Day ninety billion of this appalling heatwave and I should have written these reviews ages ago but my brain is full of boiling meat-juices now so this is the best I can do. Old spy new licks hah still got it. Condor, haunted and possibly driven mad by having Robert Redford play him in the film of his first book is living with a bunch of medication being monitored by spies but one of the spies is murdered and he goes on the run and so does the other spy and as tradition demands they break into a woman home and use her house as a shelter and she comes round to seeing how sexy this is eventually. There are shootouts and stuff. Good. I like it fine.

Been a long time getting here, but after diversion and digressions, this is it. The immortals versus the mortals, and it must be said at first glance it doesn't seem like much of a competition, the mortals being a rather limp and unimpressive lot, for all that they created the cyborgs to live through all of recorded history preserving knowledge and artifacts to profit the Company in the future. However, there's a lot going on, with factions of evil cyborgs and factions of good (ish) cyborgs racing to be the first to defeat the Company and, basically, take over the world. Then there's poor Lewis trapped under a hill, and Mendoza and the three recombinant Enforcers she has loved and lost at various points during the series, engaged in a bizarre family arrangement or experiment outside of time under the watchful eye of a powerful piratical AI. Who will rule all in the end, if anyone?

The King Of Spain rules the Netherlands, and wants to introduce the Inquisition, from Spain, known as the Spanish Inquisition and the Dutch do not expect this. 'Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition' they say. There follows a lot of oppression and revolt, told mostly through the eyes of a brother and sister, the brother fleeing to sea and piracy against the Spanish. 'Nobody expected the Dutch piracy,' the Spanish say. The sister hangs around in Antwerp before taking the road to Germany. William Of Orange bumbles around rather ineffectually, but earnestly. This is a very good book about ordinary, practical, even dull, people deciding they're not putting up with that sort of thing.

This is a nice selection of Tolkien's writings - and Peter Beagle's introduction to the joys of Middle Earth. Samples of his scholarly work, including the brilliant On Fairy Stories show his thoughtful, penetrating, and sometimes playful, critical mind at work, as does his comparison of the Maldon poem fragment with Beowulf, analaysing the nature and limitations of chivalric ideals. Two of his own fairy stories - the extremely odd and curious Leaf By Niggle, and the more straightforward, albeit with typically Tolkeinesque humble settled folk of limited ambitions as hero, Farmer Giles Of Ham and lots of hobbity poetry, much of it featuring Tom Bombadil which is the sort of thing you will certainly like if you certainly like that sort of thing. I picked this up for Tolkien reading day having merely leafed idly through it over the years it's been sitting on our shelves, and a real pleasure it's been.

Looking for a Menorah in all the wrong places.

Best volume of the orbital detective series so far with multiple storylines and sub-plots intertwining over the course of a single chaotic space station festival day. A mixture of Hill Street Blues and the great Judge Dredd storyline The Graveyard Shift and Ed McBain innnn spaaaace, this has two murders, a serial killer, terrorism, a hospital massacre and more, all filling the pages without ever feeling crowded, a remarkable feat of comics writing that wraps up as an extremely satisfying read.

Christopher, Sofia and Nassir, with the co-operation of US intelligence, try to snare the terrorist behind the death of the police recruit and the rocket attack on Sophia, but the ground keeps shifting under their feet, and in the smoke-and-mirrors world inside and outside the Green Zone nothing is really what it seems. An utterly brilliant, tense, twisty resolution to the story.

So I was presented this book as a school prize for history in 1985. Now here I am in 2017 having finally read it. I hauled this book from one end of the country to another. I made several efforts to start it that never got very far. I didn't win many prizes as a kid, or hadn't up until then. It meant a lot. I was not going to be parted with it for anything. I had no idea if I'd ever read it. And here we are.

The story of an Irish family, but also a story of Ireland. Magan doesn't go in for half measures. His story goes back to the dim forgotten unwritten reaches of pre-history, to the ancient Pictish people who inhabited Ireland before the Celts, then the Celts themselves. The first traces of his family can be picked apart from the myths and the genealogies and traced down through the lives of the Old Irish chieftains and their clans, down to the arrival of the Normans and the absorption of invading races, until finally, England has had enough, and Cromwell comes with fire and sword and ethnic cleansing.

Part of Magan's project here is to explain the English to the Irish and vice-versa, never losing sympathy for either but never engaging in apologism, either. So it becomes easier to understand why England treated Ireland the way it did, though the self-interest of it may not make it easier to forgive.

Through the turmoil the Magans, through luck and sacrifice and careful planning, survive and thrive, splitting into a Catholic and a Protestant branch. More details accrue, more characters and personalities emerge. Magan celebrates their lives and achievements even as he describes the cost of it to the ordinary Irish peasants suffering appalling hardship and deprivations as part of deliberate policy. Perhaps only a descendant of the Ascendancy could manage to be even-handed about deploring the conditions of one and taking such vicarious pleasures in the doings of the other, or perhaps Magan is simply at such pains to be completely fair and even-handed.

It stumbles a bit at the Famine, this fairness and even-handedness. In one line the Irish lose the sympathy of the English public after some hot-headed revolutionaries revolt somewhere, curtailing charitable efforts that were already woefully inadequate, in another disdaining to delve too deeply into the complex issue of blame for the Famine itself and the response to it. At any rate, his family made it through okay! They were probably one of the good landlords!

That annoyed me intensely, but I suppose the wonder of it is he didn't annoy me more.

Great-grandparent and grandparents and parents are more thoroughly fleshed out and others too, as Ireland slouches towards independence and land reform. No sense of resentment at the redistribution of the valuable asset that kept his ancestors in ridiculous wealth for so long, although one admirable aunt fares horribly badly with the IRA during the War of Independence. It's World War 1 that really puts paid to the Ascendancy, thinning their ranks considerably, though in the latter chapters every other paragraph seems to end with a portent about some part of the era coming to a close.

Having made a study of Ireland's past, Magan goes on to give some thought to Ireland's future, and honestly there isn't much to fault him with. He predicts a growing movement towards peace and reconciliation a decade or so before the Good Friday Agreement at a time when, if I remember correctly, optimism about the future of Northern Ireland was thin on the ground. Increasing prosperity in the south, along with secularisation and a more prominent place on the world stage would, he thought, gradually begin to defuse most of the genuine fears of Protestant Ulster about the Republic, provided the violence of the IRA could be curtailed. He also, incidentally, predicts the fall of the USSR and warns of the possibility that before, or as, it happens, the boyos at the Kremlin taking an excessive interest in a violent revolutionary movement in a strategic location at the edge of the North Atlantic. I actually don't know if that was ever a thing, and now he's said it it seems an obvious enough worry. Were we ever in danger of being a new front in the Cold War?

So there it is. Erudite, engaging and told from a useful, unusual and valuable perspective. I enjoyed it. It was my Prize. I won it. In 1985.

See here for my review:

https://childrensbooksireland.ie/review/stick-and-fetch-investigate-barking-up-the-wrong-tree/

I mean, I think it can be safely said that Scalped shows a great deal of sympathy for the plight of Native Americans, but for the most part the characters are divided up into those who succumb to the paralysing poisons of poverty, ignorance and despair and those who drift or charge or are pushed into a brutal and violent life of crime. There are a few sad relics of radical sixties idealism around, and it's their failures which drive the plot, so all in all it's a relentlessly grim and squalid story, with only occasional glimpses of humanity. I'm not sure I'd be thrilled if someone came into my community and told this kind of story about it, but who knows? Perhaps the anger at the results of injustice and neglect and racial prejudice is the important thing to take away from Scalped, aside from the crazy violent story.