Missing episodes – Arthur Hofn

My reads, not the books that came out this year…

2021 has been a very strange year. I don’t feel like I’ve done much with it, and yet it’s been my most successful year as a writer, I’ve been on podcasts, I’ve had a script for a radio play made and broadcast, my most successful months on this blog and I’ve had over 10,000 downloads of my online novel Beck’s Game. I’m really pleased! Thank you everyone so much for you interest and your support. However in the real world this year has been harder than 2020, not for any specific reason just the weight of the world and feelings of ennui. In one way I’m glad it’s drawing to a close, in other ways who knows that to expect of 2022? Hopefully some good things.

The Power And The Glory – Graham Greene. Like Decline And Fall (mentioned in Part One) I read this due to a love of some of the author’s other works; Brighton Rock I think is an amazingly good novel and I will blog about that sometime I hope. As I read further works I grew comfortable with Greene’s style and began to know what to expect, until I hit The Power And The Glory. Bizarrely only published two years after Brighton Rock (with only one book between them) this is very different. The text is very dense and it takes a lot of concentration to keep focused. Telling a story set in extreme rural Mexico, the hot and humid landscape is conveyed so well that the continued reading of it can be exhausting. I had no idea what the story would be when I picked this up and it takes a while for it to get going, jumping through several sets of characters until you work out what is going on. I therefore don’t want to give too much away as I actually enjoyed working out what the plot would be when reading the early sections of the book. Reading this is a commitment, but it pays off. It’s a very strange story that deserves to be given time, but the journey is as much hard work for the reader as it is for the characters.

“Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it—in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo—death coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big aboveground tomb.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

The Vanishing Futurist – Charlotte Hobson. Back on May Bank Holiday, when it was warm, I went to Marlow for the day, (lovely place) and whilst there I decided I needed to buy a book, it was one of those days. After spending too long browsing I decided to go with this. Set in Moscow in 1918. just as everything changes, this tells the story of Gerty a young English woman who, already having moved to Russia, finds herself taking on the Socialist ideals and watching as society grapples with the same struggle. There is a mystery here that is more the backbone of the novel, simply supporting the more interesting points. Gery’s life is far more absorbing than wondering what is going, and I think this is the way it was meant to be. The climax of the book is therefore more character driven, although the answers to the questions do come with the eventual outcome and work nicely. The setting and the immersion within it is the highlight of the book, just because it is so different (and a world I’m glad I’m not in), this is an achievement as it was written so long after the society it describes disappeared.

“Autumn painted Moscow every shade of red, as though for a vast performance. ‘The streets are our brushes, the squares our palate,’ announced the poet Mayakovsky, who planned to revolutionise nature permanently by giving the trees in the Aleksandrovsky Gardens a coat of scarlet paint.”
― Charlotte Hobson, The Vanishing Futurist

Doctor Who: The Myth Makers – Donald Cotton. Target books are a staple for any young Doctor Who fan, at least up until my generation. These were adaptions of episodes from the original series in a book form. (I may blog in depth about them later, but see my blog on Terrance Dicks, a hero to many people.) The Myth Makers is one of the missing stories, it was broadcast in 1965 and the tapes “junked” after so it is thought to no longer exist, however like nearly all the other stories the scripts were adapted and this short novel was released in 1985 (written by Donald Cotton, who had written the scripts). Whilst based around the legend of the Trojan War, this is told as if it it were historically true and The First Doctor and his companions arrive and get involved in the proceedings. This was first written as a “historical” in that no other alien elements are present in the story (which happened a fair bit in 1960s Doctor Who, other examples are The Aztecs and Marco Polo to name a couple), however Donald Cotton had also written this as more of a comedy, just like his earlier script for The Romans, and the novel is told in the first person by an eyewitness, who also has some historical significance. It can be a bit silly at times but knowingly so, and there are some clever puns: “Small Prophet, Quick Return” and “Doctor In The Horse”. I’d read most of the Targets as a child but there’s still a few I hadn’t got round to so I didn’t “know” what happened, it’s good to still be able to read a new old Doctor Who story, like I did in my childhood with so many of the Target books.

“Agamemmnon sighed deeply. The effect was unpleasant, even at a range of several yards. Candle flames trembled, and sank back into their sockets: as did his brother’s blood-shot eyes. ‘There may be some truth in that,’ he admitted, ‘I don’t say there is, but there may be. However, I must remind you these ambitions would have been served just as well if you had killed Paris in single combat, as was expected of you. That’s what betrayed husbands do, damn it! They kill their wife’s lovers. Everybody knows that. And Paris was quite prepared to let the whole issue be decided by such a contest – he told me so. So don’t blame me because you’ve dragged us into a full scale war- because I won’t have it.’”
― Donald Cotton, Doctor Who: The Myth Makers

The Crucible – Arthur Miller. The Crucible is a history, metaphor and play set in the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Miller had a point to make with this, it was about the “witch hunts” in the politics at the time – when you know this and understand the context it becomes a lot more powerful. Who are the witches in the town? Who is innocent but forced to admit guilt? How far will it go and is anyone safe? The play itself has a bit of a weird shape, starting by focusing on one group of individuals and then adjusting to a family outside that circle, this in itself raises the question that has been repeated throughout history, can anyone can be safe from accusation and if not, how do the guilty seem to get away with it?

“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”.”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Buy The Power And The Glory by Graham Greene
Buy The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson
Buy Doctor Who: The Myth Makers by Donald Cotton
Buy The Crucible by Arthur Miller