Here is what I have been reading and watching over the past month. It feels a little light on the reading, but that’s because I had a bit of a book hangover from July. There was also a lot of personal travel in August, which you’d think might mean more time to read, but when you’re travelling with friends and family, is more the opposite of that.

No referral links; if you like something I recommended, tell me what you liked about it, preferably over a beer, and share one of your faves in return.

Reading

The Bridge, Iain Banks

I had been putting this one off, even though the paperback has been on my shelves for years, because it is the very last Banks book for me. I’ve read and loved them all,1 even the non-fiction ones (Raw Spirit is a particular favourite, whether you like whisky or not). Because it is the last one, I also rationing my reading of this one, and not just because, being a paperback, I didn’t read it in bed (that is iPad time).

After all that, I found it an appropriate ending to my years-long journey with Iain (M) Banks: a slow-burn journey, a Bildungsroman of sorts. What it reminded me of most was Lanark, by Alasdair Gray: Scottish metaphysical dreams. But Banks fundamentally liked people, where I am not at all sure that Gray did, and that shines through one last time in this creation.

No spoilers, but not because the plot is in any way twisty or surprising; I had a pretty good idea of the conclusion before I was more than a handful of pages in. This one is about the ride, not the destination.

After 1178 — The Survival Of Civilizations, Eric H. Cline

This is the sequel to his earlier book, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. It was entirely unplanned that I was finishing this when I went to see Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey (see below), but I nearly fell off my cinema seat when Matt Damon delivered that line (no spoilers in case you haven’t seen it, but now you know there is a connection — although I have since seen a couple of reviews that picked up on it).

In a summer of apocalyptic imagery, the theme of society-level resilience is very timely — especially the fact that some big empires disappeared utterly, some continued on in a reduced state which might have still been okay for the inhabitants, and the ultimate winners (like the Phoenicians) were utterly unpredictable from a starting point in 1177.

It’s a rollicking ride for all that, with Cline managing to keep threads going both “horizontally” (everything that’s happening at a particular time) and “vertically” (how events fall out in a particular place or for a specific civilisation). It would be easy to get lost in the wealth of material here — or conversely, to extrapolate too wildly about a period defined largely by the absence or cessation of written records — but I was able to stay engaged throughout.

Cool Machine, Colson Whitehead

This book evokes a tremendous sense of place of New York in 1980, and from an African-American perspective at that. Of course I have no idea how accurate the portrayal is, but the setting feels very lived-in. The book itself is a series of heist vignettes which rattle along entertainingly, but really it’s all about the ambience.

I can see why William Gibson recommended it, as he does something very similar in his own books, creating worlds for readers to inhabit via the inclusion of a filigree of minor details and fleshing out the characters by showing them moving through that world, changing it and being changed by it as they go.

Sublimation, Isabel Kim

I forget who recommended this one, but it does interesting things. I was ready to give up about twenty pages in, as I felt that the setting was too pat: if you cross a border, you may “instance”, meaning a copy of you leaves and another stays behind. And yes, Kim does do the obvious things, but in a not-obvious way: instances have visa trouble, and there are ongoing literary threads about a version of the Odyssey (that again!) in which Odysseus instances.

The book sometimes feels more like magical realism than science fiction, even with a lot of the plot rotating around a tech company focused on instantiation. That magical-realism aspect is what initially turned me off, and I’m still not quite sure whether it gets dialled down or whether it was me getting tuned into the setting, but by the halfway point of the book, that aspect was no longer bothering me.

There is a lot of Korea in this one, which is fun to read about, precisely because I don’t know that much about Korean culture. I’m not really the demographic for K-pop, but other aspects of Korea are interesting, and very naturally realised in this book. As with Cool Machine, I can’t really comment on the accuracy, but it felt very real in the moment.

Watching

Ted Lasso

At this point you know what the deal is with Ted Lasso, and you’re either in for his folksy brand of cosy escapism, or not. She Who Must Be Obeyed and I quite enjoyed previous series, and at this point we are enjoying visiting with the characters from previous series (sadly minus Jamie Tartt) rather than looking for any earth-shattering plot twists. Of course the series is only half-way done, but I’m getting exactly what I was in for.

La Femme Nikita

I like Luc Besson as a film-maker, although I do understand he is not a nice person at all. This film really reflects a nasty personality behind it, but, in what is a worse sin on an artistic level, its narrative structure Is extremely disjointed. I can see the development of some themes he will return to in later, better-known filmes, but I cannot really recommend this one except for completists, or perhaps obsessive fans of Eighties suit tailoring. The idea of a Violent Girl might have been shockingly novel when the film first came out, but it’s been done better since, including by Besson himself.

The Odyssey

I saw this at the cinema, although not in IMAX (there is no suitable screen within easy striking distance). The big screen obviously helps, but the big sound system is actually a crucial part of the experience here — although Nolan and Ludwig Göransson’s trademark blasts of HOOOOOORNS did sometimes overwhelm the speakers.

I did not get too exercised about the departures from the original epic poem, and I say this having read parts of it in the original Greek — in metre, natch. I think Nolan mostly respects the spirit of the Odyssey, refracted through modern sensibilities. Most of the criticism I found utterly inane (the poem also uses non-linear storytelling and flashbacks, you oafs! it was written down at least four centuries after the events that inspired it, during which goodness knows how much editorialising had happened already!). There has been fan-fic set in the Homeric Cinematic Universe since the original poems were first written down, with Virgil being probably the most successful, at least in terms of longevity. Personally I am a huge fan of Claire North’s retelling of the story from Penelope’s point of view in her The Songs of Penelope trilogy; you might not think there would be three books of material there, but there absolutely are.

One point that I have not seen picked up anywhere else, though, is the design of Agamemnon’s armour. Like everything else on screen, this is no mistake, but rather a very deliberate choice on Nolan’s part. SWMBO and I both picked up on this, and our theory is that it’s marking Agamemnon out as a hero from the age that has ended, the age of the Illiad, who is out of place in the fallen or falling world of the Odyssey, where the laws of hospitality have been broken forever, and the islands are beset by the Sea Peoples, whoever they might actually be.

See you next month, with an end-of-season report on Silo at the very least, as well as opinions on the history of the Chinese Communist Party!

  1. I will make a slight exception for Transition, where I felt the conclusion was just a bit too pat and mean-spirited, but the ride up until then was still really enjoyable. ↩