this...

In some ways Big Daddy... is even more ambitious that its predecessor. Actors Ross Gurney-Randall and David Mounfield don't just portray Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks, but an immense supporting cast of lesser wrestlers, managers, and TV executives; there are even walk-on parts for Paul McCartney, Frank Sinatra and Princess Margaret. This constant switching from one role to another, one accent to the next, must be hard work for the actors, and would be hard work for the audience too if the writing were not so accomplished. As it is, the characters are always careful to remind us who they are, to keep up to speed on what they're doing and what's happening in the wider world of wrestling at each particular moment. It's all as funny as we've come to expect from Mitchell and Nixon, but it's never just funny: they have a deep sympathy for the people they write about. Ross Gurney Randall's Big Daddy is particularly impressive; reluctant at first, then half believing his own publicity; his unease at having to visit the bedsides of dying children as part of his brother's publicity schemes, and his grief and guilt about the death of an opponent, are exceptionally well-drawn; he's almost a tragic figure (albeit a 26 stone tragic figure in a spangly leotard).

Our narrator for much of the evening, and the ring-master who holds all the disparate strands together, is Max Crabtree, Big Daddy's brother and manager. He's played winningly by David Mounfield as a cheapskate north-country Machiavelli who dreams of "owning the whole of wrestling". "I'll be your Virgil in this Dante's Inferno," he tells us as the show begins, and goes on to set the tone for much of what follows; "That's not the kind of reference I'd make in real life, but this is a play and I'm a sort of semi-fictional character, so I think we can get away with it..."

Stingy, scheming and manipulative, Crabtree could be easily be the play's villain, but he's too well-drawn, too fully rounded to be just a heel. That role is reserved for Greg Dyke, best known nowadays as a dodgy Director General of the BBC, but who cut his teeth on London Weekend Television's World of Sport programme, and was responsible for taking wrestling off TV. Portrayed by Ross Gurney-Randall as a venomous cockney psychopath, he embodies one of the show's themes; the shift of power from the north in the 1970s to the London 'barrow boys' who dominated the 1980s. The tussles between Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks are the visual and comic highlights of the piece, but the real battle comes in the scene where Dyke and Max Crabtree confront one another; a high-stakes bout with the future of wrestling as the prize.

We know who won in the end, of course. The London elite who run British TV didn't like wrestling and didn't want to show it, and without TV it withered. It's not something you hear much about these days. Nostalgic TV shows and newspaper articles are forever exhuming the pop-culture detritus of the 1970s, but they tend to focus on things which middle-class North Londoners approve of, not these embarrassing pantomime gladiators whose fanbase was always in the provinces. As well as giving us a laugh, this well-researched play is drawing attention to an odd little corner of our culture that has been not so much forgotten as deliberately suppressed.

That said, the eagerness with which the Brighton Festival audience joined in Big Daddy's signature chant of, "Easy! Easy!" suggests that fond memories of wrestling survive even among hip urban types in the south east. When it tours the north, Giant Haystack's final soliloquy, in which he predicts that 'Wrestling will be back!" is going to bring the house down.

A tour of Big Daddy versus Giant Haystacks is planned for later in the year, and I shall post details both here and on my own blog when the dates are confirmed.

One is now Hitched...

2011-04-29T05:29:00.000-07:00

By the Bee's Royal Correspondent, Andrew Gorton.

“Are you following the Royal Wedding today?” I asked the Scottish manager of my Norfolk village shop when I popped in on the day of the event.

“Why should I celebrate a family that raped and pillaged my family and forced them out of their country?” he replied, less than half-jokingly. “I've spoken with family in the Highlands, and their kids are not having a day off school there.”

This has probably been the only passionate, albeit negative, reaction to the Royal Wedding I have encountered so far. The prevailing attitude has seemed to be one of sublime indifference. (When I expressed my own less-than-lukewarm attitude on Facebook, it got several 'Likes.') Everybody is glad for the day off, but that appears to be the extent of their enthusiasm. On the other hand, I hope Wills and Kate have better fortune in married life than Diana had. I think some lessons from that marriage have been well marked for this one. Hopefully there will be no conspiracy theories surrounding this marriage, now or in the future. I'm fairly certain that Charlie is not planning to bump off his new daughter-in-law at some point in the next few years. Personally, I'm surprised there isn't a theory that says Diana and Dodi faked their own deaths and are living anonymously in South America with Shergar and Lord Lucan, or something. I am half-tempted to try and circulate that one, to see how many people buy it.

Across the pond, the Americans seem far more fascinated and enthused by the Royal Family than us Brits. (Certainly many of them seem to believe the “Diana was murdered” theory.) Considering that their nation was born as a result of successful revolution against the British Monarchy, it seems rather an odd attitude to have, exactly the opposite side of the coin to my Scottish acquaintance. Maybe it is the fact that the Scots failed in their uprising where the Americans succeeded that explains the difference? I'm not sure. Certainly the Scottish clans suffered more at the hands of the English kings than the American colonists.

In my opinion, the modern Royal Family are just another aspect of celebrity culture, but with more pomp and tradition. I am inclined to view this wedding as no different, really, than any other celebrity wedding, although with slightly more gravitas. There are certainly the screaming crowds and an overemphasis on what everybody is wearing, and inane waffle from news commentators. To be fair on the other hand, none of the Royals, with the possible exception of Kate, sought nor possibly desire their status in the public eye. I could sympathise with Prince Harry when he was pulled from front-line duty in Afghanistan. It must be frustrating not being able to do the job you wanted to to, and had undergone rigorous training for, just because of who your parents are. Also, watching films like The Kings Speech does humanise them for me.

Watching bits of the event today on the telly, I am sure it was not always like this for the royals. I have a picture in my head of the Saxons marching off to fight the Battle of Hastings to hysterical public adulation, with vapid commentary on Armour by Ralph de Lauren, and speculation on whether Harold is going bald under his Jeffrey of Portman Helmet. Then, a few days later, tabloid hysteria of this new bloke, William the Conqueror's questionable taste in interior decoration or something.

It is possible history may go full circle and the Royals will become more than just figureheads, but it is unlikely. I am sometimes prone to the cynical belief that this is pretty much a Bread-and -Circuses event, but in the end, I am sure it is a harmless and much needed diversion from an otherwise grim couple of years.

A Conversation with Mark Robson

2011-04-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

If you've attended a UK secondary school during the past ten years there's a high likelihood that you've met Mark Robson, author of rip-roaring fantasy adventures and a tireless and inspiring teacher and speaker to schools and book-groups. He started out publishing his own books (the high fantasy Darkweaver Legacy quartet) before Simon and Schuster picked up his Imperial sequence set in the same world. Then came the Dragon Orb quartet, about teenage dragon-riders in another fantasy world, who occasionally fly through a dimensional rift into our own circa 1918, resulting in some smashing dragons-vs-triplane action over the Western Front.

His latest, The Devil's Triangle is the first of a trilogy about the Bermuda Triangle, the area of sea between Florida and Bermuda where bats and aircraft are supposed to go missing more frequently than they do over other large patches of sea... In Mark's story the disapearees find themselves on a parallel Earth where mammals never caught on and the dominant species are a race of highly evolved velociraptor types.

Philip Reeve: Like Roald Dahl and Captain W.E Johns, you've made the leap from RAF pilot to children's author. How did that come about?

Mark Robson: It was a strange chance that set me writing. I was down in the Falkland Islands on detachment in July 1996 and the weather that year was particularly bad. We were getting 80mph winds with heavy snow that was actually getting through the roofing and settling in the corridors! There was no way we could fly in those conditions and I got very irritable as I hate being idle. I annoyed my navigator so much with my grumpiness that one morning he snapped at me, “For goodness’ sake, Mark! Do something useful. Go write a book, or something!”

What he really said was a bit more colourful than that, but it would be inappropriate to repeat the actual language here! I’ve always loved a challenge and having always been a prolific reader, I’d often thought It would have been great if the character had done this, or if the author had twisted the story in a different way here. Why not write a book? All I needed was paper, a pencil and some time… all of which were available in abundance. I told Arnie (the Navigator) that I would write the first chapter to a book and if he liked it, I would write the rest. I’ve never looked back.

Philip Reeve: The Bermuda Triangle seems to have gone a bit quiet lately. When I was a lad it was never off the telly in one form or another. I remember an American sci-fi show called 'Fantastic Journey' which involved Roddy McDowell trying to escape from it, and there was even a Bermuda Triangle song by Barry Manilow. I quite liked reading about it, because it was a nice long way away and so not as scary as aliens, who one always suspected might land in the back garden at any moment. I'm intrigued to know what prompted you to write about it. Is it an interest of yours, or just a handy way to get your characters into the raptor world?

Mark Robson: It appears there is still a remarkable amount of interest in the Bermuda Triangle, though if you ask most young people where it is, they don’t actually know. They simply have a vague notion of it as a mysterious place where boats and aircraft disappear. I was amazed when I started putting bits on my blog about some of the more famous mysteries just how rapidly the hits on my website increased. Folk remain fascinated by the aura of mystery that surrounds the area.

My original intention was to write a follow-up series to Dragon Orb utilising the Bermuda Triangle, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt the setting offered the chance for me to attempt having contemporary characters enter a fantasy style adventure through it. What I didn’t realise was how much of a change this would require to my writing process – having so much real world action. My publishers loved the idea and commissioned it, but when it came to writing the first book, I found it terrifying. It felt like learning to write from scratch all over again. All the things I could get away with in my previous books because I was writing in an imaginary world now had to be correct. I found my research time for the silliest little things became hugely distracting to the writing process.

There are many websites and books, (most a bit dated now, but a few newer ones) devoted to the mysteries surrounding the region. The sensationalists will tell you that the effects are as active as ever. I’m not so sure about that. However, it was fascinating doing the research in the Florida Keys. Whenever I asked anyone about it in interview while they were in a work related place, they all said it was a load of hokum. Get the same sort of people in a bar in the evening and their stories are very different. Apparently ‘everyone’ knows that Atlantis is on the seabed near the Bahamas and that there are weird magnetic anomalies in the area, to say nothing of all the UFOs and USOs (Unidentified Submarine Objects). To be honest, my own experiences flying through the region as a military pilot were very mundane, but there do seem to have been a remarkable number of interesting incidents in the area, so who knows? Maybe there is something strange happening out there.

Philip Reeve: The raptor civilisation's energy source in the book is ingenious - heating the earth's mantle to increase its magnetic field - and sounds convincing to me. But it's starting to go wrong, with catastrophic climatic effects. Is that intended as a parable about our own world? I sometimes worry that all the new technologies we sci-fi writers suggest are in the process of ruining the world: it makes for a more interesting story if they go wrong, but are we giving children the idea that technology is a bad thing, and that they should be pessimistic about the future?

Mark Robson: I must thank science fiction writer and occasional editor of New Scientist magazine, Ian Watson, for that idea. My conversation with him would have sounded bizarre to anyone listening in. It went something like this:

Me: Hi, Ian. Mark Robson here. I wonder if you could help me. I’ve got a bit of a problem. I need to increase the earth’s magnetic field by several factors. How can I do it?

Pause.

Ian: Mark! Ah, yes. Interesting. Well, the obvious solution would be to bring the moon closer… but that might prove a bit tricky! (I’m thinking Yeah, obvious! Silly me! Why didn’t I think of that?) I suppose you could detonate a mass of directed nuclear charges on the far side and try to shunt it a bit nearer, but I’m not convinced that would work and the splatter would be terribly messy. Even if you did manage it, the side-effects would be horrific.

Me: Ah! So not possible then.

Ian: Well… of course, you know the earth works like a dynamo.

Me: Yes, I vaguely remember something about that from my ‘A’ Level Physics days.

Ian: OK, well the earth’s magnetic field is caused by the friction of the magma flowing around the earth’s iron core. If you could speed up the flow, the friction would increase and so would the strength of the magnetic field. Hmmm… how could we speed up the magma flow? Make it less viscous. Heat it, perhaps… hmm… that’s a lot of magma to heat…

And thus began the raptor’s cunning plan of pumping their nuclear waste into the earth’s core over a number of centuries, gradually producing the stronger field. In theory, doing this might produce the effect I describe, though probably not at the magnitude I have it in the story.

Yes, the inadvertent ecological disaster is intended as a parable. The dangers of ignoring the warning signs of an impending global catastrophe are pretty self-evident, and there’s a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek parallel to the human race’s general attitude to global warming. However, I’m trying to avoid it becoming too preachy in the story and I certainly don’t want to give children the impression that all technology is bad. Personally I’m something of an optimist and feel that mankind is so adaptive that we will continue to find ways to overcome the problems we seem to be creating for ourselves.

The political situation in the raptor society also comes to the fore in the second book. The rulers there are rather like a military junta who control their society with an iron fist. While the general raptor populace are willing to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to the causes of their environmental changes, one particular decision by their leaders in Book 2 will spark a very violent revolution.

Philip Reeve: Do you do a lot of world building before you start a book, or does it come together as you write? Do you plan your characters, or do they just grow?

I must confess that I don’t do anywhere near enough world building before I begin and that nearly always comes back to haunt me as I get further into a story. I do try to get to know my characters a little before I launch into a story with them, but again, I should probably do more. I have found with each series of books I’ve written that it takes until the end of the first book for me to feel like I know them properly. Even then they surprise me sometimes.

Philip Reeve: What's next?

Mark Robson: Book 2 of the trilogy, Eye of the Storm, is well underway. I’m just over half way through the first draft and hope to complete it in time for a pre-Christmas launch. In this book the reader will learn that the crossing points between worlds are not limited entirely to the Bermuda Triangle region and that many other famous mysterious disappearances were actually caused by random storms in other parts of the world. We find Amelia Earhart’s grandson has invented a new breed of flying machine, giving raptors the power of flight. It also appears that Glenn Miller and Lord Lucan were victims of the effect!

What I’d love to do is set the real world element of the third (and final) book off the coast of Japan in the area Charles Berlitz dubbed “The Devil’s Sea” – another area of water with a similar reputation to the Bermuda Triangle. This would, of course, require another research trip… one of the great things about setting a story in the real world!

Beyond this trilogy, I’m not sure. I’ve got outlines for about another 10 books of various types, and ideas for a lot more. Having recently gained my black belt in Tae Kwon Do, I’d quite like to try writing a modern martial arts story – the Karate Kid meets Jackie Chan in Grange Hill sort of thing. I think that would be a lot of fun to do.

Philip Reeve: Thank you Mark. Take it away, Barry!*

*And leave it there.

Bracelet of Bones, by Kevin Crossley-Holland

2011-04-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

Kevin Crossley-Holland is one of the giants of children's fiction, which he's been writing for as long as I can recall - I remember being thrilled by his version of Beowulf when I was at school. More recently his Arthur trilogy has been hugely and deservedly successful, and its lovely pendant, Gatty's Tale is one of my favourite modern novels. He's also, among other things, an acclaimed poet, and the author of the marvellous Penguin Book of Norse Myths.

His latest book, Bracelet of Bones, marks a return to the Viking north. Rather as his Arthur books drew on Arthurian traditions from all across Europe, Bracelet of Bones reminds us that the Vikings didn't just operate in northern seas but sailed and traded as far as Byzantium (Constantinople to us; Miklagard to them). And like Gatty's Tale, the new book is the story of a girl on a journey; Solveig, who sets out to follow her father, a Viking warrior who has gone to join the Byzantine emperor's Varangian guard.

Solveig's odyssey takes her from 11th Century Norway through the heart of what is now Russia, to Novgorod, Kiev, and the perilous cataracts of the River Dnieper. Along the way she encounters kings and craftsman, Christians and pagans, shamans and slaves. There is an ambush by savage Pechenegs (me neither), a meeting with an English spy, and landfall at last in Byzantium itself, a city so teeming with life and detail that it leaves you longing to know more, and looking forward to the sequel (which is already under way, hoorah!). Most of the people Solveig meets are basically good, and few of the bad ones seem completely bad; there is a refreshing absence of real villainy; a sense that people (except maybe Pechenegs) are basically decent.

This is not a fast-moving story. It flows like a river, mostly slow and patient, taking its time, occasionally rushing over sudden rapids of violence and tragedy. I wonder how it will be received by young readers used to the breakneck pacing of many contemporary children's books? I hope they give it a chance, and bring to it the concentration which it demands and deserves. They will be rewarded if they do. It's a rich and convincing evocation of the past, and at the same time a great character study - a tremendous amount of the book takes place in Solveig's head, as her thoughts and memories constantly interweave with the narrative, as do the stories that she knows; the myths and superstitions which often seem as real to her as the rest of her world. It's a book about fathers and daughters, and friendship, and the joys and difficulties of making things: carvings; stories. It's about growing up.

And perhaps more than any of these, it's about language and the love of language: like my other favourite writer, Geraldine McCaughrean, Mr Crossley-Holland is an author whose books need reading at least twice; once for the story, and once for the words themselves.

Philip Reeve

A Good Workout

2011-04-08T00:24:00.000-07:00

By Andrew Gorton

In the summer of 2010, a friend, knowing of my burgeoning interest in nature and the environment, handed me the July programme of a conservation group that had, at that time, been going for nearly a year. Activities included earthworm surveys, tree planting, and the removal of bracken, bramble and other invasive species, among similar endeavours. The group was called the North Norfolk Workout Project.

Keen to try it out, I turned up at Cromer train station, one of the pick-up points mentioned on the programme, and duly the project minibus arrived, driven by project manager Mark. After introductions, Mark explained a bit more about the group. The project had been set up by the North Norfolk district Council and BTCV, with input from English Nature and the NHS, amongst other groups. The idea was to undertake outdoor conservation projects in the North Norfolk region, and in the process give volunteers access to nature and improve their physical and mental health.

So off we went to Sadlers Wood near North Walsham - myself, Mark and a half-dozen or so other volunteers, to clear bracken from a wild flower meadow. I must admit, when I saw the amount of bracken, I quailed a bit, and wondered if we could clear it all. But we all got stuck in, and soon large swathes of the stuff had been cleared. I found it surprising and strangely satisfying to see the amount we had done just a couple of hours.

After a very pleasant tea break – an essential fixture of each session - some of the group carried out a couple of surveys on behalf of the Open Air Laboratories Network (OPAL), a scheme run by the Natural History Museum that encourages people to investigate certain aspects of the natural world and report their results. That day, we carried out a soil and earthworm survey. This involved investigating a patch of soil to find out its make-up, (how much sand, how much clay etc.), its acidity, and whether there were any earthworms nearby. The next survey involved checking trees for specific types of lichen to determine the levels of nitrogen in the air - some lichens thrive in nitrogen rich air and others do not, so this is a good way of checking air quality. In the event, we found neither earthworms nor lichens of any kind, but the results were sent off, and hopefully the boffins at the NHM can make something of them. I returned home at the end of the day having enjoyed both the work and the surroundings a lot.

It was after this that a period of ill health prevented me from getting about for a bit, so I was unable to attend any more sessions until September, when I became involved in earnest. I attended a wildlife walk in Bacton woods with Mark's colleague Fin, and saw an unbelievable (to me, at any rate) array of different fungi – 2010 being a bumper year for them. The session after that at Holt Country Park was something of a knees-up to celebrate the Project's 1^st anniversary. A good time was had by all, although I did feel a bit guilty attending the event – I had only done 2 sessions prior to this, and I was rubbing shoulders with people who had done 30, 40, or 50 sessions.... Anyway, I got a good vibe from all the other volunteers, they were proud of what they had done in the last year, and Mark and Fin were given cards signed by everybody in appreciation of their efforts.

Since then, I have worked at a number of sites throughout North Norfolk with the Project, performing a lot of different conservation activities.

At Pigneys Wood at North Walsham, one of the earliest tasks I was involved in was raking recently mown grass from a wild flower meadow. This is to prevent the grass from rotting down and swamping the soil – wild flowers prefer thin soil with relatively few nutrients; a case of 'less is more.' On subsequent sessions there I have found myself cutting reeds, planting hedges and trees and coppicing alders. Coppicing is an ancient form of woodland management, where the trees are cut right down to the stumps, and then allowed to grow, often producing several thin poles from the same stump. In the meantime, the reduced canopy allows more light to reach the forest floor, increasing biodiversity there. On this particular exercise, these alders had been previously coppiced, and the numerous poles we sawed down were going to be used for an art project. They are flexible enough to be weaved, or 'wattled' into walls. (A more recent coppicing session at Holt Country Park will see the alder trunks used to make a maze – pretty 'amazing' eh?). Incidentally, a similar technique is pollarding. This is where the trees are cut to chest or head height. This is to allow livestock to graze without damaging the new shoots.

A regular activity we carry out around Holt and Sheringham is the removal of rhododendrons, an extremely invasive species. Although it sometimes seems a never-ending task – there are masses of this plant around - 5 or 6 of us can make short work of a large rhodo bush. Indeed, it is quite satisfying to saw through a large trunk of this Triffid-like plant and remove great swathes of it for later burning.

A couple of sessions were at Salthouse Heath, clearing gorse, not only to encourage biodiversity, but to expose 4000-year-old Bronze Age burial mounds for archaeological investigation. One cannot choose but wonder what sort of people they were, or what life was like back then. The photographs below show one particular mound, before we had begun work, and after we had finished for the afternoon.

Before:

After:

There was one particular session at Salthouse I shall never forget. We'd finished early to go and see the nearby remains of a World War 2 radar mast. Towards the end of the war, a Lancaster bomber returning from a mission over Germany had to divert from it's home airfield due to thick fog that had covered the whole area. Lost, and flying at around 200 feet, the plane had crashed right into this radar mast. Six of the crew were killed outright, and the seventh died a few hours later. It was very sobering to see the remains of the tower – four concrete 'feet', each with about a meter or so of metal girder sprouting from them, adorned with wooden crucifixes and a poppy wreath. There was a light fog forming when we got there, and knowing what had happened there, it was quite an eerie experience.

On a lighter note, and speaking of fog, I have, perhaps a touch masochistically, gone out in all weathers during my time with the project. Sun, rain, snow; you name it I've been out in it. Holt Country Park, just before Christmas, looked particularly winter-wonderlandy:

The project has also garnered a couple of prestigious awards. One, awarded before I had joined, was for encouraging biodiversity in the region. We were also one of three groups short-listed for the Love Norfolk category for the Norfolk People of the Year awards. I was privileged to be invited, along with fellow volunteer Clive along to the evening by Mark and Fin (we had to wear suits, a real shock to the system!) along with representatives from other organisations involved with the NNWP. In the end, we lost to a community composting group based in Trunch. (Boo! Hiss!) But all in all, it was an honour to be short-listed, and it was a great evening, with some good food and some really inspiring stories of human endeavour. We also managed to filch a few bottles of wine to boot-something extra for Christmas!

So far, I have done some 40 sessions with the North Norfolk Workout Group, and have enjoyed them immensely. I have particularly enjoyed meeting and working with the other volunteers, who are from a variety of backgrounds. Some are college students studying the countryside and the environment. A couple of others already have degrees in similar fields. All have brought their knowledge to the Project in one way or another. Some, like me, are unemployed and are seeking to gain new skills and experience. Still others have come on the Project to meet new people and to just get out of the house and do something worthwhile. But whatever the reasons, I think I can say that we have all got something out of the North Norfolk Workout.

Andrew Gorton is an Open University student, London born but now living on the North Norfolk coast.

MicMacs

2011-04-06T04:20:00.000-07:00

Philip Reeve has been watching MicMacs (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009. Cert. 12)

Films slip past me sometimes now that I live so far from cinemas. How did I miss Mic-Macs? Did it get no cinema release in the UK? Was there no publicity? Not to worry; it's on DVD now, and it's well worth watching.

Alien: Resurrection

Jean-Pierre Jeunet has been one of my heroes ever since his debut, Delicatessen, which he wrote and directed with Marc Caro back in 1991. Their follow-up, City of Lost Children, was harder to like - beautiful but slightly unappealing - and then M Jeunet went off sans Caro to Hollywood to direct Alien: Resurrection which was legendarily, franchise-stallingly bad (although I suspect the fault lay more with the producers than the director, and there were still some lovely visual flourishes - Brad Dourif in his ankle-length, tailored lab-coat is the forefather of all the Engineers in Mortal Engines). After that, thankfully, there were no more stints helming clapped-out Hollywood cash-cows; instead, M Jeunet returned to France to make Amelie (which, despite frequently being described as 'charming and quirky' actually is charming and quirky) and the magnificent World War 1 story A Very Long Engagement.

A Very Long Engagement

And now, with very little fanfare as far I can tell, there is MicMacs, which combines some of the quirky sweetness of Amelie with a crazy bande dessine storyline which harks right back to Delicatessen. The hero, Bazil, is a man who falls on hard times, and is rescued by a mis-matched 'family' of homeless oddballs who inhabit a glorious labyrinth of junk and salvage under a Parisian flyover. (I presume these are the MicMacs of the title, though I still have no idea what a MicMac actually is) With their help he sets out to wreak revenge on the two arms manufacturers who have wrecked his life (one made the land-mine which killed his father, while the other produced the bullet which is lodged in Bazil's brain). Through a series of increasingly complex ruses involving strange, scrap-heap machines, they start to turn the two armaments giants against one another...

It's all hugely unlikely, but likeliness is not the point here. Jeunet films are fantasies, and even when they are set in present-day Paris he transforms it into a dream world. His arms tycoons don't work out of soaring glass office buildings, but in a pair of identical 1930s towers which face each other across a narrow street. The rooftops of Paris can't really be such a fantastic maze of smoking chimney-pots any more, can they? The film's scrap-metal saboteurs perform feats out of Mission Impossible with equipment which could have been designed by the Wombles. Even when he photographs something mundane, like people uploading videos to YouTube or stuck in a traffic jam among modern buildings, Jeunet gives it all a strange patina of age and difference. Under the eye of his restless, gliding camera Paris transforms itself into a parallel world, much like the retro-future of Delicatessen (which was itself a nod to the retro-future of Terry Gilliam's Brazil).

Like all my favourite film-makers, Jeunet doesn't seem that interested in dialogue. You sense he would have been perfectly at home in the silent era. In the pre-title sequence he explains Bazil's background perfectly in a few swift and largely wordless scenes. Later, at taxi-ranks and on roof-tops, there are visual routines worthy of Chaplin. It's tempting to compare it to French comic-books, but that would be misleading, because while every shot is composed as beautifully as a Moebius strip, Mic-Macs isn't like a comic book: it's like a movie. It's also very sweet - a revengers' comedy in which good triumphs, romance blossoms, and villains are ingeniously undone.

As they say on French YouTube (apparently): Partager Cette Video.

Is the Turner Prize a Reflection of Art Today?

2011-02-22T08:43:00.000-08:00

Back when the Bee was young I had a bit of a strop about the Tate Gallery (or 'Tate Britain' as it's been rebranded). This prompted Ethan Wilderspin to send in the following piece on the Tate, the Turner Prize, and, y'know, Art...

Is there any question that Claude Monet’s Impression Sunrise is art? (Whether you like the painting or not is a different matter.)
Is Tracy Emin’s My Bed art? Does anyone like it?

Impression Sunrise (Claude Monet Prints)

My Bed (Saatchi Gallery)

The Turner Prize is either a prestigious award for contemporary art in the UK for artists under 50, or it is “Crap” – a pretentious award given to talentless individuals who are self proclaimed ‘artists’. Why is there so much controversy and disagreement over the Turner Prize? Is it because some people fail to grasp modern conceptual art, or is it because some people wake up in a bed not all that unlike Miss Emin’s every day? Indeed, does raw artistic talent lie within the rooms of all adolescent boys on the mornings that their mothers forget to scold them for their untidiness?

The Turner prize emerged the 1980’s and has had more media attention since its beginnings than any other award for artists in Britain. It is named, perhaps some what ironically, after the 19^th Century English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner. The prize (awarded in the Tate Britain gallery), although having been given to painters on occasion, is heavily criticized for generally focusing on conceptual or installation art. This is undeniably the case but why do these art mediums cause so much controversy around the event?

2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey, talking of the controversy surrounding the prize, said, ‘I don’t care about all this. I want to make work that has some kind of effect on people, and basically… this show got called effectless, it had no impact and is attenuated. But I don’t get that.’ Disregarding Leckey’s personal opinion, he summarises the outlook of many in relation to the Turner Prize.

The Stuckists are a group of people who demonstrate on the doorstep of the Turner Prize every time it’s held. They claim to be “Anti the pretensions of conceptual art”, which according to them is the same as being Anti Anti-art. Essentially this shows that whether the Turner Prize is a good indication of contemporary British art or not, comes down to whether or not the individual considers a lot of the conceptual, video and instillation pieces actual art or not.

This seems to be the case, as everyone seems to want to put in their two penny’s worth. Kim Howells wrote "If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost.” Janet Street-Porter said “The Turner Prize entices thousands of young people into art galleries for the first time every year. It fulfils a valuable role”. There is so much criticism that comes from every angle, positive and negative. But the problem with the Turner prize is that this seems to be its very purpose; media hype. It is a showcase of controversy and that is all it ever has been, a magnet for media attention. Every year people wait to see how bizarre, mundane or talentless the new contestants' work will be; never do they expect (or, so it seems receive) ‘Art’ but instead media hype about some stupid soulless award.

John Bourne, curator of the Tate museum said "We are grateful for the extra publicity the Stuckists have given the Tate". This seemingly witty comment actually just seems to confirm the notion that the Turner Prize is nothing more than a mainstream advertisement which uses the media for its marketing. Is that art?

Ethan Wilderspin describes himself as 'A nineteen year old unemployed layabout with vague comic book author/illustrator aspirations...'

Firefly & Serenity

2011-01-21T02:47:00.000-08:00

By Philip Reeve

"This is the captain. We have a little problem with our engine sequence, so we may experience some slight turbulence, and then explode."

When I started writing about Stuff I Like on the internet one of the first things on my 'To Do' list was Firefly. Then I looked around and couldn't help noticing that the internet is pretty much made of Firefly: references to it, and sites about it, seem to be everywhere; surely everyone must know about it already, and wouldn't be the least bit interested in hearing what I had to say on the subject.

But lately I've encountered a surprising number of people who haven't seen it, and even some who, when you mention it, go "What's Firefly?" So here's The Solitary Bee's guide to its fellow insect-named cultural phenemenon.

Firefly (Cert 12) is a 2002 sci-fi TV series created by Joss Whedon, probably best known for the wonderful Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its sometimes wonderful spin-off Angel (a show which didn't so much jump the shark as vault nimbly to and fro across the shark in the manner popularised by Cretan bull dancers). When I first heard that Mr Whedon's new show would be a 'space western' I was unimpressed - aren't all space operas basically westerns? But Firefly takes its conceit to the (il)logical extreme, dressing its space frontierspeople in braces, duster coats and fishtail trousers and arming them with souped-up six-shooters. There are cows. There are banjos. There is a cowboy ballad theme song which mournfully celebrates the ultimate freedom of the final frontier - "You can't take the sky from me..."

Sadly it turned out that the powers that be at Fox TV actually could take the sky from us, and they proceeded to do so by canceling Firefly after 14 episodes, blaming poor viewing figures* (Boo!). It then went on to become such a cult success on DVD that Joss Whedon was able to make a feature film, Serenity (Cert 15), which continues the story (Hurrah!). Alas Serenity didn't do well enough at the box office to spawn a sequel (Boo again!)**. Since then there have been several comics set in the Firefly universe (which I've not read), but all that the show's admirers are really left with is the movie and those original fourteen episodes.

Luckily, they were fourteen pretty good episodes.

Set 500 years in the future, Firefly takes place in a far-off solar system which has been settled by human colonists. There are no monsters or aliens here (although the savage 'Reavers' who inhabit the system's fringes might as well be monsters, having lost all traces of humanity beyond an ability to maintain and fly ramshackle spacecraft ). These are far more down-to-earth alien worlds than we're used to visiting in the likes of Star Trek. The frontier spirit prevails, and the production design is a witty mix of hi-tech and old west (the Serenity is surely the only film or TV spaceship that has wooden furniture in its mess hall). The various planets have recently been unified following a civil war between the vaguely authoritarian Alliance and the freedom-lovin' Browncoats. (The Browncoats, needless to say, got stomped on.)

Our hero, Mal Reynolds, is a former Browncoat who now captains the grimy old 'Firefly' class space freighter Serenity, running cargo and contraband and generally trying to keep one step ahead of the law. As well as her small crew the Serenity carries some paying passengers; Book, a travelling preacher; space courtesan Inara***; and posh young doctor Simon Tam, who's on the run with his sister River (he has sprung her, as you do, from a top secret Alliance facility where attempts to turn her into a weapons-grade superhuman have left her talking in Whedonesque non sequiturs like Drusilla the Mockney Vampire). Over the course of the truncated series we learn more about the characters' histories while they stage a couple of robberies, get involved in duels and tangle with space gangsters. River is pursued by some scary, blue-gloved Alliance operatives, and That Christina Hendricks Off Madmen turns up as Mal's ex-wife.

All of which probably sounds a bit yawn if you haven't seen it, because, like Buffy before it and Dollhouse after, Firefly is built entirely out of genre cliches. What brings it alive, and lifts it above the competition, is hard to define.

First there's the feel of it - the folksy music, the costumes that look as if there must be a branch of Old Town on most of these moons and planets, and the wobbly, uncertain 'hand-held' camerawork which takes the CGI sheen off the effects shots.

The backstory is slightly more subtle than I've made it sound, too. The Alliance isn't exactly an evil empire (though some of its black ops have obviously crossed the line); it stands for order, security, and all the benefits of urban civilization; it's basically the sort of society that the heroes of shows like Star Trek belong to. Mal and his comrades would probably be safer and cleaner and more prosperous living under its aegis, swapping the rusty earth-tones of the Serenity and all those backwater moons for the gleaming greys and whites of the Alliance worlds... but they wouldn't be free, and like many a good western, Firefly holds that freedom, with all its dangers and dilemmas, is more important than just about anything.

Then there's the language, packed with snappy one-liners and Whedon-y little asides, Deadwood-ish 19th Century-isms, space-slang (anything nice or good is "shiny") and scraps of Chinese (everyone in the 'verse swears in Chinese, although oddly enough nobody actually appears to be Chinese...). When sci-fi cliches do appear, they're quickly undercut ("That sounds like something out of science fiction!" scoffs pilot Wash at some unlikely plot twist. "We live on a spaceship, dear," his wife reminds him.) Whedon's characters talk like no one else on telly: they falter; they make up words as they go along: they wander out into long convoluted sentences and can't work out how to get back; wobbly metaphors collapse beneath them, and rhetoric backfires. It's hard to imagine a tense eve-of-battle argument in any other sci-fi thriller featuring an angry exchange like this one between Mal and his uppity crewman Jayne in Serenity:

Mal: (Rhetorically) "You wanna run this ship?!"

Jayne: "Yes!"

Mal: (Completely flummoxed) "Well... you can't!"

And most of all there are the characters themselves. When I watched the pilot show I found it hard to warm to Nathan Fillion as Mal: he just seemed tough, brooding, and bitter. I assumed he was the 26th century's version of Clint Eastwood's Josey Wales; a burned out case who would slowly recover his humanity. But as the series progressed it soon turned out that Mal was already far more human than your average sci-fi space captain; as well as the bitter and brooding thing he can be clumsy, funny, stubborn, shy, heroic - and sometimes just plain wrong. It's a lovely, self-deprecating performance (and David Boreanaz as Angel managed something similar, so I suspect much of the credit must go to Joss Whedon's writing****).

Alan Tudyk as Serenity's pilot is equally endearing, playing one of Whedon's familiar uber-nerds, wistfully aware that he's not as tough and battle-hardened as his wife Zoe or crewmates Mal and Jayne. ( "Hey, I've been in a firefight before! Well, I was in a fire... Actually, I was fired...") Zoe (Gina Torres) tends to act as Mal's conscience, she exudes strength and decency and we wish she had more time on screen. Adam Baldwin's Jayne is a stupid, treacherous, bullying, loose cannon, but somehow quite loveable too, and the source of many of the show's best jokes (and best hat). There's really no point listing the others, because they're all just as good (well Simon and River are a bit irritating, but I think they're meant to be) and the relationships between them, their rivalries and loyalties, smouldering resentments and undeclared loves, form the heart of Firefly. That's what makes the series ultimately more enjoyable than the movie: Serenity packs a lot of plot into its two hours (and starts with the most elegant series of nested flashbacks I've ever seen to bring newcomers up to speed), but while it wraps up the story pretty well it hasn't time to explore the characters in the way that TV can. If only they'd been allowed to develop over the course of three or four seasons...

Still, at least we have one series. Well, two thirds of one series. And a movie. And a legion of loyal followers, who call themselves 'Browncoats', and whose cheerful devotion helps to keep the Firefly flame burning. Whether it will last remains to be seen: a few years ago there seemed to be an idea around that if the fans were just vocal enough the show might be revived, but that seems unlikely now. Maybe the story will continue in the comics. Maybe Mr Whedon should commission, say, a little-known British children's sci-fi author to write some tie in novels. Anyway, whatever happens, if you haven't joined the ranks of the Browncoats yet, you should buy, borrow, rent or download Firefly and Serenity (in that order).

They're shiny.

*Sci-fi shows have always suffered from being a)quite pricey to make and b)a bit of a minority interest - though weirdly the bleak War on Terror metaphor Battlestar Galactica which started around the same time as Firefly was popular enough to run to five joyless and increasingly confusing seasons...

**When Sarah and I went to see Serenity at the old Odeon in Plymouth there was a little speech by Joss Whedon tacked on to the beginning in which he thanked all the show's fans for making the movie possible. It was thoroughly charming, and it felt as if he was talking just to us. In fact, since we were the only people in the cinema, I guess technically he was....

***Joss Whedon seems to have something of a preoccupation with the Oldest Profession*. It surfaces again in the much darker Dollhouse. I expect feminists have something to say about that.

****Of course it takes quite a large team of writers to produce the scripts for a show like Firefly, and some of the dialogue I've quoted in this post may not be by Joss Whedon himself; but I'm assuming he's responsible for the creation of the character's characters.

*That's stonemasons, children.

Excalibur Pre-Fabs

2011-01-09T05:43:00.000-08:00

It turns out that Excalibur isn't just the name of King Arthur's sword, and my favourite movie; it's also an estate of 1940s pre-fab bungalows in South London, which Lewisham Council (Boo! Hiss!) is currently planning to demolish. This short video was made by Sarah McIntyre, who has written about it on her own highly esteemed blog. It's a great introduction to a place - and a cause - that I did not know about. I particularly like the way that all the streets on the estate seem to be named after Arthurian characters... though who'd want to live on Morded Road?

Monsters

2011-01-09T05:07:00.000-08:00

By Philip Reeve

Living in the country: being a parent: going to the cinema. It's possible to combine any two of these activities but not, I've found, all three. Since my son was born in 2002 I've barely been to the pictures at all, except to take him to see the occasional Pixar movie. But last night he was staying with one of his friends, so Sarah and I ventured down to the Barn cinema at Dartington to watch Monsters, an ambitious low-budget sci-fi road movie by the young British director Gareth Edwards. (In my day, young British directors only did cheesy mockney gangster flicks, so whatever you think of his film you have to admit that ambitious sci-fi road movies are a step in the right direction.)

Monsters is cut from similar (but cheaper) cloth to Neil Bloemenkamp's District 9. It follows a couple of stranded Americans as they try to make it back to the US border through a spreading 'infected zone' in northern Mexico which has been seeded with alien life brought back by a ill-advised NASA space probe (did Quatermass teach them nothing?) Unlike your average Hollywood catastophe flick, Monsters doesn't show us the end of civilisation happening overnight, but presents it as something slow and rather humdrum. Unfortunately the film itself is also slow and humdrum in places, with the central characters flanning around picturesque Mexican barrios like hipsters on a gap-year, barely bothering to mention the giant space octopi which are such a fixture on the rolling news channels. The aliens - whose motives and intelligence remain obscure - seem to have been infected by the same ennui and just stomp listlessly about knocking down buildings and scoffing pick-up tricks because, you know, that's what monsters do... It's obviously aiming to be a bit more existential than your average creature feature, but I did find myself yearning for the days when monster movies always came complete with a Scientist and his Beautiful Daughter who could explain a bit about the critters' life cycles.

Still, mustn't grumble; the film is beautifully shot and edited, and the background is nicely sketched in, with hovering gunships and flights of jets giving the impression of some huge, secret and probably doomed military operation going on just beyond the edges of the story, and signs everywhere which look like the Mexican equivalent of those wartime 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters that trendhounds nowadays find so hugely ironic. There are a couple of very well done monster encounters, and slightly too many scenes which build up a huge amount of tension and then fizzle out in some sort of false alarm. There is also a very good journey up a river clearly twinned with one in Apocalypse Now.

In the old days, monsters were always a metaphor for The Bomb; these modern ones were definitely a metaphor for something, but I couldn't quite work out what. The gringos' carpet bombing and chemical weapons seemed to be causing more damage than the creatures themselves, and a lot was made of a huge anti-alien wall which the US authorities were building all along their southern border. There was a bit of talk about how the U.S was 'imprisoning itself'. I suspect the message we were supposed to come away with was that the Third World, despite all its poverty, violence, and scary viruses, is actually no more of a threat to us than a swarm of aggressive walking squid the size of office buildings. Or something.

Ionia

2010-12-16T01:38:00.000-08:00

Paul Andruss and his partner moved to Turkey three years ago after deciding to stop moaning about life and start living it. Each year they take a trip: this year it was to some of the ancient sites a few hours drive away.

This land of gods and heroes fills me with irrational love and irrepressible longing. Here a sister married her brother and built him a tomb so magnificent it became a wonder of the world. Here, a nymph saw a young man drink from her spring and desired him so fiercely, she prayed they would never part. With cruel humour, the gods joined flesh to flesh, creating the first hermaphrodite...

This is Bodrum, once Halicarnassus, home of the mausoleum. Behind the town, hidden in hills of olive and pine, is the spring of Salamcis where the son of Hermes and Aphrodite drank. The heartland of Ionic Greece was already ancient when the Parthenon shone brand-new on the lion coloured rock of the acropolis. Cities old as time ringed the Gulf of Latmos; even then a dying seaway, choked with mud from the Meander River. First Priene and then Milatus were left high and dry. Abandoned since antiquity they provided tourist attractions for Ancient Rome.

To one side of the silted estuary is Lake Bafa, formed by the tears of the Moon goddess weeping for the shepherd boy, Endymion. On the other, the city of Miletus, where in the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul awaited the Ephesian elders. Once, Lake Bafa was seashore. The freshwater lake only formed when the estuary silted. The men of Heraclea faced with the retreating sea, dug desperate channels, causing seawater to make the lake brackish. Legend says the moon goddess, Selene, was so smitten with Endymion she threatened to forsake the sky. In response, the fearful gods made him sleep for eternity and as she wept for her lost love, she cried a lake. It was a good day in November and Bafa was body warm, we swam and can confirm the water does indeed taste of tears.

The Meander estuary is now a fertile plain. Having never seen it in November we were surprised by hundreds of cotton wool balls littering the roads. It was cotton-pickin’ time. Turkish women, in traditional rural dress of headscarf and baggy trousers, picked tufts of gossamer from branches of stunted, scrawny bushes. It could have been a hundred years ago if not for the huge blocky harvester devouring the adjacent field; it’s parallel rows of vertical teeth leaving only broken, skeletal stalks. In factory courtyards were cotton castles of pearl- grey lint, while caught in the wire of the perimeter fence, grimy candyfloss streamed in the wind. The first stop was the ancient city of Eurymos. All that is left is the Temple of Zeus. We were the only people there. It was like discovering it for the first time, as if we were some Victorian explorers with Sir Richard Burton - the one who translated the Arabian Nights, not the one who married and remarried Elizabeth Taylor.

The only problem with fantasy is truth. Although sites look undiscovered they are actually the result of extensive excavation. Unexcavated, they are under 2,000 years and at least 20 feet of wind blown soil - like the rest of Eurymos. One field is the forum and another is the theatre. Each has its herd of indifferent sheep, munching as they have munched for millennia, placidly unaware of their contribution to history, falling out the other end.

The temple of Apollo at Didim was never finished because during the centuries it took to build, Christianity became the state religion and pagan temples were abandoned. It is impossible to convey the sheer size of the site. Nothing is on a human scale, the column bases; the cyclopean stones walls - only a third of their original height. All of it dwarfs you. Awes you. It is like something built by giants.

There is a sacred spring in the temple grounds. It had recently rained and the area was marshy. It should have prepared us for what was to come at Miletus…. It didn’t. Here we saw tortoises mating. And it was lucky they were tortoises. When Tiresias saw two snakes copulate, he changed sex. Because of his unique perspective, Zeus and Hera asked Tiresias to settle an argument about who needed love the most. Tiresisa replied that if love had ten parts, women needed nine. Hera was so furious she blinded him. Leaving Zeus to compensate with the dubious gift of second sight.

Back at the car, we saw a stone placed at the base of a wall. As it was obviously for looking over, we discovered part of the sacred way stretching from Miletus, 26 km away, to the shrines of Apollo and his sister, Artemis.

We had read that Miletus has a fantastic theatre but not much else. Because of this, our friends decided they had had enough of scrambling over ruins and went to the site café, leaving us to explore.

Reaching the top of the theatre we saw the rest of the city hidden to the side, the wreckage of the harbour mouth monument, now miles inland, the forum, the stoa and senate house lining the start of the sacred way.

The site was boggy and halfway through, mosquitoes attacked. According to the guidebook the café owner was trying to sell our friends, when the Meander River silted up, the city became a malarial swamp and that was another reason it was abandoned. One of our friends said we came fleeing out of the ruins like Tippi Hedren in “The Birds” – obviously in search of a phone box to shelter in. In our defence, the mosquitoes did seem the size of Hitchcock’s gulls.

Our friend Jack is thinking of writing a travel book and, caught up in the idea, has a tendency to pause after each utterance as if waiting for an unseen amanuensis to jot down his musings for posterity, which is probably not far from the truth as he is committing the phrase to memory for future use.

From Miletus we drove through the alluvial plain to Priene, crossing the mighty Meander, now tamed to the size of the Regent’s Canal. Approaching the site, we saw the remaining columns of the Temple of Hera on the hillside and a ruin-lined road snaking down to the old port, now farmer’s fields.

Priene is another huge area of tumbled stones, smashed columns and fractured walls sheltering under black cypress and pine. Unchanged since the time of Caesar and Christ, the view across the plain takes your breath away.

The next morning, no doubt due to a sleepless night of trying not to scratch souvenir mosquito bites, we were up at daybreak. Duly covered up like Turkish cotton pickers, we walked down to the lakeside to watch the full moon turn the far water silver, while the light bringer, Lucifer, the morning star, ushered in a dawn of lemon and rose – the flavours of Turkish Delight.

The rest of Paul's enhanced photos of Didim, Miletus and Priene and extensive

footnotes can be found on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/book-drawings/sets/72157625509728092/

His novel Thomas the Rhymer - 'A children's story for adults' can be downloaded from his website.

Pull Out All The Stops

2010-12-02T10:29:00.000-08:00

Sarah McIntyre and Philip Reeve have been intrigued, entertained and amazed by Geraldine McCaughrean's Pull Out All The Stops, a brand-new sequel to her much-loved novel Stop The Train.

Here are some photographs to prove it:

Intrigued...

Entertained...

Amazed!

Stop The Train told how the children of the prairie town of Olive, Oklahoma, manage to persuade the railway company to build a station there. It also introduced the Bright Lights Theatre Company, and the spectacular schoolteacher-turned-tragedienne, Miss Loucien. In Pull Out All The Stops the young protagonists, Cissy Sissney and Kookie Warboys, set sail with the Bright Lights aboard a shabby stern-wheeler, bound for adventures involving gamblers, bandits, steamboat races and Queen Victoria ... sort of. The Bee asked Ms McIntyre to review the new book, but all she sent us were these letters...

Sarah McIntyre has just launched her own railway adventure picture book, 'When
Titus Took the Train' with Oxford University Press.

Photos by Stuart Pyle.

Fresh Pages: Samples from the Sound-World of The Books.

2010-11-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

By Nick Riddle.

The Books (Photo: Nino P.)

Radio 3’s Late Junction is pretty good at digging up a few curious and engaging pieces from the loamy subsoil of music’s less-frequented corners. Thanks to Fiona Talkington and co, I am no longer a knee-jerk knitter of the eyebrows at the mere mention of electronica or sampling. I discovered I’m quite partial to Matthew Herbert, especially his  Plat du Jour, which does inventive things with the sound of food (and makes political points about the food industry, if you want to take such things on board), and Matmos, whose album   The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast revels in references to Patricia Highsmith, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Joe Meek and King Ludwig II Of Bavaria.

But best and most listenable of all is the Boston duo,  The Books. Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong trawl through jumble sales and thrift stores for old home-recorded cassettes and use them to build, er, sound collages with music. No, that doesn’t do them justice. Their albums are stuffed with oddness, humour, non-sequitur, a kind of absurdist pathos, and - crucial, this - terrific music, inspired by minimalism and American folk and played mostly on acoustic instruments.

The Books also ransack old videocassettes in search of footage for their videos, making them more than unusually worth looking for on YouTube. Try these two for size: The first a glimpse into the violent world of young siblings, the second a track that gallops ruminatively through someone’s four-minute daydream.

Any of their four full-length albums is worth a go. Their DVD, Play All, is great if you like free-association montages, but you can end up feeling a bit mad if you overdo it in one sitting. You can order it from The Books’ website.

Nick Riddle works at Bristol University and blogs about an obscure troubadour legend at The Afterlife of Jaufre Rudel.

St Vincent

2010-10-31T03:32:00.000-07:00

Philip Reeve turns his attention to that modern-type beat music.

Now I don't set myself up as a music critic. I know almost nothing about music, and for long periods of my life I've been happy to listen to none at all. Nowadays I have an MP3 player, but it only comes out when I'm on a long train journey, and is mostly filled with stuff I liked when I was fifteen - listening to it is more about nostalgia than music appreciation.

However, I do sometimes stumble upon something new that seems good and worth sharing, and one of these good things is Annie Clark, who records under the name St Vincent. I have no idea what musical genre she falls into - perhaps she falls between several, and that's why I never hear her on the radio. Her voice is very clear and sweet, and her lyrics often verge on the whimsical, but she's never twee: there's something sinister in there too, and the arrangements are often strange, decked out with grinding guitars and bursts of sudden drama. In a way she reminds me a bit of David Lynch - that sense of something strange and twisted lurking behind the white picket fences o' Middle America... except that I always found that deeply boring and predictable when David Lynch did it, and St Vincent is never either of those things.

Enough: I think you'd better have a listen for yourself: here's one of the singles from her recent album Actor.

And this is another 'track' (as I believe they're called) from the same album, this time played live:

You're in the Country now...

2010-10-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

Text and photos by Andrew Gorton.

One rather damp morning, I decided to cycle to the ruins of a local castle (or 'fortified manor' as the English Heritage sign has it), at Baconsthorpe. I took a path along a recently ploughed field towards some woods, and soon found my way blocked by a style. Being too lazy to lift the bike over I retraced my route 50 yards and took a left turn, hoping to find another way around. Pedalling away, I was only half-aware of the fluttery, squawking disturbances in the line of trees to the right. Suddenly a piercing whistle attracted my attention. An irate capped face, that of a gamekeeper or some such, was peering at me through the undergrowth. ‘Excuse me; this is not a public footpath. You’re disturbing the pheasants!’ Chastened, I headed back the way I had come, half expecting some buckshot to pepper me as I fled. I never got to see the castle that day.

This incident brought home the fact that I, a London boy through and through, was now living in the country. There have been a few others since then. I captured the scene below on camera a few weeks back. My bedroom window overlooks a farmer's field, which has had several types of crop planted in it over the 4 years I have been here, including bright yellow rapeseed one time. The smell of that stuff was overpowering when the wind was right. It occurred to me that I would never have seen this view in North London! I found it rather evocative. There are several fields around my area, and you can often see various different agricultural machines at work, combines, tractors spraying clouds of fertiliser.... Sometimes you can also see the fruits of the farmers’ labour. I once came across 5 or 6 large sacks about 3 foot square by 6 foot high stacked on the edge of one field by the road. Noticing one was half-full, I sidled up and found it full of potatoes. I could easily have filled my pockets but I stayed my hand. I wish I’d taken some now. *

There have been a few other rural encounters. One day I was walking through my local National Trust property of Sheringham Park and I suddenly came across a herd of cows. They seemed well trained, if that term could be applied, as they kept on the fields either side of the path. The thing was, I could have walked up and tried to milk them or something. Again, that would never have happened where I come from. It actually makes good ecological as well as agricultural sense to graze them there, as keeping the grass cropped encourages biodiversity in the form of wild flowers and the insects they attract.

Some cows contemplate their narrow escape from a guerilla milking incident.

So what of the county of Norfolk? It has been said that nothing ever good came from here, but I’d disagree. Norfolk has produced many people of note, foremost of whom, in my opinion, have got to be Lord Nelson, Stephen Fry and Henry Blogg, the most decorated of lifeboat men. Norfolk has also produced heroes in the mould of Edith Cavell, a nurse serving in Belgium during World War 1, who was executed by the Germans for helping some British servicemen to escape capture, as well as the Iceni queen Boudica, who led a doomed revolt against the Romans. The county has produced its own share of sportsmen, artists and writers, including Philip Pullman, a literary hero of mine.

Speaking of literature, Norfolk has influenced the creator of one famous detective to resurrect him. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was staying at the Royal Links hotel in Cromer, recovering from a fever picked up in Afghanistan. It was when dining with a friend that he heard an interesting local legend of Black Shuck, a large, ghostly black dog that was said to cause death to whoever beheld it. And thus, The Hound of the Baskervilles was born. It is rumoured that, to this day, Norfolkians have never forgiven Conan-Doyle for relocating the story to Dartmoor.

Upper Sheringham

Andrew Gorton is an Open University student, London born but now living on the north Norfolk coast.

*The Bee in no way condones potato rustling. Ed.

War Without Hate

2010-10-10T14:42:00.000-07:00

Philip Reeve celebrates a classic film, and the book on which it was based.

I was born more than twenty years after the end of the Second World War, but as a child I could almost have been forgiven for thinking that it was still going on. We boys of the 1970's played Tommies vs Huns in the school playground, spent our evenings sticking together model Spitfires and Hurricanes, and whenever we switched on the TV there seemed to be either a wartime drama playing (Colditz, Secret Army) or one of the old war movies which the British film industry turned out in huge numbers both during the war and in the decades after it. The 'seventies were a grim decade for this country, so I suppose it's only natural that we liked looking back to the last time we actually achieved anything, but in retrospect it all seems slightly sad; a washed-up culture, forever looking back. It's one of the greatest and least recognised achievements of George Lucas that he finally brought World War II to an end; after Star Wars came out the 00-gauge Spitfires that dangled from our bedroom ceilings were replaced by X-wing fighters, and schoolboys learned to make blaster noises instead of straining their young vocal cords with the stertorous egh-egh-egh-egh-egh of Schmeissers and Tommy-guns. War movies (which had by then been degraded to the level of brutish fantasies like The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare) were replaced by a new sort of fantasy; there were no more chipper Tommies on our screens; cinematic GIs were embroiled in a far more dubious war in Vietnam, and Nazi-slaughtering had been outsourced to Indiana Jones, who seemed happy enough to do it on a freelance basis. TV channels still stuffed the gaps in their schedules with old war films, but they began to look rather quaint - quite unfairly so, as many of them were actually very workmanlike productions, made in the days when Britain still had a film industry worthy of the name, and often based on the memoirs of people who had done extraordinary things between 1939 and 1945.

My favourite of them, though, was one of the later ones, and its story (as far as I know) is pure fiction*. Released in 1958 and adapted from his own novel by Christopher Landon, Ice Cold in Alex is that rare beast, a war movie with almost no actual war in it. It tells the story of a captain in the British Ambulance Division, his sergeant major, and a nursing sister who, after the fall of Tobruk, make a long and difficult journey across the desert in a battered army ambulance to escape the advancing Afrika Korps and reach British-held Alexandria. Along the way they pick up a South African officer, whom they gradually start to suspect may really be a German spy. Here's an absolutely splendid trailer for it ("North Airfrica: The Bettlefield of Giants... ").

The movie is a classic, and very easily available on DVD even if you haven't caught it on the telly, where it's frequently re-run. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, it stars John Mills as Captain Anson, Sylvia Syms as the nurse, Diana, Harry Andrews as Sergeant Major Pugh and Anthony Quayle as the South African hitch-hiker, van der Poel. It was released in the US under the gung-ho sounding title Desert Attack!, which is rather misleading, since the only attack in the whole movie is the bombardment of Tobruk by off-screen Germans which starts the story off; once our heroes are on the road in their ambulance their main enemy is the desert, and the important set-pieces are not their encounters with Afrika Korps patrols (who mostly behave with a regard for the Geneva Convention that would have been unimaginable in the screen Nazis of a decade before) but the tense crossing of abandoned minefields and treacherous salt-flats. The unforgettable scene in which the ambulance has to be cranked by hand up a seemingly endless incline - twice - is worthy of Clouzot's Wages of Fear. It's such a good film that I'm almost afraid to mention it, in case another reference on Google leads some bright spark in Hollywood to do a remake starring Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie and sky-loads of CGI Stukas...

The book on which the film was based is less well-known these days, but thanks to the miracle of buying second hand books on the internet I was able to come by a copy recently. I'm pleased to say that it is every bit as good as the film, and although the film is faithful to it (except for one rather startling change which I shall come to in a moment) there is enough extra detail, enough fleshing out of characters and historical background, that I was never bored by knowing what was coming next. Christopher Landon could write, and he was writing here about something he understood, having served in ambulances during the desert war himself. He is remarkably honest about the psychological strain of it all (Anson is on the verge of a nervous breakdown as the story opens, and increasingly dependent on drink). He's also scrupulously humane. 'A War without Hate' was what the Germans called the conflict in north Africa**. Since their lot started it that was hardly for them to say, and one imagines there must have a bit of hatred washing about in those savage and deadly desert battles. But it's true that there seem to have been no atrocities, that both sides treated prisoners and enemy casualties well, and that a certain respect and almost affection seems to have existed between them. This Landon captures well, and he is always careful to remind us that the Germans are as human as his heroes. Even when the widowed Tom Pugh thinks of his wife, killed in Plymouth by 'a lone raider, the fighters on his tail, dropping his load... to get more speed for the desperate run home', he is aware that 'There had been no hate in the mind that loosed those bombs, he knew, only fear. And in him, now, there was no hate either.' These small asides underline one of the main themes of both book and film; the possibility of comradeship between the Brits and their German passenger; enemies united against 'the greater enemy: the desert.'

But the big surprise of the book, to someone who knows the film, is that it is Sergeant Major Pugh, not Captain Anson, who is really the hero. Anson is sympathetic and admirable, and the friendship between the two men is at the heart of the story, but far more of it is told through Anson's eyes than Pugh's, and crucially, unlike in the film, it's Pugh who gets the girl.

What was at the root of that change, I wonder? Did John Mills, as the bigger star, have to be given the love scene? But if that's the case, why could he not have played Pugh instead of Anson? Was only the officer class allowed to have love interest in British cinema of the '50s? In some ways the relationship between Anson and Diana in the film is more interesting than the Pugh/Diana pairing in the book - it has an awkward, one-night-stand quality which leaves us in some doubt as to whether it will continue once they get to Alexandria, while Pugh and Diana in the book are clearly going to get married and head back happily to his village on the Tamar. But it leaves the always excellent Harry Andrews playing something of a stereotype; the indomitable, uncomplaining, basically sexless sergeant major who keeps things running smoothly for his more sensitive commanding officer.

In the end, I can't help feeling that by making this change in his screenplay, Mr Landon slightly betrayed his own novel. But then movies always betray the books on which they're based, and I suppose if he hadn't done it, someone else would, and might have made a far worse job of it. And if there had not been a film, not only would be the poorer for the lack of it, but the book would probably have vanished into obscurity by now, one of many such novels written, in the years after the war, by men who'd seen a thing or two and had stories to tell.

*The trailer and poster both seem to suggest that it's a true story, but there is no mention of that in the novel.

*Also the title of a very good history of the period by John Bierman and Colin Smith

Mr Levett's Scottish Tour: Part the Last.

2010-10-09T02:14:00.000-07:00

In which Jeremy Levett and family reach Edinburgh, the final stop on their Caledonian oddyssey.

Photo: Oliver Bonjoch

I'd forgotten Edinburgh. It's one of the loveliest cities I know.

Colin and Paula are old friends of my parents, and their children only a bit older than my brothers and I. Their house, near Newhaven, is linked to Dorothy and Paul’s house on Corstorphine Road by a pleasantly long walk along the Water of Leith.

The path felt as though it had been built by someone digging through my dreams. If it weren't for the regular-but-unpredictable outcrops of dogshit it's damn close to heaven on earth. At times it's a steep-sided valley with fast-flowing water and greenery on all sides, with only the murmur of traffic and the looming silhouettes of viaducts far overhead to remind you you're in Scotland's first city. At other times, it's a straight, civilised watercourse, one storey down from the rest of the town, with flat bridges and buildings on both sides, like a shallower, wilder city canal. The path crosses over the river on all manner of bridges, and sometimes leaves the water's edge entirely, passing through neat gardens and streets of two-up-two-down tenements or rising a dozen metres to meet a road or circumnavigate a building, swinging you around on a cobblestoned waltz. Everything is green and alive, but the path is clear. Not by the actions of some local authority, but because hundreds, maybe thousands, of people use it, every day. But when we walked the path, the place (somehow) wasn't crowded; in the depths of the city, you can feel perfectly alone.

Photo: Richard Webb

It's got the good stuff: history, architecture, and all sorts of whimsical Fringey things by and sometimes in the water (weird little statues, follies, a rain shelter made of rebar.) The buildings on either side range from Elizabethan half-timbered things real and fake, through the skeletons of old mills (weirs and leats are the only remains of many more) to brand-spanking-new yuppie kennels. Tenement blocks and grand houses tower on the hillsides above. There was a pleasing lack of plastic trash, either in the water or built next to it.

My brother Oliver had left us for rehearsals and Stage Crew work for the school production (he's doing lighting). The day after we arrived in Edinburgh, the school theatre company rolled into town, for their show... at the Edinburgh fringe. What a total coincidence.

The production was "ASBO Fairy Tales." I wasn't overwhelmed by the concept (fairy tales - BUT WITH CHAVS AND DRUG REFERENCES LOL) the script (spotty and overly reliant on sudden scene changes and random narration), or the idea of private school kids pretending to be chavs (just because I didn't think they could do it without looking dumb, rather than from any stereotypes or issues of class warfare, comrade.) But it turned out to be pretty good entertainment; the acting was excellent across the board, and laughs were had. The only thing that let it down was the lighting - an endless sequence of painfully ghastly failures, which left the actors in pools of darkness, blinded the audience, set the curtains on fire, strobed us all into epileptic fits, and at one point caused all the lights to explode, sending showers of red-hot fragments across the stage, drilling into my body and stopping dead my beating heart, OLIVER. Still, I later heard they had totally unusual and unexpected full and near-full audiences for the rest of the week (still running at a loss, as all Fringe things do, but a less crippling one.) After the show I offered to help tidy things up, an offer perfectly timed to coincide with there being nothing to do but hobnob with the actors. We went down a Secret Back Staircase past a long line of nervy-looking young thesps wearing period costume and clutching various props, lining up for the next show. They really rush them through; the turnaround time at these venues would make pit crews envious. Most of the talent seemed to be Mikes: Mike Lovering (lighting, covering for Oliver's treasonable incompetence), Mike Howie (butt-ugly duckling) and Maik Keefe (mutely suave crack-piper of Hamelin.) It's odd how well I get on now with people who I just didn't have much contact with in school. Odd, and good. Mikes are cool people.

After that, Dad went off to Fringe it up on his lonesome while Mum and Dorothy bought Nick and I hideously overpriced, slow paninis and I browsed the fringe guide: trash, gimmicky trash, the same magnificent Flanders & Swann act we'd seen with Ned years ago, lolsorandumXD trash, shows that would have sold out five years ago, a variety show by Clarke Peters! Then we trotted up the Royal Mile, to look at buildings Paul had designed and be harangued by a million and one assorted weirdos in assorted weird costumes. So thick were the crowds that we got separated, upon which the heavens opened. The weather had been highly un-Scottish, and I was reminded of something our old Glaswegian neighbours would say in response to a sunny day: we'll pay for it.

We paid for it.

Photo: Alan Ford

The next day, Dad and I climbed up to Arthur's Seat and looked down on the city - the winding, picturesque tangle of the Old Town, the orderly grid-pattern of the New, weird spiky spires, office buildings that looked like a scaled-up

Giant's Causeway, faux-Athenian ruins and fortified civic buildings (St. Andrew's House, Scottish government HQ, combines Art Deco stylings with no-bullshit Scots construction sensibilities, a match made in stony heaven). Tugs guided a big liner into the docks among towering cranes and grain elevators, the tops of the Forth Bridge cantilevers poked up from behind the hills over the firth. Little puddles in the rocks were black with dead midges. We came down on the path less travelled (read: one fumble away from a rockslide) and had lunch in the town - battered cheeseburger. I've said it before: I love a place that takes its cholesterol seriously. Then, armed with a memory stick, a street map torn from the Fringe guide, some bus recommendations from Dorothy and the TomTom capability of my new phone, I crossed town to give Andrew a copy of Office, and back again to watch some Fringe shows Dad had recommended.

On the 14th, we picked up Oliver and drove back south in beautiful sunlight, stopping to look over Morecambe Bay and buying dinner from a chippie by a railway bridge. The fish and chips were fantastic, but it felt strange; there were no chipsteaks on the menu, and the accents were Northern, not Scots. In the darkness, sleepy and happy, we arrived home.

Jeremy Levett has his own blog, here.

A Conversation with Ian Beck

2010-10-02T04:29:00.000-07:00

I think it's fair to say that Ian Beck is something of a legend in the world of children's books; part of that great generation of illustrators who emerged from Britain's art colleges in the 1960s. He has long been famed for his picture books, but in recent years he's turned to writing longer stories too: his beautifully illustrated Tom Trueheart series harks back to the era of Arthur Rackham and Heath-Robinson, while the novel Pastworld uses his deep knowledge of Victorian London as the basis for a very 21st century sci-fi thriller. He's kindly taken time out from writing and drawing to answer a few questions for the Bee. But first, settle down and enjoy this trailer for his latest book, Tom Trueheart and the Land of Myths and Legends.

Philip Reeve: It turns out we're both Brighton boys. Can you tell us a bit about your background?

Ian Beck: I was born just after the war (WW2 that is) not in Brighton itself but in Hove. My family was working class, and very much so. My father was a milkman, and we lived in a house with, and rented by, my maternal grandmother. Most of our neighbours lived in rented houses and they mostly rented from the same landlord. It was essentially the end of an Edwardian way of life which was still lingering on post war. Our immediate neighbours were an elderly brother and sister who were completely Edwardian, he wore a tasselled smoking cap and a black velvet smoking jacket with a quilted collar and frogging and I can still remember the texture of their chenille table cloth, and the pictures of Queen Victoria on their biscuit tins. I have no doubt that this fuelled my later obsession with the era. Although we were poor I never felt the lack of anything and indeed had the usual sort of 1950's childhood, Saturday morning cinema club, (ABC Minors) cubs and scouts, Adrian Hill and Sketch Club and Quatermass on television, all of that.

A youthful Ian Beck (far right).

I failed my eleven plus and went to the local secondary modern school. This in many ways was the saving of me. No real pressure to perform academically. After the first year the incumbent headmaster was imprisoned for paedophilic crimes against some of the boys. A new head was appointed who was very keen on Shakespeare and plays and drama and the arts generally and as time went on I got very involved in acting in the school productions and designing the programmes etc inluding making a lino cut for Macbeth. I liked performing and public speaking and even went to elocution lessons run by of all things the CO-OP (my father was a Co-op milkman). This has certainly helped latterly in my visits to schools and so on. At the same time I had noticed and studied the profusion of little black and white drawings that were all over the Radio Times, and I noticed the names of the illustrators who drew them too, only in those days they would have been referred to by most people not as illustrators but commercial artists. My immediate ambition was to get a job drawing for the Radio Times, I wrote to them and a had a polite reply which suggested art school as the first priority.

Following the uprising in Hungary against the Russians in 1956 a great many creative refugees came to Britain. One of them, a sculptor named Victor Prejm, ended up teaching art at my school. Both he, and the headmaster, Mr Turner, encouraged my ambition in their different ways. Mr Prejm suggested that I went to the children's saturday morning art classes at Brighton School of Art. This was a revelation to me, the feel of the art school that is and the glimpses I managed to get of the glamorous full time students, girls with pony tails black slacks or stockings and baggy sweaters. I was at once determined to go there as a full time student myself when I left school. However my Father died suddenly just before my final year, and it took some persuading by my headmaster for my mother to allow me to go to the art school at all, which in the end (very happily) I did in 1963.

At art school I had ambitions to be a painter. However during my foundation year it was clear to the staff that my interests were almost entirely literary, I would produce large charcoal and conte drawings based on seeing Orson Welle's film of Kafka's The Trial and after foundation I was bundled off into Graphics. We were very lucky to be taught then by a profusion of talented illustrators. Raymond Briggs was a part time tutor as was John Lawrence, John Vernon Lord, Ferelith Eccles Williams, and Justin Todd. Of my fellow students during those five happy years, one of them, Ian Butterworth, has latterly designed several of my picture books, it is amazing to have had that continuity of friendship and collaboration over nearly fifty years. Several illustrators came out of my year, most notably Peter and Sian Bailey, and designer illustrators too, like Bob Norrington. I became focussed at Art School on a career in Illustration, I drifted for a while after I left and was eventually persuaded by my then girlfriend's mother to move to London, which was the best and most sensible thing I ever did. I certainly feel that London is where I belong now even though I still have great affection for the sea and seaside places.

PR: I've been aware of your picture books for a long time, but I think you've only recently started writing longer texts, including Pastworld, which isn't illustrated at all. Was writing novels always an ambition, or something that came later?

IB: While I was at Art School, and indeed before, I was an obsessive reader. I got totally hooked on certain writers. Ray Bradbury, Vladimir Nabokov, M R James, Chesterton's Father Brown stories, odd novels, such as Portrait of Jennie by Robert Nathan which I found trawling the second hand bookshops. I tried to write throughout my art school years, principally adult fiction but was very easily distracted and was also very good at self discouragement. After my move to London I went to creative writing courses at the City Lit, in Stukeley Street but these somehow only strengthened my own insecurities. It was after all the early seventies and avant garde novels were the only thing possible for a young would be or aspiring writer. I admired Alan Garner, and also and especially Thomas Pynchon. I ended up writing pale versions of them which inevitably petered out after a few pages. By this time I was earning a good living as an illustrator. Not for children's books but for magazines, album covers, that sort of thing. By the mid seventies I was also a regular illustrator for the Radio Times, so one childhood ambition was fulfilled at least. It was only when I was married and we had our first baby that I began to get interested in the idea of illustrating for children. Looking back on some of my earlier commercial work, it seems an obvious leap. A lot of what I was doing before was heavily influenced by various children's illustrators of the past, a kind of nursery nostalgia which seemed popular with art directors then.

When our first child was about a year old I had an approach from the Oxford University Press. A young editor there named David Fickling had an idea for a baby book, which showed parents how to play all the old finger games. I drew some samples and was offered the book to illustrate, which was; Round and Round the Garden, first published in 1983 and still going strong. This was such a pleasurable experience, both drawing for the book and working with David, that I wanted to do more. Luckily the book was a success and so more followed until the books gradually edged out all the other work. David also encouraged me to write my own stories to illustrate which I did increasingly.

PR: I remember the Radio Times being a treasure-trove of illustration. By the '70s when I was looking at it the TV section was mostly photographs, as was the cover - except at Christmas - but the radio pages always had illustrations, and I remember trying to copy these little images by people like Robin Jacques, who was the first illustrator whose work I came to recognise. I probably had a go at some of yours, too!

We should talk about influences. From following you on Twitter I've gleaned that you're a big fan of cinema, and I've also heard you mention that the Pre-Raphaelites were important to you...

IB: I grew up in the era before Television. In my childhood you could wander into a cinema at any time during the programme, ('B' picture, cartoon, newsreel, trailers, adverts, ice creams, 'A' picture) you could also sit there all day and see it all through more than once if you wanted to. It was common to walk in half way through a thriller, pick up the story as it went along, in media res, as it were. See it through to the end, then catch the beginning watch it through until the middle, then say, 'this is where we came in', and leave. This all changed with Psycho in 1960, when Hitchock allowed no admission after the film had started, so gradually continuous programming stopped. Cinema was and is certainly, along with music the biggest influence on my work. Seeing films in those big glamorous single screen cinemas in Technicolor and Cinemascope was bound to have a lasting effect, it still does.

There was a big revival of interest in Victorian art while I was at art school, the art nouveau revival, the re-discovery of Aubrey Beardlsey ( a Brightonian) and Alphonse Mucha all of that set me to reading books on the period by James Laver, William Gaunt, and others and I soon immersed myself in it, the recognition and interest partly stemming, I have no doubt, from those quaint childhood neighhbours in Hove. It all felt and still feels very alive and real to me.No accident then that my first novel for young adults, Pastworld, should be set in an alternate version of that London.

PR: There's a house in Brighton with a blue plaque on it to say it was once home to Aubrey Beardsley, 'master of the line'. Some friends of mine used to think he must have been a famous angler! And I remember falling completely under the spell of the Pre-Raphaelites when I was about sixteen and making pilgrimages with my friend Justin Hill to see the Burne Jones windows in Ovingdean Church; I wanted to be a Pre-Raphaelite. Unfortunately there wasn't much call for that sort of thing in the 1980's; I think the Victorian revival had passed by then, and they pretty much knocked it out of me at art college. But I did feel that fascination with things Victorian and Edwardian all through my childhood, and for a long time afterwards; it seemed much more real to me than the real world, which I thought was hugely overrated!

Can you tell us a bit about what you're working on at the moment?

IB: I have just finished the second draft (I doubt it will be the last) of a new novel for younger readers, again a Victorian setting but not London, a big square house in the country which is surrounded by an enchanted wood,there is a changeling girl, and such like things.it is called at the moment; The Haunting of Charity La Touche, it will be illustrated too, with black and white drawings as are my Tom Trueheart books, but not silhouettes.

I am also finishing the first draft of another young adult title, provisionally called The Hidden Kingdom, which I am enjoying writing very much. I don't want to say too much about it, except that it snows a lot and it is set in a mythical place.

PR: Every time I look at Twitter there seems to be something by you saying, "A good day's writing!" or "Just polished off another chapter - going well!"... Do you really enjoy the writing process? And do you plan the stories, or just let them grow?

IB: I do enjoy the process of building the story. I feel I am blessed to be given a chance at a new phase in my work and especially at my late age. It all feels like a bonus, I can imagine nothing nicer than settling in with a good scene to write. I do plan, and then, despite the planning, the thing suddenly runs away on its own power. Things crop up, accidents, notions, links I hadn't thought of and so I follow them. The craft is I think in lacing it all together and making it seem meant and the only way the story could have gone, that is what I have been gradually learning. Not only over the last four years or so, but of course in all my years of reading too.

For further information (and illustration and animation) visit Ian's Website...

It's That Sheep Again: the Bee salutes Vern & Lettuce

2010-10-01T09:14:00.000-07:00

By Philip Reeve.

It's always a shame when a favourite post is finally nudged off the bottom right hand corner of the Bee's front page, and I was particularly sorry to see my conversation with Sarah McIntyre go. But fear not; not only will it be available in the archive for as long as there are pixels, but this week marked the official release date of her collected Vern and Lettuce stories.

These started life as weekly one-page strips in the DFC or David Fickling Comic, a publication which seems to have collected together a startling number of excellent writers and artists, but which sadly only lasted for 43 issues. (Partly, perhaps, because it had the worst title of any comic ever. David Fickling is famed within the worlds of publishing and children's books as a lovely man and a creative powerhouse, and young readers may recognise him as the publisher of top children's author and Radio 4 Rent-A-Gob, Philip Pullman. But I don't think children are much interested in publishers, whatever publishers may like to believe, and I can't see why they'd want a whole comic named after one. Would the Beano have survived all these years if had been called The DC Thompson & Co. Comic?)

Anyway, the DFC may be dead, but the strips to which it was once a home go marching on in the form of some very nice TinTin-format hardbacks called The DFC Library, and one of them is the lovely Vern and Lettuce. Vern is a sheep who lives in a tower block and works as groundsman (or groudssheep) in Pickle Rye Park; one of his neighbours is Lettuce, a rabbit, and her family of bunnies. It's all very charming without ever going anywhere near twee; the drawing is elegant and witty, but simple enough to make children want to copy it. In the first part of the book each page is a separate little story, often concerning Vern's attempts to keep the moles off his lawns; later on a kind of story-arc develops, linking the episodes into an adventure in which Vern and Lettuce embark on a misguided attempt to qualify for a TV talent show and end up confronting a maniac pigeon who plans to smother London in poo. Sarah MacIntyre's writing delights children and keeps grown-ups chuckling, too, and she's not above throwing in a Lord of the Rings reference at a particularly tense moment. Her palette is lovely as well; slightly autumnal oranges and violets, with a faded, textured look, harking back to Great Picture Books of the Past Which I Can't Quite Put My Finger On. (Perhaps that's because it doesn't really look like any of them, it just looks as if it belongs with them.)

So if you know anyone who's young or young-at-heart, your Christmas present buying worries are at an end; the only thing wrong with Vern and Lettuce is that it's too big to fit in a stocking. I'd suggest you hang up a pillowcase this year instead.

Other titles in the DFC Library are Spider Moon by Kate Brown, Good Dog, Bad Dog, by Dave Shelton (I was at college with him!), Mezolith, by Ben Haggarty and Adam Brockbank (too scary for me), MO-BOT High by Neill Cameron, and Monkey Nuts by the Etherington Brothers. More details can be found on this here David Fickling Books website.

More about Vern and Lettuce themselves here.

Inception

2010-09-30T02:40:00.000-07:00

Christopher Nolan's Inception is a film which seems to have been dividing opinions this summer. Fashionably late as always, the Bee takes a gander. Our reviewer is Rhys Jones.

The idea that drives Inception is the concept of the invasion of dreams. Invading the dreams of their victims, 'extractors' are able to glean precious secrets from the subject. Dom Cobb is such a man, and with the help of his team, he is one of the best in the dream-invasion field. Cobb and his crew hook themselves up to their subjects with wires, and together they infiltrate the subconsciousness of their victims.

Hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe), a wealthy businessman, they have been tasked with implanting ('incepting') an idea into the head of Robert Fischer (Cilian Murphy), who is set to inherit his father's multinational business empire. But the 'inception' of ideas is a whole lot harder, and involves many levels of dream states. And the more levels, the more is at stake, and Cobb is withholding vital information; information that could sabotage the whole operation....

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb, Inception is an amazing, heart-stopping multi-genre film that manages to combine sci-fi, action and thriller into one, gratifying cinema experience.

Unlike many contemporary action-come-thrillers, Inception is very much about the characters. It's not often you come across such a wide-variety of different characters in one film, and even less often is the main character so deep and so well performed that you really come to understand and connect with him. DiCaprio has done a magnificent job of bringing Cobb to life, and Inception proves that he is a great actor who deserves the recognition of winning an Oscar for his contribution to this film.

It's not only DiCaprio who inhabits his character with such distinction, though. The whole cast, many of whom have collaborated with Christopher Nolan before (including Michael Caine and Cillian Murphy, who both starred in Batman Begins) manage to take up their roles perfectly, fitting them like well-tailored after-dinner jackets. The Canadian actress, Ellen Page, who, at 23, already has numerous films under her belt, is really convincing as a young woman who is involved, not by choice, in such a large scale, illegal operation.

At this point, I should probably say something about Christopher Nolan, who I'm sure many know for directing the two Batman films, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Nolan is responsible for the concept of the film, which he wrote and directed himself, around the notion of “exploring the idea of people sharing a dream space — entering a dream space and sharing a dream”. Originally wanting Inception to be a horror film, he later changed his mind as horror films are traditionally very emotionally lacking, and he wanted to “raise the emotional stakes”. Nolan's screenwriting skills seem as accomplished as his directing skills, as Inception really does piece together in a very cinematic way.

The cinematography is perfectly executed; shot on film rather than digitally, every scene is beautiful in it's own right, and wonderfully lit. Action is caught perfectly, without too much wobble, and the score, written by the popular composer Hans Zimmer, ups the tension greatly. The visual effects are fantastic, and some will surprise you to know that they didn't involve CGI.

So, when everything is added up, what is the result? Well, it is something that should not be missed. Both intellectually gratifying and full of action, this tense piece of film-making involves the viewer, where other films only command you to be a spectator. Going to the cinema without being prepared to think is a bad idea, as Inception requires you to think, and grasp at ideas that are complicated but also wonderfully thought-provoking. Anyone who thinks Inception is a nice film to watch on a Saturday evening, a film to switch off to, again I say this is a bad idea; not only does the viewer need to be involved with the film, but the memorable action scenes will manage to keep your heart rate at a constant high. Inception is both visually and intellectually stunning, and is sure to be one of the best films of the coming years.

Exiting the cinema and stepping into the warm, autumnal sun is like waking from a dream.

Rhys Jones's book reviews can be read at his own site, Thirst for Fiction.

Citizen Science

2010-09-27T13:17:00.000-07:00

By Andrew Gorton

I think there is a tendency now that when the 'S' word is mentioned, the image that is conjured up in most people's minds is of huge, barely comprehensible projects such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Human Genome Project and the like. There is a very human tendency for non-scientifically literate minds to go blank, or sometimes seize up with panic at the mere mention of science. Certainly scientists and engineers are perceived as highly intelligent but socially inept, working on a level that most people cannot hope to reach.
Do not fear though, because there are ways average people can contribute to the scientific enterprise.

One very simple thing to do is to take part in a volunteer computing project. This is where you can lend your computer's (capacious) spare processing power to one of an increasing number of

scientific projects. This first began in 1999 with SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). One of their ongoing projects is to sift through data gathered by radio telescopes for specific patterns that may indicate the presence of intelligent life. The SETI team pioneered the technique of parcelling the data out over the internet to ordinary desktop computers, which would then process it during their idle moments. All a PC user has to do is download a free piece of software, hook up to the project and just let it run. Whether or not you can see any point to SETI, the project has paved the way for many other projects such as more mainstream astronomical projects and medical investigations to looking at new ways of playing chess. One recent project that caught my eye is in the process of decoding three ENIGMA messages transmitted during World War Two. ENIGMAs were complex machines that were designed by the Germans to encode messages. The codes were supposed to be unbreakable, but teams at Bletchley Park were able to do this by, among other techniques, developing the first computers. There is a computer museum located there now.

For those wanting a more active role, Galaxy Zoo was launched in 2007. The idea behind this project for anyone with a web browser can classify pictures of galaxies by their shape –whether elliptical or spiral. Although computers are good at crunching large amounts of data very quickly, one thing they are not good at is pattern recognition jobs like this, something which humans excel at. The military have a phrase for similar situations – using the Mark 1 Eyeball. In many situations this approach is better than any amount of technology. (The phrase was even used in the new Battlestar Galactica TV series. If memory serves, the characters had to solve a problem similar to Galaxy Zoo’s.)

Galaxy Zoo has been extremely successful with 150,000 volunteers taking part in the first stage

enabling the project scientists to conclude a lot about galaxy types and their behaviour. The project has since been relaunched, as Zooniverse, with galaxies taken from the Hubble telescope archives and a more comprehensive classification process. Having taken part it is a strangely addictive process: you are shown a photo of a galaxy, and you answer questions about its structure (round or spiral; if spiral, how many arms; how tight are the arms; and several more in a similar vein) by pressing the appropriate button next to the photo. The process takes about 30 seconds for each galaxy, and you can easily spend 15 minutes or longer doing this. Even the most powerful computers could spend several minutes on each galaxy, and their results are often unreliable. The same project has now widened considerably. Users can now classify features on the moon, and hunt for solar flares and supernovae.

Since moving to the Norfolk coast from London about 6 years ago, it recently occurred to me that I know very little about the natural world, especially the wild life. Last year a website called iSpot was launched with involvement by the Open University. This website allows you to upload photographs of plants, animals and fungi –anything living wild basically, for other users and wildlife experts to peruse. You add the location, habitat and date of the observation, and what you think the critter might be. Other people can agree with that ID or supply their own if you are unsure. iSpot made the news recently when a species of moth that was new to the UK was identified by an expert. I bet the six-year old girl who put it up on the site was dead chuffed! They still have the insect, which will shortly end up in the Natural History Museum for posterity.

For myself, I have contributed a number of butterflies and other insects to iSpot, as I have been out and about in my garden, and my local area at large. I get quite a buzz by supplying an ID from a book and having several other people agree with it!

Amethyst Deceiver

Being unemployed I have been involved in a number of voluntary activities. A recent one I have started with is an organisation called Norfolk Workout, which carries out a number of conservation activities in my local area. A recent activity involved a bird and butterfly survey to Bacton Wood near North Walsham. As is often the way, we saw no butterflies and only a few birds, but the fungi were everywhere. I have never seen so many types before in one place. I took photographs of a few, (due to Murphy’s law, the batteries gave out on the camera before I could take many pictures. Will always carry spares in future!) then had them identified on iSpot. I then emailed them to Mark, the organiser, and he wants to use the for a fungi website he wants to set up. A couple of the more striking examples are included.

Fly Agaric

Mr Levett's Scottish Tour, Part Five: Whisky Galore.

2010-09-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

After Culloden, we stopped by Inverness for a mediocre fish and chips by the coach station, and on to the Black Isle (which is a green peninsula), past the seemingly endless fence of a cattle show, spying oil rigs out in the Moray Firth in the slanting rain. At Cromarty town we watched tugs escort an oil tanker out from the deep water terminal, and made a six-pointed trace italienne sandcastle with bastions and ravelins (without the bucket and spade our cottage came equipped with, which had been left in Elgin). In Cromarty, we found a lovely second-hand bookshop/cafe hybrid thing, whose gimmick was having walls and ceiling coated with signatures from past patrons. (The most famous one they could name was "Tolkien's great niece", though.) We bought a lot of tea, several excellent biscuits and a little interesting-looking literature, and headed on back to the cottage.

The following day we did the whisky industry.

Image: The Speyside Cooperage

The Speyside Cooperage is one of the few functioning places of its kind left in Scotland, supplying dozens of distilleries, and they're justifiably proud of it. There are thousands of casks piled up behind the place. The tables and chairs in the cafe are made of casks. There are rain shelters in the car park, made of half-tuns on their sides with little windows and chairs. Made from casks. We got shown around an interesting history of the cask industry (they being the go-to break-bulk container for literally thousands of years), watched an educational video about casks, were shown the cooperage floor full of manly coopers doing manly things, had the general cask-making process explained to us with helpful diagrams and examples of tools and cracked staves.

Casks are an essential part of the whisky-making process, the ageing being what gives whisky a lot of its flavour, and the wood and what it's previously been used for (whisky is only very rarely aged in casks that haven't had another kind of alcohol in them) are very important. The coopers we saw were rebuilding casks, which is the main work done by Scots cooperages (their master coopers do actually make casks from scratch on occasion, but they're bespoke and thus rather expensive.) Used bourbon and sherry casks are broken down and shipped from America and Spain. US law forbids re-using bourbon casks, a law presumably passed due to the influence of a cooperage magnate, or the owner of a lot of prime forest. It looks like back-breaking work; they do twenty, twenty-five of these a day, earning a respectable salary (in the master cooper's estimation, anyway). Apprentices train for four years, and there was a special area laid out for them, but there weren't any in attendance the day we came. At the cafe we were given some wine made from oak leaves (me neither) and bought some tablet.

Just down the road from the cooperage is Glenfiddich distillery, which prides itself on being one of the few left with its own cooperage, and brags about its professional coopers rebuilding seventeen casks a day. Glenfiddich was much more slick than the cooperage; a bit too slick and commercial, which is slightly weird given that the tour is free. Once we'd got past the appallingly gushy, overwhelmingly desaturated, slow-mo-blurred-smiling-crofter-faces-littered, one-too-many-twists-on-a-catchphrase video (with headphones in many languages! I amused myself by twirling the language dial around; simple things please simple minds, like having a single sentence go from Japanese to Russian via pretty much the entire Indo-European family) introduction video, we got to the distillery itself. It was a lot like Bushmills - various immense vats oozing exotic odours, spirit safes built according to brass-and-glass sensibilities that would give steampunkers screaming orgasms, funny-shaped copper stills radiating heat, dark, busy warehouses redolent with the angels' share. I'm pretty sure all distilleries are about the same inside; in Raw Spirit (one of his best books for the simple fact that the plot was dictated to him by the world). Iain Banks tours more distilleries than I've had hot dinners, and comes to the same conclusion.

It all makes me almost wish I were interested in alcohol. At the end of the tour they sat us down in the bar and gave everyone sample drams in 12, 15 and 18-year-old incarnations, but they all just tasted like fire to me.

After the tour, parents discussed Highland Games (some were playing on screens in the bar; I always thought caber-tossing was some sick joke thing that didn't actually happen, like haggis running around, or Baba Yaga, or Swindon) with the nice German guys in our group, while I chatted up with our pretty tour guide (all tour guides in Scotland so far, despite having good Scots names like Donald and Morag, sound more English than the Queen; in her case it was because her dad was in the army, though I haven't heard any excuses for Culloden Duncan). The day was yet young, but we needed to get Dad back to an appointment with the spinemongler in Elgin. On the return journey, collectively musing over printing and bandwidth and sati-themed nursery rhymes, we stopped at a bridge by ol' Tom Telford, arching over the turbulent Spey with plaques proclaiming its proud Welsh heritage, and helpful signs explaining why Telford loved his Welsh ironmonger so much, though I can't remember why now. Thundering pairs of RAF Tornadoes swept overhead the whole way home (carving parallel lines into the sky, until they turned off near Sandford and were lost).

On the Saturday we set off on the long road south to Edinburgh. On the way down we espied a ruined church lurking by the roadside, and explored. There were death's heads on half the gravestones, among various other highly morbid symbols; the church had no roof, and the weathering inside suggested it had lacked one for a long time; it all reminded me somewhat of Marienkirche in Lubeck (so it was with wry amusement I noted it was called St. Mary's). Beyond it all, there was a pervasive, distant buzz, like a thousand beehives. Mum suggested midges. If that was true, it was terrifying.

Image: castlesuk.net

Craigievar Castle was the spitting image of the tower houses I'd been hoping for, save for being pink. It had straight-up walls and loopholes for shooting at cattle rustlers, and an almost stereotypical highland toff's interior. It was pink. It had a minstrel gallery containing a spindle and a bunch of Civil War-era (ours, not yours, any Yanqui devils reading) lobster-tail helmets, pikes and muskets, all lurking threateningly as if daring you to play them; but it was pink. It had glorious, sweeping grounds with ancient trees, monkey puzzle and funny grey cows. But it was pink.

Really, really pink.

Castle Kellie, our last stop before Edinburgh, was a deeply Civilised country house, brimful of nannyish guides and down-the-centuries ephemera (children's picture books of the late 19th century look both hilariously racist and Uncanny Valley creepy). Most hilariously, a couple explained (in character) how to Keep Up Appearances as a fifties family celebrating the coronation, while short on money but attempting to be long on class. It... it was the most unexpected, and the most priceless, moment of the holiday so far.

Crossing Fife we had a perfect view of the glorious Forth Bridge in the dying sun, on the last leg into Edinburgh.

Confessions of a One-Off Archaeologist: Part II

2010-09-25T13:24:00.001-07:00

Alex Keller has been busy launching his first novel since he regaled the Bee with the first installment of his archaeological adventures. Now he's back with the second installment...

Life in Bulgaria wasn't all digging however. Around two o'clock each day, we would pack up our things and be taken back to Nikyup in a state of near exhaustion. Once arrived, we would slump into the cafe/bar that served as our port of call for all food and drink related things, and work out what we we do for the rest of the day/weekend. In this blog, I'll try to give you some idea what life was like over there off the dig site.

Most week-day afternoon/evenings were spent in our village. However, entertainment in Nikyup itself was pretty thin on the ground as it is very, very small. It contained only two bars (that I remember) and not a great deal else. Once we had returned and used the outdoor shower (I'd recommend anyone who lives in a hot country to get one of these. So, so nice...) we could either go to the bar we spent our mealtimes in (so the less adventurous of us could sit down at 3pm for a late lunch and wander off to bed at 3am having not moved a hundred yards all evening); or walk up the street (slightly over a hundred yards) to another bar that had what was laughably called a “beer garden” complete with its very own dodgy pool table and outdoor toilet. Most week day evenings would be spent in one bar or the other recovering from dehydration by drinking horrendously alcoholic beverages.

At weekends we tended go to the nearby city of Veliko Tarnovo. After the the more basic lifestyle of Nikyup, Veliko Tarnovo was a oasis of western life: flushable toilets; dodgy nightclubs playing cheesy music; people trying to sell us illegal copies of DVDs and CDs in the street; and cocktails (I remember one called 'The Swimming Pool' was particularly severe!). Veleko Tarnovo was a much needed change after the dust and the heat of the dig site. A usual Saturday would involve heading to the city for lunch at the outdoor swimming pool with attached restaurant (bliss!); wandering about for a bit, perhaps to the old fort that appeared to be Tarnovo's only tourist attraction; then pop to a bar before going to the Spider club, a possibly Mafia-run “joint” full of dangerous energy drinks, long drops, and concrete floors (surprisingly, only one person lost their front teeth. We expected more).

Overall, I enjoyed my time in Bulgaria. It was hot and tiring, and perhaps five weeks was a bit too much, but it was certainly a very different experience from any other time when I've been abroad and I don't regret a single moment!

http://the-solitary-bee.blogspot.com/2010/08/confessions-of-one-off-archaeologist.html

Ten Ancient Civilizations...

2010-09-25T13:24:00.000-07:00

Debbie Owen has alerted the Bee to this useful round-up of Ten Ancient Civilisations That Were Incredibly Advanced on Online Doctorate Degree.
Click HERE to read the article...

Books with bite: the rise of dark romance for teens

2010-09-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

By Caroline Short

As a bookseller I am sick to death of ill-written vampire fiction for teenage girls. Half of our Young Adult department is now black-spined and dedicated to the outrageously beautiful boys and girls who matriculate together, drink one another's blood and live in a heightened state of emotional and sexual arousal. Sexual awareness, death and violence have always been interconnected in literature (and film), but now more than ever they permeate the teenage genre, glamourised to the extreme and marketed to arguably the most malleable audience out there.

My aversion is, of course, a personal reaction, based largely on the quality of the mass-produced, market-saturated genre. This is certainly not to say that dark romance doesn’t have its place on our bookshelves, nor that it isn’t teaching some important life-lessons to an audience displaying what must be acknowledged as previously unseen level of commitment to reading. Like J K Rowling before her, Stephanie Meyer deserves commendation for bringing a disaffected audience back to books.

The popularity of vampire fiction has always been inextricably linked to changes in our social, political and economical situation. Victorian vampire fiction reflected a society in which women were beginning to gain purchase academically, economically and politically, but whose sexuality was stifled: the connection between vampires and sex mirrored that between loose morals and perceived evil. In more recent history, a resurgence of interest in the pale of face and sharp of tooth in the 80s coincided neatly with the AIDS epidemic and the disease’s associated connection to blood and sex, the popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the late 90s with the rise of “girl power” and the emasculation of the dominant male, with his bodily protrusions.

Current vampire fiction is of an entirely different ilk. The modern take offers choice in the matter of how they live their lives and procure their “necessities” (i.e. blood). As with humans, they may choose whether to live a good and virtuous life over one of murderous destruction. They are fatally flawed, but can overcome this through restraint.

The modern teen is growing up in a time of uncertainty and confusion. The worldwide nature of our current economic situation is unlike any encountered before in the breadth of its reach. This recession is an international issue, encapsulating every first world nation across oceans and borders, leaving the population unsure as to what the future might bring…

So, vampire fiction does its usual party trick, of creating a physical entity representative of the wider “big bad”. Only this time, the vampire takes on all the uncertainty, the fear of the unknown, and even the glimmer of hope that the reader is exposed to on a daily basis. Unlike in their previous incarnation, these vampires are not instinct-led killing machines. They come in all colours, across the moral spectrum, choosing whether to kill or compromise. You could be onto a good’un or being seduced by a bad – but you won’t know which you’re backing until it’s too late.

Either way, the moralistic and hopeful tale these dark romances weave provide a desperate generation with much-needed potential silver-lining. They also drive home the theory that, in order to attain the happy-ending, there must always be risk and sacrifice along the way. The nature of the risk and extent of the sacrifice are for you to discern.

If, like me, the idea of yet another tale of love, lust and blood-sucking leaves you cold, do not despair. There are a handful of authors out there writing truly fantastic, non-vampiric fiction for the teenage market. Meg Rosof, Celia Rees, Malorie Blackman, Sally Gardner and Laurie Halse Anderson (to name a few) write wonderful, engaging stories with life lessons at their heart, across genres encompassing sci-fi, crime, modern and historical fiction.

And for confident readers, the classics are crying out to be read – Wuthering Heights is a great choice for teenage girls, perhaps particularly those who lean towards the dark side… Indeed, thanks to Harper Collins you can now buy a copy deliberately designed to buy into the dark romance market – and partially responsible for putting Emily Bronte at the top of the classics bestsellers chart for the first time since records began.

Whatever teens are choosing to read, I suppose the important fact remains that they are choosing to read. There is so much life-knowledge to be gleaned from a love of books – and despite appearances to the contrary, vampires truly are optional!

Caroline Short is a bookseller, editor, education consultant and entrepreneur, currently blogging at The Second Hand Shopper.

Buffy badge by Button Betty

The Godfather of Sail

2010-09-19T02:33:00.000-07:00

Philip Reeve explains why you should set a course for wherever books are sold and stock up on the novels of Patrick O'Brian.

"Why are you both reading Patrick O'Brian?" asked my son Sam the other day, spotting that his mother is reading Master and Commander for about the third time while I'm on The Ionian Mission for what must be the fifth. It's a reasonable question, and one which might be echoed by anyone who hasn't encountered O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, for to a casual observer they must appear to be cut from the same militaristic cloth as CS Forester's Hornblower yarns or Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels. Hopefully the fact that we've both read and re-read the Aubrey/Maturin novels is proof that they offer something more than just tales of derring-do in the Napoleonic Wars. If I had to find a comparison I would say that they are more like Jane Austen, except that Patrick O'Brian excelled at writing battles, tempests, and shipwrecks, which were never really Jane Austen's strong point.

The series began back in 1970, gradually grew in popularity through the eighties, and achieved huge acclaim in the '90s from the sort of critics who would usually sniff at books like these, followed by more widespread fame in the noughties with the release of the film Master and Commander, a pretty good screen version, although (or perhaps because) it doesn't follow any one book but mixes elements from many of them*.

Master and Commander is also the title of the first book. It begins in 1802, when a young naval commander, Jack Aubrey, meets penniless physician Stephen Maturin at a concert in Port Mahon, Gibraltar. Despite their shared love of music they are very different characters - almost exact opposites, indeed, for Jack Aubrey is big, straightforward, friendly, good-looking, a pretty conventional English Tory, an excellent seaman but a little naive ashore, while Stephen Maturin is small, rather ugly, reserved, physically clumsy, deeply intelligent, a keen naturalist, and a political radical of Irish/Catalan descent who took part in the failed rising against British rule by Wolf Tone's United Irishmen in 1798. But somehow they hit it off; Stephen sails as surgeon aboard Jack's brig the Sophie as she cruises the Mediterranean in search of French and Spanish ships, and a deep, enduring friendship begins that will be the subject of a further twenty novels. War is always the excuse for the stories - Jack is ordered off to frustrate French or American plans in just about all of the world's oceans, and Stephen, finding that his hatred for Buonaparte exceeds his distaste for the British Empire, becomes an intelligence agent - but they are not simply war stories. They are not really about plot at all, although the plots are good, and often nail-bitingly tense. The real heart of the books is the characters; those two great central characters and all the lesser ones - hundreds and hundreds over the course of the whole series - who orbit about them.

O'Brian's approach to character is subtle; often he doesn't tell us what people are feeling; he just shows us what they do, and leaves it to us to work out why they do it. They don't read like characters whose attributes have been thought out and noted down on index cards before the author set to work; they are inconsistent and perverse; they grow, and age, and make mistakes; the heroes sometimes behave in ways which make us think less of them, although they never lose our sympathy; apparent villains sometimes reveal a kinder side, or at least some reason for their villainy. And they all speak and think in a wonderful, rich, utterly convincing Georgian prose. It isn't necessary for a historical novel to feel as if it were written in the era it's describing, but it's impressive when you find one that does. (It's also rather infectious: I'm always warning Sam to put a coat on to preserve himself against the falling damps. Sometimes he'll pop into my office to report, "Mummy's compliments and wittles is up.')

The series is also surprisingly funny; when I started reading them I hoped to be entertained, and I expected to be informed, but I didn't expect to laugh out loud so often. Some of the comedy is quite broad - a reliable source of fun are the zoological specimens which Stephen brings aboard - wombats on deck; a beehive in the main cabin; a three-toed sloth which acquires a taste for rum ("Jack! You have debauched my sloth!") - but most of it springs from the foibles and failings of the characters, and it grows funnier as we come to know them; Jack's tendency to mangle proverbs and quotations, and his infectious delight in his own bad jokes; the endless grumbling of his servant Killick, Dr Maturin's continuing inability to grasp the basics of seamanship and the nautical jargon which his shipmates spout, and the sly pride with which he uses the few scraps of naval terminology he does possess to baffle fellow travellers even less nautical than himself.

To a newcomer this naval lingo may be one of the most noticeable things about the books, and perhaps off-putting. All this talk of double preventer backstays, futtock shrouds, bowlines, topgallants, studdingsails and flying jibs can seem a bit bewildering, and even the helpful diagrams which appear at the front of the more recent editions can't pack in a hundredth of the details. Luckily for non-nautical readers we have Dr Maturin on our side; he is as bewildered as we by these reams of grommets, knees and catheads; even more so, perhaps - I don't think he is ever really sure of the difference between port and starboard, and the things we actually need to understand - the importance of gaining the weather gage in battle, for instance - are patiently explained to him by his shipmates in terms which even we can grasp. Personally, although I know little more about the workings of a square-rigged ship than I did when I started reading, I find this cascade of odd, archaic, highly specialised words one of the many delights of the series, but I'm sure that some readers are equally happy to treat it as background detail; you no more need to understand sails and rigging to enjoy O'Brian than you need grasp the physics of Warp Drive to watch Star Trek. And anyway, it is not all ships and sea: the books spend much time on shore as well; with Jack Aubrey's wife and children and his deliciously vile mother-in-law, with Stephen's contacts in the worlds of intelligence and natural philosophy, and with a vast array of characters met in foreign ports, some recurring, some mere passing sketches; admirals and ship's boys, noblemen and paupers, Frenchmen, Americans, Turks, Parsees, Chinese, Africans, even a pahi-full of Polynesian lesbian separatists, all vividly brought to life with a few words, making the series not just a portrait of the British navy but of the entire early nineteenth century world.

The tone changes subtly about half way through, when the Napoleonic Wars are running out and Jack Aubrey is in danger of being promoted to the rank of admiral, which would make him more concerned with administration than adventuring: time seems to slow down, reasons are found to halt the progress of Jack's career, and Stephen becomes rich enough to buy the lovely frigate Surprise. Perhaps the later books are more historical romances than historical novels. But none of that dents a fan's enjoyment in the least.

I suppose that if I were a proper book reviewer I would be pointing out faults as well as high points, but to be honest I can barely think of any. It's true that some of the books end rather suddenly, but that's just a good reason to start the next one. It's true that The Hundred Days, the penultimate book, written very soon after the death of Mrs O'Brian, comes perilously close to jumping the shark when it abruptly kills off several major characters, hustling them off-stage with barely a goodbye. It's also probably true that the female characters are less engaging than the men: it seems that you have to be outwardly beautiful to qualify as an O'Brian heroine, which is odd in a writer so attuned to his characters' inner lives. Stephen's great love, Diana Villiers, can be particularly annoying; forever running off with richer, better looking men, and forever being forgiven. What does he see in her, I wonder? But I don't mean that as a criticism of Patrick O'Brian; I'm just infuriated by Stephen Maturin, who seems now like a real person to me, and who I wish would settle down with some nice, sensible lady naturalist instead (indeed, towards the very end of the series just such a lady is introduced, so he might have done so had the story not been cut short by O'Brian's death).

And that, I think, is what makes Aubrey/Maturin so readable and so re-readable; the characters come to feel like old friends, and it is always good to be back in their company. The series may have ended but, like Blandings Castle, 221b Baker Street or Bag End, the stern cabin of HMS Surprise will always be there waiting for us, a small, comfortable space upon a vast ocean, filled with music and laughter and good conversation and the smell of fresh coffee and toasted cheese.

Patrick O'Brian's novels should be available just about everywhere. (Nowadays there are even special editions without ships on the cover - for the ladies, I presume, or people who don't want to be seen reading sea-faring tales.) He also wrote several unrelated novels, and an excellent biography of Picasso.

*I thought Russell Crowe made a rather good Jack Aubrey. Paul Bettany did a creditable job as as Dr Maturin, but he was just too good-looking, and too clean: I imagine Stephen looking more like Hugh Laurie's baleful Dr House, but dressed a in blood-stained frock-coat and a vile wig, under which he's keeping a dead shrew which he plans to dissect later. One of the striking historical details of the books is that Stephen, for all his scientific brilliance, has no inkling of germ theory - how could he, being a man of his time? His filthiness is a running joke, and he thinks nothing of eating dinner or opening up a patient with same knife he's just used to dissect a decomposing dolphin.

Mr Levett's Scottish Tour: Part Four: Culloden

2010-09-16T02:01:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Levett and family continue their perambulations through bonny Scotland, arriving this week at the field of Culloden where, on the 16th April 1746 the Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart was defeated by Government forces. (All images in this post are taken from the visitor centre website. )

The visitor centre at Culloden had clearly had a lot of effort put into it; Paul later told us it cost the National Trust for Scotland a cool twenty million quid. I wonder how much of that went on the building (solid, grey wood), how much on the artefacts (muskets and edges, medals and pottery, woodcuts and handbills, cavalry boots and field guns) and how much on people proofreading every last line of information to keep it as neutral as possible. My dad tells a story from when he was working for Scots government, in which a senior Scot asked a junior Scot, only half joking, “Campbell, eh? Whose side were you on in the Forty-Five?” Getting on for two hundred and seventy years, and it's still an issue.

All the signs in the visitor centre were bilingual – English and Gaelic – a strange sort of sop to a set of ultranationalist Gaels I wasn’t even aware existed. Unlike the Welsh, the Highlanders seem less tiresomely attached to their old tongue; but I suppose the Welsh had no Clearing, no Culloden. The exhibition was a fairly well set out maze of corridors, with a peculiar design; on the right hand was the red wall, which told the story of the Government, and on the left the blue wall, following the Jacobites. While for the first few metres it seemed to be “pick your bias”, each wall describing its faction in glowing terms, you would then have to switch sides, as both proceeded to thoroughly deconstruct their cause and talk at length about the various defeats, setbacks and foolish mistakes they suffered in the run up to April 16. The last corridor was somewhat dodgy, using unseen speakers to play you audio clips ostensibly from soldiers on the eve of the battle; I preferred Peter Watkins' version. Then there was a reconstruction of the battle in a room whose walls were all screens, which was stylish, expensive, and in every sense visceral.

After this, the corridors panned out into a huge room full of militaria centred around a big floor screen displaying a top-down RTS style account of the battle, all Time Commanders-style (I wonder if they actually used the Total War engine...)., and then a door to The Place. The field itself isn’t much to look at. Well, it’s a field, what do you expect? There are rows of red and blue flags showing the original line of battle, GPS-linked audioguides that play you a clip when they detect you’re on a certain piece of ground, a great big stone memorial to the Romantic Lost Highland Cause, and a great many small monuments celebrating where individual tartans were gunned down. There was only one memorial to the Government's troops (who were, in case you didn't know, as much Scots lowlanders as Englishmen): “FIELD OF THE ENGLISH; THEY WERE BURIED HERE.” Mum got the impression that was biased towards the Government, in emphasising the Highlanders' failures and making little of the Government's losses; I felt it was entirely the other way round, with a soulless and inaccurate monument to Cumberland's troops but a trashy Victorian headstone for where every chieftain and famous clan was heroically escorted from this vale of tears by Brown Bess.

It was a tricky one; the Gaelic, the romanticism and the serious wait before the museum got around to mentioning the actual outcome had me rather annoyed at a perceived pro-Jacobite slant, but by the end I wasn’t so sure. The disgusting Victorian Bonnie-Prince-Charlie-on-a-bottle-of-Drambuie ahistorical romanticised kitsch that no true Scotsman on either side actually believes has left its mark, perhaps indelibly, and even in this most truthful of exhibits there still seemed to be a hint of That Noble Lost Cause; but maybe this is a knee-jerk response I have that objects to any recognition of the Jacobites as anything but doomed, misguided idiots on the wrong side of history.

In modern parlance, you can call the Forty-Five a heroic act of defiant independence against economic tyranny (under Union rule the lowlanders and city folk were prospering, the Highland crofters and smallholders not so much) and religious persecution, betrayed by incompetent leadership. But in that same modern parlance, the Jacobites were a foreign-backed insurgency of a small minority attempting to violently overthrow a legally elected, popularly accepted government, and replace it with an absolutist monarchy. Still sound romantic to you?

The displays were informative, the artefacts plentiful and well-chosen, and the audiovisual stuff of extremely high quality; it’s a serious, no-nonsense account of Culloden in all its brutal detail and desperate futility, and you really could see where the £20m went.

By the by, Bonnie Prince Charlie was a prick.