The Yiddish Policeman's Union
By Michael Chabon

Man makes plans and God laughs.

This was a marvelous read and a book I found very hard to put down. Not only beautifully written but very witty, with a great dead-pan humour throughout. I actually found myself laughing aloud occasionally in fact.

I don't read police "procedurals" generally, although the recent Maigret read probably counts. Chabon's novel is decidedly different however. A murder mystery set among the diaspora Jews of Sitka, Alaska, in a world where Israel was snuffed out soon after its formation. So it is actually an alternate history novel and some subtle differences to our world are hinted at occasionally. The USA offered the Jews their new chilly far north home but the catch is that it is a temporary arrangement and that "reversion" to the US is about to take place after a fifty year run. Once again, the Jews have homelessness to look forward to.

With a hard-boiled, slovenly but dogged and capable detective protagonist, an ex-wife also in the police force and a half native Tlingit partner, the book shares many features common to the genre. However, suffused with Yiddish and Eastern European Jewishness, it is a very refreshing take on the hard-bitten crime story. I've learned a few Yiddish words here and, luckily, there was a Yiddish glossary in the back of my paperback edition. I now have a few other Chabon novels on my shelf to read sometime and this book is also one for a future re-read as well.

Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh have a great exhibition on at the moment called The Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives. It covers a bit more than just the Colourists, including other artists working around the same time, such as: Sargent, Whistler, Melville (a great watercolour on display) and some of the Bloomsbury Artists, such as Duncan Grant.

Above: Leslie Hunter, Peonies in a Chinese Vase, 1925,oil on board (from Dovecot web site)

Perhaps it is a little easy to forget Dovecot Studios sometimes, unless you keep an eye on weaving and tapestry arts, but it is a bit more than a tapestry studio. It does a lot of art, craft, design and education as well and has a really good exhibition space. There were a lot more paintings being shown than I expected, which was a very pleasant surprise.

Above: Arthur Melville, Orange Market, Puerto de Los Pasajes, watercolour on paper, 1892

I was surprised and happy to see a painting by Kees Van Dongen :

Above: Kees Van Dongen, A Vase of Flowers, oil on canvas, 1920

Above: S J Peploe, Still Life with Bottle, oil on canvas, 1912

The building used to be public baths, built in 1885 and the first of the kind in Edinburgh. It's beautiful inside and the tapestry studio is where the original swimming pool sat :

Below: The viewing gallery, looking down on the tapestry artists.

I'll re-visit the exhibition before it finishes on 26 June 2025. It is well worth another look.

Many art works are not on display in galleries and museums because there is just not enough display space and the collections are large. However, it is still frustrating to see how many are out of sight.

One work I came across is an example: The Green Bottle by the Scottish Colourist Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell. I saw this for the first time recently and liked it a lot, but had never seen it before. Looking it up, I discovered where it was and was disappointed to see that it was "In Storage". A shame because it's a great painting. At least it is in the National Gallery of Scotland, so I might get a chance to see it in person sometime.

This one joins many other works out of sight, including works by other Scottish artists like S.J. Peploe and Leslie Hunter.

Speaking of Edward Gorey, I came across two things about him a day or so after posting about the "tribute" exhibition in Leith.

One was a link on Hacker News about a Comics Journal article by Cynthia Rose about how she had some correspondence with him many years ago. A lovely little story, short and sweet. It shows off more workings of his eccentric mind.

Over time, we discussed a range of topics: the Moors murders, the benefits provided by a ha-ha, Gustave Doré's views about the London slums, Lillian Gish in The Wind, Japanese ghost behaviour in the Edo era, spirit photography, London's cheap bookstores, Rudolf Nureyev's feet, illicit dissections and why green wallpaper had killed Victorians.

I'd never heard of a "ha-ha" until I came across it in Ian McEwen's book Atonement. It is : "a ditch with a wall on its inner side below ground level, forming a boundary to a park or garden without interrupting the view".

The other Gorey reference was seeing that he had done the covers for two books by the writer of "strange" stories, Robert Aickman. I've read some Aickman (and will read some more) and his subtle and odd (sometimes unsettling) stories seem to be a good combination with the artist.

On the right is Gorey's cover for Aickman's collection Cold Hand in Mine. His art also graces Aickman's Painted Devils collection. I have Cold Hand in Mine and it is on my "to be read" list. Unfortunately it is not the one with the Gorey cover.

I found the image of the cover on the blog feuilleton by artist and designer John Coulthart. Some of his artistic interests closely match mine.

Take Back Plenty
By Colin Greenland

I have been trying to curate "good" books to read, so have been picking up "classics" (of whatever genre), as well as recommendations (whether BookTube, personal or otherwise). So far with a lot of success, but it can be hit or miss of course. I heard good things about Colin Greenland's Take Back Plenty (BookTube I think) so picked it up as my next read. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a miss for me.

Greenland is an academic and, according to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, did a PhD at Oxford in science-fiction (yes, I am surprised). Originally, he seemed to have some association with British New Wave science-fiction in the 1970's but this may have been tenuous with respect to his written work. This is his fourth novel, first published in 1990.

Take Back Plenty is not a bad book per se, just written in a jokey and "knowing" way I didn't always appreciate. I almost put it aside a couple of times actually, but carried on and finished it.

It's a "space opera", so expect spaceships, aliens, technology and planetary adventure; a story that could almost be described as a "romp" in times gone by. Although I'm not a fan of humorous books, I did find one or two moments in the book funny. But overall, the novel was a bit of everything, all over the place and too much going on. The central character, Tabitha Jute, had a lot of potential, but was a bit of a standard issue wise-cracking cargo ship captain, swept along by a never-ending sequence of events strung together. She seemed a bit feckless in some ways. I never felt much excitement or suspense and the "world-building" seemed a little confusing to me as well.

The novel won a few awards and also spawned a couple of followups but I will probably not bother with them.

Edward Gorey was an American artist/illustrator famed for his quirky, gothic and somewhat macabre drawings. In his centenary year (he was born in 1925, died in 2000), the Customs House in Leith was the venue for a small exhibition of works by artists paying him tribute.

Above: A view of The Shore in Leith from the Customs House. A blue sky in February.

Right: From the Pious Infant by Edward Gorey.

The art of drawing, illustration and printmaking is such a neglected field that it was great to have a show like this. I think most cities could really do with a dedicated gallery for the graphic arts, Edinburgh included.

Thanks to Paper Galaxy (Linda Hughes) and everyone else involved for taking the time to curate and put this together.

The exhibition was called Phantasmagorey.

The The Gashlycrumb Tinies is a great example of Gorey's work and black humour: an "ABCD" book of weird and wonderful situations ... and untimely deaths. The "tinies" come to unforunate ends.

Below: From the The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963). This illustration is taken from the Gorey page at Lambiek.

Almost all the art at Phantasmagorey was by artists paying Gorey tribute, including a few I know such as Kate Charlesworth (who lives in Leith apparently), Tom Gauld and Steven Appleby. As you would expect, many pieces were quirky or macabre as well.

Right: The Prim Reaper by Morten Morland

Right: The Match by Ray Baker. A great "Pen on Paper" construction.

Below: I didn't catch the creator of this. Gorey loved making up strange animals.

Song of Kali
By Dan Simmons

This was not a very comfortable book to read at times. I enjoyed it, if that term is appropriate, and looked forward to sitting down and reading but it is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it was a little stomach churning in a few places! Labelled part of a "Fantasy Masterworks" series (Gollancz), it could be classified as "horror" perhaps, if one wanted to classify at all. In addition, it is unclear if there is any actual "supernatural" element here. A feeling of dread pervades the narrative.

This is a dark, bleak and unsettling story about an American writer who travels to Calcutta with his wife and baby daughter, with the aim of getting hold of a manuscript from a poet long thought to have been dead. The poet, M. Das, disappeared years previously but seems to have re-surfaced with a new work of a quite different nature. The American wants to collect the new work for publication in the USA and also meet Das but he is elusive. On finally reading this manuscript, it may not be something the world should see.

The city is a major character in Simmons' tale and can be a grim backdrop. This is not an India the Ministry of Tourism will like (although the book is set decades ago now).

Left: A depiction of Kali from wikipedia.

As Wikipedia says, she is the "embodiment of the grim worldly realities of blood, death and destruction". She is also the Goddess of cremation grounds. In Simmons' novel, she is all of these things.

There are many horrific elements to this novel but it is well written and fast paced. You continue to read but know things are probably not going to end well, at least for some. I loved a re-read of the Hyperion books last year and I am glad to have a few more of his novels on my shelf waiting for a read (or indeed a re-read).

My Friend Maigret
By George Simenon

I found three Maigret books in a Free Library near me. I've heard very good things about Simenon and his detective so I picked them up and have now read one. My first Simenon went very well.

My Friend Maigret is a short and incisive crime mystery set on a French island off the Riviera. A small cast of characters are in focus after a murder, with Maigret accompanied by Mr Pyke, an observer of his methods from Scotland Yard. There is humour with the wry interaction of Maigret and his quite taciturn colleague, who he seems to slightly resent but also admire, and also great local colour. This all takes place in the Fifties, and shows its age in some ways of course (telegrams, for instance). However, it is extremely readable and I found the prose sharp and quite witty. Human behaviour, and the types you might find in a place like this, are timeless though, and crime will always be familiar. Very well done novel and I look forward to the next one.

Helix Wars
By Eric Brown

Helix Wars is Eric Brown's followup to his Helix novel, a book I liked a lot. Whilst I would not rate this as quite as highly, it is a very worthy sequel.

Taking place about two hundred years after the first, the human colony has made its home on the Helix and been assigned a "peacekeeper" role by the Helix Builders. When one of the alien races on the Helix decides to wage a war of conquest on another, a human inter-world pilot is shot down and dropped into the midst of the terror and ravages of the war.

What we end up with is a great action and adventure story, with a chase, a rescue attempt, an alien partner, high technology and a brutal foe. Like the first book, Brown is good on the interaction and relationship between people, here alien people. We empathise with the alien point of view completely, and the morality of killing is explored as the characters debate and argue about what sort tactics to use and how justified killing is. It is an excellent science-fiction thriller: easy to read and pacy like the first book.

I will say that I don't particularly like the cover of the paperback I have though. It makes the book look like a video game, or some sort of "role-playing" fiction! Getting past that though, a straightforward action book I enjoyed reading a lot. Now to find the next Brown book to pick up: they are not all in print anymore I think.

The Chrysalids
By John Wyndham

This is my third Wyndham novel, and it is one some people consider his best. Another great adventure story, this time told from the point of view of an adolescent boy.

The story takes place in a much changed world after some sort of cataclysm (called the "Tribulation"), almost certainly nuclear given the descriptions of the state of nature and fear of mutation. We open with humans living in very basic circumstances in a farming community run under extremely strict religious law. David's father is the tyrannical and brutal leader of the farm clan, obsessed with rooting out any "deviation" from the True Image. In the Bible, Man is created in the image of God. God does not have six toes on a foot. Outside "civilisation" is a very different society, populated by people banished or born to live on the fringes and eke out a much harsher existence. Here, there is no "true" image and existence is very mean. In the world of the farm we encounter a child, then a few more, who have an extra ability of telepathy, more easily hidden than, say, a sixth toe. Until it is noticed.

David and his friends communicate long distances through their minds, and from an early age are aware of the danger they would be in if their difference is discovered. The books leads inevitably to this and their escape attempt. It turns out that being able to communicate in this way imparts some advantages.

A short book, it tells a well known story of the evils of persecution and the need for tolerance of difference. A shared humanity. But also considers what sort of "improved" human evolution might produce: perhaps even a "superior variant" of Homo Sapiens. I thought that the conclusion was a little quick and perhaps a bit pat. It also lapses into some polemic regarding evolution and change near the end, with Wyndham getting up on the podium to lecture. With this said, I enjoyed it, even though I would place it slightly below the The Day of the Triffids in my estimation. Many more good books and short stories of his to try next.

I visited the National Gallery of Scotland in the first week of 2025 to have a look at the Turner watercolours, shown once a year in January. I do this every year.

I am now very glad I went early, because the week after there was a big queue to get in, and earlier this week (Thursday 10am), another even longer queue. I have never seen queues before: snaking out the front door and up the side of the gallery building.

A reason might be that the exhibition was of the Vaughan Bequest from the National Gallery of Ireland this year for the first time. Maybe a good enough reason itself, or maybe good marketing, advertising or an "influencer" somewhere. They are such good paintings that I am just glad I managed to have a look.

From the National Gallery of Scotland site :

In 2025 the National Galleries of Scotland will commemorate the 250th birthday of beloved British artist JMW Turner with a once-in-a-lifetime, free exhibition. For the first time, visitors will be able to marvel at over 30 Turner watercolours from Dublin.

I over-heard a gallery assistant saying that Dublin has not got queues like this.

Adam Bede
By George Eliot

It was that moment in summer when the sound of the scythe being whetted makes us cast more lingering looks at the flower-sprinked tresses of the meadows.

I found Adam Bede, George Eliot's first full length novel, extremely moving. Yes, perhaps a bit romantic and sentimental, but nevertheless, a strong emotional response. Some chapters were almost unbearably difficult to get through because of the strength of feeling it brought forth.

It is easy to begin reading and get wrapped up in the world of the small English village of Hayslope at the turn of the 19th Century. Eliot has such beautiful prose, the countryside and people come to life and you are swept away to "Loamshire", her fictional English county.

There is a lot of sympathy for the lot of the common workers she pictures in her books. She has sympathy but also a sharp eye and the world she describes is not always one of dappled sunlight and radiant meadow. People might be grey faced and pinched as well as rosy cheeked and dimpled. The story itself is a well known and time-worn one, as the author, publisher and reader knew: the central event is based on a story Eliot heard from her aunt when she was young. A squire falling for a farm girl was a tale commonly melodramatic but here made fresh, immediate and more realistic.

It is a slow book and infused with Christian thought and speech, with strong moral sentiment. There is also a huge amount of empathy, love, respect and humour; there are some very funny observations by Eliot (as an occasional narrator) and her characters. Mrs Poyser has a sharp and witty tongue, not sparing anyone, not her husband or even her landlord, the old squire. The scene where she gives him a piece of her mind when he tries to push her into an unwanted business arrangement is a real gem. When Hetty Sorrel, her beautiful but very vane niece, lets her imagination run and struts in front of her bedroom mirror "with a pigeon-like stateliness", we see it and laugh, but it also becomes heart-breaking later. I felt for Hetty even though Eliot does a lot to expose her vacuity, thoughtlessness and vanity.

The book is not without faults, Adam himself is perhaps a little too unblemished after all, but the novel is one of the greatest I've had the pleasure of reading.

Dying Inside
By Robert Silverberg

I have not read any Silverberg and he is a giant of the science-fiction genre, so it is time I rectified that. I think Dying Inside was an excellent book to start with.

First published in 1972, Dying Inside concerns a man born with the ability to read people's minds. Imagine how great that would be? Well, not so fast! Set in mid-seventies New York, David Selig is now in his forties and has lived a decade or so with the realisation his powers are waning. This causes him much anxiety, to say the least, but the "gift" he was born with has been a blessing as well as a huge curse in his life. What might a life be like if you had this ability? Would you always want to know what people really thought of you?

Selig is not a particularly likeable man. He is cynical, unhappy with his station in life and full of guilt about his power. In fact, ignoring the telepathic ability, he exhibits many of the traits of the stereotypical New Yorker, and a Jewish one at that. I have not read much Roth, but perhaps he would be at home in a Roth novel. Or think of Woody Allen, minus the jokes, but plenty of black humour. Dying Inside is sometimes called "literary" science-fiction (descriptive terms like this can be fuzzy); in fact it is barely "science-fiction" at all. At least so far as most people would think science-fiction is (consider: Orwell's Nineteen Eight Four is science-fiction).

Perhaps "literary" because of this. Silverberg is a well read and erudite man and he has spent time polishing his prose here, inserting clever and thoughtful literary and philosophical references. He also conjures up the atmosphere of the New York of the times, especially the Seventies, post JFK and King assassinations, and the cultural, social and educational milieu (and dysfunction).

Not a long book, I found it quite a pleasure to read.

Good news everybody ...

I've been very angry about the Economist App performance this year, particularly how much it was crashing. I was having to do a factory reset on my tablet every 8 weeks to get a decent experience reading the magazine on my tablet. I am very pleased to say that things seem to have significantly improved however.

There was an update sometime in early November I think and since then it feels a little more responsive and also much more stable. So far, I have really noticed it behaving better. Now the ratings and comments I see on the Play Store are still quite bad but, for me, it seems like the update has fixed the biggest issues I had. I'm still cautious of course, but I am happy to report this. I should rate and comment about this on the "store" sometime soon as well.

This is the site of the former Royal Bank of Scotland building on Dundas Street in Edinburgh. A huge building, it was demolished recently and now sits empty beside King George V park. The development has hit a snag.

The original plans have changed and the developers are after new permissions from the council. The work is expected to include a lot of new student accomodation of the sort that has been put up throughout the city. Also a lot of rental, residential and a bit of office. There is a lot of pressure on housing: the amount available is insufficient and the costs are high and rising, but I have mixed feeling about this for a variety of reasons. Let's see what happens ...

More information is on the Spurtle.

There's a great article in The Atlantic called The Crumbling Foundation of America’s Military. It is a very sobering look at how far the war fighting capability of the USA has shrunk over the last thirty years. The war in Ukraine has put this into very sharp focus.

It turns out that a lot of America's industrial production of things like 155mm howitzer shells (see right) is via a process almost unchanged for a hundred years. Slow and expensive. The article notes that when Russia invaded Ukraine :

At that time, the U.S. was manufacturing about 14,000 shells a month. By 2023, the Ukrainians were firing as many as 8,000 shells a day. It has taken two years and billions of dollars for the U.S. to ramp up production to 40,000 shells a month—still well short of Ukraine’s needs.

There is a huge amount of dysfunction, inefficiency and cost involved throughout the supply chain. The USA is having to seriously consider a future conflict with a "peer" adversary, not armies like Iraq or the Taliban. They can produce technically advanced weaponry but at massive cost: the Houthi's launch drones that cost a few thousand dollars each. Tomahawks that are fired to intercept these are expensive :

When American ships began striking Houthi targets in Yemen in January, they fired more Tomahawks on the first day than were purchased in all of last year.

How inefficient and sclerotic is the industry? This was a painful read :

One of the most famous examples of this dynamic was an unmanned aircraft invented by the Israeli aerospace engineer Abe Karem originally called Albatross, then Amber, and finally the GNAT-750. He won a Pentagon contract in the 1980s to design something better than the drone prototype offered by Lockheed Martin, known as the Aquila. And he delivered, building a machine that cost far less, required just three operators instead of 30, and could stay aloft much longer than the Aquila could. Everyone was impressed. But his prototype vanished into the valley of death. Although it was a better drone, Aquila looked good enough, and Lockheed Martin was a familiar quantity. But Aquila didn’t work out. Neither did alternatives, including the Condor, from another of the Big Five, Boeing. Only after years of expensive trial and error was Karem’s idea resurrected. It became the Predator, the first hugely successful military drone. By then, Karem’s company had been absorbed into General Atomics—and Karem lost what would have been his biggest payday.

The Atlantic article is worth reading in its entirety.

It is a new and very dangerous world, much easier and cheaper to sow destruction and hard to defend against. The best thing we can all do is to avoid going to war, not at all costs, but certainly make extra effort not to. Wars have a habit of going in very different directions than the one we expect. I have just been listening to the brilliant podcast The Rest is History and their talks on the diplomatic failures that lead to the First World War. We need to learn from history and be much cleverer in how we deal with threats. We can't afford not to.

Greybeard
By Brian Aldiss

I was between books, picking new ones up wondering what to to go for, read the first few paragraphs of this and didn't want to stop. I liked the prose and seemed to be in just the right mood.

Greybeard is the story of people thrown together by circumstances and travelling down a river to the sea. Unfortunately, the "circumstances" are the end of the world, or at least the end of the human component to the world. A few decades ago, an "accident" has rendered humanity and some animals sterile : children have vanished and people are getting old. With the general collapse, nature is now rapidly reclaiming the world and what people survive exist in small isolated pockets, aging and some reverting to an existence informed by rumour, myth and fable. Forests reassert themselves and the nights are dark.

Greybeard is a melancholic story told in a beautifully lyrical style. Aldiss has a way with words in a sometimes spartan way. Great descriptions of the new natural world taking shape as Man diminishes; mist, water, oak and badger come into focus now. The characters, especially Algernon Timberlane ("Greybeard") and his wife Martha, come to life in a special way I think and their love is beautifully described. Martha has a great wit.

I hesitate to call the novel "gentle", it is a story of the end of the world after all and there is certainly some violence depicted. But this is not dwelt upon and no brutality. There is always a background possibility of danger of course. I've seen it described as "pastoral", and I think this fits and what makes the book so good. I've read three great novels from Aldiss now: Non-Stop, Hothouse and now this. I think Greybeard might be my favourite.

The Time Machine
By H.G. Wells

I am embarrassed to say I have never read any H. G. Wells. I have rectified this recently however by reading his first novel, The Time Machine.

I should have done this years ago, perhaps as a teenager, because it was such a great book. I can understand why it was such a big success on publication in 1895: people were introduced to an author with a huge imagination and perhaps the first true science-fiction story. I enjoyed reading this immensely.

Not only an exciting adventure but thought provoking in a way that must have been quite unsettling to the readership back then. We not only travel to an almost unimaginably distant future of 802,701 AD but come to see what human evolution might mean; Darwin's theory being only a few decades old and still troubling to many. Wells was certainly not one to predict a heroic future progress of humanity. This might be one reason some critics and readers found him difficult. From Brian Aldiss' Billion Year Spree :

His audience is accustomed to powerful heroes with whom they can unthinkingly identify. A mass audience expects to be pandered to. Wells never pandered.

Perhaps a quote more applicable as his output increased, but a story where the human species can split into two, with one predating upon the other and all thought of science or art banished must have been hard to take. Even the idea of a deep "geological" time was fairly new (With Lyell's Principles of Geology published in 1830).

Wells' novel is brilliant. Now for The War of the Worlds I think.

The Kings of Eternity
By Eric Brown

Having read Eric Brown's Helix and loved it, I thought I'd read some more of his work.

The Kings of Eternity is a good science-fiction story that switches between the modern day and the 1930's. Three friends encounter an otherworldly portal that opens in the woods, and then an alien contact. This changes their lives, as you would expect, and over the years they have to come to terms with this and what it entails.

Brown manages to convey the protagonists well as men of the earlier 20th Century: their language and understanding of the situation is of that time. Luckily, the scientific advances at that point mean they have some sort of framework within which to place the strange events. The book is always very readable and engaging, even with a bit of a slow start. It is not an action packed story, although there is some action, but it gets into its stride quickly. What they encountered years ago endowed them with a gift and each has to come to terms with this. In fact, the novel is as much about relationships as "science" (or adventure), and in the end, a love story. So, a "scientific romance".

Well written and quite lyrical in parts, there is a lot to like about this book. In some ways, old fashioned (in an H.G. Wells way), but it is an uplifting and positive read.

It is that time of year again, and the Open Eye Gallery opens its 2024 Small Scale show.

Selected artists are invited to submit works in any medium, unframed, with the only restriction limiting the dimensions to 15 x 21 cm, the classic ‘postcard’ size.

Small pictures usually reasonably priced. Lots of good ones from good artists.

Below:
Left: Nestled off the Loch by Megan Burns, Acrylic on board, 15x21cm [link]
Right: Full Moon Afternoon by James Tweedie RGI, Acrylic on card, 15x21cm [link]

Below:
Left: Patience by Clare Mackie, Acrylic on canvas, 15x21cm [link].
Right: A Squirrel for Mary by Tracey Johnston, Acrylic on board. 15x21cm [link].

Most of the paintings are priced £200 to £600 but there are one or two priced much higher. I'm not sure why. Have a look and see what you think. The show is online only.