Book review: The Secret Commonwealth

A successor to Northern Lights and friends. Lyra is now twenty, a student at St Sophia's, but all is not well between her and Pan: they are estranged: not only can they separate (I forget the heart-rending circumstances from the end of The Amber Spyglass) but they really aren't getting on.

Here the weakness of PP's theology / philosophy starts to get in the way of the plot-driving. If you just skip over that, it is fine; you're left with a decent adventure-mystery story with far-middle-eastern tinges. But if you pay attention, there are problems. Lyra has been led astray by two books of popular philosophy, one arguing that rationality is all; one that daemons don't exist. Or some mixture of the two; it is all piffle so I wasn't really paying attention. But obvs, emotions are a real thing, real states of our brain, evolved over the aeons for presumably evolutionarily valuable purposes that one can readily conjecture. And obvs the daemons exist - in PP's world - because they persist over time, can interact with the environment, can be reliably described in concordant ways by independent witnesses, and so on. The nominally intelligent Lyra and her friends fail to think of any of this, and PP doesn't really put much effort into them. But on reflection this is a problem, because I think PP actually cares about this aspect and is trying to say something, and failing.

Along with the Dust, which already made no sense, we now have Rose Oil, which really makes even less, but we don't find out much about it in this book, presumably that comes into volume three heaven help us. We only find out that mysterious "mountain men" who read like Muslim fanatics want to destroy it, and those who grow it. Aside: an early harbinger of this is Miriam's father's perfumery going broke; but this is quite implausible: just one source of perfume would not be so vital. Going further, within the book, it begins to seem as though the entire economy of the Middle East hangs on Rose Oil, despite no-one knowing anything about it.

PP is regrettably heading off to woke-land; you can ignore that too if you like but it mars the story if you're paying attention: for example all corporations are unerringly and unthinkingly evil, because obvs, how could it be otherwise.

Finally, I think he allows himself carelessness in speech; for example at one point a character says "People are feeling brutalised by the laws, exploited by their bosses, discriminated against by social structures they've got no means of changing". This is more the plot background; people don't speak like that.

And finally again: I think he is careless of the consistency of his world. In Oxford, it is all steam trains and bicycles and we're maybe somewhere vaguely like the 1920's; meanwhile the insurgents in the desert have pickup trucks and machine guns and are in the now.

CRA town bumps, 2026

The finest sporting event of the year returns. But alas I am in O2 (aka M2) this year, rather than O1, having lost at the seat racing; still it was a fair trial. And - apart from the lost glory of course - I sort-of gain, because M2 has been going out as a crew 2-3 times a week, whereas M1, being full of ringers, only really went out together last Sunday.

But enough of that. Since I'm writing this after the fist day, I can report how it went.

Monday. Here we see M2, and as you can guess we went up, catching Fitz Alum just before or at Ditton. A good row. GPS gives us a max of 22.8 kph off the start, which I consider improbable; but likely we hit 1:30. And for some odd reason my HR doesn't kick in until half way through, getting to 156. Harry took a video of he start; it all looks quite clean. We had both Harry and Conor giving distances; this was quite confusing as they could both be heard, but Harry was more optimistic; so we went from half-a-length to three-quarters-and-closing; I took this to mean they had put in a push, which we were reeling back in; but I think now that wasn't so. Anyway, it was all the familiar feels: good to get whistles, taking forever to get the next one, seeing the crew behind fall back - good - but then get bumped - ah that means we really want this bump to stay ahead for tomorrow. Can I afford to just keep rowing cleanly or do I really need to put in 100% effort? I did put in extra to help us around Grassy, being on bowside. But on Plough Reach we sped up a little - it all went by in a blur and I had my head down of course but I think there were boats bumped out on Grassy and we lost a little there in steering - and we were down to "three feet!" and then it happened. Hurrah!

M3 was somewhat less glorious, we went down, to Tabs Past Masters, but that did include Morley, Arnold and Gunning, who really shouldn't be slumming it down on the third division. GPS. We got almost to First Post before... well, Andy's video tells the story. I love the way I slide into view, arm raised. Although he only captures the end, certain issues are evident: Luke catches with his blade at 45 degrees, as does Steve. However, I think we had a decent row, up to the crew's ability; since we didn't get to the corners I don't think my steering was tested.

Traditionally (2025), I try to do a pre-bumps assessment before the first day. Having failed to do that, I'll try to write what I would have said. Both M2 and M3 are decent for their divisions. M2 can get down to 1:30 off the start and doesn't die too quickly; M3 is more typically 1:45, but also doesn't die, and is significantly better balanced than last year (but frustratingly needs to be told for stroke side to pull their finishes up, and refuses to internalise this). M3 got somewhat unlucky in their (fast) chasing crew; we were making some, but slow, progress on Rad 2 ahead. I have hopes of actually getting around First Post in the future.

Tuesday. M2 have the day off, so I only have M3. Starting now at #14, we have Poachers behind us, who should be respectable but old. We do well enough, getting almost to Grassy before getting zapped. GPS. They responded well when I called for pushes; but we were just a bit too messy to stay ahead. Oh, and also I stuffed up the entrance to Grassy a bit: having got too close to the far bank I had to steer out a little, which meant when turning into Grassy my stern swept out and they were outside me and in taking the corner I would have bumped myself; I needed their stern inside me to get any further round and hope for a surprise.

Wednesday: M3 off, back to M2. We row-over behind Press. Initially we gained, perhaps to 3/4 of a length, but then quietly and gently faded. I feel just a tiny bit guilty about that, because I wasn't at 100% effort, but... well. I felt that it just wasn't going to happen. Behind us we watched Fitz get to within a length, maybe closer; get pushed very hard by City of Clare, but escape; good. Then drone M1 and watch them go up, on Ditton.

Thursday: back to M3. A little late to the start - still spinning on the four minute gun - because the hard was crowded and I wasn't pushy. But we stayed calm. We're hoping for a row-over today, with little hope of catching Poachers. GPS. But to my surprise we're creeping up, getting to within a length, maybe better, so I exhort the crew to stay on it, and we do largely. They get a poor line around Ditton, possibly influenced by weed, but certainly they head off to the far bank and we pass them. Cheers all round and willow. And then O2... GPS. Our strategy is to go harder on the start and catch / scare them early... I had argued against this, and in favour of emphasising staying faster after the start, but I go with the flow. Anyway, it was a decent start, but it doesn't help, they are if anything further off than y'day (and GPS says our A14-to-Plough times are within a second all three days) until... yes, you guessed it, luck strickes twice and they also stuff up Ditton, probably weed on the rudder, and just as we're doing an all-out bumps-ten kind of thing - which does actually lift our speed - we've gone past them, and wind down. Cue more willow. Later: doring M1, who look to be about a length down around Ditton, and my drone can distantly see them on the Reach, though TBH I cannot tell one crew from another. But later it emerges they bumped up just before the Railway (which is their finish, but they could chase, their target being crew 8).

Book review: A Wrinkle in Time

Wiki tells us that A Wrinkle in Time is a young adult science fantasy novel written by American author Madeleine L'Engle. First published in 1962, the book won the Newbery Medal, the Sequoyah Book Award and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. The main characters... embark on a journey through space and time, from galaxy to galaxy, as they endeavor to rescue the Murrys' father and fight The Black Thing that has intruded into several worlds and that is about right. It is a child's book - our copy has "Alice Jewell" written into it, so E must have borrowed it from her - but I'm afraid I could not love it; though one should be aware that a sixty year old is not the target audience. The natural comparison is to Narnia I think, but it does not fare well.

Like Narnia, the book has barely-concealed Christian overtones; though amusingly the "guardian angels" look enough like three witches to have confused some of the duller Christian folk. Unlike Narnia... I'm not sure exactly. I dislike the tone. The book is flat. Perhaps this review says some of it.

But perhaps more than anything else I just didn't enjoy reading it, and had to force myself to keep going. Partly that is because the characters - well, Meg at least, but she is central - keep having Deep Emotional Problems and this jars; because whilst her problems are deep, they all play out on the integer scale of {0, 1} which is wearing. Yes! The book has no subtlety.

Incidentally, there isn't any time travel in the book. The title only refers to the method of (space) travelling, which is hand-waved "fifth dimension" stuff.

Book review: The Gardens of Delight

By Ian Watson. Not a bad book, but a meh book; having finished, I'm now wondering why I bothered. Perhaps because it is, refreshingly, a short tome: a mere 176 pages in this printing. Hardback, second hand, for £8, from Any Amount of Books, on the way from the NPG to KC.

The title is of course a reference to The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch; the book is constructed as a "well, what if there was one for real: a Garden, a Hell, and an Eden; how might that play out?". It plays out as a spaceship, visiting a distant planet, to check up on the previously-sent-out colonists from a hundred years ago or so (as an aside, the dynamics of this, especially the politics and economics, are absurd; thankfully they are not dwelt on). Mysteriously, the planet has been terraformed into the Gardens; the inhabitants speak of a God, but of course it is merely space-aliens, who have done this thing for their own inscrutable purposes. Naturally, it is possible to conjecture various reasons why they might have, and the book does, but these are only things you might have though of for yourself, so that aspect fails to interest.

A review that I largely agree with is here; from which I quote "The book is full of half-baked theories drawn from philosophy, theology and psychoanalysis. Alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone come up frequently, as do Jungian archetypes... a modest book, despite its grandiose speculations on the nature of God and humanity. It doesn't claim to be anything more than what it is: a carrier bag full of the author’s quirks and obsessions".

So yes, not to be taken or judged too seriously, but nonetheless marred by rather too much explanatory dialogue of all these not-very-interesting systems; though perhaps they were more interesting in those distant days.

Oh, and I read this when young; but obvs retained little.

Art for art's sake

...money for God's sake. But this is just a list of visits to galleries and stuff, so I can find things again, perhaps. Where approriate, the link is to a blog post about the visit, which will then contain a link to the pix.

Quite often nowadays I scan picture descriptions and add them to the photo as captions. This only works within GPhotos, and doesn't get uploaded to Flickr, due to Google being annoying like that. For example, from NPG, the one I've inlined of the young woman is captioned in the GPhoto version.

* National Portrait Gallery July 2026.

* Wien, 2026:  Kunsthistoriches Museum, Nat Hist, Leopold and Belvedere.

* Imperial War Museum, October 2025.

* Norway and Sweden, July 2025.

* National Portrait Gallery June 2025.

* National Gallery, April 2025.

* Musee d'Orsay, August 2024.

* Westminster Abbey; Courtauld; National Gallery; Royal Academy, March 2024.

* National Gallery, January 2024.

* Cezanne at the Tate, and British Museum, March 2023.

* V+A, May 2022.

Book review: Pharos and Pharillon

By E. M. Forster. Author of Howard's End and also, rather less well known like this book, of a history of and travel guide to Alexandria.

This is an elegant lightweight cultured tome, that I am not fit to review, so I won't, not really. While cultured it is not generally snooty, it is quite ready to share with you. There's probably just one exact word to describe this type of literature, but I don't know it.

Nowadays, this would be something dreadful; whilst not quite fair, an analogy that comes to mind is the book Bothy which E brought to St Gervais and I partly read, which has the modern tendency to giganticism that this slender tome lacks.

EMF is oddly enough most at home in literary lanes; and so the piece on cotton is inevitably disappointing. We get little more than his incomprehension, whereas it would be interesting to know more of the threads of the cotton trade; why is the share dealing end now nearly deserted; and so on.

But this is a book of essaies in the real sense and so contains as it should some failures. The last, on Cavafy, is nice.

Book review: The Storm Lord

By Tanith Lee. Pulp pap, of course. I knew that when I bought it, you can tell from the cover. But good or bad pap? Middling-verging-towards-the-bad-side I think. But nonetheless I did finish reading it, and did quite enjoy perhaps the first two thirds.

The cover, whilst fantastical, does as so often somehow summarise the book: a beautiful fragile woman helpless in the protection of a strong manly warrior. Indeed, as several Goodreads reviewers - well, practically every reviewer - note, women get a pretty bad book: largely passive, just waiting to be raped it seems. If TL weren't female this would be rather pathetic male fantasy; as she is, it is... hard to explain. Maybe it is what she thought the genre demanded. Just possibly it is a reductio-ad-absurdam of the conventions of the genre. But the female fragility is amenable to need: sometimes they die at a touch, but where necessary they survive long enough to give birth to a future plot character.

Does the book have anything to say, or is it merely fantasy epic for fun? I tend to the latter. For example, things are kinda poorly thought out - one example of which is that there's a map in the front, but it is missing many of the places visited in the text. A better example is the lowlands telepathy. In the book, this is merely part of their passivity - they don't, on the whole, speak. But it would be a valuable skill, with many obvious applications, not least military. None of that is explored.

In the end Our Hero rides off into the sunset, discarding any obligation to help out and fix the mess he has made, to help build society anew.