The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 28)
And so I circle back and reread the book I read just over a month ago.
This has been a most enjoyable experience, reading through the whole series. Rereading this one so soon was an excellent opportunity to see if I could spot any clues that I missed the first time (certainly one or two).
The apparent logical jumps the characters make at the climax made more sense this time, so that was good.
Excellent stuff. I look forward to the next one.
The Banshees of Inisherin, 2022 - ★★★★
Martin McDonagh’s latest is sad, hilarious, tragic, and true. Or feels like it could be true, even if some of the decisions characters make are baffling, to say nothing of gruesome.
On a rugged, beautiful island off the coast of Ireland in 1923, with the civil war going on on the mainland, two friends fall out. Or rather, one says he doesn’t like the other any more. A whole sequence of events flow out from this simple, almost child-like choice.
The funniest part happens when one of them goes to confession.But that’s only to be expected: confession’s a pretty funny kind of thing, when you think about it.
(Updated 2022-12-11 at 18:47:58)
Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 27)
For some reason this is the one whose title never sticks in my mind. When I try to think of the books in the series I always seem to have a hard time bringing this one to mind.
Which is by no means because of the story, which is excellent. Strike and Robin take on a cold case, 40 years old. When I wrote about this before I said I thought there was too much time spent on the other cases. That didn’t seem so this time.
Also back then, I was recovering from being sick. This time I was just starting to be. And indeed, I was reading a section where Strike gets flu and tries desperately to convince himself that he can’t be getting it; to no avail, of course. I was reading that and thinking, ‘Yes, I’m definitely getting it.’ And not flu.
Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 26)
The rereading continues. It’s actually now a couple of weeks since I read this, this time. what with forgetting, and then coming down with Covid, and what have you.
Politics is the background for this one, with Robin going undercover at the House of Commons to try to find out who’s blackmailing a government minister — or rather, why? The blackmailers are known, but nobody outside of the minister’s family knows what it is they have on him.
All good stuff, as ever. I had totally forgotten who was behind it all (where ‘it’ is the murder that follows the blackmail), which just goes to show you can easily enjoy a whodunit a second time.
Well, damn. As the only one in my immediate family never to have had it, I really thought I was going to get away with it.
Barry Lyndon, 1975 - ★★★½
I had never seen this Kubrick film, and it was a little hard to get my head around it as a comedy. Which it kind of is, though I've also seen it described as a drama, and it has elements of both. Tragedy too.
It's a strange one. Beautifully shot, many scenes composed like paintings, and a great score. I mostly enjoyed it, but it's definitely not up there with 2001, in Kubrick's work.
Wednesday Night is Music Night
God, I have missed this so much. Live music FTW.
I get emails from the Joe Strummer Foundation . The most recent one told me that their artist of the month for September was someone called Gemma Rogers. I hadn’t heard of her, but was interested when I read that she’d had an album launch at Paper Dress Vintage. That’s a place just down the road from me on the Narrow Way. It used to just be a second-hand clothes shop, but now it’s more, I guess.
Anyway, the thought that she might be a local piqued my interest, as well as the JSF recommendation, so I gave her a listen, and liked what I heard a lot.
She was booked to play at a place called Folklore, on Hackney Road, so I thought, why not? In support was Gabi Garbutt and the Illuminations , who I saw once a few years back, because Sean Read, whom I know from round these parts, was producing them and playing in the band. Back then. Not anymore. Not tonight, at least.
Going to a gig in a small venue? No big deal, right? Except… this is the first gig I’ve been to since I saw Glen Matlock. At the end of February 2020.
It felt like quite a step.
But after a bite to eat across the road, we made our way in through forbidding, castle-like doors. Inside is a smallish bar area, and a classic pub backroom. The stage made of two layers of forklift pallets topped with hardboard. It was smoky. Visually, it was like being back in the eighties. But of course, it was stage smoke-machine smoke. Exactly why it filled the air before anyone had taken to the stage escapes me.
Unless it was to show the lasers. It looked like this:
Anyway, Veronica Bianqui brought her Hollywood-fuelled LA tones to Hackney Road. Though it turned out she had been on the bus with us down from Clapton.
I probably enjoyed Gabi Garbutt’s performance most of the three. Because at times? At times they sounded a bit like late-period Clash.
They sounded. Like. The Clash. Combat Rock-era. I think it was mainly the bass player sounding a bit like Paul Simonon. Whatever, I can pay no higher compliment. No higher compliment can be paid.
But Gemma Rogers was also great, with the singalong of ‘Rabbit Hole’ being the highlight. Not often you get the band applauding the audience.
But yes: I had missed it so much more than I realised. Just getting together in room with a hundred or so people, while others make rocking sounds up the front? How could I have forgotten?
Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 25)
This is, by far, the most gruesome book in the Strike series. The crimes, the killings are, that is to say.
It also gives Robin the most action she’s had, as well as the most danger.
And I still, since reading it seven years ago, haven’t investigated Blue Öyster Cult. Oh well.
Also I don’t really like the #NotMyKing hashtag that some republican campaigners have been using. It implies either that someone else should be king, or that there is or could be someone who is ‘my king’. Republicans believe no one should be king. Or queen.
Did anyone else get heavy Cybermen vibes from the royal funeral parade? All the slow marching with a drumbeat on every step? Everyone in time, rocking from side to side…
God Save Your Mad Parade
I surprised myself, really. I, an avowed republican and atheist, watched the Queen’s funeral.
It was a historic event, there’s no doubt about that. If only because we need reminding once in a while that we live in a militarist theocracy.
Sure, the Prime Minister — elected, but just barely having any democratic legitimacy — was involved, reading one of the weird stories from the strange Christian book, The Bible. But look at the start of the ceremony. The military led the march to the church, surrounding the coffin throughout. Just inside the doorway they handed over to the religionists, who led them down the aisle.
All the living Prime Ministers were there, and some other politicians too, I expect. But it was not a day for them, for the elected; nor for their electors, for ‘commoners’, except to bow their heads and throw flowers.
I kept an eye on Twitter throughout, but it wasn’t nearly as snarky as I imagined. A few comments about dropped papers and spiders, but mostly just revelling in it.
The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 24)
A satire of literary London wrapped in a murder mystery. Robin gets more to do than in the first one.
Which comment makes it mildly amusing to me that I wrote seven years ago that there isn’t enough of her.
The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 23)
So we move into a(nother) period of rereading. Reading the new Strike novel immediately made me want to go back to the start. Mainly, I think, because I wanted to stay with these characters. As I type I’ve just finished the second in the series.
The characters, though, are very different back here. Well, Strike not so much. Robin is new-minted, still unformed, and doesn’t get nearly as much pagetime as she deservedly does in later books.
Good stuff, this tale of a famous model who dies in a fall from a balcony. The police have written it off as suicide, but Strike, when asked to investigate, has other ideas.
Keeping the whodunit alive, I had completely forgotten who actually was the guilty party. Or rather, I remembered it as being someone other than it was. So I was surprised by it, which you don’t really expect on a rereading.
Molly's Game, 2017 - ★★★½
Aaron Sorkin not quite at his best. Decent film, based on the memoir of Molly Bloom. Who is nothing to do with Ulysses, but parents who either were huge James Joyce fans, or had no knowledge of him whatsoever. I lean toward the latter.
She nearly becomes an Olympic skier, but is put out of action by injury. She falls into helping to run a poker game for extremely rich people. Takes it over and it becomes even bigger, even richer.
Even more dangerous. The mob gets involved. The FBI get involved.
Great dialogue, as you’d expect, but mostly presented by characters who are seated, rather than walking at high speed. Perhaps playing poker while walking at high speed would have improved the whole thing.
Not bad, though.
The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith (Books 2022, 22)
This may be the best so far of the Strike books. My favourite so far, anyway.
Despite being set in 2015 (time flows differently in Galbraith world) it’s very much of now. People being bullied online, right-wing terrorist organisations. Crossrail still being built. Oh wait, they finished that. If the novels ever catch up with reality, Cormoran and Robin won’t have to pick their way past roadworks around Denmark Street.
And The Tottenham pub won’t be there any more. What will Strike do then? Well, OK, he’ll just complain about it being renamed The Flying Horse, I imagine. I think I was in The Tottenham once, years and years ago, and didn’t think too much of it. But who knows.
Anyway, the book! Yes, it is excellent. I loved it. The only thing I didn’t like was the sheer physical size. It’s over 1000 pages, and when it’s not breaking your wrists, it feels like it’s breaking its own spine.
The titular Ink-Black Heart (it should, of course, be hyphenated, as an adjectival phrase) is a cartoon series, initially on YouTube, moved to Netflix. Having read the description, I really want to see it.
It spawns a fan-created game, and therein lies the problem. Fans, you know? They can be troublesome types. Even dangerous.
Parts of the book are presented as in-game chat threads, with up to three streams running in parallel down the pages. It could get very confusing. It doesn’t, it’s fine.
Read.
The Title of The Smiths' Third Album
I’m a republican, but you’ve got to acknowledge that old Queenie had a good run. Apparently the direct descendent of Mary, Queen of Scots, which I didn’t know.
My favourite story about her is the one about the landrover and the Saudi crown prince.
The weirdest thing about the change of monarch for me? The King’s Speech is an Oscar-winning movie, not something to ignore on Christmas Day.
Excession by Iain M Banks (Books 2022, 21)
Yes, I’m only reading Iain Banks at the moment. What of it? Or I was for a brief period up until the book after this.
Probably my favourite Culture novel, and possibly the best. Mainly because the ships are most prominent and coolest and it’s all just huge fun!
I talked about it back in 2013 god how can this have been going on for so long? Where by ’this’ I mean The Great Banksie Reread. On the other hand, I suppose as long as I reread his books, it’ll be going on, no matter how many ’re-’ prefixes we might want to apply.
There are a couple, though none of the SF, that I’ve still only read once. I think maybe literally a couple: Stonemouth and The Quarry. And one, the poetry collection (with Ken McLeod), that I’ve only partly read.
But anyway, Excession: pure dead brilliant. If by some odd means you’ve read his SF and haven’t got to this yet, you have a treat in store for you. Or if you’re just starting out. Or if you’re re-re-rereading, like me.
The Culture meet an object? Entity? Being? That they don’t understand and can’t cope with. An Outside Context Problem, as they call it. It’s excessive, so it’s an excession. Things are set in motion. (Some of them very very fast things.)
Dead Air by Iain Banks (Books 2022, 20)
Banksie’s most political book, I think it’s fair to say. In the sense that the real-world politics and opinions of the author and the first-person narrator most closely align, and that it was written at about the time it is set and is often about the time it was written, as well.
It starts on 9/11, though that tragic event is only background. A London-based Scottish radio DJ and commentator gets up to mischief and into trouble.
It stands up well twenty years on.
All the President's Men, 1976 - ★★★½
I read the book years ago, and of course knew the broad outlines of the Watergate story. This was a good dramatisation of it.
Or rather, of part of it. Because its ending is weird and disappointing. Just when things are really starting to ramp up, it seems, and political dominoes are going to fall, we get a teleprinter like you used to get at the end of Grandstand on a Saturday, when you were waiting for Doctor Who.
And it prints out a summary of who was convicted and what sentences they got.
And that's it. We're done.
A very deflating ending, I felt.
The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M Banks (Books 2022, 19)
The last of the Culture books and Banksie’s SF books, both at all, and that I had only read once.
The odd one about this, as a Culture book, I realised only very late on, is that neither Special Circumstances nor even Contact are involved, directly. Just a random grouping of ships who take an interest in the matter.
The matter in question being the decision of a species called the Gzilt to sublime, or leave the material realm for higher dimensions. This a common endpoint (or new beginning) for civilisations in the Culture universe, and I wonder whether, had Iain lived, he would have taken us to the point where The Culture itself was making that decision.
Anyway, the sonata in question is one that is barely playable because it was written for ‘an instrument not yet invented’, which turns out to be be the Antagonistic Undecagonstring, or Elevenstring. An instrument with some 24 strings (some not counted in the name, because they are not played, they just resonate) designed to be played with two bows simultaneously.
Our hero — or at least, the main humanoid viewpoint character — Vyr Cossont, has been surgically adapted to have an extra pair of arms to allow her to play it. It is still next to impossible, but she has made it her ’life task’: something to do while waiting for the day when your civilisation sublimes. The decision for them to go was made long before she was born.
But her playing the sonata is only a side issue. The real problem is that maybe someone is trying to sabotage the sublimation. Or maybe not, but odd things are afoot, and various people and ships get involved, and it’s all a whole shitload of fun.