thesecretdogproject

I’ve read Terry Pratchett’s books for years now, his writing career progressing in parallel with my reading career. I think I read Wyrd Sisters before I was out of primary school, although most of the jokes went over my head. I’ve stuck with Pratchett since then, voraciously consuming his back catalogue in it’s entirety, whilst the Christmas Discworld novel became a Parkin family tradition for a decade.

The thing about Pratchett’s books is that everyone has their favourites, and for different reasons. I have particularly fond memories of the creepy Lords and Ladies, the ramshackle knock-down-drag-out fun of Guards, Guards and Men At Arms, the stunning opening duo of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Equally well, everyone comes across the odd book that doesn’t do it for them. Pratchett at his best is brilliant, Pratchett at his worst is far from bad, but is nevertheless a comparatively empty and unsatisfying experience.

I’m happy to say that, for me, Unseen Academicals is one of Pratchett’s better books, and certainly one of his best for some time. It has a good fun set of protagonists, the stalwart Lord Vetinari and Archchancellor Ridcully get an airing, and behind the fun and frolics there is a more serious agenda of examining wider themes of social class and personal empowerment. Fans of the inimitable Pratchett style won’t be disappointed either, with the trademark wit in full force, and footnotes much in evidence.

This said, I won’t be returning to Unseen Academicals the same way I have to some of the favourites of yesteryear. To a seasoned fan, there are too many Pratchett cliches to make this book a real winner — a token bad guy gets his comeuppance, the creature everyone expects to be a monster is actually quite nice, the wizards bicker and eat large dinners. The pacing and plotting is fairly predictable, and the storyline isn’t compelling enough to deeply engage the reader.

You can buy this book on Amazon in paperback for less than a fiver now, and on those terms this book is great value. If you’re a fan and you’ve not read this yet, go and put your order in now! If you’re a newcomer to Pratchett, the back catalogue has far greater treasures than this.

If you’ve seen the film of Cold Mountain, be aware that Hollywood ruined it — the book is far better. Part anti-war novel, part love story, part paean to feminism, Frazier’s book is a more nuanced and complex work than the silver screen managed to render. Beyond the obvious themes of conflict and longing, Cold Mountain explores deeper issues of self deception, redemption, and the meaning we may ascribe to life when all around is in chaos.

Written with a taut economy reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy (a lazy comparison, perhaps), Cold Mountain is an easy book to read quickly. Yet it repays more careful consideration. From the sparse poetry of the chapter titles (like any other thing, a gift, the shadow of a crow) to the little vignettes of lives that Inman observes as he makes his long journey back to the mountain of the title, each element of this book has been placed with care.

A great read. Avoid the movie.

Quite how Robert de Board hit upon the idea of basing his novella about the psychological process of counselling on Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows is beyond me, but it was a happy moment of inspiration. Although both subjects seem like unlikely matter for an engaging work of adult faction, de Board brings them together with style, yielding a charming and enlightening book.

It seems natural that every generation feels itself to be living in pivotal, vital times; and we are no different. Technology in general, and the Internet in particular, are changing the world.

Yet we really have nothing on Issac Newton and his contemporaries. They not only lived through the savage Plague of London and it’s subsequent fire (the former killing thousands a week in the summer of 1665; the latter destroying most of the city), but also the political upheaval of the invasion of William of Orange, the formation of the British Houses of Commons, and the institution of the Royal Society, which helped lay the foundation of what became the modern scientific method. In the meantime they also developed the fractional reserve system, which is the basis of our financial system. If you want vital, pivotal times, look no further!

Few could hope to stand out against such a brilliant background. Newton, however, is just such a person. His works of natural philosophy and mathematics revolutionised contemporary science. Today they form the cornerstone of modern mechanics. But Newton’s academic career only really occupied him until his middle age. After that, he moved to London to take up the post of warden of the Royal Mint, and it is this period of Newton’s life that is the main subject of Levenson’s Newton and the Counterfeiter.

Written as a strict history, rather than a historical novel, Levenson nevertheless manages to maintain a superb tension and pace throughout. Chapter by chapter, he cleverly switches focus between Newton and one William Chaloner. Chaloner was something of a underworld luminary, reportedly one of the foremost forgers in a criminal class bleeding the English monetary system dry through wholesale counterfeiting of coinage. This pitched him at direct odds with the Royal Mint, and cast him into a gripping power struggle with the surprisingly ruthless Newton.

Although sticking strictly to facts and reasonable surmise, this book succeeds in portraying not only a remarkably balanced view of one of England’s most vaunted thinkers, but also a visceral image of the realities of life at the turn of the 18th century. The descriptions of the notorious Tyburn prison, and the fate of those that left its gates condemned for crimes against the Crown, told without hyperbole, are not for the feint of heart.

Well crafted and finely written, Newton and the Counterfeiter tells a cracking yarn of two remarkable people, set in some of the most interesting times England has ever seen. Fantastic stuff.

A book with the word “classic” on the spine is sometimes difficult to approach. Irrespective of what you encounter within, the mere label compels respect. And so it was with Moby Dick, a book famous enough that it is more a kind of cultural cornerstone than a classic novel. Whether you’ve read it or not, you know what Moby Dick is, you know what it is about.

So the things that were most interesting about Moby Dick were the things that surprised me. I wasn’t expecting it to be laugh-out-loud funny, but it was. I wasn’t expecting it to offer transcendent passages of lyrical, almost astonishingly vivid prose, but it did. I wasn’t expecting it, along with everything else it comprises, to yield a paean to the leviathan, to the inscrutable forces of nature the whale embodies. But there it was.

Although it is certainly a classic, Moby Dick isn’t an easy read as such. The plot, such as it is, is scant enough to require little attention; and Melville spends some of the balance of what is a fairly weighty tome on several lengthy discourses on tangential topics such as the artistic depictions of whales in contemporary media. While somewhat pertinent in laying the groundwork for the denouement, these chapters can be hard going. In addition, the language, dazzling in places, is difficult in others. Particularly, perhaps, for the less developed attention span of the modern reader raised on a diet of punchy sentences and quick-fire dialogue.

While it takes some reading, there is a sense in which Moby Dick is a better book for the effort it demands of the reader. It’s a big book: big themes, bold language, a weight of words and images; a true leviathan. It needs to be wrestled with, just as Ahab wrestled with the white whale.

Having spent nearly the last two months sounding the depths of Moby Dick, I felt the need for some distraction. Leviathan hooked me in a bookshop within the first two paragraphs, and I decided that Melville, were he alive today, would surely not mind my augmenting my reading of his novel with a reading of this.

In some respects, Moby Dick and Leviathan are complementary. They both explore the American character, they both deal in incredible truth, they both tread the narrow path between heaven and the void. Yet where Melville’s book is generous of spirit and sparkling with wit, Auster’s is a much more introspective and contemplative volume. It is almost as if the damnation they discuss is the damnation of their time: Melville is writing about hellfire, the fury of the deep, the mysteries that man cannot fathom. Auster’s damnation is a different beast; more insidious, a deep-set soul-sickness curled within the very heart of the American psyche.

Comparisons aside, Leviathan is a gripping novel, yet it seems suffused with the confusions and emptiness its characters struggle with. Different renderings of different truths slowly revolve about one another, leaving the reader struggling to fully empathise with either the protagonist or the narrator. The gradual revelation of the story of a man’s downfall is compelling reading, but as a human story it somehow fails to connect.