Publisher:        Hutchinson

Published:       2019

ISBN-10:        1786331373 (2019 hardback edition)

ISBN-13:         978-1786331373

Pages:             336

Words:            111,000 approx.

*** SPOILER ALERT – DISCLOSES SOME KEY DETAILS OF THE PLOT ***

Robert Harris is British, a former journalist, and a very well-known author of literary historical fiction.  One of his first successes was the best-selling Fatherland, an alternative history novel based on the idea that the Nazis won the second world was and kept their greatest crime secret for decades thereafter.

The term ‘second sleep’ refers to the view, held by some historians, that until the industrial revolution it was normal in the western civilisations for people to have two separate periods of sleep in each night –sometimes referred to simply as the first and second sleep.  In this novel, many of all of the characters sleep according to that pattern but there is also a more subtle meaning in the choice of title, which will become clear shortly.  The book has an appealing old-world feel, enhanced by the use of italicised chapter titles such as The register yields a secret and In which Fairfax’s plans are thwarted.

The protagonist of the novel is one Father Christopher Fairfax, a priest within the diocese of Exeter who has been dispatched by his bishop to bury a fellow priest (Fr. Lacy) who has died in a remote west-country location.

Although we are told at the very start that Fr. Fairfax sets out on his journey in the year 1468, the story is set some 800 years in the future – but this does not become unmistakably apparent until Fairfax reaches his destination and begins to settle in for the night.  There are a few early clues that the 1468 being referred to here is actually in the future.  The first clue noticed by this reviewer is a mention of parakeets in the Devonshire countryside. 

Later, we learn that the late Fr. Lacy was a collector (illegally) of artefacts from the twentieth-first century – including items made from plastic and an Apple mobile phone!  In due course, it emerges that technological civilisation was wiped out by some undeclared catastrophe in the mid-twenty-first century, that the catastrophe was interpreted as the Apocalypse of which the bible warns, and that the numbering of years was re-started with the year 666 – hence, 1468 is about 800 years in the future.

In the time of Fr. Fairfax and his late colleague, all technology much more advanced that the horse and cart has disappeared, and all efforts to recover the technology of the ‘ancients’ is condemned by the church as heresy.  The church has its own tribunals for trying those accused of heresy, and a heretic’s punishment may include the branding of an H onto his forehead.  The clergy are required to be celibate – a requirement which Fr. Fairfax struggles to comply with.  Perhaps most startling of all, the English state is waging a long-term war against a caliphate in Yorkshire!

Fairfax investigates the circumstances of Fr. Lacy’s death and comes to believe that it was connected in some way with his illegal collection.  That investigation brings the father into closer and closer contact with the other main characters: an itinerant lecturer on the ancients, the local grand lady (Lady Sarah Durston, which whom Fairfax commences an affair) and a wealthy and energetic local gentleman retired from the army but still using the rank of captain.  Together with these characters, Fairfax’s investigation expands to include the nature of a concrete ‘monument’ known as The Devil’s Chair.  Their investigations lead them to suspect that near this structure there must be something significant and secret buried at the time of the Apocalypse.  Unauthorised and illegal excavations by the captain’s men uncover a series of underground cells constructed from reinforced concrete and connected by steel doors.  Immediately after the discovery of these chambers, Fairfax’s bishop arrives, and it becomes clear that he has been aware of the later Fr. Lacy’s interests for many years.  A land slide traps Fairfax and Lady Durston within an inner chamber from which there appears to be no hope of escape.  The story ends with Fairfax reassuring the injured Sarah that ‘there is a door – we will go through it in the morning’, even though he has failed to find a tool with which the door can be opened.  Whether Fairfax’s statement is taken literally or figuratively, this seems a very unsatisfactory ending.

Overall, this is a fascinating novel based upon an ingenious idea but somewhat marred by its ending.  The motives of the protagonist, in what may be the last hours of his life, are left ambiguous – and not in a way which makes it possible for this reader to draw satisfying conclusion of his own.

Publisher:        Scribner (an imprint of Simon and Schuster Inc)

Published:       2019

ISBN:              978-1-5011-8774-2 (2019 hardback edition)

                        978-1-5011-8776-6 (e-book)

Pages:             267

Words:            86,500 approx.

Gordon L Dillow is a veteran newspaper reporter and columnist.  He has co-authored several previous non-fiction books.

This book gives a wide-ranging and up-to-date account of the threat posed to mankind by asteroids and comets – in particular asteroids.  Topics covered include the history of our knowledge of asteroids, meteors and meteorites, the process by which we came to understand the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the scale and scope of US and international efforts to develop a planetary asteroid impact warning and defence system. 

The account given is thorough and witty. Examples include the description of the personality of Walter Alvarez (co-author of the current dinosaur extinction theory), who is described as having an ego ‘positively bursting with health’.  A ‘Scottish author and minister’ is described as having calculated the number of inhabitants of the solar system as 21,891,974,404,480.

Dillow’s account begins with a visit to Meteor Crater in Arizona, a mile-wide hole in the ground formed by the impact of an iron-nickel asteroid ‘half the size of a city block’ some 50,000 years ago.  This particular impact crater is used repeatedly as a hook on which to hang the narrative of the book.  First of all, we are told the story of an early twentieth-century mining magnate (Daniel Barringer) who planned to make a fortune by digging into meteor crater to finds the meteor in question and treat it as a rich, ready-made and massive nickel-iron nugget.  At the start of that gentleman’s efforts, the best-informed scientific opinion was that the crater had not been formed by an impact at all.  In fact, it is now firmly established (by the presence of minerals only formed at extreme pressures) that it was so formed, but Barringer’s efforts were stymied by the fact that the meteor destroyed itself on impact when its kinetic energy (it was travelling at an estimated 40,000 miles per hour) was converted into heat and it was explosively vaporised.  We also learn that the near-circular nature of impact craters is due to the explosive nature of hypervelocity impacts.  Crudely, if a bomb strikes the ground and explodes then the shape of the hole made depends little on the angle of approach.

The story of the disappointed mining magnate is a prequel to a discussion of modern ideas for mining asteroids in space – not just for their metallic content, but also for water and other substances which are useful in space but cripplingly expensive to transport from the ground.  Two US companies working towards asteroid mining are mentioned, but one gets the clear impression that each is a good few years away from any prospect of actually extracting anything useful from an asteroid.

An account of the hunt for asteroids all the way from the discovery of the first (in 1801) up to present-day high-tech searches is given.  That story begins with a search mounted by a team of astronomers at the end of the 18^th century to look for a planet presumed to be lurking between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. That team allegedly referred to themselves as the Celestial Police (but in German), and their initial successes have been followed up in the two centuries since to the extent that over half a million asteroids are now known.  Of those, only a small proportion are on orbits which approach that of the earth.  Currently, asteroid search efforts led by NASA and other professional organisations are finding and characterising (in terms of orbit) new asteroids on a nightly basis.

The fact that damaging asteroid impact is not something that come along once in every few million years is illustrated by the stories of three impacts in the last hundred years or so: the Tunguska event of 1908 (which may actually have involved a comet nucleus), the Chelyabinsk event of 2013, and another event in Russia.  The first two of these are described in some detail.  The Tunguska event involved an explosion which flattened hundreds of square miles of trees in a remote part of Siberia.  The Chelyabinsk event (which was captured on many mobile phones) caused widespread damage and resulted in over a thousand casualties.  The point is made that the Tunguska event could have occurred a few thousand miles to the west and would (in that case) have caused massive casualties.

The world’s current state of partial preparedness to detect and cope with threatening asteroids is described.  That description is not reassuring.  It seems that we are fairly well-equipped to predict impacts by the large asteroids (say a mile across), but there are almost certainly a great many asteroids which have yet to be detected but which could still menace cities or even states.  The larger asteroids (as the dinosaurs discovered) present a global threat through their ability to modify the global environment.  As for means for avoiding asteroid impact or mitigating its effects, the only option currently available is the evacuation of threatened areas.  There is no developed mechanism for deflecting an incoming asteroid, though there are many ideas.  Efforts to develop such means appear to be hampered by an understandable reluctance to countenance the use of nuclear explosions in space, though it is explained that deflection could sometimes be achieved using ‘kinetic’ impactors (i.e. big lumps of metal hurled at an asteroid).

This is an undeniably fascinating book, which covers many historical and scientific aspects which have only been touched on in this review.  Its coverage of the subject appears to be right up to date at the time of publication.

Publisher:        Penguin

Published:       2017

ISBN:              9780141982489

Pages:             256 (2017 paperback edition)

Words:            70,000 approx.

Matt Jockers is Professor of English and Data Analytics at Washington State University.  Previously he has held academic posts at Nebraska and Stanford Universities, and he is cofounder of the Stanford Literary Lab.  His on-line CV indicates that this is his first book, although he has many conference papers and other publications to his credit.  Jodie Archer has a PhD supervised by Jockers at Stanford.  Her first degree was in English (which she studied at Cambridge), and she worked for a time at Apple before beginning her PhD.

This book reports on Jockers’ and Archer’s joint work to apply machine learning and data mining in an attempt to determine just what quantifiable parameters indicate that a novel will become a bestseller.  The account given is necessarily short on technical details, but a postscript entitled Some Background on Method sketches out some of the technical details.  For one thing, that postscript spells out the programming challenges arising from the many special cases and ambiguities present in all natural languages.  For another, the postscript makes it clear that Jockers and Archer took some steps to avoid the problem of ‘over-training’, that is the problem of developing a tool capable of performing well on the training data but far less well on new data.  Whether the steps taken to avoid over-training were successful it is impossible to say on the basis of the facts given in this book.

The authors describe the software tool (or maybe suite of tools) they’ve developed as a ‘bestseller-ometer’.  Their analysis begins with a corpus of thousands of novels – some bestsellers in a sense they define carefully, and some not.  On the broadest view, the software appears to do two things.  First, it identifies those features which appear to be strongly characteristic of bestsellers.  Second, given a new novel, it makes a prediction of the likelihood of that book becoming a bestseller.  The focus on bestsellers might be thought a little unscientific, since marketing and author’s track record must be a major factor in sales.  Nevertheless, the conclusions drawn are at the very least food for thought for the aspiring writer and Jockers and Archers observations are often insightful.

The software developed by the pair scans the novels fed to it (in a language-aware way sketched out in the postscript) looking for thousands of different features divided into several different categories – some more easily assessed computationally then others.  The categories include verbs and nouns (not surprisingly) but also commas and full stops (and other sentence terminators – as indicators of sentence length).  The software also attempts to identify and count topics, and (perhaps more contentiously) to assess emotional tone and how it varies throughout each novel.  The algorithms attempt to assign a numerical value to emotional tone, and the book contains graphs of emotional tone against location in the text for a variety of novels.  An attempt is made to adduce the optimum curve of emotional tone against ‘time’.  This seems particularly questionable, since surely emotion tone is not quantifiable and perhaps cannot be reliably assessed by an algorithm.

Jockers and Archer make a distinction between topic and theme, and that distinction is not at all clear.  It is plain that topics (which might include ‘sport’ or ‘politics’ or ‘love’) are less abstract then themes, but it is not at all clear where topics end and themes begin.  This could be key, since clear recommendations are made about the number of topics a novel should ideally contain.

About a dozen findings one might regard as key emerge from the Jockers’ and Archer’s study.  It would be hard to arrange these in any meaningful order, but here are a few which struck this reviewer:  Topics which readers especially seem to like include work and relationships.  Maybe this is because those topics occupy so much of our waking thoughts.  The number of topics also appears to be key – ignoring the question of just what counts as a topic.  Jockers and Archer suggest just a few main topics, with one dominant topic.  They assert that ‘Telling the heart of a story with fewer topics implies focus’.  They also have some interesting things to say about dialogue tags and contractions.  Also, Jockers’ and Archers’ evidence suggests strongly that bestsellers are more sparing than other books with adjectives and adverbs.  To quote: ‘bestsellers are about shorter, cleaner sentences, without unneeded words’.

Overall, this is a stimulating book full of ideas which the writer can take on board but naturally need not take as gospel.  The computational approach is not spelled out in full detail, but enough is explained in the ‘technical’ postscript to make it clear that some of the pitfalls of machine learning have been considered by the authors, and to make it clear that a great deal of detailed thought had gone into the algorithms used.

Publisher:        William Collins

Published:       2018

ISBN-10:         0008241767

ISBN-13:         978-0008241766

Pages:             416 (2018 hardback edition)

Words:            152,000 approx.

Simon Winchester OBE is a British-born journalist with a long record of covering key news events (including Bloody Sunday and Watergate) and a series of well-researched factual books behind him.  His previous books include Krakatoa and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (about contributions made to the original Oxford English Dictionary by an inmate at Broadmoor Hospital).

This book describes the history of mechanical precision, starting from the application of John ‘iron mad’ Wilkinson’s canon-boring technique to the cylinders for James Watts steam engines.  The account does not restrict itself to mechanical precision for purely mechanical systems.  Later chapters cover the techniques used to achieve the extreme and finely detailed dimensional accuracy needed for the manufacture of modern digital chips, and the issues of optical precision which confronted the initially ill-fated Hubble Space Telescope. 

An early chapter explains that precision manufacture is essential to make mechanical parts freely interchangeable, even in something as simple as a musket. This point is made using the experiences of a fictitious American soldier fighting the British in the war of 1812, who’s contribution is slight because his musket has a broken trigger which cannot be replaced (because a new trigger must be made by a blacksmith) for some days. 

The story continues by way of Joseph Bramah’s challenge to all-comers to attempt to pick his allegedly unpickable lock.  The contributions made by Bramah’s one-time apprentice Henry Maudslay (the bench micrometer and the screw-cutting lathe) are covered, together with Maudslay’s work on Marc Isambard Brunel’s system for mass-producing pulley blocks for the Royal Navy – possibly the first instance of automated mass production.  Much emphasis is put on the idea of a machine tool as a machine which makes other machines and as an idea which is essential to mass production and to reproducible mechanical precision.

The different manufacturing philosophies of Rolls-Royce and Henry Ford are discussed by way of some lengthy anecdotes about the author’s experiences of driving Roll-Royces during his days as a journalist.  It becomes clear from this part of the book that the two companies had used precision in quite different ways; in the former case to ensure ultimate quality, and in the latter to ensure that each part delivered to the production line would fit exactly as required without ever any need for fettling or adjustment.

The shear spectacle of the Great Exhibition of 1851 is described, together with the relevance of the new ideas of precision to the prestigious products and inventions displayed there.  The slightly-scary sight of massive steam-driven machinery at the Exhibition is described – a spectacle made more alarming by the fact that the boilers providing steam to those exhibits were housed outside the Crystal Palace itself.

Turning to precision in optics, the author again uses some of his own experiences of high-quality equipment to explain just how the development of modern cameras occurred.  This account goes right back to Niepce in the 1820s with his hours-long exposures and includes clear explanations of the advantages of multi-element and aspheric lenses. 

Some almost unbelievable statistics relating to the manufacture of chips are given.  One of the most amazing of these is an estimate of the number of transistors in the world – thought to be more than the number of leaves on all the world’s trees.  Another is the confident prediction (attributed to an Intel executive) that by 2020 there will be a chip containing more transistors than there are neurons in a human brain.  The chapter about chip manufacture also contains a section on the LIGO gravitational wave observatory, described early in the book as the most precise instrument yet made by man.  It is explained that the successful operation of that instrument depends on the detection of changes in the length of a kilometres-long tunnel which are small compared to the diameter of a proton.

Finally (if one ignores the Afterword), there is a chapter about the respectful attitudes in Japanese culture to extreme precision, on the one hand, and traditional craft modes of production on the other.  The author describes a visit to the Seiko factory, where both types of attitude can be seen side-by-side.  There, quartz watches are being made by the thousands per day in one part of the building while mechanical watches are being made by a small team of craftsmen. There is no hint that anyone in Japan would see any incongruity.

There is a fascinating account in the Afterword of the development of the modern system of measurement units (the Systeme International), explaining the forces which have driven that system to eventually adopt standards based on universally-available references sources (such as the wavelengths of particular spectral lines emitted by particular atoms) provided by nature herself.

This is an entertaining account of the development of mechanical precision with a clear explanation of the historical drivers responsible.  Apt and entertaining illustrations of some of the key steps in the process are given, in several cases based on the author’s own experiences.

Publisher:        Bloomsbury Paperbacks

Published:       2011

ISBN:              9781408891384 (2017 paperback edition)

Pages:             368 (2017 paperback edition)

Words:            130,000 approx.

Madeline Miller is an American novelist and a former teacher of Latin and Greek.  She has published two novels at the time of writing: The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018).  The first of these (reviewed here) won the Orange Prize for Fiction.

The book is a re-telling of the Iliad story from the viewpoint of Patroclus: Achilles’ closest friend and (at least according to this account) lover.  The story continues to be told from Patroclus’ point of view after Patroclus’ death, when he tells us in despair that ‘I am air and thought and can do nothing’.

The context of the story is the Trojan war, but there are two main interpersonal themes: the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, and that between Achilles and Agamemnon – the leader of the Greek forces in that war.

Patroclus’ life does not begin well.  He is regarded with contempt by his father, the king of a small Greek state, and while still a child he accidentally kills another child (the son of a nobleman) in a dispute over two pairs of dice.  As a consequence, he is exiled to the court of king Peleus of Phthia, where he becomes the intimate friend of Achilles – who just happens to be the son of the king and of the sea goddess Thetis.  The goddess makes frequent appearances in the story.  She is no admirer of Patroclus – or perhaps of any human except Achilles – and she plays a central role in the unfolding of the subsequent tragedy.  Thetis is portrayed as back haired, chillingly beautiful and stern.

Thetis attempts to prevent Achilles from becoming involved in the Trojan War by sending him off to Mount Pelion to be educated by the centaur Chiron.  Patroclus joins him (very much against Thetis’ wishes), they learn together, and they become lovers.  Achilles (known to all who need to know as ‘the best of Greeks’) becomes a warrior par excellence and Patroclus becomes (in the words of Chiron) ‘a competent solder’.

The Trojan War begins following the cuckolding of King Menelaus of Sparta by Paris of Troy – one of the sons of King Priam.  Achilles is recalled to his father’s kingdom, where a delegation of kings tries to persuade him to fight.  His mother has other plans and arranges to hide him in female disguise on the island of Scyros where he is a clandestine guest of King Lycomedes.  He is followed there in short order by Patroclus, but not before he has conceived a son (as part of Thetis’ cunning plan) with one of the daughters of that king.  Odysseus (who is portrayed here as crafty and perhaps untrustworthy) visits Achilles on Scyros and persuades him to take part in the Trojan War – to which naturally he is followed by Patroclus.  Achilles leads an army of Myrmidons from Phthia. 

Patroclus becomes aware of a prophecy that Achilles will die at Troy if he goes there and, also, that he cannot die until Hector (a son of Priam) has been killed.  Thereafter, Patroclus agonises over his friend’s fate and his own impotence to prevent it from coming to pass.  He hopes fervently that Hector will be preserved by the gods as long as possible.

The Greek attack on the Trojans begins with raids on the countryside around Troy.  The spoils of that raiding – women included – are distributed to the generals of the Greek army as prizes of war (and therefore objects of intense pride).  One of these is a conspicuous beauty called Briseis, who is allocated to Achilles at his own request.  She does not, however, become a sex slave.  Rather, she is treated with relative respect and becomes a close friend of Patroclus: so close that she later suggests that he should father a child by her.  Throughout, we hear repeatedly of Patroclus’ devotion to Achilles and it is clear (although not spelled out) that their intimacy continues.  Agamemnon claims his own prize of war: a woman called Chryseis.

The story then follows the pattern of the Iliad: Chryseis’ father (a priest of Apollo) asks Agamemnon to return his daughter and offers a generous ransom.  Agamemnon refuses and treats the priest with deliberate contempt.  A plague follows, which the soldiers blame on Agamemnon’s impiety and on his ignoring the conventions regarding the ransoming of prisoners.  Achilles plays a key role in persuading Agamemnon to return Chryseis to her father.  Agamemnon, then takes Briseis from Achilles.  Patroclus is deeply disturbed because he knows that she is likely to be abused by Agamemnon.  Achilles, on the other hand, appears far more concerned by the insult offered to his own pride by the stealing of his war prize: a view with which his solders have immediate sympathy.  Achilles responds (for himself and on behalf of his men) to take any further part in the war.  Near disaster follows for the Greeks, as they are driven back to the point at which the Trojans begin burning their ships and therefore destroying their only way to get home. 

Achilles’ troops become less and less tolerant of his prideful attitude.  Ultimately, and in despair, Patroclus turns the tide of the war by posing on the battlefield in Achilles’ armour.  This solution allows the Greeks to approach victory, but at the cost of Patroclus’ own life.  Achilles is driven to despair by grief.  He re-enters the war, declaring that his only concern now is revenge.  Achilles is killed, in keeping with the prophecy, but not before making Greek victory inevitable. 

Ultimately, Achilles’ and Patroclus’ ashes are interred together under a monument which is initially marked with Achilles’ name only.  This is changed to show the names of both Achilles and Patroclus, after the shade of Patroclus pleads with Thetis.  In a final scene, the two comrades and lovers are imagined as re-united in a spilling of golden light within a shadowy afterlife.

This is a compelling book told with style and with a convincingly chilling sense of what life might have been like for nobles, warriors and slaves in the Greek bronze age.  The plot of the Iliad is followed closely, and the possible flavour of an age in which occasional interventions by the gods could be expected in conveyed well.

Publisher:        William Collins (an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Published:       2019

ISBN:              978-0-00-827693-5 (2019 hardback edition)

Pages:             259

Words:            67,000 approx.

Will Storr is a British journalist and non-fiction writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, the New York Times and a range of other papers. His previous books include The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science.  He teaches journalism and storytelling classes in London.

In simple terms, the aim of the book is to use current understanding of how human personalities develop and sometimes fail – together with insights from modern neuroscience – as a basis for guidance on how stories should be conceived, plotted and written.  That guidance even extends on occasion down to the level of sentence structure and the way word order affects the building of an image in the reader’s mind.

Storr mentions two other ‘story theorists’ repeatedly: Christopher Booker (author of The Seven Basic Plots) and the American mythologist Prof. Joseph Campbell.  Brief mention is also made of Jockers’ and Archers’ The Bestseller Code in the context of ‘big data’ analysis of novels.  Throughout, Storr cites well-chosen examples from a very wide range of fiction.

At an early stage, Storr points out that the world we perceive is not dictated directly by the unmediated impressions of our senses.  Rather, those impressions are processed, in many cases rather heavily, by our nervous systems.  He refers to the world perceived by the brain as an ‘hallucination’.  While this is by no means the normal usage of that world, it is a good and important point that what we see (and hear, and feel etc.) around us is to a large extent created within the brain; and we all know that the world the brain constructs for us can differ in major respects from the real world.

Much is said about character flaws and their importance in adding interest to a story and driving a plot.  Storr uses the term, ‘theory of control’ to refer to the set of assumptions – acknowledged or buried – a character (or a real person) bases his life upon.  Storr suggests that a person’s theory of control is the set of rules he has evolved early in life to allow him to understand the world around him and to make his role in it bearable.  While this model seems rather simple and might be questioned in various ways, it seems very plausible to explain why characters behave in the way they do in stories and why their behaviour can change in the course of the story in response to stressful experiences.  It is suggested that in each story the ‘ignition point’ (presumably where the drama begins) is the point at which one or more of the protagonist’s character flaws makes his theory of control no longer workable.  Of course, it’s not just the protagonist who, in general, has character flaws which amount to weaknesses in his theory of control; the same can be true of the antagonist and of any other key characters.

Another interesting and helpful aspect of human psychology is the apparent existence of multiple selves – even in the normal individual.  Storr refers to a ‘riotous democracy of mini-selves’ and cites the neuroscientist David Eagleman as writing that these selves are ‘locked in chronic battle’ for dominion.  Any of us who has struggled to lose weight when dieting knows all about that!

The book contains an appendix entitled The Sacred Flaw Approach, which might be regarded as a recipe for developing and writing a story.  That recipe is based largely on the author’s storytelling course and has at its core the idea of the erroneous assumption (within the protagonist’s theory of control) which the character is most desperate to cling on to.  The ignition point is then the point at which the sacred flaw becomes so obviously a flaw that it must be discarded.  Again, the psychology might or might not be sound, but the idea seems serviceable as a way to build characters and a plot around those characters.

This is a very thought-provoking book which arguably is as much about the development of the human personality and its pathologies as about writing.  It is a compelling and easily digestible read which seems certain to be of some value to any author or aspiring writer.

Publisher:        Penguin

Published:       2019

ISBN-10:         0241983207

ISBN-13:         978-0241983201

Pages:             336 (2019 paperback edition)

Words:            100,000 approx.

Pat Barker CBE is the award-winning author of over a dozen novels, many of which have been described as ‘gritty’ by some.  Perhaps most famous of these the Regeneration Trilogy of books set in the First World War.

At the Hay Festival in 2019, Barker stated explicitly that The Silence of the Girls was intended to remedy the lack of any female voices in The Iliad.  It was plain that she saw this lack as unfair and long overdue for correction.  The background is therefore that of the Trojan War (whether that war actually happened or not) and the adventures of Achilles, Patroclus and their comrades in the campaign led by Agamemnon. 

Violence towards women is represented unflinchingly – both the violence of capture and slavery, and the sexual violence committed during the process of sacking a city and, routinely, against women of all classes thereafter.  Most of the story is told from the viewpoint of Briseis, a noblewoman enslaved when the Greek army takes one of the cities neighbouring Troy.  However, this is not the only viewpoint; there are also passages from the viewpoint of a narrator omniscient to the extent of knowing what is going on in Achilles’s mind.

The story begins with the capture of Briseis and the handing out of the noblewomen as sex slaves to the leaders of the Greek army.  Briseis is allocated to Achilles, who does not hesitate to use her – though there are occasional hints that he is more naturally drawn to his inseparable male companion Patroclus.  Patroclus is presented as a more sympathetic figure than Achilles and most of the other Greeks.  A friendship develops between Briseis and Patroclus which leads to the sharing of small confidences.  We learn that Patroclus and Achilles have been close friends since childhood, and that Patroclus killed a man (or another boy) in a frenzy when he was still a child.  We learn through the eyes and ears of Briseis that Achilles’s mother is a sea goddess who occasionally visits him on the beach at the time of his daily swim.  Briseis also swims from time to time, and she discovers that Achilles is seized by a particular lust for her when she goes to his bed smelling (and maybe tasting) of the sea.  This is the first of several character flaws possessed by Achilles on which, arguably, the whole story turns.

Agamemnon has his own sex slave, whose name is Chryseis and whose father turns out to be a priest of Apollo.  When the priest arrives at the camp in full religious regalia to request his daughter’s return Agamemnon refuses outright.  This is thought by many to be especially cruel and impious; not least by Briseis who had formed a close relationship with Agamemnon’s allocated slave.  Briseis responds by effectively praying to Apollo to visit a plague upon the Greek camp.  Her prayers are answered, a huge and debilitating death toll results, and Agamemnon is eventually persuaded to return Chryseis to her father.  As overall commander of the Greek army, Agamemnon decides to fill the vacancy in his bed by taking Briseis from Achilles.  In one of the most chilling scenes in the whole book (in this reviewer’s opinion), Agamemnon makes explicit his ownership of Briseis and his contempt for her and for Achilles by performing an act which is revolting without being overtly sexual.  This is described disturbingly well.

Achilles’s pride is affronted by Agamemnon’s appropriation of Briseis.  He responds not by challenging Agamemnon but by declaring that he and his men (the Myrmidons) will be withdrawing from the siege of Troy and from the whole of the war.  However, Achilles and his men do not physically withdraw from the theatre of war.  Rather, they wait – while continuing to train and maintain their military skills.  One way to read this is that Achilles is so proud, and perhaps so immature and arrogant, that he cannot resist waiting long enough to witness what he is certain will happen next.  Many of his colleagues understand his decision to withdraw but find themselves deeply troubled by his decision to remain in the field.

What happens next is that the Trojans gain the upper hand.  Many of Achilles’s comrades, and especially his closest friend Patroclus, plead with him to re-enter the fight.  Achilles consistently demands, as his price, an apology from Agamemnon.  He knows that no such apology will ever be forthcoming.  Finally, Patroclus proposes a solution.  He will re-enter the fray in Achilles’s armour and at the head of the Myrmidons – while allowing almost everyone to believe that Achilles himself has relented.  This stratagem turns the tide of the war, but also results in the death of Patroclus.  Achilles is inconsolable.  He finally chooses to take up his arms again – but purely to avenge the death of his dearest friend.  It seems clear that the insult from Agamemnon counts for nothing with Achilles at this point; he wants only revenge for the death of his friend and (it is hinted) lover.  We also learn that a prophesy has persuaded Achilles that whatever happens he will not be returning home from the Trojan war alive.  Agamemnon makes an attempt to return Briseis to Achilles.  As part of that process, Agamemnon swears an oath to the gods using carefully chosen words which make his impiety even more apparent.

Achilles’s re-entry into the battle advances the Greek cause to the point where their victory is inevitable.  Meanwhile, Hector – eldest son of King Priam of Troy – is killed, and his body is brought back to the Greek camp.  There, it is treated with deliberate disrespect and damaged every day by Achilles but somehow miraculously recovers to its intact state overnight every night.  One evening, as the Greek soldiers carouse, Achilles is visited by King Priam – who has travelled without attendants or protection and somehow penetrated into the very tent where Achilles and his men are eating.  Priam pleads with Achilles for the return of Hector’s body.  Achilles responds with courtesy and charity and returns Hector’s body to the old man.  Achilles motives are not spelled out, but it appears that although he is a savage man who believes that sexual violence to captured women is just as acceptable as military violence on the battlefield, he also believes that the grief of a father for his son should be respected. 

Finally, Achilles is killed and his bones are interred (with due ceremony including the sacrifice of one of Priam’s daughters) in an urn with those of Patroclus.

The book re-tells the Iliad story in a compelling way which make the nature of the violence against the women involved shockingly clear. At the same time, it makes clear the crucial flaws in the characters of Achilles and Agamemnon and the central role of those flaws in the playing-out of the tragedy.

Publisher:        Hodder & Stoughton (a Hachette UK company)

Published:       2019

ISBN:              978 1 473 66248 3 (Kindle edition)

                        978 1 473 66249 0 (hardback edition)

Pages:             432 (hardback edition)

Words:            122,000 approx.

This is the second of the two books published thus far in the Frances Gorges trilogy series.  Tracy Borman is a former history lecturer at the University of Hull and currently a colleague of Lucy Worsley as Joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces.  This is her second novel. 

The story begins in 1606 – the year after the gunpowder plot.  The protagonist is Frances Gorges – a noblewoman who has server as an attendant to Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of James I.  Readers of Borman’s first novel, The King’s Witch, will know that Frances has already attracted the wrong sort of attention by practicing herbal medicine (seen by many –including the king – as a sure sign of witchcraft) and by coming under the suspicion (not without some justification) of being peripherally involved in plot of the previous year.  When the story opens, Frances is living at her family home in Wiltshire (Longford Castle) where she is expecting a child conceived with Thomas Wintour, one of the executed plotters.  Her plan is to lie low at Longford, but her elder brother is making her life uncomfortable in a wide range of ways and then she receives a letter from Wintour’s sister pleading for further active (and undercover) support for the Catholic cause.  Frances initially decides to ignore that plea.

Frances receives a proposal of marriage (but marriage in name only) from Sir Tomas Tyringham – a close friend of the late Tom Wintour (there are a great many Tom’s in this story) and a supporter of the Catholic cause. There is just one condition: she must cease her involvement with the struggle to oust King James and install a Catholic monarch.  After some hesitation, Frances accepts.  Frances’s child is a boy who is christened George – and who is treated by her new husband as his own.  George is presented to the world as the legitimate son of Frances and her husband.  Frances also resumes her role as an attendant to Princess Elizabeth – with whom she resumes a close friendship.  Prince Henry (James’s heir) is aware that Frances was once accused of witchcraft and subjected to humiliating examination in the Tower by the official ‘witch pricker’.  He uses that knowledge to inflict the maximum suffering possible on the already-burdened Frances.  Prince Charles (the future Charles I), on the other hand, is too diffident and too much under the shadow of his father and his elder brother to be effectual in any way.

Circumstances conspire to make it impossible for Frances to ignore the pleas (and sometimes threats) of her associates from the time of the gunpowder plot.  Through the princess, she becomes acquainted with (and charmed by) Sir Walter Raleigh – a rather indulgently-treated prisoner in the Tower as a result of his involvement in a plot early in King James’s reign.  Under pressure from Raleigh and a range of other powerful figures, Frances becomes involved in efforts to make sure that Princess Elizabeth marries a Catholic prince.  She also serves as witness to the secret marriage of Arbella Stuart to a descendant of Janes Seymour –essentially an attempt to create a rival heir to the throne.  In the course of the story, Frances falls in love with her husband and they become lovers but, nonetheless, she feels unable to confess that she has broken the terms of their agreement by becoming involved in Catholic plotting.

Towards the end of the story, Frances decides after much soul-searching (and under the influence of two powerful real historical figures) to poison Prince Henry – partly to achieve the ends of her co-conspirators, but also because she know that he is about to present the king  with evidence that she used her herbal skills to save the life of her husband following a hunting accident.  The outcome of her efforts to achieve that end make for a nail-biting climax.

The novel is well plotted and makes good use of real historical characters and locations.  An author’s note identifies the main departures from solid historical evidence.  One of these concerns the true religious outlook of Robert Cecil – who is King James’s key adviser throughout much of the story, and who dies towards the end.  Much of the action takes place in the various royal palaces in and around London, and at times it is not quite clear until well into a chapter or a scene just which of the palaces is being used as the setting.

Publisher:        Hodder and Stoughton (A Hachette UK company)

Published:       2019

ISBN:              978 1 529 31941 5 (Hardback)

                        978 1 529 319439 (eBook)

Pages:             270

Words:            62,000 approx.

Prof. Paul Murdin OBE is Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University and was co-discoverer of the first stellar black hole (Cygnus X-1).  He has also had a career as a broadcaster and commentator for the BBC and for CNN.

This is a book for the layman (no maths, no graphs even), but it does not shy away from referring to some key open questions in planetary science and to key pieces of current research.  The open questions discussed include the ‘spokes’ which appear and disappear in the rings of Saturn on timescales of hours or days, and the significant gaps which remain in current mathematical models of the formation of our own solar system.  References to current research include the ‘Nice’ simulations (named after the French city) key to current understanding of solar system formation.  Also mentioned is the Grand Tack theory which suggests that within our own solar system the diameter of the orbit of Jupiter has changed enough to re-arrange the order of the planets at least twice since they were in the process of formation.

There is one chapter for each of the planets, plus a few additional chapters to cover a selection of the moons (including our own) and the objects in the asteroid belt (in particular Ceres). There is an interesting account of the process by which it was decided to remove Pluto’s status as a planet.  As part of that account, Prof. Murdin writes that ‘we astronomers were looking foolish, like medieval theologians arguing about the degrees of angels’.  Each chapter begins with a summary of relevant data and a tongue in cheek quotation attributed to the body about to be discussed.  In the case of the chapter on earth, the planet’s ‘secret confession’ is ‘I was happy with the cyanobacteria […] but those humans are too many […]’. 

There is something surprising or amusing in every chapter.  Often the amusement derives from the history of human understanding of the planets.  In the case of Mercury, one intriguing fact (revealed by radar measurements in 1965) is that the time taken for the planet to rotate about its axis (its ‘day’) is precisely two-thirds of the time it takes to go around the sun (its ‘year’).  It is explained that this is an example of tidal locking – the same phenomenon that make the moon present a fixed face to the earth.  It would have been even more interesting if there had been some explanation of how the precise ratio of two to three can occur through tidal locking.

In the case of Venus, we are told that a 1686 book by a Frenchman asserted (when translated into English) that the inhabitants of that planet are ‘little sunburnt gentlemen’ who are ‘given to making verses , and […] every day inventing feasts, balls and masquerades […]’. 

Two of the moons covered are Titan and Enceladus – both moons of Saturn.  Prof. Murdin suggests that Titan can be regarded as similar to earth at an early stage in its development – in particular in terms of the possession of a thick atmosphere of mostly nitrogen.  The analogy with earth falls down somewhat when in comes to sunlight – Titan being about eight times further from the sun than the earth is, and therefore receiving about a sixth-fourth as much sunlight power on each square metre of its upper atmosphere.  Regardless of that, no-one can fail to be impressed by the single photograph from the surface of Titan taken by the Huygens lander in 2005. 

Enceladus, by contrast, may be one of the most promising places to search for primitive life beyond the earth.  That moon is thought by many to contain a sub-surface ocean heated by tidal action from Saturn.  Geysers (‘cryovolcanoes’) on Enceladus erupt water from that alleged ocean out into space – where it could in principle be sampled and studied by a passing space probe.

This is, in summary, a fascinating book likely to tempt anyone with the least scientific inclination to be tempted into a variety of further reading on planetary science.

Publisher:        Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books)

Published:       2019

ISBN:              978-0-241-30959-9 (2019 hardback edition)

                        978-0-241-36093-4 (2019 trade paperback edition)

Pages:              236

Words:            80,000 approx.

The subtitle of this book is: How hidden webs of information are solving the mystery of life.  A less succinct description might be that this is a book, amenable to the scientifically informed reader, which describes a range of new and exciting discoveries and ideas in the general area of the physics underlying life at the molecular level and of just how life processes and uses information at the molecular level.

Prof. Davies has had a long and distinguished career, both academically and as an author and lecturer with the aim of making science accessible to a popular audience.  In addition to his purely scientific work, Prof. Davies has a long-standing interest in interactions between science, religion and spirituality, and his work in that area has been recognised by the Templeton Prize.

The book packs in a great many ideas and accounts of a great many recent discoveries and ideas.  It begins with the question What is Life? and the ideas suggested by Schrodinger in his 1943 lectures with that title. Davies points out that while it is possible to produce a list of properties possessed by some (and in some cases all) life forms, it has not thus far been possible to give a single definition which clearly distinguishes a living organism from non-living matter.  He points us, in particular, to Schrodinger’s point that living things appear (but only appear) to defy the second law of thermodynamics by achieving local reductions of entropy.  A brief digression on vitalism follows, in which the traditional forms of that idea are rejected.

Next, Davies moves on to the relationship between energy, entropy and information – with a particular emphasis on information as it is stored, processed and used by living cells at the molecular level.  He reminds us of Maxwell’s demon – a mythical creature invented by Maxwell as part of a thought experiment in which the second law of thermodynamics also appears to be ignored.  The resulting discussion brings in current ideas of fundamental physical relationships between entropy, information and energy.  The idea of an ‘information engine’ is also introduced, and it is claimed that such devices have been built and demonstrated at the nanomachine-scale.  The idea of a very small and useful demon is generalised somewhat.  It is suggested that many of the chemical (or physical) mechanisms at work in DNA copying and error-correction, and in the transcription of genes into protein molecules, can be regarded as using real-life demons – but without the un-physical attributes that Maxwell’s demon would have had if it had been real.

Later, the discussion turns to evolution and to some apparent violations of the long-held doctrine that the flow of information between genome and proteins is one-way – from the former to the latter.  Davies cites several studies which appear to show information flowing in the opposite direction – allowing a sort of Lamarckism.  As part of the same account of evolution, evidence of a phenomenon called ‘adaptive mutation’ is described.  This appears to be a process by which some organisms can enhance their own processes of evolution in challenging circumstances.  The existence of epigenetic effects is also referred to as part of this discussion, and some very puzzling experiments on some unfortunate worms which have been cut in half by researchers are described.  The term ‘Darwinism 2.0’ is used in the book to refer to the new understanding these reported discoveries appear to lead to.

The new field of quantum biology is then briefly visited.  Prof. Davies makes the important clarifying point that chemistry relies in fundamental and unavoidable ways on quantum processes, and therefore there is no question that quantum processes are involved in biology and in most other things.  He refers to those well-accepted effects as trivial quantum processes and to other effects whose role in biology is more contentious as non-trivial quantum processes.  In the latter category we have such things as electron tunnelling and quantum entanglement – both thought by some to have some role in fundamental biological processes. 

Ideas for quantum computing are discussed – together with the huge consequences likely if any of those ideas become practical reality.  Davies points out that quantum computing systems could perhaps have appeared naturally and might be very valuable as information processing systems within living things.  He suggests, as a personal conjecture, that nature is unlikely to have overlooked that opportunity.

Next, the origin of life is addressed.  Prof. Davies makes the point that there is absolutely no evidence that life has appeared anywhere else in the universe and therefore (the allegedly huge number of habitable planets notwithstanding) it could be an exceedingly rare occurrence.  He then summarises current ideas and understanding of just how the simplest living systems could have formed.  That summary concludes that no convincing mechanism by which a system capable of replication with imperfect inheritance (and therefore capable of evolution) has yet been proposed.

This book is a compelling and up to date read packed with facts and ideas sure to set any thoughtful person thinking.  The emphasis throughout on information processing as a fundamental facet of life seems completely reasonable.  There is a suggestion, at several points, that new physical laws will be needed to understand how physical systems become physical systems which are also alive.