Having read Mitchell's award winning Cloud Atlas (it won the British Book Awards Literary fiction award, and the (from a sales point of view) coveted Richard and Judy Book of The Year), I was keen to see what his first published novel, "Ghostwritten" was like.
The structure is very similar to that of Cloud Atlas - stories are told from the perspective of various protagonists, with occasional meetings between them: for example, we have a courting young couple spotted in an airport bar by a businessman from another story. As an idea, this works really well as Mitchell uses great attention to detail to nicely tie the story together. His literary ability and excellent characterization even manage to make a mass-murdering terrorist a vaguely sympathetic character.
Before getting into more detail, I want to get my main criticism out of the way. it is an issue I think that few people would have, but one which put a dampener on the whole novel for me. He has a character who is obviously a physics genius (he does over-egg how smart she is, and to my mind this is the weakest character in the whole book) who has an absurd lack of knowledge about things she would have a complete grasp on. For example, she mentions - as an idle fancy- the distance from the sun to the earth, and overestimates the distance by four and a half times. She also seems to have a very poetic turn of mind for a physicist, and also her backstory doesn't quite add up - for example, she seems blissfully unaware that the company she works for (who design guidance systems for space rockets) gets a large proportion of it's funding from the American military, and that the guidance systems she designs are used in actual missiles that kill actual people. Given the high standard of characterization throughout the novel, this is very poor, and stands out glaringly to me.
If the reader had no or very little science background (as I suspect Mitchell has) then this would not be an issue, and probably wouldn't arise. Some checking of facts by either Mitchell or his editor could have completely avoided this issue, and made her naive rather than unbelievable.
The rest of the characters in the book are brilliantly well drawn - I particularly liked the feckless writer and the Russian art thief. Their escapades are well realised, and occasionally quite funny: there is a scene where the writer hides in a cupboard in a casino to escape a couple of knife-wielding cousins. It is interesting to see that this book contains ideas that will resurface in Cloud Atlas. The writer appears as (if I recall correctly) a music student, only slightly tweaked and slightly less moral.
Mitchell's writing style is poetic and full of visual detail, which draws the reader into an almost film-like experience. This works very well throughout the novel, although I think this novel would be almost impossible to film - mind you, they said that Tristram Shandy couldn't be filmed.
Mitchell captures the idiosyncrasies of his characters very well. His turn of phrase is often outstanding, and presents the characters' thoughts and desires very well.
Saturday, February 7
Tuesday, January 27
A new look at the desktop
It's nice to see creative people reimagining the PC desktop environment: Windows offers very limited customisation, Linux mainly offers KDE or Gnome (and never the twain shall meet - the disparity between the KDE fans and the Gnome users apes the fanboi 'tudes that happen throughout the net, and it's always struck me as strange that Macs generate so devotion just because they're purty), and Macs offer the X desktop.
Having watched a presentation by one of the Bumptop team, I remain unconvinced by its practicality and usability, and it will certainly (by its nature) be a resource hog. This being said, who wouldn't want a desktop environment which has a physics-based feel, allowing you to throw uncooperative documents about? Take that, you stupid spreadsheet! In your face, typo-in-a-shell-script!
One feature that I particularly like is the
Have a look for yourself:
http://bumptop.com/
Having watched a presentation by one of the Bumptop team, I remain unconvinced by its practicality and usability, and it will certainly (by its nature) be a resource hog. This being said, who wouldn't want a desktop environment which has a physics-based feel, allowing you to throw uncooperative documents about? Take that, you stupid spreadsheet! In your face, typo-in-a-shell-script!
One feature that I particularly like is the
Have a look for yourself:
http://bumptop.com/
Sunday, January 18
Review: Samuel Pepys' Diary -Concise edition
I spent an hour this morning trying to get into Samuel Pepys' diary (admittedly the concise edition, as the complete work has more than a quarter of a million words), and found it to be not quite the 'ripping yarn' that academics and diarists claim it to be.
It is true that Pepys was a larger-than-life figure, spending his fruitful and eventful life in London in the late 1600s socialising with the movers and shakers of Parliament and nobility; but also that he was a decidedly human man, with an appetite for big dinners and apparently 'his own and others' young servant-girls'.
He was also troubled for most of his fairly long life (he lived to be 70) by kidney stones, for which he eventually had surgery for in March 1658. Given what medical conditions were like at the time, and that this was considered at the time to be a risky operation, one can only wonder at the pain he must have been in to consider surgery of this nature necessary. It is typical of the nature of the diary that he refers to it as "my old trouble", as if it is a rather trying Wodehousian aunt instead of an excruciating and debilitating complaint.
The main difficulty I had with the diary is the immense numbers of people that Pepys knew, in both his professional (he worked his way up through the civil service, eventually becoming Secretary of the Admiralty as well as being MP for Harwich and also serving as Fellow and president of the Royal Society) and personal life. Even with a fairly good grasp of the history of the period (which I freely admit I don't have) , I could see that this lsit would become overwhelming. Without footnotes, I would have not begun to be able to piece things together at all. Sometimes, he refer's to people in a slightly roundabout way - in this case, this is due to Pepys being deliberately circuitous as he was aware that he had enemies and his diaries could be used against him.
As a historical resource, though, the diary is extremely valuable and as such will stay on a bookshelf somewhere. There are diary entries regarding the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London (1666), of which he wrote several pages. It is interesting to note that his first response to the fire was "I thought it far enough off, that I went back to bed again, and to sleep". It is only later, when Jane, his wife, rouses him with the news that "300 houses have burnt down" that he "made myself ready presently" and "walked to the Tower (of London)" so he could get a better view. Throughout this entry there is a sense of unhurriedness, and this is common for the diary as a whole: even as a young man he mentions going to the office as if it were more of a coffee-house or a gentleman's club than a place of work.
In summary, then, whilst Pepys' style is pleasing and dryly humerous and his life full of adventure, many of his diary entries refer exclusively to what he had for dinner or to the day to day mundanities of life. In one sense, this does add to the completeness and a feeling of a life being recorded but in another makes one wonder what the unabridged diary is like, if entries such as
It is true that Pepys was a larger-than-life figure, spending his fruitful and eventful life in London in the late 1600s socialising with the movers and shakers of Parliament and nobility; but also that he was a decidedly human man, with an appetite for big dinners and apparently 'his own and others' young servant-girls'.
He was also troubled for most of his fairly long life (he lived to be 70) by kidney stones, for which he eventually had surgery for in March 1658. Given what medical conditions were like at the time, and that this was considered at the time to be a risky operation, one can only wonder at the pain he must have been in to consider surgery of this nature necessary. It is typical of the nature of the diary that he refers to it as "my old trouble", as if it is a rather trying Wodehousian aunt instead of an excruciating and debilitating complaint.
The main difficulty I had with the diary is the immense numbers of people that Pepys knew, in both his professional (he worked his way up through the civil service, eventually becoming Secretary of the Admiralty as well as being MP for Harwich and also serving as Fellow and president of the Royal Society) and personal life. Even with a fairly good grasp of the history of the period (which I freely admit I don't have) , I could see that this lsit would become overwhelming. Without footnotes, I would have not begun to be able to piece things together at all. Sometimes, he refer's to people in a slightly roundabout way - in this case, this is due to Pepys being deliberately circuitous as he was aware that he had enemies and his diaries could be used against him.
As a historical resource, though, the diary is extremely valuable and as such will stay on a bookshelf somewhere. There are diary entries regarding the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London (1666), of which he wrote several pages. It is interesting to note that his first response to the fire was "I thought it far enough off, that I went back to bed again, and to sleep". It is only later, when Jane, his wife, rouses him with the news that "300 houses have burnt down" that he "made myself ready presently" and "walked to the Tower (of London)" so he could get a better view. Throughout this entry there is a sense of unhurriedness, and this is common for the diary as a whole: even as a young man he mentions going to the office as if it were more of a coffee-house or a gentleman's club than a place of work.
In summary, then, whilst Pepys' style is pleasing and dryly humerous and his life full of adventure, many of his diary entries refer exclusively to what he had for dinner or to the day to day mundanities of life. In one sense, this does add to the completeness and a feeling of a life being recorded but in another makes one wonder what the unabridged diary is like, if entries such as
"I am told this day that Parliament hath voted 2s per annum for every chimney in England, as a constant revenue for ever to the Crowne" March 3rd, 1661
made the concise edition, how detailed must the full edition be? The best conclusion I can draw is that the Diary of Samuel Pepys is not a book I could recommend as a page turner, but more one to sit on a shelf or by a bedside for dipping into when one has a few minutes and is not sure what to read and definitely as something useful to have to hand in case of wanting to know of life in London in the 1660s.
Monday, January 12
First post
After several years of poo-pooing blogs (and as General Melchett said "You should never ignore a poo-poo"), I have decided to make a start on one of my own.
This blog is primarily designed to showcase things I find interesting, things I make and do, and so forth. I'm not as yet completely sure what's going to go on in it, but time will tell. I expect it will probably have a readership of (at most) five people, and as such can act as a diary.
I can safely say that the following will be involved:
Proper English Literature (as in, written pre-1900)
The joys and sorrows of learning Perl (my current project at work)
Open Source Software (the future of IT as I see it)
Too many photos of cats, puppies and trees.
This blog is primarily designed to showcase things I find interesting, things I make and do, and so forth. I'm not as yet completely sure what's going to go on in it, but time will tell. I expect it will probably have a readership of (at most) five people, and as such can act as a diary.
I can safely say that the following will be involved:
Proper English Literature (as in, written pre-1900)
The joys and sorrows of learning Perl (my current project at work)
Open Source Software (the future of IT as I see it)
Too many photos of cats, puppies and trees.
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