Confessing my first crime

Once upon a time, I thought that not finishing a book you had started was a crime. A social crime on par with stealing, only justified in the most dire of circumstances. Who leaves a story stranded like that? I wondered. What kind of degenerate abandons characters they haven't even met yet?! 

(You probably think I am exaggerating, and I understand that, but I am not. I still do not fully trust People Who Do Not Finish Books On the Regular.) 

I ploughed through Michel Houellebecq's Atomised on this principle -- come to think of it, that may have been the book that broke me (go read some of the reviews and you'll see what I mean. Whatever you do, do not read it.). A short time later, I picked up a book by Richard Powers, the first pages of which had the vaguest scent of Houellbecq's horrifying imagination, and I noped right out of that first chapter. 

So it began.

Next was The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, which I just kind of forgot to continue reading. I was about a quarter of the way through and then I started reading something else, with the intention of coming back to it, and I just never did. This was more a case of neglect than abandonment, but that's still a crime.

Since then, there have been many -- oh so many -- books that I have cracked open and left cracked, with no intention of ever trying to undo my crime, and a small contingent that I plan to visit again. I'm making my way through Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light again (although I confess to taking a quick break to read The Wild Things).

Two of Roberto Bolano's books -- 2666 and The Savage Detectives -- have fallen victim to my Houellebecq-inspired crime spree, as well as The Biographer's Tale by AS Byatt, The Golden House by Salman Rushdie, Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald, The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West and the second book in the Last Policeman series.

All, according to the critics, good books, but not enough to hold my attention. See, I'm an editor, which means I spend the whole day reading and rereading content, focusing on words and phrases to try to make them as functional as possible. After a solid eight or ten hours of this, it's hard to get out of that mindset. Truly great books lull that part of my brain to sleep, but good or almost great books leave room for that part of my brain to kick.

So, in the meantime, I have reread a few books, looking for that feeling you get when you read a truly beautiful book. I'm a literary junkie looking for a fix. And finding it in works like The People's Act of Love by James Meek, Marissa Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Night Film, Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy, and most recently, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

Do not judge a book by its movie, folks. Even on a second reading, Cloud Atlas is the kind of book I wish I could write, but since I can't, I'll just read it over and over again, finding something new each time.

I am confessing my crime partly because I hope to stop doing it. But, really, I'm just assuaging my guilty conscience so I can sin anew.

Westworld, Season 3

Originally, this was going to be a post comparing the Terminator franchise with Westworld. I'll explain why a bit later, but I've decided that my love for the former can't share a post with another franchise, especially one not worthy. (Yes, I said it!) That post also explains why I have shifted the focus of my blog slightly. Basically, I spend all day reading and editing text, so all I want to do afterwards is not read. But I still need stories to cope with the everyday, so I watch a lot of TV, which means you'll just have to accept that I'll be posting about TV series more. It is what it is, and I'm not going to argue about it.

Anyway ... I was motivated to write this post after watching Season 3 of Westworld (which was about a year ago, and no, I haven't watched Season 4 yet, for reasons to be explained - let me finish!). Something had been jumping up and down at the edge of my awareness from the end of Season 1 and through Season 2. By the middle of Season 3, I was having full-on conversations with the "something".

The androids are too human. They have clearly been written by humans. It's a bit like watching a portrayal of a human created by an alien that only knows about human behaviour from watching mainstream TV.

The androids think of themselves as singular identities. They refer to themselves as "me" and "I" and they have memories that they seem to organise in a linear way, like a human would. This singularism is forced on us because we are encased in a single body. Although our cells die and are replaced, and we grow and mature and creep toward death, most of us experience our bodies as a constant entity (note I said most).

The "I" of the androids, however, have been housed, first, in a "mainframe" as part of a computer program, and then downloaded into multiple bodies to live out different storylines. Their names and identities change with the story. Although the series doesn't deal with this, I don't see how it would be profitable to have each character active in only one place in the park at one time. Surely, you'd have the same character in multiple destinations, where you are sure they won't run into each other.

Once their story - or their part in a larger story - has ended, their "I" is uploaded again and interrogated, while their bodies are either prepared to go back into the field or archived and replaced. This would happen daily or every few days.

Now, bear in mind that many of the storylines were traumatic, especially for women. They took place in the Wild Wild West where women were at best someone's daughter or wife, and at worst, worth less than a cowboy's horse. Most of the female androids experience both extremes and everything in between during their 30 years or fewer in the park.

Dolores and Maeve

When the androids escape, they are wearing their respective bodies, and their personalities continue to develop in a way that is consistent with their programming and their experiences in the park. They think of themselves as singular selves with a history and a future that they are fighting to protect.

I couldn't jump this hurdle. I couldn't reconcile how an android that has existed both as part of a computer program and as different personalities playing out the same scenarios over and over could think of themselves as a singular identity rather than a pluralistic one. (Note: I'm adopting "pluralistic" as the antonym of "singular" because that's the word that keeps coming to mind, and if the writers of Westword can play fast and loose with meaning, so can I.)

Once they leave Westworld (the park), Dolores and Maeve think of themselves as separate people, but if they are the product of the same program, are they really? Surely the edges of their personalities would blend into each other? Surely they would be the same and different at the same time?

I expected both characters to become more "glitchy" as they spent time in the outside world - not necessarily in a negative way. I expected them to display a digitally induced form of DID (dissociative identity disorder), where the multiple facades of their person-hood would become apparent. I expected them to act more like a product of a computer program.

But instead, they doubled down and became more human. And I got more and more irritated, until by the final episode of Season 3, I was shouting at my computer. I think I missed a lot of the subtext - and probably the larger text - because I was so lost in trying to reconcile how these two characters could be so human. (In other words, I may have gotten some of the details wrong, so please don't bother me about them.)

Sam Worthington in Terminator Salvation

The link to the Terminator franchise comes in the fourth instalment, called Terminator Salvation. Don't shoot me, but I actually like the movie, not as a continuation of the series, but on its own. Christian Bale is the worst John Connor, but Sam Worthington (despite what I think of Avatar, which is not good) steps up and does a great job of getting us to relate to his character, before we find out his secret - the secret even he didn't know. *dramatic pause*

In one of the last scenes, Skynet appears to Worthington's character and lays out how it is using Sam to get to John. Apart from the ludicrousness of a computer program explaining its evil masterplan to one of its own servants, Skynet displays the same kind of singular identity that the androids in Westworld do. Perhaps that is the only way to engage with us humans, but it's just so ... jarring.

I don't know what I'm expecting instead. Perhaps some of the hammy acting from Dr Who (of which I'm a fan, before you come for me, but come on - Daleks?), except without the characters melting down because the human brain is incapable of housing a digital entity (I feel like I've seen that somewhere before ...) or the offensive attempt to portray genuine mental illness as something to ogle.

As much as I enjoyed Season 1 of Westworld, I've been avoiding Season 4. Perhaps the writers and actors addressed all this and so I'm complaining into a void. Perhaps ... Or I'm going to spend another eight episodes yelling at my computer. Stay tuned.

The Somerton Man

I'm breaking the mold (my mold, which admittedly was already fractured and worn) here by blogging about something that is not literary or related to publishing or my frustrations with publishing or about the discord between the world of my imagination and reality or - you get the point. For those of you already familiar with the Somerton Man, you can probably jump ahead or just skip this post entirely. I have nothing new to add. All this information has ben analysed and debated over and over and over. But if you're still reading, let's go.

First: I love mysteries. You may have realised this when I blogged about Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold. But it has to be the right mystery. My criteria are vague. I'm not much for supernatural theories - magic is just science we haven't figured out yet, so nothing 'mystic'. I enjoy true crime, but not all true crime. I'm interested in crimes affecting women (I can make a sarcastic comment here but I won't), and not interested in crimes involving children. I'm interested in why people break the social contract, but I don't believe in making excuses for deviant behaviour either. (Life's hard, but it's not a character in your story and so it also doesn't owe you anything.) I particularly like frustrating mysteries, where there is a set of clues and the "truth", but the only way to link one to the other is to have been there and witnessed it.

Cue: the mystery of the Somerton Man. I referred to this offhand in a recent (time is relative) post, but let me explain why I'm writing about it now: the mystery was recently solved, except that it wasn't. We now know who he is, but not why he died or - well, you'll see.

On 1 December 1948, on a beach in Somerton Park, Adelaide, Australia, two horse-riders stumbled across a man in a suit. At first, they thought he was doing what people do at a beach (particularly, I would imagine, in a post-world war society): sitting on the sand, watching the waves and contemplating the choices he had made, but as they rode back home, they realised something was wrong. There was no obvious cause of death, and witnesses reported they had seen the man in the same position the previous evening from about 7 p.m.

He was dressed formally: in a shirt and tie, brown trousers and shoes, and a tailored double-breasted jacket, but he was not wearing a hat (remember: it's 1948). He did not have a wallet and there was no other form of identification in any of his pockets. In fact, the labels had all been carefully cut from his clothes. Police immediately suspected suicide, or perhaps a stroke (but that was not quite as racy).

But then the autopsy found his stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver and spleen all to be "deeply congested" while his heart was perfectly normal. The Somerton Man had been poisoned, but there was no trace of any poison in his blood or in any of the affected organs. The only conclusion the coroner could make was that his death was "not natural" and probably "not accidental".

(I'm going to condense time and mix details like this with the findings of the police's investigation because, well, I can. Also, I am going to leave out dead ends, like people incorrectly identifying the body to police, because you can read all that online but not here. The Wikipedia entry is a very detailed account.)

The coroner noted that the man's shoes were clean and had been recently polished, suggesting he had not been wandering the shore and considering the many ironies of existence. The sand around the body was not disturbed and there was no evidence of spit or vomit, which one would expect from a man dying of poison. Later, a witness would claim that he had seen one man carrying another in the vicinity on the night the Somerton Man died.

Found in various places on the man's person were: an unlit cigarette, a box of cigarettes (which contained several cigarettes of a different brand), an unused rail ticket to Henley Beach, a possibly used bus ticket, a comb, chewing gum and a half-empty box of matches.

The police were unable to identify the man using his dental records. Two newspapers ran the story, but all the tips flooded in in response to the publicity led to dead ends. So, the police made a plaster cast of the man's head and shoulders, the coroner embalmed the body and it was buried.

I know what you're thinking. It was my first thought, too. It's 1948 and the man has no identification, not even the labels on his clothes. Obviously, he was a spy, because the movies have taught me that every vaguely suspicious person in the 1940s was a spy. Apparently Adelaide was Spy City because there was a military research facility nearby and Australia's espionage (I mean, intelligence) organisations were going through some "changes", so they had a surplus. We'll make this The Theory to Beat.

The next "break" in the case (check out the lingo) was a piece of paper that was sewn into one of the man's trouser pockets, which was discovered several months after the body came to be just a body. (Note also that there was evidence he had tailored other spots on his own suit, which will be relevant shortly.) It was rolled up and on it was the phrase "Tamám shud", in a "foreign" script. The phrase comes from the final page of a book of poetry titled Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam, translated from Persian to English in 1849, and it means "it is ended". The poems are all about living life with no regrets and, so, dying without any baggage (excuse the pun). It looked like the paper had literally torn from a copy of the book, rather than copied by hand.

Actual photo of the script, via Wikimedia Commons

That book turned up in the backseat of someone's car, which was parked near the beach and had its windows open because it was a different time. The final phrase had been torn out from the back of the book, so it cannot be coincidence. The car owner gave the book to police once he realised it was relevant to the case, but he said he did not know the dead man. Some reports say that the book appeared in the man's car a full week or two before the Somerton Man died, suggesting he was staying in the area and that he visited the beach at least once before his death.

The book contained two pieces of information. The first was a series of capital letters, written by hand at the back of the book, that were assumed to be a code:

Police scan of the handwritten code, via Wikimedia Commons

However, cryptologists have never been able to break the code and at least one professional organisation asserts that it cannot be a code. So far, this is very spy-like behaviour - except for the fact that this book landed in the police's hands at all - supporting The Theory to Beat. 

The second piece of information was a telephone number, also written at the back of the book. This phone number belonged to Jessica Ellen "Jo" Thompson, who claimed she did not know the dead man. However, police noted that she was being "evasive" (I am curious what exactly this entailed) and that when she was shown the plaster case, she looked like she was "about to faint" (you know, as women do). She then asked that her name and other details be removed from the case files (and the police complied). 

Jo died in 2007 and in 2014, her daughter Kate said she believed her mother did know the man but for some reason refused to acknowledge him. There were also details about her mother that Kate couldn't reconcile, like the fact that Jo spoke Russian but refused to say where or when she had learnt the language and she was interested in communism (which of course means she must have been depraved). The only clue her mother left her daughter with was the offhand comment that the Somerton Man was known "at a higher level than the police force". What are the chances that they were both spies? I've already covered the "surplus" of "agents" both in the area and after the war, so I'd say pretty decent.

The only information Jo would give the police is that she had owned a copy of the Rubaiyat during the war but she had given it to a soldier named Alf Boxall, and so for a while, police believed that Boxall was the Somerton Man. But in 1949, Boxall was found to be alive and in Sydney (with the wonders of social media, I imagine they would have found him sooner). He still had the book and the final page was intact (although technically, that doesn't prove that this book was the same one Jo had given him - apparently, it was not that rare a book).

In January 1949 (roughly two months after the Somerton Man's death), staff at the Adelaide railway station (remember the train ticket) reported that a suitcase had been checked in on the day of his death (30 November) and had not been claimed. The outer label had been removed. Inside were some of the normal things you'd expect to find: pyjamas, slippers, a dressing gown, a pair of trousers (although, interestingly, the cuffs of the trousers contained sand), underwear and shaving items (but no socks). But then there were some unusual things: a screwdriver, a well-worn table knife, a pair of scissors, a square of zinc and a stencilling brush (used on merchant ships).

Also in the suitcase was a spool of orange thread, which matched the thread that had been used to sew the scrap of paper into the Somerton Man's pocket.

A police photo of the discovery of the suitcase, via Wikimedia Commons

The labels on these clothes had been removed too, but the Somerton Man had not been as careful here: some of the clothes had different spellings of the name "Keane" stamped on them and there was a laundry bag with the same name. The clothes could have been second-hand (today we'd say "vintage"), but what are the chances that all of his clothes came from the same source? This was another dead end as the police could not find a missing person with the surname "Keane" or "Kean", not only in Australia, but in other countries too.

As I mentioned, leads continued to trickle in but none of them stuck.

Let's take a massive leap forward now, not only in terms of time but technology. Jo had also had a son, named Robin. In 2013, Robin's widow and his son gave an interview claiming that the Somerton Man was Jo's lover and Robin's father. The proof: the shape of their ears was the same (I kid you not). The police decided to re-open the case and exhume the body to try to extract some DNA evidence. That proved futile, as the body had decomposed too badly, but several strands of hair were found embedded in the plaster cast, which turned out to be viable.

There were a lot of "cooks" in the kitchen by now (most as unqualified as me), but a physicist and electronic engineer named David Abbott and a forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick were on the trail with the hairs from the cast. They used the DNA they were able to extract and ran it through a "genealogy research database" (the home page of which claims that "Anyone can upload their DNA profile, analyze the results, and compare DNA shared with others"). They found a distant cousin of the Somerton Man and used that information to construct a family tree of a couple of thousand people (which, still, was the best lead anyone had had in 60-odd years). 

With a bit of sleuthing, Abbott and Fitzpatrick found their man: Carl Webb, an electrical engineer from Victoria, Australia, who had disappeared in 1947. (I do have to point out that this investigation was private and did not take place with police assistance, and that it still needs to be verified by sources other than the media, but I'm going to go with the DNA evidence and the woman whose entire career is dedicated to this kind of thing (i.e. Fitzpatrick) over the organisation that did not find the identity of the Somerton Man in - let me calculate this again - 74 years.)

The information on Webb is pretty scant. He was apparently born in Melbourne in 1905 and then married in 1941. He was "an instrument-maker" and his wife was a "21-year-old foot specialist", according to an interesting article in Smithsonian Magazine. Webb left his wife in 1947 and she started divorce proceedings (in  his absence) in late 1951, being apparently one of the only people who was not aware of the tantalising mystery brewing across the whole second half-century of the 1900s. He liked to read and write poetry, as well as bet on the ponies (those in the know now speculate that the "code" at the back of the book was a shorthand record of the horses he had bet on). Oh, and to nail this coffin shut, his sister was married to a man named ... Thomas Keane.

As I "hinted" at at the beginning of this post, the mystery is solved but not: we have a name and a bare timeline, but not the details of the tapestry, the meat of the pie (inside joke). Was Webb poisoned by someone else, or did he decide that life was just not worth the hassle? If the former, which I am going to tack to The Theory to Beat as the most likely, what was he poisoned with and why did it not show up in his blood or organs? Who was the man who allegedly carried him to the beach and then staged his body? Why was that scrap of paper sewn into his clothing? Why were all the labels removed from his clothes and from his suitcase? What happened in the year and eight months between when he left his wife and shuffled off this mortal coil without a soul noting his demise, at least in public? And what was his relationship with Jo Thompson?

Shakespeare had the innocent Juliet ponder, "What's in a name?" This story suggests not much, particularly if more than half a century has gone by between a man's death (which seems to be the most interesting thing about his life) and the opportunity to erect a headstone. All of which could be proof that he was a spy and doing a better job of hiding it than Jo Thompson. Alternatively, facing down the bleakness of existence in a really bleak decade, perhaps he thought he would do in death what he couldn't do in life: leave a mark, which is kind of like poetry writ large.

I still back The Theory to Beat, for the record. I'm invested in it now, which is proof of nothing. We have the evidence and there is the truth, but we have no way to link those two things together, except using a narrative (and until someone cracks the code of time travel - but then wouldn't we already see proof of someone already having returned to past and solved the mystery?). So I suppose in the end, this ended up being a literary post, in a sense.

A police photo of the Somerton Man's corpse, via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 18: Picnic at Hanging Rock

 The publishers of Picnic at Hanging Rock may have escaped judgement (in an Oprah-esque way) by saying that they didn't know it was not a true story. That they had done their due diligence and had been convinced by the local legend of the disappearance of the three girls and one woman. We might have thought that they were lazy or (and this is probably more accurate, with my experience of the last fifteen years in the publishing industry) facing an impossible deadline that encourages you to cut corners while also producing a peerless product.

But then there is Chapter 18. The last chapter of Picnic at Hanging Rock that was not published in the original edition (1967). There's a reason for that. It's B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Bat poop crazy. Philip K Dick in the shed nuts.

I will expand on this in a later post. In the meantime, an updated edition with the missing chapter was published in 1987. It seems to be out of print, so the only copies you will find will be second-hand. I don't have that patience, so I (and I do not do this often) found *cringing* a PDF.

Watch this space.

True stories and not-so-true stories

I read Picnic at Hanging Rock when I was about eleven. It was a well-worn paperback from a second-hand bookshop, and I have no idea where it is now (I don't know why this is important but it is). It's the true, legendary story of three Australian schoolgirls and a teacher who, in 1900, go missing during a school field trip - a picnic to Hanging Rock. They (or, to be macabre, their bodies) are never found, nor is there a single trace of them - even in pre-CSI days, you would think they would leave something: a footprint, a piece of linen or thread from their dresses, even hair goddammit.

This mystery has haunted me for years, along with the mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart and who the Somerton man is (this one has apparently been solved - but has it really? Do I really want it to be?). Later, when I was studying English Lit at varsity, we read Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It drove me Nuts (capital 'N' intended - I'm an editor, so just assume every error is intended. It'll save both of us time). 

Chronicle of a Death Foretold tells the story of the murder of a man named Santiago in a small town in Colombia some time in the 1950s. The foretelling bit isn't an issue - I'm okay with magical realism. The novel suggests that the murderers are a pair of brothers, the Vicario brothers, who are avenging the honour of their sister. (They murder him, his family murders them, their family retaliates, etc.) But there is some doubt. The novel never definitively names the brothers as the murderers and there are other characters who have reason to hate Santiago, which apparently is enough to murder someone.

Sparknotes and similar sites will tell you that the Vicario brothers are, without a doubt, the murderers, but it's not true, so don't write that in your essay. The story is told by an unnamed 'unreliable narrator', who is recalling the events long after they happened. Bits and pieces are missing, and it's possible that the narrator is remembering the whole event incorrectly - or is the murderer themselves. So what we have at the end of the novel is a whodunnit without a 'who'. So just a 'dunnit'. Trust me. I read the thing three times, determined to prove my lecturers wrong and solve the case.

One of my lecturers claimed that one of the themes of the novel is the nature of storytelling itself. What we expect and how violated we feel when our expectations are not met. Well done. Expectations violated. I suspect that if I ever met the author and asked him who the murderer(s) was, he'd say he doesn't know. Sometimes I really hate post-modern literature.

But Chronicle of a Death Foretold is fiction (although it is apparently loosely based on a true story). It doesn't claim any relationship to the truth. (Truth.) Also sometimes crimes like these don't have a resolution. The police have evidence, but no way to piece the evidence together to form the profile of the murderer. Although frustrating, we have to accept this or go mad every single minute of the day.

Imagine my reaction when, this week (i.e. 28 years after first reading the book), I found out that Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a true story. It's a local legend, but there is no evidence that it is true - not a newspaper article or editorial, no police reports, nothing. This mystery has lived in my brain and I have worried about those girls and what might have happened to them. For. Nothing. Why would someone do this? More importantly, why would someone do this to a reader who already has trust issues?

Fargo, both the movie and the series, used the tactic more recently. The writers and directors and producers who take our money argue that an audience will trust the storytellers more if we think the story is true. So they begin the story with the disclaimer, "This is a true story." They then explain where the events took place and when, hammering in the last nail in what turns out to be the coffin of our trust.

None of these storytellers think ahead, apparently. Yes, we trust you in the moment and suspend disbelief so high that it's pretty much a UFO in the sky. But what happens when a person's trust is violated? You feel angry, right? You think back through your interactions with the other person and brand them 'untrustworthy'. You feel violated. I really enjoyed watching both versions of Fargo. But once I learned that they were fiction and not the true stories I had believed them to be, I felt like they had experimented on me and without my consent.

If they had begun their tales with "Based on a true story" or "Based on true stories that happened [where] in [when]", I might have had slackened the rope I'm using to hang them. Alternatively, they could have ended with a similar disclaimer that acknowledged that the story was in fact not true or not entirely true. It's a small difference, but it acknowledges that at least part of the story is fiction. I would have been annoyed when I learnt that there is no truth to the story, but I would not have been so angry. I would have appreciated the (semi-)honesty.

Instead, I am POed. Part of the reason I am so Angry at this ploy is that the storytellers acknowledge the sleight of hand they played with our trust. They said that they could get away with more when they had the audience's trust. Seriously? Are you children who don't understand ethics or the implicit contract between creator and audience or just social mores? There's a scene in The Office where Michael is giving a seminar and he advises the salespeople to lie to their customers. He says, "You bought it. And now you can't return it." The manager of the branch says, simply, "But now we think you're a liar."

Now we think you're liars.

The Power

In my generous sabbatical from updating this blog, I have read The Power by Naomi Alderman twice. I read it for the second time at the end of 2020, after trying (and failing) to finish Alderman's fictional, experimental podcast The Walk. So why am I writing about it now, a year and a half later? Because I overheard someone say recently that if women were in charge, the world would be a more peaceful place. They clearly did not go to an all-girls' school.

I might have agreed with the sentiment, at least partially, before reading The Power. Not because I think that women are innately more peaceful, but because we are raised to be more empathic, to take the feelings of others into account and to try to resolve conflict. Consider the games we play as children. Girls play 'house' and they play with dolls, where they roleplay social situations and how to interact appropriately with others. Boys build things and then destroy them. They play games where they only have to consider themselves and their needs - and how to fulfill their needs.

There are of course exceptions and overlaps: girls may play with their brothers' toys and boys may have enlightened parents who let them play with whatever toys they'd like, even if they're considered 'girly'. Society is also changing, but that simply proves that these divisions existed in the first place.

Another reason I am returning to the novel's ideas is that I have watched seasons 1 and 2 of The Wilds three times in the last month and am eagerly waiting for the third season. Without giving away too much of the plot, the series begins with eight girls shipwrecked (plane-wrecked?) on an uninhabited island. We soon learn that this traumatic experience has been engineered as part of a social experiment to prove that women, because of their society-building skills, are better equipped for leadership.

I admit I scoffed when I heard the reasoning for the experiment and felt tense every time the head of the scientific team appeared on screen. Saying that women are more equipped for something like this is as offensive as saying that men are.

However, what we soon learn and the reason I have watched the series so many times, is that each girl is different. She has had different experiences and she has reacted to them differently, disproving the thesis that women behave inherently one way and men another - and proving my thesis that we are all individuals. I'm addicted to those stories (which is well-established on this blog), which are told so well and acted out so well.

(There's also the realism of the script - apart from the cycling of clothing, so that the girls seem to be wearing a new outfit every episode. The longer the girls are there, the more bedraggled they look. Their skin starts to burn and shed from exposure to the elements, they are dirty most of the time, their clothes have holes in, and their hair becomes either limp or frizzy and unruly, to the point where one of the characters breaks a brush trying to comb it. They aren't able to build elaborate shelters or to find an abundance of food - they often go without for days at a time. They don't try to map out every inch of the island, beyond confirming the island is uninhabited, finding freshwater and trying to find food. They also behave like the children they are, rather than shouldering the challenges like adults - they have tantrums, verbal spats and many passive-aggressive meltdowns.)

The Power goes to the opposite extreme to disprove the thesis that women are 'peaceful' and relationship builders. The novel considers what the world would look like if women were physically more powerful than men. Note: not as powerful as, but more powerful. One day, young women around the world wake up with the ability to shoot electrical jolts from their fingertips. In some women, it's stronger than others: they can main or kill someone with one jolt. This ability spreads to some older women, too, and it can be awoken by encounters with younger women. It can also strengthened with practice.

Predictably, patriarchal society is horrified - heavens forbid that young women assert themselves or fight back when molested or attacked. In the beginning, men and older women (most of whom don't have this freak ability) try to isolate and shame these 'mutants' - until they realise who really has the power in this new age. They also try to protect poor young men much more vociferously than they have ever tried to protect young women (trying to protect the 'virtue' of young women is not the same thing).

The novel, like The Wilds, follows seven main characters, including one young man (a self-styled journalist) and an older politician and mother whose daughter has the power. Many, but not all of the girls have been victimised, ensuring that the reader begins the story with strong empathy for these young women who are finally able to turn the tables on their abusers. Young Allie defends herself against her foster father who is molesting her (with her foster mother's implicit consent). Roxy plans to avenge the brutal death of her mother at the hands of her father's enemies. Tatiana flees her dictator husband to set up a new state where women are free.

But, as they say, power corrupts. It not only corrupts one's actions, but also one's mind. What started as a genuine grievance against specific people spreads until innocent and guilty people are lumped together and so that people who have committed different degrees of violence are given the same punishments. There's no awareness among the women wielding the power that they have now become the abusers or that they are repeating history. They are blinded by their own emotions, like militia in the midst of civil war.

The damage the women inflict on global society outweighs anything that history can offer as a warning, but it almost seems inevitable. The scale of the violence equals the violence that women have experienced throughout (at least recorded) human history and have simply borne. In addition, would some of the retaliations that are described in the book seem so heinous if they were carried out by a man?

There is some sort of gender revolution on the horizon and the seeds have already taken root. I guess we'll have to see what kind of plant it grows into. I'm not sure what plant would adequately represent the future described in The Power - probably something written by Jeff VandenMeer, but that seems like cheating.

The cover of This World is Full of Monsters by Jeff VanderMeer

Beginning Foucault's Pendulum

I wrote the bones of this post three years ago, when I was recovering from a reading slump. For most people, this diagnosis is not worrying - it means your life is full and you don't have time for frivolities. For me, a reading slump has a darker meaning. Reading is how I understand the world, it's how I soothe myself, it's how I gather the strength to continue from one day to the next. Without it, I'm literally body slamming the world without armour, with my eyes closed and my teeth clamped shut. (You may think I'm exaggerating here, and I can see why you'd think this, but no, dear reader, for once, I am not.)

Bear this in mind as you read on. It may also help you to know I never got any further than a couple of pages into Foucault's Pendulum.

I should have known, from the moment I read the word "isochronal" in the second sentence and had no idea what it meant or how it could possibly describe a type of "majesty".

(Devoted readers (yes, devoted) will know that I always read the first paragraph (or the first page if the book was written by Rushdie and measurements like "paragraphs" are relative) of a book before buying it. It is one of the rules I use to avoid becoming a hoarder living in an igloo made of mouldy and slowly decaying books. The other being that I may only buy a book if it is on my to-read list. Or if it should be on my to-read list. Or if I like the author and there is a space on my bookshelf or in the bookshelf that I am forced to buy to accommodate this new book. Or because, like a puppy, the book needs to be adopted. Or - anyway.)

I was standing in the second-hand bookshop (which is conveniently placed to intercept me on my way to my local grocery store). The store always smells like a rancid mixture of old books and liquorice, and I must be honest, is populated by a lot of black spines with red titles or pale spines with swirling fonts. At the risk of being a snob, I have also noticed, over the last eight years, how the contemporary fiction section (sub-labelled the "book group" section) has shrunk to two bookcases, while the romance section has swelled to four. I have never seen a Byatt on its shelves, although Lessing and Meek have made a couple of appearances.

There, at eye level, was Foucault's Pendulum, a book that is definitely on my to-read list. I didn't even bother to read the first paragraph. I slid it from its place and held it to my chest while I pretended to look through the rest of the bookcases. Once home, I placed it on my nightstand, ready to begin reading. But, as you'll remember, I was slumped, so the book sat there for a few weeks, judging me (or at least, reflecting my own self-judgement more clearly than a mirror).

Then, it happened. A sense of agitation that happens when I haven't read for a while. My imagination's withdrawal symptoms when subjected for too long only to movies and TV series. That evening I settled into bed with a cup of hot chocolate and picked up the novel as if it were a valuable relic. I studied the front cover, the back cover; I read the imprint page; I flipped through the pages and smelt them. Then, finally, I began reading the first paragraph.

What was I thinking? To break a summing-summing long sabbatical from reading with Foucault's Pendulum? A book that holds down post-graduate English-literature set-lists like a paperweight? Of all the books to ease my way back into the world where my imagination holds court, without allowing it to start chopping off people's heads.

Looking at the first page now, I see another clue (one that might have avoided this debacle had I thought to read the first paragraph in the bookstore - although, who am I kidding, what difference would that have made?): the epigraph is written in what looks to be Hebrew. Ahhh. It's not me, it's you.

Other clues include the fact that the book was written by Umberto Eco, he of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (which I enjoyed - but mostly because of about two pages where he describes wandering around in a mist-soaked landscape as a young boy trying to avoid Nazis - and which many people did not). Then there's the fact that the third sentence hosts the symbol for pi (yes, the Maths symbol) and ... really, do I need to continue?

The original purpose of this post (I am upgrading from "Point" to "Purpose") was to point out the insanity of breaking my book fast with a book written by a master like Umberto Eco. (And remember that I am no ordinary reader, that books have been for most of my life a prism through which I experience the world, that a reading slump for me means not only boredom but having to face the world alone and without the code to understanding why things happen and how to respond to them.) 

I used to read before falling asleep (and over breakfast and sometimes dinner), but over the last year I have replaced this with series. Which means that many of my dreams (some lucid, which, trust me, is confusing) now feature vampires and zombies, and I get fatally shot semi-regularly. Sometimes more than once. There have also been a surprising number of cameos by bears. Which is actually respite from a recurring nightmare I have had over the last seven or eight years in which one of my favourite and most encouraging teachers in high school tells me how disappointed she is in me and then refuses to acknowledge me, except to tell other people what a disappointment I am. Make of that what you will.

So, I wanted to restart my bedtime routine and I picked up my book and read the first three pages and realised that, although I was pretty sure those three pages were describing the pendulum and its movement, and I knew that pi is 3.142, that was it. I started again. But by the end of the first three pages, I somehow knew less about the book, as I was no longer sure that the pendulum was physically real or whether it was a metaphor, but the prose was very pretty ... and I fell asleep.

I picked it up the next night, because I don't quit. Not when it comes to literature. Reading it again, those three pages did not seem as cryptic. Even "isochronal" fell to my scrutiny. When I am tutoring and we come upon a word my student doesn't understand (kind of a surprise attack, but I'm not sure who's more surprised: the word or the student), I always encourage her to break the word down into its components. So, taking my own advice, if:

• "iso-" means "equal"
• "-chrono-" refers to time and
• "-al" means that the word is an adjective,

then "isochronal" means that the pendulum swings in equal measures. Which makes me wonder if this really needs to be said, since that's the sole purpose of a pendulum. And if you are talking to someone who doesn't know what a pendulum is or what it does (even though they are reading a book written by a polymath and polyglot and, no doubt, other poly-isms), does it really help you to help that reader by using a word like "isochronal", which apparently you need an English degree and an editing career to translate?

(Yes, I know now that Foucault's pendulum is an invention that demonstrates the Earth's rotation, wise ass, but that's not really the point of this post. What is the point? I'm getting there...)

As I mentioned right at the beginning of this post, back when you were a young tyke and I had such promise, this took place three years ago. What was the point and why, out of all the many, many posts I have started and abandoned, did I choose to revive this one? The glib response is that the moral of this post is that you shouldn't read books written by masters like Eco right before you fall asleep and you should always read the first paragraph before buying a book.

Another lesson is that reading is meant to be fun. True, literature is the web holding my world together, but that doesn't mean it needs to be a hard slog. I don't have to read and understand and enjoy every book because it's canon (otherwise Joseph Conrad and I would have a problem). In most cases, life stretching out behind and before me seems long (no matter what people say), but when measured against all the books on my to-read list, it's way too short, so why waste it reading books that don't pass the first-paragraph test?

Finally, for me writing is understanding, whether I'm doing the writing or I'm transforming the words on the page as the reader. I don't understand concepts (or myself) until I have trapped them in a cage of words. Except the cage is the opposite of a cage: it holds things in, but frees them at the same time (I'm doing an excellent job of illustrating my point here). Maybe Foucault's Pendulum and I just met at the wrong time.

PS. Three years later, I have no idea where my copy of the book is, which is odd, because I know exactly where every other book I own is. Make of that what you will.