Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

I love Connie Willis! She writes intricate stories, meticulously researched, her characters come alive on the page, their environment is present in more than words and she does it all with gentle humour and romance.

She writes a book about the Middle Ages – you are there. Simple as that.

And that’s how it works. In her writing world, time travel has been invented, about fifty years from now, and historians are lining up to go through to the past to study their favorite historical periods. It’s modern people going back in time.

The theme is a step forward from the often hokey time travel stories of classic SF, where a scientist goes back and alters history, or kills an ancestor, or in one nifty story, is his own mother and father. All the wrinkles in time were done to death long ago, but here is Connie breaking new ground and collecting all the science fiction writing awards going.

I knew I’d enjoy these two books. Together they are two halves of one big novel and the reader is well advised to read Blackout before All Clear, lest all the surprises of the complex plot be revealed before they are set up.

So I bought them both on Audible.com and listened to them in sequence.

The print edition of Blackout might have helped. In the beginning, there is confusion in both the story and the mind of the reader. So many characters, all leaping back and forwards in time, interacting in past and present. Some of the characters are really the same person with two or three different names, depending on their assignment. To make things worse, the careful schedules of the historians are being re-arranged or cancelled with no apparent explanation. The English researcher who has received an American accent implant for a Pearl Harbor trip is now being sent to the Dunkirk evacuation first, for example, and he has to come up with a plausible explanation.

It’s all chaos, but that’s fine. The time continuum is a chaotic system and small inputs at critical points can have major impacts later on. It’s all part of time travel theory.

But something’s going wrong with time. Historians are sent back to World War Two on assignment, but somehow become stranded as events conspire to make their return to the future difficult. Is the gun emplacement freshly built on the portal site a coincidence or is it the continuum trying to protect itself from fatal damage? If the researchers somehow alter events so that Hitler wins the war and time travel is not invented at Oxford a century later, then there will be hell to pay.

The sense of worry and despair builds up through the dark days of the war, as the British Army is kicked out of France and the bombs begin to fall on London. There’s a mirrored sequence around the time of the Normandy Invasion, when the Allies return to the Continent and more and more dreadful terror weapons are aimed at England.

Throughout the book(s), more and more characters are introduced, though thankfully there are only a handful of point of view protagonists. The settings are varied, from the wartime Oxford Street department stores, St Pauls Cathedral during the height of the Blitz, Dunkirk and Dover in the Evacuation, and Kent as the V-1 flying bombs are falling out of the sky.

We are taken to Trafalgar Square during the VE Day celebrations a number of times through the eyes of different characters, but the nagging fear builds: was the war really won or did the historians somehow accidentally intervene in history through their chance encounters with significant people?

I must confess that I was getting doubtful about the time travel theory until towards the end of the second book when Connie Willis revealed a magnificent twist that sorted everything out. Ironically – and yes, Agatha Christie and her mysteries make an appearance in these pages – the answer was there in plain sight all the time and in her narrated introduction the heroic author gives away a vital clue. Listen very carefully!

There’s an enormous number of loose ends to be tied up, but they are all squared away, and there are poignant moments along the way when we realise that things aren’t going to work out perfectly. But it’s an immensely satisfying ending all the same, all the better for the long and tangled path we’ve followed to get there.

In fact, it might be worthwhile keeping a notebook open to jot down names and places, just to keep it all straight in your head. The reader can always flip back and forth through the print edition, but the audiobook is pretty much a linear progress through a chaotic narrative.

Perhaps the best part of the book is the atmosphere. Connie Willis has done her research well, aided by a lucky afternoon with some of the people who lived through these times, and she brings wartime London to life beautifully. The sound of the bombs, the taste of the scarce food, the noise of the shelters, the scarcity of clothing, the dark of the blackout and the eventual joy as the lights are turned on again. We are there.

A few minor grumbles. In the audio version, although the accents are superbly done, I must take exception to the sheer number of long “a” sounds. It grates on my ear to hear “train parsengers”.

Nothing in wartime Britain cost 5p. Sixpence, if you please! And it’s day before month, when talking dates – the English would definitely not have been discussing dates in American format!

But these are minor niggles, and all in all, I must confess – I love Connie Willis!

–Skyring

An added bonus, if you are an Audible.com customer, is a free download of Connie Willis and Carrie Vaughn (author of the Kitty Norville series) discussing these two books (and the Kitty series), research, writing and just having a great time together.

Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century by Paul Milo

I’ve always been a bit of a science fiction nut. Gadgets fascinate me. I drive a car filled with buttons and screens. GPS, climate control, sound system, cruise control, iphone, bluetooth, remote controls…

“We’re living in a science fiction age,” I tell my passengers, as I change to a new tune on the sixstacker.

And we are. My car may not fly or drive itself, but it’s sleek and silver and a world in spacetime away from the car my father drove – which had fins, may I add.

I have a supercomputer in my pocket with instant global communications. I can chat in realtime video to someone in the Faeroes. It’s just mindblowing, when I think about how newspaper stories of my childhood came via cable from London and were days behind. And don’t even think of ringing overseas unless you want to spend a fortune on a short conversation with somebody you could barely hear.

My younghood was full of visions of the future. The Jetsons, HG Wells, Popular Mechanics, Stanley Kubrick…

Somehow it didn’t quite work out that way. Modern London may have a few shiney towers, but much of it would be familiar to Charles Dickens. Paris more so, given that it wasn’t half destroyed by aerial warfare in a nuclear war.

This book looks at what the future was going to be like. 1984 never had human clones or rocket holidays to Martian resorts, dirigible cruiseliners with dinner in pill form served by robot waiters, but it’s fun to read about all the things we were going to have, backed up by quotes from leading thinkers on how all this stuff was just round the corner.

Or the things that blindsided us. Who saw the internet coming? Blogs and tweeting and viral videos. Revolutions run by cellphone. Capitalist China.

Paul Milo has had far too much fun with this book. One can almost hear him chortling with glee each time he pulls out some ancient government report advising investment in zeppelin stations for popular locomotion, skimming through for the choicest quotes on bionic eyes and lunar highrise.

I guess my favorite invention that never happened is the atomic car. Prototypes were actually built showing how the reactor would sit in the rear end, a safe metre or so away from the kids in the back seat. You’d never need to refuel, you could power your house from it, you could probably go supersonic if you needed to overtake.

And yet the concept makes the children of this modern age laugh until they cry at the folly of the notion.

My only criticism of this book is that it would have been enhanced by some photographs. The city of airships and towering saucer pods. The robot butler. The happy family off for a weekend on Saturn, Dad smoking his pipe as he soars past the moon.

Nevertheless, a good read, something to make you think next time you hear a politician talk about our bold new future.

Thames: The Biography
by Peter Ackroyd

I ducked into a bookshop in Kings Cross Underground to get Peter Ackroyd’s marvellous book London: The Biography. I was there to check out every square on the British Monopoly board and I wanted to get my research right.

The book was a superb resource. I buried my nose into it and didn’t come up for a long while. Perhaps the highlight was reading about London Stone and then seeing the actual relic of the ancient city right there on Cannon Street.

So when I recently found a companion book on the Thames in the bargain barrow at Paperchain in Manuka, I couldn’t get my money out fast enough.

My hostel, just down from St Pauls, was only a short walk from the river, and I have walked along it, and over the Millennium Footbridge scores of times, each time pausing to lean over and watch the slow water. If ever there is a sacred river in the English-speaking world, this is it. The bridges, the cityscapes, the legends, the images – they all flow together to form the natural counterpoint to the city itself.

Peter Ackroyd doesn’t disappoint. In fact he soars above my expectations. It would have been so easy to trace the path of the river down to the sea, talking of the history and the places at each stage, but he follows a different course. Each chapter is themed: trade, wildlife, bridges, weather, death, music, literature, religion and a dozen more.

We see the river as a whole being twenty times over in a new light. And each time it is a different river, never the same twice, every set of eyes and every heart focussed on a new view.

I love this approach, independent of time and place, the river has its own stories and its own way of telling them. Happenstance and artifice are blended by Ackroyd, skipping around like light on the ripples of the running river.

Pictures a plenty, along with maps, but this is no guidebook for a trip from A to B. This is something to dip into almost at random, to emerge refreshed or appalled as the case may be.

Sometimes the river was dead with filth and pollution, sometimes seething with life. It’s all here, along with the curious places and people of the water and waterside.

Next visit to London, I might venture a little further up and down the great river. In the meantime, I’ve got enough to keep my appetite stoked right here.

–Skyring

The Pentagon was attacked on the same day, and a fourth airliner was hijacked and crashed at the same time, but it was the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre which dominated the television and print media. It’s what we were looking at on CNN, and the other two planes were just items on the ticker in comparison.

That’s because of the images. The photographs, the videos, the webcams. The planes endlessly looping into the towers, the smoke rising, the collapses, the dust clouds, the wreckage, the shocked faces and flowers and flags.

Compelling viewing. I know I watched with horror that night, as an episode of West Wing ended in tragedy and crisis and turned into real life. It was nearly dawn before I got to bed.

Along the way I had my own reality check – I went to the Empire State Building webcam, a favorite site of mine, aimed the thing downtown and there they were, on fire as I watched.

David Friend has told the story of the photographs, the videos, the webcams that awed, angered, horrified and inspired. Watching the World Change is 434 pages that not only tells the stories, but traces the way news gathering and reporting has evolved. The 9/11 attacks occurred just as digital cameras and cellphones were starting to become ubiquitous. Still pricey, but out there and involved. Nowadays, we watch news unfold on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, but in 2001, they were still to come.

The book contains a colour photograph section, in which many of the images discussed in the text are shown. And striking they are. Everyone knows “The Falling Man”, in which a curiously calm man is caught in mid-fall between the two towers. Just a man in his last moments of life, the stark cladding of the doomed buildings a backdrop. Death in the modern age.

Many others are included, moving and curious and stark. I think the one that hits me hardest is a candid shot of a group of emergency workers hauling away the body of a chaplain. The dead man peaceful, apparently asleep, the faces of the five big men carrying him studies in grief and determination, the dust and smoke of the disaster everywhere.

The chance shots – the video camera pointed up at precisely the moment of impact. The photograph of a crowd gathered to watch, the cameraman turning his back on the blazing buildings unaware as he snapped the shutter that the first tower had just begun to collapse, the sound still three seconds away, but the sight hitting the onlookers like a hammer. The group of people almost casual picnickers on the banks of the East River while disaster unfolds behind them.

Some photographs became famous, their subjects following on fame’s path. I remember the photograph of fireman Mike Kehoe climbing the stairs to fight the fire far above. “Poor bloke,” I thought, “he must have died in the collapse, and been aware that he was doomed.”

But still he carried his equipment up past the line of evacuees. Happily he survived, and his story joins those of the photographers.

The last image is one that has become an icon. Like the famous flag-raising above Iwo Jima, this one happened by chance, even though the composition is similar. A tilted flagpole, a team of servicefolk raising the flag for morale, the flag’s symbols a contrast, here in colour against the dust and wreckage behind.

This is a remarkable book, in itself an examination of a moment in history, a look at how we see news, how we react, how the pictures flashed around the world have human stories. These images, these people, these stories, they are legends of our time.

–Skyring

The Fifth Witness
by Michael Connelly

I love a good legal thriller, and Michael Connelly has produced a ripper with this one. We meet Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, again as he ploughs through a new world of legal practice, the humdrum but topical world of mortgage foreclosures. Happily we don’t spend the book rummaging through deeds and banks and loans – there’s a murder case popped up, one which will grab our hero by the nuts and turn him right around.

Apart from Mickey, the book is full of unique characters, a real Los Angeles cast. The way they interact together keeps us entertained and guessing right to the end – there’s a twist or two, and not just Mickey’s testicles.

The courtroom drama itself had me gripped. Each side kept pulling rabbits out of the hat and it was touch and go at every chapter. Connelly has done his homework on this one, and we learn a bit about current legal trends along the rollercoaster ride.

Continuing development with Mickey Haller, reflecting Harry Bosch’s progress in the parallel novel stream. It’s a pleasure to see the wheels turn, not just on matters of law, but questions of ethics and philosophy. Looking forward to reading future instalments.

The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship by Jeffrey Zaslow

Ames is in Iowa, just north of Des Moines.

I remember Des Moines. Discoverylover and I had been debating where the accent was and whether it was pronounced in the French fashion or what we imagined Iowans might say. I asked the lady behind the counter about how to say the name of the place we were in. She looked me square in the eye and said, slowly for the idiot foreigners, “Duh air ree kuh ween”.

For the record, it’s pronounced in the French way: “Day Moyn”.

I’m not sure how to say Ames, but perhaps it is also in the French manner. Aimes? Amis?

This is an extraordinary book. Written by a man, it describes the friendship of eleven women, progressing from infancy to middle age. A group friendship remaining steady and ongoing through the decades, fragmenting a little as the girls married, left Iowa, found new careers and raised families, and then reforming as contact changed from letters and long-distance phone calls to group emails, with the “Reply All” button copping a pounding.

There are laughter and tears along the way, with the “crying couch” at a four-day reunion weekend getting lots of use. I shed a few at poignant moments, and cackled at the funny bits.

This is a history of a friendship, but it’s also a glimpse into the lives of some extraordianry people. The small town doctor who turned tragic death into joyful life, for example. The brave heart of a girl who never grew up. And the eleven women – ordinary in everything except for the strength of their sisterhood.

Together they overcame tragedy, fought off diseases, helped each other over the rough patches in life, and always came up smiling. The photographs of the girls growing into womanhood are scattered through the book, happy and beautiful, glowing and gorgeous.

There’s a website and talk of a movie.

I guess the message of the book is that you don’t make it through life alone, not without becoming bitter and withdrawn. Camus told us this. Family and friends are the catalysts to spark development, reinforce the good things, smooth over the bad.

Family is one thing – you have no say in the matter. But friends are the people you pick – and who pick you – and you are defined by the people you hang out with as much as any other factor in life.

I thought that this might be boring, but I was pleasantly surprised. The story is told well, with surprises and adventures spaced out through the book. Emotional lows are balanced by highs, and the book ends on an upbeat note.

Perhaps the best part is right at the end, where a photograph shows the notebook-wielding writer surrounded by “The Girls” in a field behind the house of the reunion. He must have had a time of it, dealing with emotional dramas as the women relived the stories of girlhood, teenship and onwards, often helped along by a few glasses of wine. What to put in, what to leave unsaid, how to phrase the tricky bits.

He’s done a fine job. And now I might pass this along to a friend.

Hippopotamus
by Stephen Fry

I wasn’t sure what to make of this to begin with, but I found it increasingly brilliant as I went along.

Stephen Fry has wickedly rewritten the country house detective mystery. Brought it into the modern age, along with associated bad language and cultural references. But realistically, it could have been set any time in the past century. Like P G Wodehouse’s novels of upper class English society, it is ageless.

Wodehouse could not have written this, however. Not enough fun, and too much sex. Including all sorts of odd couplings, some of which are uncomfortable to think about.

It’s hard to work out what sort of book this is, to begin with. Is it a first person narrative? An epistolary novel? A self-indulgent bit of male wankery. Certainly the protagonist is a little off-putting in his aging drunken lechery.

But we do not have to love the driver to enjoy the ride, and Stephen Fry has his characters lined out and fleshed in perfectly. We can see them all in our mind’s eye beautifully, in their diverse natures.

Red herrings are liberally scattered through the book as the story develops. We learn a lot, but by the time we realise we are being led down a garden path, it is too late – the trap is sprung and we have to reorient our thinking in another direction.

The plot itself is fascinating. A little slow to develop, as previously noted, but it picks up, and gentle reader, it is well worth the journey.

There are couplings, games, journeys, eye-wincing injuries, Roundheads, spaniels, beets and roots before the witty gathering where the secret is revealed and the reader left aghast.

Oh, but this is sweet!

Michael Connelly, LA crime writer, packed out the theatre in the National Library of Australia yesterday and I was there in my cabbie clobber, thinly disguised with a Pops top.

I’ve enjoyed all of his books and was glad of the chance to see the writer and hear him talk about his craft. He kicked off proceedings by saying that he hadn’t turned off his own phone and might as well take a picture. Anyone who had brought along a copy of one of his books, hold it up, please.

Half the audience waved crime novels in the air. Some people had bags full of the stuff.

I didn’t. If I buy another MC book, it’ll either be a garage sale cheapie to BookCross after reading, or an e-book of some kind. He mentioned in response to a question that only 52% of sales for his latest book The Fifth Witness (See all Legal Thrillers Books) were print, and the percentage had been steadily declining.

He spoke of many things, beginning with the beginning, when he began reading crime fiction, devoured all of Raymond Chandler and went into journalism, before writing his first Harry Bosch novel in 1992, based on his experience as a crime reporter in LA.

Since then, he’s written a bit over one novel each year, spreading his energy over several character streams, but always returning to Bosch. He wants to keep writing Harry Bosch stories as long as he is able, so fans probably have quite a few more novels to look forward to.

He writes a little each day, no fixed target, just enough to keep the story moving forward. He doesn’t work from an outline, but he knows the beginning and the end, and in between he improvises.

One point I noted – as did just about everyone else, scribbling down notes on everything from Moleskines to forearms – was that he regards novels like cars. You might not like the protagonist who is driving the thing, but you had better enjoy the ride! As a taxi driver, this resonated with me – I don’t need my passengers to love me, but I want them to have their taxi needs satisfied and exceeded.

Word of mouth is his preferred publicity medium. He had a modest success with his first novel, but each time he found a wider audience, with the Blood Work movie starring Clint Eastwood and The Poet he found that he retained his audience. The The Lincoln Lawyer series, which increasingly intersects the Harry Bosch world, brought yet more readers.

Incidentally, he initially set the Lincoln lawyer, Mickey Haller, as an independent character, but changed his name after completing the book so as to hook in with Bosch, whose father’s name was Haller.

Connelly’s characters change and age. Each book is set in the time it was written, and if it has been nine months or two years since the previous in the series, then the characters likewise age. Good strategy, in my opinion.

After a few questions from the audience, the session broke up, with most attendees sprinting for the signing line upstairs at the bookshop.

Me, I went on the road and found a few cash customers.

Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh

A poignant book. Written effortlessly by Waugh, this book is full of echoes, mirrors and allusions. Like the paintings of old English houses Charles paints, capturing the majesty before the wrecking crew moves in to knock up a red-brick block of flats. here is the last sad glow of the English glory. Eton and Oxford, a decent regiment, a safe seat, a good match. Dinner at the Savoy and summers in Venice.

It’s all here, the final trembling grooves in the record before Hitler and Mussolini knock the gramophone off the table.

Charles is a fairly safe pair of hands to catch these last drops of honey. He describes the buildings he paints, the friends and relations, the characters, the families with a fine brush, colouring in the details, laying down a wash of sparkling June skies or drear grey January as required.

You can almost see Sebastian, golden youth with a teddy bear, leaning in at Charles’ window to say hello. He’s rich and titled at first glimpse, but in the end, well.

Charles picks up from penury, forced to dine with his father in the early days, until he’s on the brink of the grand prize. And then, well.

This is one of a series of books, semi-autobiographical I suppose, dealing with the period before and during the war. British men overcoming difficulties in a very British fashion.

I enjoyed this. A wonder I hadn’t read it previously, given its classic status. I could certainly read it again, to collect the nuances and pick up on the foreshadowing. Charles and Sebastian sunbathing nude on the roof of Brideshead. Are they lovers? Or just good friends?

As noted in the preface, the story drips with the good things in life. The food and wine of those last heady days before the guiltwork is covered by tarpaper and rationing restricts the viands. It’s all confusion and khaki at the end, waste and breakage of the beautiful bejewelled world.

And Charles never did finish painting the office, did he?

Right. Next step is to find the DVD of that television series that everyone was talking about in the days of my innocence.

Watch this space!

Corn! It was impossible to escape the corney hokum of this little piece of Texas, carefully cornserved for the tourists. Longhorns, cowboys, marshalls, steaks that overflowed the serving plate, over-the-top bumper stickers, whimsical store names. Armadillos. Catfish and jalapeno.

I had an absolute ball.

My eyes were opening to the world, I was meeting fascinating people, I was learning about life, I was learning about myself.

And I met a hero. She would laugh at the description, but in my eyes she’s Paula Bunyan, Amelia Earhart, Lara Croft.

And she’s coming here! To this blog!

Pardon my excitement. Pardon my Texas corn. But buckle up, grab some soda, get ready to hang on tight.

Stay tuned!