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Anyway, highlights from the past month or so:
Revolutions in the Earth by Stephen Baxter, writing about Edinburgh geologist James Hutton. Lots of interesting material on the period (where there was still popular if diminishing support for the idea that the world was only six thousand years old) and the history of Edinburgh and Scottish society of the time, and Baxter seemed to have a good, clear view of Hutton as someone caught between previous beliefs about the formation of the earth and modern scientific ones. Very enjoyable.
Next up was Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson, the third book in his series on climate change. And… it’s an odd book. There’s more of the same musings on the environment, politics and social organisation that dominated the previous books, though without the tension of the impending global catastrophe of the middle book, and it’s worth picking up if you want to know what happened to those characters. But in some ways it doesn’t feel like much of a conclusion to the series. It’s well written but nothing much happens. I can understand the difficulties of writing about sustainable lifestyle change dramatically, and I sort of see the responsibility for not writing in some technological MacGuffin that eliminates the problem, but it’s a long novel in which people go about with their business, gradually adapting or not to their changed environment, making occasional interesting observations, and then it just seems to peter out… So, odd and slightly unsatisfying really, even if it was generally very good.
The second and third volumes of Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series were lighter affairs altogether. Just about managing to continue the charms of the setting from the first book (Napoleonic war! With dragons! And awkward social structures!) by the end of Throne of Jade and Black Powder War I was starting to feel a bit restless, but the overall impression was of the author getting strapped in to repeat the formula for a couple more continents (African dragons next!) with only a minimum amount of development. Fun though.
Sara Maitland’s Brittle Joys which I thought was really lovely, lovingly crafted and touching. Must get reading more by her.
Then the Paul Auster edited True Tales of American Life which I really liked. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a collection of mainly two or three page stories sent in to a national radio programme where the basic idea is stories that could variously be described as incredible, unlikely or marked by coincidence or just plain spooky, organised by various themes. I was quite charmed by the book, even if it dipped in quality towards the end, and surprisingly moved by some of the stories when I didn’t expect to be.
After hearing mixed reviews, I wasn’t really going to bother with Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, but managing to pick it up for an especial level of cheapness I didn’t actually dislike it as much as I might have feared I would. *pause* That said, a few weeks after reading it I can’t remember much of what’s worth mentioning about it, except that I remember being reasonably entertained, a lack of drag, and not being particularly annoyed by the standard metaphysical tics. Could have been worse.
As recounted here I was generously given a free copy of Tracy Chevalier’s Burning Bright. I should have looked that gift horse in the mouth. I should have checked its teeth. I was ready to put aside my doubt and just hope for a second that a popular romance featuring Blake might either have something interesting or entertaining to say about him or his time and place. But no, in addition to your trite, simplistic, sensational plot, your use of the Blakes as minor characters and your use of “Mr Blake” as the randy old man who lives next door and inanely gibbers snatches of his poetry at every opportunity just isn’t forgivable. I mean, it wasn’t that it was so jarringly inaccurate so much as it was an incredibly banal and bloodless use of the source material. I mean, if you’re only going to do the minimum amount of research and slap on whatever quotations you find first why bother? Tracy, if you’re reading, I’m trying to resist the urge to suggest that you deserve to be violently swatted with copies of your own book, but it’s quite, quite hard. You’re attending the 250 years of Blake conference I can’t afford (guest speaker!), you’ve had access to the Lambeth biography Michael Phillips has been preparing, why oh why did you prepare this lifeless pile of tosh for publication when you could have been doing some more productive like, I don’t know, sucking on the dug-up desiccated eighteenth-century donkey balls previously mentioned. Please desist from writing these atrocious historical romances with literary pretensions, you’re neither the historian or novelist you think you are, or if you are, god help you.
That last one was so predictable.
And now the star of the show. With a title like Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages this was always going to struggle to be less than brilliant. What was maybe not quite as expected was its worth as a serious academic work (on an admittedly small field of interest perhaps). Edited by Jo Stanley, it’s actually a series of short essays on different periods and aspects of female pirating. And it’s full of fascinating info on general pirating as well, like the development of the meaning of the skull and crossbones in the seventeenth century being drawn from an earlier red flag (probably sown by a woman of course!) signalling no quarter, and general information on the relationship between pirating and privateering and pirates and coastal towns. The bulk of the book is given up to the serious, rather than sensational, appraisal of how women were intimately involved in piracy without actually donning breeches and cutlass. It attempts to follow the invisible, unrecorded history of the women that would have supported pirate vessels either from port or occasionally actually on their ships, providing food, nursing, sex or other services, and without whom this illegitimate form of earning a livelihood would have been impossible. The book is careful to underline that while in times of desperation pirate vessels might have turned a blind eye to the odd disguised woman working in other “manly” roles, they were largely hostile to females on board not in prescribed roles, very few, maybe less than a dozen, female seafarers came to openly captain a pirate vessel and come to historical prominence. So it's really despite the facts of life for women in these periods that a few extraordiary individuals managed to gain and even sometimes hold on to power and the ability to live their lives on their own terms - one, Grace "Granny" O'Malley was even recieved in audience by Elizabeth I. Not to forget, though, the more theoretical approach that views these women pirates as transgressive, cross-dressing, sometimes lesbian figures who, potentially, were participating in the piratical sailing of the open seas as individuals able to free themselves from (some of) society’s conventions with the added incentive of escaping their established gender roles - but that wouldn’t have been nearly so good without understanding the historical and economic context surrounding it. The book’s actually at its weakest when it occasionally strays away from the focus of its research to conjecture about the similarities between women pirates and modern-day feminism, primarily because it makes tenuous links poorly supported rather than it being a bad idea in itself I hasten to add, but overall it’s excellent and highly recommended. The book that is, not piracy as a career. There really is too much engrossing material in it to do justice to in a short review, but it's a brilliant idea for a book that turns out to actually be both thought-provoking and seemingly based on solid research, so what's not to like really. Keira Knightley should just forget about it.
Currently around half way into The Vampire Genevieve omnibus by Jack Yeovil (or Kim Newman if you like) bits of which I read as a wee lad. And it’s actually really good, it definitely benefits from the author not being that bothered about the setting, and there’s very little of the over melodramatic bloodletting and vampires chucking people about the room one might expect, and there are some nice clever touches, so, yes, ace! Up next is the Gaiman “devised” Temps, where various sci-fi types gang together to pen stories about a British League of Superheroes. Looks fun anyway.
This post is dedicated to all the bold female pirates sailing with the good ship Barbelith. |
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