The Bona Dea Scandal

Just written an article about the Bona Dea Scandal

An escapade by the young P.Clodius Pulcher, the aristocrat who, a couple of years later would become a radical tribune of the people. The individualism of the period of the Late Republic does fascinate me; men and women seem to have been able to do and say fairly much what they wanted, with little in the way of repercussions.
This is in contrast to the greater social control exercised by Augustus a generation later, with his marriage legislation which made people's personal lives became a matter for the criminal courts and his successor Tiberius, with his tribe of informers that made people afraid to criticise the powers-that-be. I wonder if anyone has written about Augustus' daughter Julia, politicising her promiscuity (always a loaded term!) as the action of an old fashioned, reprobate Republican, refusing to have her personal life legislated for. Something to explore, possibly. Of course the Late Republic was also a time of violence, instability and corruption and politicians used their daughters and sons as pawns in marriage alliances but still things seem more open and equal than under the dead hand of tyranny.

Hipparchia

Just had my article on the Cynic philosopher Hipparchia posted to History in an Hour.com. She's a fascinating character, who applies her understanding of Cynic philosophy to her own situation and decides that normal rules about women and what they could and couldn't do simply don't have to apply to her.

http://www.historyinanhour.com/blog/

Diogenes Laertius is a horrible writer (out of some kind of wierd, misplaced humour he feels the need to sometimes end his biographies of philosophers with nastly little poems about their deaths) but he offers an absorbing compendium of characters and anecdotes in his Lives of the Philosophers. His very lack of discrimination and his wholesale dumping of detail from his sources, some of which he clearly doesn't really comprehend himself makes him so invaluable as a repository.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0258


Really enjoying Gore Vidal's Julian at the moment - can't believe I never read it before.

Handling the Undead John Ajvide Lindquist Book Review

This book, by the author of the acclaimed Let the Right One In presupposes a scenario in which the recent dead of Stockholm revivify, one excruciatingly hot day. As we might expect from this author however, the novel offers far more than the standard zombie entrails-fest, instead it is, in part, an eloquent meditation on human responses to loss and grief.

We observe events unfolding through a range of perspectives; the first sign of what is to come is relayed to us from the viewpoint of a chance observer whom we never meet again. A larger scale perspective is offered by several bulletin style summaries of what has been happening across the city as the dead begin to awaken and the authorities and ordinary people struggle to formulate their responses. There is an underlying fear that the unprecedented crisis will prompt the state to take sinister and unaccountable measures - where are the dead being taken? Why are their relatives being discouraged from visiting? Should the reliving be classified as corpses or people with rights? There seems to be a thin line between ruthless authoritarianism and well-meaning bureaucratic bungling by human beings who don't really have a clue what to do next.

The primary focus however is on three families who have all suffered recent bereavements and have to deal with very mixed feelings as they discover that their dead have returned to a (sort of) life. It is one thing to long for your beloved to return from the grave, quite another when they actually do. Among those whom we meet are Flora, a teenage Marilyn Manson fan blighted (rather stereotypically) with self-harming tendencies and her devout Christian grandmother. David, a stand-up comedian and his young son Magnus and retired reporter strangely named Gustav Mahler and his daughter Anna. These characters are convincingly drawn, in particular David and Flora are brought to vivid life for us.

The ‘zombies’ themselves are virtual blanks; although sometimes frightening, they are more subtle than the crazed brain-devouring monsters beloved of film, but the living characters struggle to find in them the person they once knew and loved. They are essentially alien, exiled, non-functional.

In a sense their presence is like the dreams one has of those dead in which they are somehow both with us and yet not with us, we are glad to see them again yet sense that all is not right, cannot be right.

There is much in the book that remains mysterious and unexplained (though I think it is a book that would well repay rereading) but it delivers its own strangely beautiful redemption.

Being Human, Some (slightly obsessive?) thoughts

I've been really enjoying the series of Being Human since it started. By chance I got to see the original pilot and long after G and I would say wistfully 'if only they would bring back that programme with the vampire and the werewolf and the ghost!' It quite escaped our attention, of course, that there actually was a massive online campaign to get the show put back on - we thought it was just us who had noticed and liked it.

It was a delightful surprise then when it did come back, although it took me a while to get used to the new Annie - she seemed slightly too posh and bland compared to the small Northern woman who had played her before, but I'm used to her now.

What is so good about it? Partly that vampires in general just are good. Werewolves of course are inherently less charming but George's pained humanity ably contrasts with and compensates for his bestial condition. Annie the ghost, I do have reservations about, but we'll come to that, at any rate as a female third, she balances out the household dynamics.The combination of these beings with their flat in Bristol, their hospital jobs the ordinary life that surrounds them is particularly satisfying. I like Trueblood very much but it is so much within a tradition of Southern Gothic that it seems quite natural that there should be vampires, just as there are alligators which seem equally unlikely (I haven't travelled much). I think some of my favourite episodes were in the first series for example when they tried to integrate with the local community and Mitchel befriended a small child - only for the household to be branded as paedophiles.

In this second series I have found the whole concept of the vampires and how they operate problematic. There seem to be an awful lot of vampires in Bristol and if they had all previously been in the habit of killing at whim, it is hard to see how this could possibly have been covered up, however skilled their network of support - we're potentially talking about hundreds of people a month found dead and exsanguinated. There would be an outcry!

 Mitchell's authoritarian attempts to impose total abstinence on all the vampires also seems absurd when the possible compromises seem so obvious. Vampires apparently don't need blood to live - they're capable of living off normal food, though in an impaired condition. (Vampires that don't really need blood is another concept I'm not too happy with.) If they have this marvellous network that seems to enable them to get away with practically anything why don't they simply enjoy moderate amounts of the blood of the willing? - like that poor Emo girl that Mitchell appears to have quite gratuitously chained and terrified, despite her initial willingness. Then Mitchell could legitimately crack down on those who wantonly attacked and killed members of the general public. Alright, then, arguably, there would be no story, but it bothers me, possibly because I am in the midst of writing a vampire novel and trying to cover all angles of how it could and couldn't work, I'm sure I've left logic gaps.

The ghost is just too solid, it would be better if she flickered a bit or moved around in a sort of jerky stop motion way. Sometimes it's easy to forget she's a ghost - at least now they've stopped the whole thing with her being able to interact with the general public - I've liked her better these last couple of episodes.

The sinister man who appears to just like bursting werewolves is good, I'm afraid I have to hide my eyes when werewolves get put in the werewolf bursting machine.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters Review

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters


This is one of the books I got on a 3 for 2 offer, using a kindly Christmas GiftCard. Sarah Waters is one of my favourite contemporary writers. She plunges one very vividly into dark, gothic Victorian landscapes with intricate plots and, in Affinity and Fingersmith at least, an undertow of despair. I didn’t get on so well with The Night Watch, the book completed just previously to this one and set in the Second World War, but that may be because I was sulking about being so briskly weaned off the claustrophobic Victorian Gothic I so enjoyed. Perhaps I will reread it soon.

The Little Stranger is set in the Post-war period, but is very gothic indeed.

The surviving members of the Ayres family: Mrs Ayres, her son Roderick and her daughter Caroline live in Warwickshire in the once elegant Hundreds Hall, an eighteenth century mansion, now in a state of decay. They are visited by a Dr Faraday, who is called in to attend upon the servant.

Central to this book is the depiction of the changes in the social fabric of Britain in the Post-War period. The Ayres family and Dr Faraday can be seen as representative of the old order and the new. The Ayres are, in some sense, dinosaurs, struggling to maintain their crumbling mansion, but living on a level of genteel poverty and hardship that the working class families, who are moving into the council flats with all mod cons that are being built nearby, would no longer expect to tolerate. Dr Faraday, by contrast, is the son of a servant, who has achieved the middle class status of doctor through his ability, hard work and great sacrifices on the part of his parents. The old order still holds sway however: it is something of a shock to learn that the Ayres keep a fourteen year old girl as their live-in drudge. It would be a year or so yet before the school leaving age was raised to 16.

Following Dr. Faraday’s initial professional visit, he gradually becomes an indispensable friend of the family and a witness to the troubles which descend upon their heads.

As misfortunes are visited upon the family, the increasingly omnipresent Dr Faraday struggles to reassure them that there can only be rational explanations for the happenings that plague the Ayres, in the face of their growing insistence that the house is tenanted by some uncanny evil. Their struggle to hold on to the decaying mansion with its closed off, derelict apartments becomes more desperate even as this reader, at least, could not help inwardly urging the characters to just pack up and leave. The family’s efforts to keep up appearances and maintain their status arouses both sympathy and exasperation. Caroline the sister is an intelligent, capable woman, who enjoyed life in the WRENS, during the War. She is seemingly doomed to spinsterhood, being a plain awkward woman in her middle twenties. She wanders around the countryside with her dog, picking berries and helping with the milking. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that she could simply get a job and bring in an income. Roderick, a once bright and promising young man, was seriously physically and mentally scarred by a “smash” in the RAF. His life is bedevilled by great mounds of paperwork on his desk that represent the financial troubles of Hundreds Hall.

Discussion of social analysis in the novel must not detract from the fact that this is a genuinely scary, creepy book. The atmosphere of the decaying old mansion and its inhabitants, marooned in time is brilliantly evoked by Caroline’s reference to the fact that the stopped stable clock was once playfully manipulated by them as children so that it matches the permanently stopped clock of Miss Havisham. Even at an early stage in the narrative Caroline recognises that the joke has worn distinctly unfunny.

The atmosphere is quite similar to that of Affinity, where uncanny events are afoot and there is an atmosphere of malevolence, but unlike in Affinity, we are not provided with a rational explanation at the end, or not one that conforms to contemporary ideas about what is rational. Reminiscent of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher and also, to me, of stories like Maupassant’s The Horla in which the reader has a rather clearer apprehension than the narrator that all is far from being well. Very much recommended.