January 7, 2025
Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett is one of my favourite writers. I have loved every book of his that I've read so far. This is a book that made me want to gush, and to tell every reader I know, to do themselves a favour and read it.
This is book thirty-seven in the Discworld series and the seventh and final book that features characters from the Unseen University, a wizarding university in Ankh Morpork. While it helps to have read the earlier books featuring the same characters, it is not necessary to do so. This book can be read as a standalone.
Unseen Academicals has a mix of familiar characters and new ones who only appear in this book. Of the familiar characters is the first among equals, as he refers to himself, Arch Chancellor, Mustrum Ridcully. There's the former dean of Unseen University who has, at the beginning of the book, left to join a rival university, Ponder Stibbons, the youngest and most productive member of the staff, and Lord Vetinari, the ruler and tyrant of Ankh Morpork.
The story begins when Ponder Stibbons, as the new keeper of traditions, discovers that a generous grant from a former Arch Chancellor that the university depends on, is not going to be available any more, because one of the conditions of the bequest is that the University will raise a football team that will play a game every once in a while. The staff have been ignoring this condition for the last twenty years, and would like to go on ignoring it. But when Stibbons points out that losing the grant will mean that they will have to restrict themselves to three meals a day, instead of the usual nine, they change their tune.
Lord Vetinari, in the meantime, wants to reform the game of football, bring in rules and codes of conduct. The rivalries are getting more heated, and the fighting in the streets, every time there's a game, is getting out of hand. Elsewhere in the city there are dwarves who are engaged in bringing fashion to Ankh Morpork, who find the perfect female model in the most unlikely place.
Some of the most important characters in this book are the ones who work below the stairs at the University. There's Glenda, who runs the night kitchen and makes the best pies in all of Ankh Morpork; her friend and fellow cook Juliet; Trevor Likely, son of a legendary footballer who works in the candle vats and loves football; and Mr Nutt, a goblin who works with Trevor. Mr Nutt is fiercely intelligent, a polyglot and a polymath. He reads widely and thinks deeply, has charming manners, and is one of the kindest people around. He develops an unlikely friendship with Glenda who is a straight-talking, intelligent young woman who does more than her share of helping and taking care of people. The two of them are the heart of this book.
This is a fabulous story with a brilliant plot, well-crafted characters, excellent dialogue and fantastic story telling. It's about football and fashion, but it is also about inclusivity and openness to people who are not like us, and the truth that intelligence, skill and competence are not the purview of the few. They can be found anywhere if we will but look.
Slow Horses, by Mick Herron
Slow Horses is the first novel in the Slough House spy series by Mick Herron. The “slow horses” are a group of MI5 agents who have been exiled to Slough House, a rundown administrative purgatory for having made career-ending mistakes. These agents are now relegated to dull, tedious tasks of little consequence and are generally considered outcasts within the intelligence service.
The plot kicks off when a young man is abducted by a far-right group who threaten to behead him live on the internet in 48 hours. The whole country is watching this horror as it unfolds, hoping that surely, the unthinkable cannot happen, not on British soil. The slow horses, generally as far away from any useful action as possible, find themselves unexpectedly caught up in the race to save the hostage.
The key characters are:
Jackson Lamb, the brilliant but cynical leader whose looks can deceive. A veteran spy with a mysterious past, he seems content to be in charge of Slough House. He torments his subordinates, generally having nothing good to say about any of them. But no one messes with Lamb, not even Diana Taverner.
River Cartwright, a young and ambitious agent with a family connection to the service, he is desperate to redeem himself and return to the main MI5.
Sid Baker, a genial and competent agent, inexplicably among the disgraced at Slough House.
Catherine Standish, an alcoholic agent haunted by her past mistakes, relegated to doing mind-numbing paperwork for the present, but has more experience than the rest and knows almost as many secrets as Lamb about the service.
Louisa Guy, Min Harper and Roderick Ho: Louisa and Min are field agents. Louisa’s costly mistake was losing a target on surveillance and Harper’s was a dumb mistake of leaving a classified disk on the Tube. Ho is the geek, the guy who can hack his way into anything, but while he taps into the backstories and secrets of his colleagues, he has no idea why he has been banished to Slough House (he had no public error or fiasco to answer for)
If you love espionage thrillers, I would highly recommend this one. The books have been made into a television series with Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb.
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry
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If equal affection cannot be
Let the more loving one be me.
(W. H Auden)
Some books are hard to summarise. A novel about astronomy, religion, friendship, unrequited love…Enlightenment by Sarah Perry is all of these things. What will stay with me though is the atmosphere of the bleak Essex landscape, Perry’s beautiful and unhurried telling of a complex tale, and the character of Thomas Hart.
Thomas is a slightly old-world/out-of-time middle-aged newspaper columnist in the Essex town of Aldleigh who discovers a hidden passion for the stars when he is forced to do a column on the approaching Hale-Bopp Comet. The year is 1997. Hart is a slightly reluctant member of the local Baptist Church - reluctant because he finds his identity at odds with his faith and the views of the Church (Thomas Hart is gay), but a member nonetheless because it allows him to remain engaged with Grace Macaulay, a 17-year-old he has known since she was an infant, and feels responsible for in some ways. The two, though two decades apart, are friends and allies. Grace,, with a pious and strict father, also struggles with her faith. On the verge of adulthood, her curiosity about the wider world is stoked by a boy she meets one day.
One day, Thomas receives a letter from James Bower, who runs the local museum. Bower wants to enlist Thomas’s help in pursuing the mystery surrounding a local manor house - Lowlands House - owned in the 19th century by a certain John Bell, who lived there with his wife Maria Vaduva. It is believed that Vaduva haunts the now uninhabited manor; she is known locally as the “Lowlands Ghost”. His interest piqued, Thomas visits James, and in the course of their interaction, finds himself falling for him. James is wholly unaware. But their obsession with Vaduva grows. They uncover evidence that she was an amateur astronomer and may have discovered something quite special, that has never been known or acknowledged.
As the story goes on, Thomas and Grace both suffer heartbreak, Grace finds herself far from Aldleigh and separated from Thomas, and we meet them again 10 years later, and 20 years later, while the unsolved mystery of Maria Vaduva continues to form the backdrop to their lives.
Perry has written about subjects that are very close to her personally - faith (she left the Baptist church in which she grew up), astronomy (a lifelong passion), and Essex, and it shows. I loved The Essex Serpent but I might love Enlightenment more.
I marked out many passages in this book (including the Auden poem). Even if I don't re-read the novel, I think I will find myself returning to Thomas’s columns for The Essex Chronicle.
Ending with an extract from a letter by Thomas:
"And did I ever tell you about the laws of Kepler? The first describes how heavenly bodies orbit the sun, and that is the law of ellipses. The second law I've memorised as I used to memorise Bible verses when I was young: the semi-major axis sweeps out equal areas in equal time. This means that bodies in orbit move faster and faster as they near the heat of the sun, rushing like a man into his lover's arms. Then they move past their perihelion, the embrace is done, and they become listless and slow in the dark. Lately it's seemed to me that you became a kind of sun - that since you've been gone I've moved through a world with no warmth in it. But my orbit is closed, and everything that passes will in its time return - so I imagine myself moving again towards some heat and light I can't make out - T.H."