A RUMINATING GHOST

I’m utterly in love with this book. I’d read plenty of reviews and interviews with Jeff VanderMeer before finally picking up a copy of the Bantam trade edition, so I was reading with considerably high expectations. Fortunately, VanderMeer didn’t disappoint.

I think the key to understanding and enjoying City of Saints is to not ever, at any stage, to think of the book as      an anthology linked by the city of Ambergris. This is not simply a collection of linked stories, but rather a novel of versions. You are reading a novel, but one whose component parts have been separated for closer inspection. Reading ‘The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris’ is like getting all the background filler material in a standard novel, only that here it’s delivered as a pseudo-history, complete with footnotes. The other three novellas that comprise the book’s first half are magnificently strange, each with a unique flavour, with ‘The Strange Case of X’ being so overwhelmingly self-conscious (where does the writer end and the character begin?) that it ends before you feel it’s begun, so caught up are you in trying to unravel what’s fiction and what reality.

Don’t mistake it for yet another dull attempt at surrealism though. Surrealism works because it subverts or abstracts a shared notion of our ‘normal’ reality – a kind of acute slippage between the audience and the artist. Yet reading City of Saints is, in many ways, like reading Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books – there’s nothing supernatural or terribly fantastic about the city of Ambergris, only that it’s very strange and it’s reality, as C.N. Manlove said about Peake’s work, has no connection with our sphere of possibility.[1]

The Appendix picks up where ‘The Strange Case of X’ leaves off. It is purported to be a collection of personal effects found in X’s cell at the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute. Again, since they are all so intertwined and referential to each other, these need to be read in their entirety to enjoy the full effect. Personal highlights from the Appendix include ‘The Cage,’ with its very scary ending that would make an excellent M. Night Shayamalan-style suspense thriller, ‘In the Hours After Death,’ with its strangely bittersweet account of what happens after death, ‘The Exchange,’ which is just strange (I love how this is actually set during the usual riots associated with the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, but this old couple is calmly enjoying dinner and), and ‘Learning to Leave the Flesh,’ the struggle of finding the right words to express a death, to capture something about the essence of a person’s life, moved me very deeply, having attempted a similar exercise recently in regards to a passing in my own family. Expressing such loss creatively, especially if it is a close to home, is extremely difficult, and VanderMeer approaches the task in such a way that the self-consciousness of the piece becomes an expression of his own struggle to find the right words – we can sense the author at work.

I haven’t seen the hardcover edition, but as I understand it the Bantam edition (pictured above) contains the same material. I’m not super-amazed at the interior layout though – sometimes the text looks too squished on the page, as if it needed more space. I don’t know how it appears in the hardcover, but I know it has larger dimensions so I imagine it is much better laid out. The hardcover art is much more striking as well, and I’ll be tracking down a copy as soon as some spare $$ miraculously find their way into my wallet.

A highly recommended book, and one that should also prove that fantasy literature needn’t be all about hobbits and elves, nor about too-strange an events or characters that the reader can’t engage with.

So what happened today? I took a small pile of books to the (absolutely useless) local book exchange, hoping against hope that I'd stumble across some rare gem nestled away in a corner. Amazingly, I managed to find a copy of the Gollancz edition of M. John Harrison's Light. Hooray for me! What makes this particular book exchange so laughable is their complete ignorance of other methods a customer has for buying books (The Book Depository, for one), and subsequently any conception of accurate pricing. Take, for instance, the Wordsworth Classics range - a (very) poor man's alternative to Penguin and Oxford's range of classic. In Australia, the Wordsworth titles sell for an average $4.95, depending on the thickness of the book. I once took a couple of Wordsworth titles into this book exchange, they gave me some credit, and that was that. Next time I went in, these two titles where on the shelf for $12.50 each. This struck me as the kind of ignorance born out of inadequate research, which is baffling since the owners are supposed to make regular trips to the UK to source books so you'd think their knowledge would be fairly extensive by now (should I also tell you that one of the owners told me she only reads classics like the ones I exchanged? Shouldn't that make her the go-to-guy for info on these kind of books?). Since the odds are so in favour of not finding anything worthwhile in this exchange, I shall be avoiding it in future.

In other news, I've just discovered that Penguin have reissued their three H.P. Lovecraft collections in the fancy schmanzy new design they've got for the Modern Classics range. I quite like this new design - from the few I seen, they feel like a much sturdier binding (they're most likely not, but I think so). However, the material used on the back covers seems to scratch fairly easily. The contents are exactly the same as the previous editions, only the cover design has change. That means buying all three will NOT give you every Lovecraft story (I think there's sixteen missing - enough for a fourth volume perhaps?), but you DO get Joshi's excellent introductions and exhaustive notes for each story - when it was first published, Lovecraft's inspiration, etc. Quite nifty editions, I think.

And to wrap this post up, I came across this quote in Rosemary Jackson's Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (Routledge) while doing some thesis reading today. It seems to speak very much to what I've tentatively labeled, for the sake of my thesis, 'contemporary fantasy' (ie, fantasy published post-2000, as a general rule. Not to be confused with the urban/contemporary subgenre).

"By offering a problematic re-presentation of an empirically 'real' world, the fantastic raises questions of the nature of the real and unreal, foregrounding the relation between them as its central concern. It is in this sense that Todorov refers to fantasy as the most 'literary' of all literary forms, as 'the quintessence of literature,' for it makes explicit the problems of establishing 'reality' and 'meaning' through a literary text." (p. 37)

Well, it’s finally a reality!

During the second half of 2007, I took a creative writing unit as part of my degree at Murdoch University. The unit was designed to allow students to work on and develop one 6000-word piece over the course of the semester. However, unlike previous creative writing units, this one didn’t allow for a reading of each student’s completed work. We were only privy to extracts as they were workshopped over the course of the semester. As such, it was suggested that we somehow publish our work—for ourselves—so that everyone had an opportunity to read everyone else’s finished pieces. I volunteered to compile this humble anthology, which at the beginning was merely going to be spiral-bound photocopies done on the cheap. Concurrently, I’d been reading Jeff VanderMeer’s very interesting essay on the publishing history of City of Saints and Madman, which was where I first came across the term POD, or Print-On-Demand publishing—a digital printing process which allows for cheap reproduction, making it financially feasible for small runs like ours (30-odd copies). So I put it to the group that we pursue this avenue, making our anthology as professional-looking as possible, which increased my workload since I was now compiling and designing and editing—all for the first time in my life. In keeping with the nature of the anthology, it was title Before the Dust Settles, representing our first foray into published writing, and was ostensibly published by Liminal Press... hopefully my fellow classmates will get the (admittedly not very funny) gag.

Today, I received the proof copy (many thanks to Cory @ Digital Print Australia for putting up with such a newbie), and it looks fantastic. Our cover art is a fantastic line drawing by Petri Ivalo Sinda, a fellow classmate who also has his story included. The full contents is:

Introduction – Peta Mulcahy
Peta was our tutor and an experienced writer and editor in her own right. She expected the best from each of us, and wouldn’t let anyone settle for second rate writing.

Of Life and Death – Lesley Ward
A story with a social conscience and distinct local flavour. Lesley doesn’t mind telling it like it is, but does it artistically and with an economy of language that I envy. A young man’s experience of life and death in the vibrant world of Fremantle.

Saving Eyes – Michelle Tan
Michelle writes with a kind of simplicity that draws the reader in its warmth and heart. Saving Eyes is not a sentimental story by any means; rather, it makes its point gently and carefully. It is about a young woman’s last day in an anonymous city, and what it means to find yourself.

I Slipped Away – Seth Merlo
My own story is the only real fantastic piece in this anthology. It was also an opportunity to work through my own feelings regarding my father’s unexpected death. A dying man has an opportunity to see his father one last time.

Circles – Rachel French
Rachel’s contribution is a collection of poetry about the cycles of life and death as she sees them played out in her local context, allowing her to tackle a range of issues including the murder of Sofia Rodriguez-Urrutia-Shu in 2006.

Satisfaction – Penny Morgan
Penny’s story focuses on a cast of middle-aged couples and the interplay and sexual politics between them. She writes with a wonderfully controlled prose reminiscent of Virginia Woolf (who I understand Penny is heavily influenced by).

Chessday – Bernard Booth
This pseudo-science fictional piece zips along at an incredible pace thanks to Bernard’s rapid-fire and witty dialogue. A physics professor decides to get rid of the verb to be from his internal lexicon, with disastrous consequences. It also raises the question of how physics as a discipline might be advanced when it takes a lifetime to learn all the basics.

Love and Other Agnosias – Petri Ivalo Sinda
Petri has already had stories and artwork published in the likes of Eidolon and Daikaiju and is pursuing a creative writing Honours degree. His story here displays his penchant for experimenting with technique and language without sacrificing a good story. A man with a strange medical condition manages to find love and fulfillment.

Flowers for the Queen – Pearl Sumner
An autobiographical piece that chronicles an incident in Pearl’s childhood. Pearl is blind, and this gives her writing an incredible aural sense that the rest of us simply couldn’t achieve—while we tend to focus on the visual and struggle with the aural (if we attempt to deal with it at all), Pearl pins sounds down to the page as if she plucked them out of the air. Her story is poignant and representative of the kind of society we had at the time.

It’s a diverse collection, which is as it should be, given the unit ostensibly caters to all types, though I struggled against the program’s general dislike for speculative fiction and was told on one occasion that my talent was wasted on Fantasy. If I have any talent at all, I think the greater crime would be in not using it, in not writing at all, and I find it rather disparaging to claim that the fantastic offers ‘real’ writers no genuine opportunities to flex their creative and intellectual muscles.  At any rate, this anthology represents an opportunity for me personally  to have a go at editing and publishing, an activity that has fascinated me for a while and which I wouldn't mind moving into as a potential career. Already, there's things I'd do differently next time around, but everyone has to start somewhere I suppose.

Toshiba announced earlier this week their plans to drop the HD-DVD format, given the recent defection of Warner Bros., coupled with Universal and Paramount quickly following suit. So I guess this means Blu-Ray won out in the end. I'll admit, to a certain degree, that I've always liked Blu-Ray just because it had a cooler name (HD-DVD is kinda dull), but as well as that, the fact that Blu-Ray has a larger capacity seemed to me a kind of future proofing, that the format can be improved on without too much trouble, while HD-DVD would reach its capacity much quicker and necessitate the need for new hardware and the like. Now, I'm no technical expert, and that statement may be a load of tosh, but Blu-Ray's larger capacity was the one thing that drew me to the format in the first place. That, and the sleek sexiness of the PS3.

Sound like a bandwagon jumper, don't I? What can I say, I'm risk-averse. Early adopting seems to me a potential waste of many $$, so I'm happy to wait.

So now, the plan is save for the shiny black goodness that is the Playstation 3, and put a halt to DVD purchasing. My reason being that although the PS3 is backwards-compatible, it seems silly to double-spend: buying a movie on DVD that I will later want to upgrade to high definition. I might as well wait a little while longer and get the Blu-Ray disc.

Forums are already rife with debate about how long Blu-Ray will last before the next format—presumably digital download (DD)—takes over, and whether BR will truly take over from DVD before that happens. Being the cynic that I am, I believe Sony & Co., having so recently won the 6-year format war, will do everything they can to milk BR for all it's worth before another format takes over, including back room deals to hold that next format back. Clever and all-pervasive marketing won the war for Sony, and clever and all-pervasive marketing will see Blu-Ray last a good while yet.

Then there's the debate over whether people prefer having the physical object in their hand or are happy to download content in some fashion, whether via the internet straight to your PC, Fox and other satellite providers, or some other technology like internet-enable TVs. My gut feeling is that people will prefer the physical object for a long while still, and I'm firmly within this camp. You may be able to download and print up your own covers and all that jazz, but its just not the same as going into JB HiFi and getting the real deal. It's all a matter of changing perceptions though, and I have no doubt that in 5-10 years my daughter will be asking me why I bothered assembling such a quaint but oh-so-obsolete Blu-Ray collection. It's then that'll I'll sit her down and tell her a story that begins with something like "When I was a lad..."

In the meantime, there's a Playstation to ogle:

     Can you feel it's power?

Over at Ecstatic Days (Jeff VanderMeer's blog), he's running a rather neato competition to win a personalized copy of every anthology he and wife Ann will edit between now and 2010. All you have to do is write a brief (300-500 word) 'New Weird' story about an incident that's happened to you, or that you've witnessed, with the idea being that there's enough strange things that happen every day in our so-called 'normal' world. I've posted my entry at his blog, and it's included down below. It's about a wild and windy night a little while ago during which my wife woke up utterly terrified at the sound of what turned out to be a couple of cans in the laundry being blown off the window sill, but which she thought, in her semi-dreamlike state, was the sound of our daughter's cot collapsing. I was still pretty much awake, so I knew that it was just the wind, but I've never seen or heard her so scared before, and so I thought the incident nicely captured the 'this world we live in is an odder place than we might think' mentality that Jeff VanderMeer is looking for in the competition. That half-awake, half-asleep twilight where the dreams are so surreal and yet so utterly vivid is truly fascinating, coupled with our ability as humans to completely terrify ourselves at things which turn out to be so totally mundane, is, to me, proof of the power of the imagination and, by extension, fantastic literature, and should be enough to ensure its place as a mode of compelling and highly inventive storytelling. A healthy curiosity of the unknown is always such fertile ground for a writer to play in. What is frustrating is that writers in the purely mimetic tradition will often say they agree, in the main, with such a statement regarding fantastic literature, yet continue to disparage and discourage the mode in practice (Murdoch Uni Creative Writing Program, I'm looking at you).

So, here's what I whipped up very quickly in order to meet the competition deadline.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Imps in the Eucalypt
By Seth Merlo

In the assumed security of their bedroom, the couple slept fitfully, uncomfortable in the strange, unseasonable humidity. Outside, the night was deep, but alive, and the wind howled through the tall trees across from the house like banshee calling the names of the dead. The banging of loose alsynite on the neighbour’s patio echoed through their tired minds with the ritual clang of muffled cymbals. On the edge of dreams, the night noises turned the woman’s chaotic thoughts to her baby daughter, asleep in the room next door. Too tired to wake, but too awake to settle, she tossed and turned and whimpered in her state of half-sleep.
    For a time, she dreamt of savage dogs. Beside her, her husband now lay awake, listening to the trees amplifying the sound of the wind, making it seem more violent and devastating than it actually was. Without warning, the wind would pick up and send itself screaming through the old eucalypts, tearing the leaves off their branches and whipping them into a furious whirlwind that raced up the driveway and battered against the fences, where they would settle for a short while before being scattered again. By morning, the leaves would lie dying in great mounds, but for the moment they were a swarm of angry imps that kept the husband on edge and his wife unsettled.
    Her mind turned again to their daughter, who slept contentedly in her cot, unfazed by the frantic carnival taking place outside her window. Even in her fitful sleep, the wife’s thoughts were always on her child, always hoping for the best, always protecting against the worst. She could not know that it was herself who needed more attention at this moment than her daughter.
In the quiet space between whirlwinds, the husband had finally fallen asleep. Exhaustion kept his mind free from the disturbing menagerie of imagery that plagued his wife’s brain, and would have kept him at rest if it weren’t for the sudden piercing crash that burst into his subconscious.
    Next to him, his wife sprang from the bed. In a fit of the purest panic, she screamed incoherently and he leaped across the bed to follow her, fully wakened more by the terror he heard in his wife’s voice than the dreadful noise of the imps. The light went on immediately and she made for their daughter’s bedroom, believing the helpless baby to be in certain danger.
    Her husband, recognising the din for what it was, reached for her arm and held on to her, turning her around to face him in the hopes of calming her down. She could hear herself screaming, and as he reassured her above the clatter of the whirlwind, she came to her senses and he held her.
    As one, they opened the door to their daughter’s bedroom. Sitting up, with a smile poking around the edges of her dummy, the small child waved happily to her mother and, as if reassuring her that everything was fine, said “Hi, Mamma.”
    Down the hall and in the laundry, an empty container and can of insect repellent slowly stopped spinning and came to rest against each other. In the light of day, the couple would understand, and laugh together. But the husband would not easily forget the sound of panic and terror in his wife’s voice that the strangeness of night had wrought.

  Curtain: Poirot's Last Case
  Agatha Christie










  Neuromancer
  William Gibson









  The Dispossessed
  Ursula Le Guin










  Things Fall Apart
  Chinua Achebe









  Wide Sargasso Sea
  Jean Rhys










  Viriconium
  M. John Harrison










  Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy
  Michael Moorcock

 

  The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
  John le Carré










  A House for Mr Biswas
  V.S. Naipaul










  Brave New World
  Aldous Huxley










  American Gods
  Neil Gaiman









  The Left Hand of Darkness
  Ursula Le Guin










Reviews to follow....

possibly...

Many a spoiler lies herein: I've just returned from a Hoyts La Premiere session of I Am Legend, an average adaptation of Richard Matheson's justifiably classic novel of the same name. To start with, it would be unfair to berate director Francis Lawrence for updating the time period of the novel to our (very) near future since it would make little sense retaining the novel's then-futuristic 1970's setting (Matheson's novel was published in 1954). That's not to say that such an update doesn't bring its own fair share of problems and changes to the source material; that's an inevitable factor in these kinds of novel-to-film adaptations. The major difficulty that I imagine the writers faced was in translating a novel that primarily takes place inside its protagonist's head into a visual medium like film. As a result we have Will Smith talking to mannequins he's posed throughout an abandoned New York city, and the family dog offers a companionship not found in the novel, but which is perhaps justifiable on film where it would be problematic having a character who practically never speaks. The dog still dies in much the same way it does in the novel: tragically and representative of Neville's complete isolation.


There are two changes in the film that frustrate me, and very much alter two important aspects of Matheson's novel. The first is Neville himself. I quite enjoy Will Smith's movies and I don't think many people can complain that they don't get what they expect from his films. But in this instance, he's as miscast as he was in I, Robot. Both films were great popcorn flicks, but as adaptations of classic science fiction stories, they fail (I, Robot more so than I Am Legend, in my opinion). Matheson's Neville is a relatively uncomplicated man: he misses his wife and daughter and struggles with the fact that he is the last human being alive, but what he is not is the uber-slick military scientist that Will Smith portrays. One has enough trouble buying Will Smith as any kind of military officer (see Independence Day), but compounding that by asking the audience to believe he is also a top-notch scientist is pushing the boundaries of credibility. Plus, how on earth did he manage to get all that lab equipment into the basement of his New York apartment? What is frustrating about this is not so much the stretching of belief, but that Smith's Robert Neville doesn't learn anything about the virus over the course of the film, since he's responsible for it. In the novel, Neville is one of the few immune to the virus, but has to find out for himself the nature of the enemy he is fighting. It's an important distinction to make in terms of character development, because Smith is essentially the same man at the end as he was at the beginning - sorry for what he's done and trying to right it. While Matheson's Neville goes through several phases of depression and rejuvination before the novel's end.

Which brings me to the second aspect of the film that frustrated me, namely the ending. For those who have read the book, you'll remember that Neville takes a woman in who he is lead to believe is another human survivor, but is in fact a vampire sent to spy on him. This was possible because Matheson included two types of vampires - the undead zombies who do all the drinking of blood, and humans who are simply infected by the virus, of which the woman Neville discovers is of the later. In them, the virus has mutated enough to allow them to go out into sunlight and on discovering this, they determine to form a new society of their own kind. This was the crux of Matheson's novel, of the ending of one social order and the rise of another. The classic status of the novel is derived from this depiction of how humanity as we know it might deal with its own (self-inflicted) demise, when we believe we are the dominant species on the planet and aren't going anywhere. It challenged the assumption that we've always been the way we are, and always will be, evoking both a consideration of Darwinian evolution and a reconsideration of the foundation, function and place of societies throughout history. Lawrence's film discards any semblance of this powerful theme in favour of a standard humanity-will-find-a-way-to-survive ending that sees Will Smith sacrifice himself so that his (very human) female companion can escape to the survivor's colony in the mountains. Robert Neville became the titular legend for all the wrong reasons - as saviour of the human race as we know it, able to cure the vampires of their 'otherness' because they threatened the assumptions that his society was founded on. Mathesons' Neville goes to his death understanding and accepting that his world is at an end. He's tried to find a cure, he's tried to survive, but ultimately he must give in to the hubris of his kind. To a degree, then, the novel was a cautionary tale. In Lawrence's film, humanity suffers no such hubris and is able to overcome anything if it a) has enough guns, and b) puts its mind to it (whatever that means).

On film, I Am Legend is more suspense than action. The sequence of Neville going into the dark warehouse to find his wayward dog is a standout, lit entirely with only the light available from the flashlight on his rifle. Flashback sequences provide all the drama such a film requires, establishing Neville's back story as the virus spreads chaotically and New York becomes ground zero. The blowing up of the bridges wasn't nearly as epic a moment as the trailer made it out to be, but the subsequent scenes of a deserted New York are really the trump card of the film. The all-CG vampires got boring quickly and I was left wondering why at least a portion weren't extras in prosthetics. According to ShockTillYouDrop.com, Richard Matheson has already signed over rights to an as-yet unwritten sequel, based on this film's current box office receipts. Personally, I can't see why a sequel is needed and it will no doubt only further dilute the mythos  of the source material. But that's Hollywood.

This, along with The Crying of Lot 49, was required reading for my Literary Theory unit this year. Both books were used as examples of postmodern writing, and I enjoyed both immensely. DeLillo makes use of the collapse of artistic hierarchies that postmodernism affords and, not without a hint of irony, celebrates the absurdities inherent in human life. One has to admire a writer who makes an 'Airborne Toxic Event' as ordinary as ordering Chinese take away and watching movies with the family. The ending concludes the book almost as a black comedy, with Jack, having lived through the Toxic Event, having visited The Most Photographed Barn in America, and having dealt with his wife's infidelity, still yearns for something to make him feel alive, an adventure, if you will, that he can call his own.





I like these Modern Library editions. They have much snazzier covers than the Penguin or Oxford range of classics and look a lot nicer on the bookshelf. However, their introductions are a little slim and tend towards the effusive, and can hardly be compared to the scholarly detail of their Penguin or Oxford counterparts, which is a shame, because Modern Library get some substantial names to pen these introductions (Arthur C. Clarke, in this case). This particular story is, of course, a genuine classic, since it depicts one of the earliest and best examples of an alien invasion of Earth. Its other notable strength is its broad scope: not only is it science fiction, but it also falls within the realm of invasion literature; novels written prior to the First World War that depict an invasion of England by a foreign power. It was a branch of fiction that tapped into the prevailing pessimism and fears of the time, in much the same way that a sizeable portion of SF written in the 1950s tended to play on fears about the Red Menace. The 1953 film version updated the novel to this post-war setting and remains highly watchable, while Spielberg's 2005 film is about as exciting as repeats of Friends. Neither film, though, seems to capture the desperation or visual imagery which makes Well's novel so particularly striking.



This is rightly considered one of Dick's best, if only because it is so obviously born out of personal experiences. The notion of Fred/Bob keeping tabs on himself is classic Dick, and works wonderfully when further compounded with Bob's (or is that Fred's?) growing addiction to Substance D. I don't think much of drug use, but when I read the dedication that closes this book, I was moved. It elevates A Scanner Darkly into the realm of tragedy, which is perhaps what makes the novel distinguishable amongst the vast variety of Dick's output. Richard Linklater's 2006 film, which was not actually released until 2007 in Australia, is one of my films of the year. Many reviews have already talked about how it is arguably the first film adaptation of a Dick novel to actually stick to the text, and it's all the better for it. Plus, the rotoscoping just looks so cool!





What an utterly terrible book! This is one of those few instances were I could unequivocally say that the film was superior to the source material. Even when ignoring the sexism and racism inherent in Fleming's work, Doctor No is just poorly written. I find it laughable that Fleming genuinely believed he was writing for an "'A' readership" (Bennett, 'The Bond Phenomenon', 1983), and even more so that "evidence from reviews in the literary weeklies of the period suggest that this is precisely how they were regarded and read initially." How can an author write about giant man-eating squids wrapping their toothy tentacles around the leg of our hapless hero and go on to write "one might have thought that the sophistication of the background and detail would be outside their ['B' and 'C' class readers] experience and in part incomprehensible"? So, Jamaica is too sophisticated for working and middle class readers? Or a spy who does more running around than actual spying is incomprehensible? Fleming clarifies that in hard cover, his books are designed to appeal to an 'A' readership, but are "equally readable" to all classes in paperback, a strange distinction that I put down to a combination of economics (hard covers are too expensive for working class readers) and class snobbery (he still feels his books might be too sophisticated for them). At least Sean Connery had a go at some detective work before running off to woo Honey Rider, and her ludicrous back story of living in an abandoned house full of animals and creepy crawlies is thankfully dropped.


An unoffensive, easy to read biography of David Mattingley, an Australian who piloted Lancasters during the Second World War. It's written with a view to appealing to younger readers, and offers some interesting insights into the life of a pilot and his crew during the war. The titular battle order was for a bombing run over the Ruhr, dubbed 'Happy Valley' by the airmen, and during which Mattingley was seriously injured. As a result, he saw the remainder of the war out while convalescing. His story will never be mythologised like that of the Memphis Belle or Dambusters, but its good to be reminded of these little stories that make up the bigger picture.