nwhyte's reviews
4427 reviews

The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch

adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-hanging-tree-by-ben-aaronovitch/

Sixth in the Rivers of London sequence, which I have generally enjoyed a lot. The drug-related death of a teenager turns out to involve the daughter of the goddess of the river Tyburn (the river which waters the roots of the original Hanging Tree) and Peter Grant and colleagues are brought in to sort things out. Also the Americans; also the Faceless Man, antagonist in a couple of earlier books. It ends with a grand magical shoot-out in a luxury apartment block. I quite enjoyed it, but got a bit of a middle-book vibe, as if the pieces are being put in place for something more to come.

I am a bit surprised to see that readers on both LibraryThing and Goodreads rate this higher than the previous book, Foxglove Summer; I’d have put them the other way round. Users of both systems agree in ranking the next in sequence, Lies Sleeping, top; so I have that to look forward to.

Monica by Daniel Clowes

challenging dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/monica-by-daniel-clowes/

As usual, a disturbing comic book from Clowes, this time looking at the life of a woman called Monica, trying to discover the truth about her origins after her mother abandoned her as a child. The images are vivid and the stories deliberately a bit obscure, so that you have to concentrate on getting the links. I thought it was great, if anything a bit more accessible than some of Clowes’ other work. Recommended.

Doctor Who: 73 Yards by Scott Handcock

dark mysterious fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/doctor-who-73-yards-by-scott-handcock/

I wrote of the TV story that this book is based on:

I was in Glasgow planning the Worldcon for the showing of 73 Yards, and a bunch of us clustered together to watch it in someone’s room. This too was tremendous, a Doctor-lite episode that called on Gibson (who turned 20 last week) to portray her character aging through the decades, with one of those timey-wimey plots that can actually go awry rather easily but in this case didn’t.

This time the old school actor who I cheered for was Siân Phillips, who was of course Livia in I, CLAVDIVS, almost half a century ago, but has done some more recent Big Finish work as well. She too is in her nineties but clearly in her element as the sinister old woman in the pub.

Watching it again, one is stunned especially by Millie Gibson as the aging Ruby. Apparently these were the first scenes that she filmed for the show.

I am slightly surprised that this is Scott Handcock’s first Doctor Who novel, possibly his first book-length work at all; he has been writing, directing and producing for Big Finish since 2006. 73 Yards was one of my favourites of this year’s stories anyway, and Handcock has done it justice, focussing necessarily on Ruby’s story (since the Doctor is hardly in it) but also giving some neat extra bits – back-stories for the people in the Welsh pub, a scene with Ace, the ultimate fate of UNIT revealed. Very enjoyable.

Just to add, as I commented on social media soon after the story was shown, that the fictional Robin ap Gwilliam looks eerily like the real prime minister of Georgia.

Sunstone, Vol. 2 by Stjepan Šejić

emotional medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/sunstone-vol-2-by-stjepan-sejic/

Second volume in the story of the loving and kinky relationship between Alison and Lisa, this one mainly punctuated by flashbacks to Alison’s previous experiences with best friend and former lover Alan. Again, very tastefully done.

Richard II: A Brittle Glory by Laura Ashe

challenging fast-paced

4.0

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/richard-ii-a-brittle-glory-by-laura-ashe/

There are four chapters, each dealing with an area of kingship as practiced by Richard. In her prologue, Ashe makes the point that the court is not one of those four, because it was carried by the king wherever he went. The four areas are Parliament, the battlefield, the City of London (where Richard hand-picked his namesake Richard Whittington as Mayor), and the shrines connecting the King with God. 

The overall thesis is that Richard was driven by a concept of kingship where he was divinely appointed to lead, and did not need to keep people like the other magnates and the citizens of London on board with anything that he did. He felt this very deeply and it informs the Wilton Diptych, which is a personal statement of his religious beliefs which we can only dimly understand. Of course, it was not sustainable; he made too many enemies and was overthrown and (probably) killed.

It is worth reflecting that British constitutional history was a close run thing. If Richard had been even slightly more politically adept, or luckier, he could have assembled a coalition of favourite lords combined with urban stakeholders to support his personal rule without institutional safeguards, provided that there was something in it for them; and that could have proved a lasting political settlement. He was in fact lucky in how the Peasants’ Revolt played out, and that the Lords Appellant in the late 1380s also pushed their cause too far and allowed him to regain control for another decade.

As it was, the fact that Parliament successfully overthrew him one and a half times (counting 1388 as well as 1399) consolidated the English constitutional theory of Parliament as a sovereign institution which constrained the monarch, to the point of deciding who the monarch could be. Richard was clearly not interested in constitutional theory. If he had been, he might have lasted longer.

One point that I wished the book had spent more time on: Richard’s reign was a really good time for the arts in England. This is the age of Piers Plowman, Chaucer, Wycliff, Gower and the Pearl poet; and as mentioned the Wilton Diptych and the funeral monument in Westminster Abbey that Richard built for his first wife and where he was eventually laid to rest. I don’t think you would find a similar flowering of the arts in England for a century or two either before or after. Richard himself doesn’t deserve a lot of credit for this, but it’s worth noting.

There is a page on Richard’s temporarily successful campaign in Ireland in 1394, and half a page on his unsuccessful return in 1399. These were the only visits to Ireland by a reigning English monarch between King John in 1210 and William III in 1690.

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

adventurous funny fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/night-watch-by-terry-pratchett/

Samuel Vimes, the head of the Watch, is yanked back through time to the early part of his career while pursuing a criminal, and finds himself roped into leading the earlier version of the Watch at a moment of civic unrest. He successfully engineers a de-escalation of the conflict, resulting in the elevation of Lord Vetinari to leadership of the city, and returns to his home timeline in the nick of time to help Sybil deliver their child.

There are some tremendously effective moments here. At the beginning we see the Watch, and several others, commemorating the moment by gathering in the graveyard of the Small Gods, but we readers are not told what this is all about until it becomes clear to us througout the book. The scene sets an emotional tone for what follows, very effectively.

The clash between security forces and peaceful (if politically radical) protesters has a lot of precedents. Pratchett would have known the Amritsar Massacre scene from Gandhi, but writing in 2002, he would also have known of the two films about Bloody Sunday that came out earlier that year. The discussion of barricades is also a callback to Les Miserables – Victor Hugo spends an entire chapter on the subject. Most of all, of course, he gives his fictional clash the same name as the famous 1936 confrontation between fascists and anti-fascists in London, the Battle of Cable Street. You are left in no doubt about what side Terry Pratchett was on.

A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle

reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/a-friend-of-the-earth-by-t-c-boyle/

A novel from 2000, this is another environmental crisis dystopia, set in two timelines; 1989 through to the mid 1990s, when it all goes wrong, and 2025-26, when our protagonist starts to pick up the emotional pieces again (though the world is still catastrophically damaged). I found it very well done – the protagonist’s ex-wife comes back to him in the first 2025 section, and the history of their relationship, and the fate of his daughter from a previous marriage, all play out against the damage being done to the natural world by humanity, both directly through logging and indirectly through climate change. A lot of my 2025 novels have been very depressing, and this is too, but I Iike it the most of any of them. 

The dead frog on the cover was rather disturbing to see every time I opened the book on Kindle though.

Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish, and Gender by Spenser and His Contemporaries by Joan Fitzpatrick

challenging slow-paced

4.0

This is a book-of-a-PhD-thesis, a genre that I’m sympathetic to; it takes the Faerie Queene as its core, and looks also at other writing by Spenser and his contemporaries, teasing out particularly what is said about women and gender identity, and how this relates to Spenser’s understanding of Ireland and the Irish. Spoiler: Spenser was not very convinced of the good points of either women or the Irish. There’s also a particularly good chapter on Spenser’s take on the wild Irish landscape. Substantial stuff which I’m not really equipped to judge more thoroughly.

Österreich Im Jahre 2020 by Josef Von Neupauer

reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

It is quite a short book – 200 large print pages in the most recent edition – with typically ponderous nineteenth-century German sentences with long subordinate clauses which even DeepL struggles with. The premise is that by 2020, Austria – and when we say Austria, we mean the entirety of the Hapsburg Empire as it was in 1893 – has long been a Communist utopia under a constitutional monarchy, thanks to the wise reforms enacted by Franz Josef II and his heir Franz Ferdinand when he in turn came to the throne. (In reality, Franz Ferdinand was a petulant bigot who loved killing animals, and if he had ever come to the throne he is unlikely to have ruled in an enlightened manner.) Everything is tightly regulated by the authorities and everyone loves this because society has been made perfect. Money has been abolished, and so has smoking.

Most modern reviewers remark on the future arrangement of European politics in the book, which is actually dealt with rather rapidly, in two as-you-know-Bob moments of exposition, the first in Chapter 7:

Austria no longer has an army, as a disarmament treaty has long existed in Europe; but it maintains a very important naval defence force. [NB that this is the Austria which controls Trieste and Rijeka.]All the Continental states, which in the east are fully protected by Russia in return for subsidies and seconded personnel, have agreed on a coastal defence alliance and maintain not only coastal fortifications but also a strong navy, partly to protect themselves against England, which has been driven out of all seas and islands from Gibraltar to the Red Sea, and partly to protect themselves against the predatory states in Argentina and China, from where piracy is shamelessly practised.

A more extended description in Chapter 13 explains that the European Union (not quite given that name) depends on regional security as well as internal disarmament:

Turkish rule had been completely abolished and Russia had taken over Asia Minor and Arabia, Italy Egypt, France the area from Egypt to the western border of Algiers, Spain the entire west of northern Africa. The peoples of the Balkan states had formed four independent Christian empires under the sovereignty of the Emperor of Austria, who was also in command of the navy and coastal defence.

…We consider that there is no danger of the Union breaking up, as the German Confederation once did, and provision has also been made to ensure that Union law can develop in line with the times. We hope that England will soon be compelled [gezwungen] to join the Union, and for the still distant future we may well assume that the whole of Asia will be won over to the collective principle, and then Europe, Asia and Africa, which in reality form only onecontinent, will be united into a single confederation of states.

A lot to unpack here, perhaps more than these few paragraphs are actually worth, but I’ll just note that there is no reference to Islam anywhere in the book.

The other thing that surprised me was the book’s take on women and sex. The population has been kept under control and dispersed around the countryside – Vienna has only 3,500 inhabitants – and reproduction is controlled by the sinister and all-powerful Women’s Curia, a body which includes all women over the age of 18. Only a few women are allowed to have babies, for good old eugenic reasons. Women who give birth to illegitimate children, ie without permission of the Curia, are either forced to permanently wear a garment of shame covering their face and body, or graciously allowed to emigrate to Africa. (Nothing is said about the consequences for the fathers.) The Women’s Curia legislates and enforces all of this, and it is portrayed as a Good Thing.

I’m scratching my head to think of another sf novel, or even another novel, where pregnancy is treated quite so neurotically. Brave New World, perhaps; but in that case there are (almost) no pregnancies at all, human reproduction having been mechanised.

Having said that, it’s clear that there is a lot of sex happening in Neupauer’s future Austria, and his protagonist Julian West has several close encounters and one definite score with the lovely Giulietta. Nothing is said about how the large amount of sex doesn’t then lead to large numbers of babies, but perhaps we are meant to read between the lines of the unspoken activities of the Women’s Curia. The book ends with a long letter from Giulietta to Julian, in which what isn’t discussed is perhaps more interesting than what is.

Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

challenging reflective slow-paced

5.0

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/neurotribes-the-legacy-of-autism-and-how-to-think-smarter-about-people-who-think-differently-by-steve-silberman-and-a-mini-bibliography/

A big thick prize-winning book by the late Steve Silberman, looking in detail at the history and practice of autism and neurodiversity, and how American society (and by extension, Western society) is coming to terms with making accommodations for people who, as he puts it, ʎlʇuǝɹǝɟɟᴉp ʞuᴉɥʇ.

There were a couple of chapters that really grabbed my attention. One was a section about Hugo Gernsback, who set up science fiction fandom as a safe space for people to be geeks and nerds, and whose own behaviour is recognisably on the spectrum now – for instance, his invention, the Isolator, allows you to concentrate on the text you are reading without sensory distraction and even has its own air supply.

The other striking chapter is very much less fun, looking at the early twentieth-century eugenics movement and at the Nazi policy of killing neurodiverse children. The psychiatrists responsible for these murders survived into successful post-war careers in Austria. It is pretty stomach-churning.

The story of the struggle for autism is generally pretty tough, though it has a hopeful end. I can see both sides; in the initial grief and confusion after B’s diagnosis back in 2000, I too was desperate to find a way that she could be ‘cured’, and I know of other parents in a similar situation who spent vast amounts of time, money and emotional labour on snake oil solutions for their children. 

I fairly quickly came around to acceptance that our family was following our own path, and that society needs to adapt to our children’s needs more than the other way round. It’s a tough path all the same, and I felt many moments of solidarity with the people whose lives are discussed in Neurotribes; though the book doesn’t include much on those who are as cognitively disabled as our daughters. 

The book also concentrates very much on the US policy landscape with only brief looks at what is going on in other counties (and nothing at all about Belgium). But I found it helpful in understanding my own thinking in any case.