TJ

If the United States were a person, it would be suffering from schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder, and this book explains why.

Allen Guelzo covers the history leading up to the American Civil War in considerable detail, placing the war in the context of evolving political, social and economic differences between the North and the South, and in particular the internal contradictions of Southern society that made it unable to live with the North, or even itself.

The national vision of the United States has been haunted by the horrendous visions of black slavery from the very beginning, and Guelzo argues that the uniquely racist slave society of the pseudo-aristocratic South was ultimately incompatible with the growing push toward a liberal, market-centric, democratic, industrial, “free-labor” republic in the North.

The war itself was, like all wars, not necessary to achieve anyone's goals. It was merely the worst of all possible solutions to the problems facing Americans in the mid-1800's, the one least likely to achieve its stated ends, and the most inefficient means available for the one single end it actually did achieve: the preservation of the United States as a single country. But for a nation that has always been led by men who hear the voice of God telling them to do terrible things, war was the easy option.

Guelzo does a good job of placing Emancipation in context, and emphasizes that most anti-slavery agitators were at best weakly supportive of civil and political rights for freedmen. His account of the war itself includes a nicely interwoven texture of social history along with the battles, and a lucid account of the political and personal gyrations that saw the numerically and financially superior North fight ineffectively and incoherently for the first several years of the conflict.

His account of Reconstruction is relatively short, as it practically must be. It is to all intents and purposes an event that is still going on as Americans continue to struggle with the trauma that layered itself on top of their national schizophrenia. Something close to one in ten young men died by violence and disease and malnutrition and neglect–those factors collectively known as “glory”–in the war years and after, and the larger social questions of racism, civil rights and political participation for all Americans are still not resolved, as modern political parties continue to gerrymander and pass “voter ID” laws that the manipulative operators who filled the void left by Lincoln's death would recognize as variations on their own theme.

Because when you hear the voice of God in your head telling you to do terrible things, the one thing you will never admit is that you were wrong to do them, or back down from your relentless pursuit of the goals they have directed you toward, regardless of the human cost.

“Big Data” is a current buzzword in the software industry, but its popping up all over, and turning out to be at least as useful in the humanities as in the business world.

Using computers to store, organize, search, filter and sort the historical record is an art still in its infancy, but it is already bearing fruit. Geoffrey Parker's “Global Crisis” is almost certain from the tree of Big Data: the depth, breadth and complexity of analysis would simply not have been possible without advances in modern technology.

That said, this is not a dry book of numbers. Parker brings to life the people and the times, examining the crisis from as many perspectives as possible. It is very clear from the data that the climate crisis of the 17th century was indeed global: it was not some minor aberration restricted to Western Europe, unless events in Western Europe caused crop failures and historic-record weather events in China during the Ming-Qing transition.

As much as one third of the human population died in the 17th century, which saw massive sequential crop failures at different times all over the world, and lacking global trade there was no way to move food from unaffected to affected areas. Until global capitalism really got its feet under the table in the 20th century there was simply no way for humanity to address a crisis of this magnitude.

Records–including official, personal, and natural–across the world show that between 1620 and 1680 there were extreme climate events at far higher frequency than in any other period of human history, and political responses to them were almost uniformly wrong-headed, favouring top-down dictatorial absolutism over distributed democratic control. The abject failure of top-down absolutism on every front set the stage for the more pluralistic, tolerant modern world, where global capitalism eventually was able to do what no other economic system anywhere ever was able to do: actually generate enough wealth to feed the entire human population, and relegate famine to causes solely political, generally caused by partisan absolutists, both Marxist and Fascist.

The book is magesterial in scope and extremely long, clocking in at almost 1000 pages with several hundred pages of references and notes. The same events are covered from multiple perspectives, which does allow a certain amount of skimming, but the insights come thick and fast. Contingency is emphasized, but it's hard to argue with statistics: of the dozens of revolutions that promised to “change everything” in the 17th century, exactly one succeeded, the revolt of Portugal against Spain. From this, we can reasonably conclude that anyone who suggests the appropriate response to any modern crisis is a revolution that “changes everything” is either an historical ignoramus or a flipping idiot. Possibly both.

It's also fascinating how the same dysfunctional impulses affected both governments and revolutionaries the world over. Governments became more authoritarian (because that always works so well) while revolutionaries not only focused on egalitarianism, they actually used the same terms (“Levelers” in England, “Leveling Kings” in China) to describe themselves. Unsurprisingly, the leveling impulse was as pointless and stupid as the authoritarian impulse it opposed.

Human economies are highly dependent on relatively stable background conditions. In the face of the global climate instabilities–partly due to volcanoes, partly due (probably) to the Maunder solar minimum, partly due to internal feedbacks–the global economy of the 17th century faltered, and huge numbers of poeple died.

Today we plausibly face a similar period of unstable climate, mostly due to human activity, and particularly thanks to the successes of anti-nuclear activists in the 70's and ‘80's, who did everything they could to ensure it was impossible to replace base-load coal with safe, clean, efficient modern nuclear power plants. Although thanks to our integrated global capitalist economy we should be much more robust agasint climate change than the 17th century was, we are still likely going to face hardships, and this book will give a sense of the kinds of things that we know can and do happen, because they have happened before.

I really enjoy personal memoirs of the wars of the 20th century, which generally add an intimate and human perspective on an otherwise entirely monstrous enterprise.

Don Fraser was a graduate of the University of Toronto before the war, and joined the RCAF in 1940. He served several years in England and was a pilot on the some of the first “Leigh Light”-equipped anti-submarine bombers, killing people on U-boats in the English Channel and the North Sea over a period of several years. The book is based on the author's daily diary of those years, and has an immediacy and clarity that makes it a gripping, tragic and sometimes funny tale.

I always wonder if my father–who was an instructor with the Commonwealth Air Training Programme from 1940 to 1944–will show up in books like this, and while he didn't, the experiences he lived through are clearly reflected here. He had many stories about his childhood and the friends he grew up with, and every single one of them ended the same way: “And then he went off to war, and never came back.”

Fraser is a quiet, stoic voice reminding us–after a successful career as a botanist and professor of geography–of the death of a generation. His lack of emotional engagement is best summed up by his sole comment on seeing his widowed mother and younger brother for the first time in three years, “Everyone looked fine.”

A generation of young men had their lives destroyed, and every survivor was left wounded in the their soul. Books like this are an unassuming but unequivocal reminder of the utter stupidity of war–the inefficiency, the callousness, the evil–that sends so many young men not to “glorious death in battle” (as if there was such a thing) but to stupid death in training accidents and the like.

This is an impressive work of popular history, focusing on the life and times of one of Rome's strangest politicians.

Cato the Younger was the great-grandson of the famously puritanical Cato the Elder (he of “Carthago delenda est” fame, or however it goes.) Growing up in the shadow of his great ancestor's reputation, and following his own proclivities toward abstention and self-denial, he became an acolyte of Stoic philosophy and adopted a wide range of extremely eccentric behaviours, from wearing and outdated and simple toga to refusing to wear shoes. The authors liken this to a modern senator showing up in 18th century costume to a regular day's business.

The real strength of the book is the careful yet lively accounts of Rome's political battles in the tumultuous decades of the late republic. This is a story we've all seen or read parts of, but it's a complex and confusing tale of shifting alliances and unfamiliar institutions. I've read a fair number of contemporary histories as well as modern accounts of the same period, and this one does an extremely good job of threading a coherent path through the chaos of events. The authors wisely skim over some of the weirder political machinations (Julius Caesar's ploy to hold office despite being pontifex maximus is given no mention) while giving fair accounts of the relevant ones, particularly Cato's strange treatment of his wife.

They also draw fewer parallels to the intransigent and politically tone-deaf conservatives of the present day than they might, but that's a good decision. It lets the reader decide to what extent history is repeating itself, or perhaps merely rhyming.

If you have an interest in late republican Roman history–and really, anyone who is interested in the struggles of democracy in the present day ought to be–this is an excellent book for both neophytes and relatively knowledgeable readers.

This is the most remarkable biography I have ever read.

I have a basic grasp of the Napoleonic era, and have read histories of the Peninsular War and the Russian Campaign and the like, but I have never read such a clear and evocative precis of the little Corsican sociopath himself.

Like the little Austrian sociopath 150 years later, the man himself diminishes the more you know about him. The child of a rebellious political environment, always arrogant and self-aggrandizing, he changed the face of Europe for the worse, killing upwards of three million human beings and wounding and assaulting untold millions more in the process.

A brilliant, energetic and improvisational general, he never mastered the disciplines of logistics and intelligence the way his ultimate nemesis, Wellington, did. Alan Schom details his pattern of failure from the abortive and incompetently executed Egyptian campaign onwards, and documents the same mistakes made over and over by a arrogant little prick who was so self-involved he was incapable of learning from his spectacular and deadly mistakes.

The only thing lacking–which is hardly a critique of this masterful biography!–is an examination of the sociology of dictatorship. How is it that such spectacularly incompetent administrators repeatedly insinuate themselves into the highest offices, from the Roman Republic to modern day developing nations to the rather broken republic to our south (I am writing this from Canada)?

If you want to learn more about how the political landscape of Europe was reshaped 200 years ago by a disgusting nutjob and his legions of emotionally-addled followers, you could not do better than read this meticulous, lively and well-reference work.

Norman Cantor comes close to the standard set by Michael Grant for semi-popular history. Like Grant, he's expert at moving between abstract synthesis and particular detail. His history lives and breathes, but it isn't just one damned thing after another. There are causes and effects, however obscurely recognized by ourselves and even moreso by the people of the time.

He starts in the Late Roman period and takes his own sweet time getting the period we normally think of as “the Middle Ages” (say between 800 and 1300). His account also extends well into the Renaissance, and this expansive view of the Middle Ages is extremely valuable for placing the currents and causes of the times into the larger context of Western history.

There were certain problems Western Europe inherited from the Roman Empire, like what to do about those damned Germans. But also how to put the Church and State into amicable relation to each other, and how to find justification for law.

One of the things I found most interesting about the book was its role as tour-guide to Medieval experiments in collective organization. The general topic of collective organization is a difficult and under-studied one. In business we have the niche discipline of “theory of the firm”. In economics there have been studies of cooperatives, collectives and partnerships and why they fail in competition with corporations (in their post-1850's modern sense). Sociologists, political scientists and–as in this case–historians have weighed in as well. But no one has tried to pull the study of modes of collective organization into its own field, and it deserves it as one of the most important aspects of human life.

Monasteries were the canonically successful form of collective organization during the Early Middle Ages, and as such get considerable attention. I had not been aware just how important they had been for supplying armed force to kings in the first five centuries or so after the fall of Rome. They also lead the colonization of lands left fallow by the post-Roman depopulation, and served as nuclei for further intellectual and social development.

As time passed and wealth increased they were supplanted by towns, baronies and finally nation-states, although which developed where was contingent on many things.

The perpetual state of political fragmentation in Germany, for example, meant that baronial or princely estates were the dominant political form, and the inability of the Holy Roman Emperor to impose his will on Germany meant that national institutions never strongly developed. In an example of the almost-casual insights the book provides, it follows from this that the German Church was never strongly curbed by the national government, which led to excesses and bad behaviours that made Germany the most fertile ground for the Lutheran Reformation.

Cantor is particularly good at illuminating causality without imputing intent, and there is a nice section at the end of the book that discusses the “paradoxes” of the Late Middle Ages–the period between 1300 and 1500 when the world was transitioning into the humanist, individualist separation of Church and State, and laying the foundations of what would ultimately become the modern world. There were a bunch of social and intellectual forces that one might expect would produce changes that never happened. The growth of republican thinking and no discernible effect on the autocratic state. The massive depopulation attendant on the Black Death didn't produce an outpouring of pious literature, but in Cantor's words, “entertainment and soft-core pornography” (Boccaccio's Decameron).

He also understands the limits of understanding: in covering the period between 1300 and 1500 he acknowledges it is difficult to pick out any over-arching principles. It was a time of innovation, exploration, growth, decay and change, but compared to the relatively orderly progression of events and ideas that dominated the preceding centuries it is hard to see what is driving it.

In summary: I've not encountered any single-volume history of such a long period except maybe Grant's “The Ancient Mediterranean”, and I don't ever expect to again.

I've read a bit of Chaucer and know a bit about 14th century history, but John Gardner does an excellent job of unifying various threads in this account of the poet's times.

The main events (from an English perspective) in the second half of the 1300's are the internal politics of the Plantagenets (the children and grandchildren of Edward II by Isabella of France), the 100 Years War (with France, in part to assert the right of the children of Isabella to the French throne), the adoption of English as the language of the court, the Peasant's Revolt, and the Plague. None of these events are independent of each other, yet are often studied separately.

By turning his story on the axle of Chaucer's life Gardner is able to bring them all into a single compact tale, since Chaucer–as a minor member of the court, a sometime soldier and diplomat, and a life-long civil servant (or as close as the medieval world could come to such a thing)–was touched by all of these and more.

As such the book is more times than life, as we know relatively little about Chaucer the man, other than what is revealed by his poetry. Gardner-the-novelist has a keen eye for incidental details that illustrate the timeless nature of human folly, which is fundamental focus Chaucer's humane and insightful poetic stories. My favourite is the claim the Edward II's youngest son, John of Gaunt (born to Isabella in Ghent, Belgium) was in fact a changling, swapped at birth for a Flemish imposter. Modern conspiracy theorists of the “birther” kind might be pleased to know their particular delusion has deep historical roots.

If we know less about Chaucer than we might like, this book puts his work in context and is an excellent reader's companion to the poems, adding texture and locality to their universal concerns and observations on the human condition.

“Keep Mars Weird” is a broad satire about the encroachment of creeping capitalism on “gritty” and “authentic” culture, specifically Austin TX and SxSW or whatever it's called, although it applies pretty well elsewhere too.

The plot is propelled more by the political needs of the polemic than any particular plausibility, and everyone gets a bit of kicking along the way, which is what raises the book from 3 to 4 stars: it's a satire on the human condition, and doesn't pretend that one way or another is going to Solve All Our Problems.

The characters are stereotypes who do manage to grow just a little bit in the course of the story. This book isn't going to change anyone's life, but it's a fast, enjoyable read, especially if you've been in any way part of an alternative, underground, or otherwise “authentic” art/music scene.

Lem is a weirdly two-sided writer: he can be a stuffy, high-flown intellectual or a playful, quizzical fumbler. Reading this memoir of his childhood, the deep foundations of his playfulness are clear. He was a strange, unbridled child, with a penchant for destruction and desecration–which reminds one of Hogarth from “His Master's Voice”–that the adult author finds horrifying but is by no means willing to disown.

The book was written in 1965, when Lem was 45 and becoming well-established as an author of science fiction. He claims in the opening that it was an attempt at letting his child-self speak for himself, and that he feels he failed to do this, but while there are certainly adult ruminations scattered throughout, he seems at least to an outside observer to do a tolerable job of showing us scattered fragments of his childhood, which are likely all that remain. There is less coherent narrative than he seems to think, and that's just fine: memory is a series of glimpses of the past seen through the guard-rails of the present.

One odd missing feature, though, is religion, which gets almost no mention. He was of Jewish descent, had some Jewish education, but once said he was raised Roman Catholic... it may be that opening that box would have resulted in something impossibly complex in the context of a relatively short memoir, but it would have been fascinating to see it, never-the-less.

This collection of mostly formal poems is quite lovely. The moods vary from playful to contemplative, and there is a forcefulness in their simplicity of form and language, which is direct, pure, and clean.

This is formal poetry for the modern world, stripped almost entirely of floweriness to show us fragments of the poet's heart in ways that speak to our common humanity.

Even the essays into free verse, like “Grey Thoughts” are well done, and the title poem, “On Margate Beach” deserves its pride of place.

I've not given it five stars because then what would I give Tennyson or Elliot or Frost? But it really is an excellent collection of work, and I look forward to more from Margaret Mundy.

An acquaintance described this book, in analogy with “horse opera” and “space opera” as “opera opera”, and that's a pretty good description. Conrad Scalese is strong-armed into writing the libretto of an opera under an impossibly tight deadline, working with a composer he has reason to hate (and not just because Conrad is the librettist and Roberto is the composer, which is usually sufficient...)

Volcanoes, secret societies, Napoleonic politics, personal intrigue, betrayal, lust, love, hatred... opera at it's best.

I found the style a tad flat and the plot verging on over-dense, but those are decidedly personal preferences. The long climax is extremely well-paced and the ultimate resolution operatically satisfying.

This is a bit of a specialized book that goes into a great deal of detail on the history of two specific innovations in Victorian medicine: anesthesia, particularly the use of chloroform and particularly its role in midwifery; and sterile technique in surgery. It also touches on the “hospitalism” controversy that was stirred up by Sir James Simpson's proposal to do away with crowded, unsanitary hospitals and replace them with the Victorian equivalent of mobile clinics.

Drawing heavily on the Lancet as the voice of the medical community at the time, as well as much detailed research into the backgrounds and writings of the people involved, Youngson gives a sense of how alien the Victorian world was in its medical practice while at the same time hitting notes of eerily familiar to anyone following various modern medical or quasi-medical debates. He reminds us that what is obvious in hindsight was often obscure at the time, and that the rate if not quite the direction of technological change is driven at least as much by fashion and social circumstances as science.

Science–which is the public testing of ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment–involves a great deal of concrete, detailed, precise attention, which is not something human beings have a superabundance of. I know I don't. Humans are lazy and tend at our worst to interact with abstractions rather than external reality. This makes proving novel ideas to ordinary people extremely difficult, because empirical proof happens in concrete, detailed, precise reality, not vague “big picture” ideological abstractions. Badly performed anesthesia could kill patients. Incorrect sterile technique in a clean hospital could achieve almost as good outcomes as correct sterile technique in a dirty one. Statistical comparisons across radically inhomogenous samples is fraught with difficulties.

The great lesson of science is: details matter, and a mind that is incapable of focusing on a plethora of details–due either to simple lack of ability or because it has been blinded by looking too long into the blinding light of ideology–will be incapable of changing its beliefs due to empirical demonstration.

We owe the revolution in Victorian medicine to those few, rare minds who took reality seriously enough to pay attention to it, and understanding their struggles is an aid to those of us who would like a little more reality in our public discourse today.

As a walking tour of a particular era in the Atlantic slave trade this is a very good book. The degree of awfulness on the part of participants in the slave industry is unfathomable, and the degree of incomprehension, hypocrisy, and wilful ignorance on the part of “civilized” beneficiaries of the slave industry is uncomfortably close to home in a world where Chinese labour toiling under conditions that are not at times very far from slavery dominates the world's productive capacity.

The book is very descriptive. This was probably a wise choice on the part of the author: really inhabiting the lived sensations of the narrator would have made almost impossible reading, but I still wish some of the scenes were more visceral in their impact. I felt like I was seeing into the past, but not inhabiting it in the way some historical fiction manages to achieve (read the opening chapter of Patricia Finney's “The Firedrake's Eye” and you'll know how it feels to come awake lying in an Elizabethan gutter, for example.)

Events are at times too clearly a result of the need to move the characters across the landscape and through time in a particular way, which makes them predictable, which also reduces the emotional impact of their eventual resolution.

But still: a solid, well-researched, and readable historical novel that covers the trans-Atlantic slave industry extremely well.

An absolutely delightful, slightly picaresque, romp through a well-realized galaxy of the future.

We need a name for this sub-genre, of which “Firefly” (the TV series) is the exemplar in the same way “Neuromancer” is the exemplar of cypber-punk. Whatever that sub-genre is, this is the best, most original, example of it I've read.

That said, it is entirely original: there is zero similarity to the characters and situations in “Firefly”, but it has the same vibe of a small independent ship with a crew of characters who are diverse and human, driven by different desires and often on each other's nerves.

The opening chunk is a bit heavy as we are introduced to the crew, because we aren't just learning their characters but their species, and it's a lot of information to absorb, but the author handles it just gently enough to make it digestible, and having set us on that solid foundation is free to explore their needs and wants with aplomb.

It's hard to think of a more tired, stale, boring, clapped-out premise than “famous historical tale told from the perspective of the women involved”, which has been done to death and far past it in the last 20 years, mostly by authors who unfortunately think that the premise is somehow so inherently interesting that they don't have to do any more work.

So the only reason I read this book is it's by Pat Barker, who is a genius, and my god she did not disappoint.

This is better than Homer. Really. The story lives and breathes with a visceral reality and enormous compassion, both completely typical of Barker's work, who I swear understands men at war better than any living writer.

This is the story of the Illiad as told in the voice of the female captive whose seizure by Agamemnon is the source of the “rage of Achilles” in the first place. Briseis was born a princess whose city fell the marauding Achaeans as they set siege to Troy. Chosen by Achilles as a prize, taken from him by a churlish commander, she sees the relations of power and love and lust and pride and honour that drive these men to the pursuit of glory, and their doom.

The brilliance of Barker's work is we both feel for Briseis's plight while somehow also finding sympathy for her captors, who are no less trapped in the same system of power and violence.

One really notable feature of her telling is the linear modernity of the narrative structure: Homer frequently introduces characters and only much later tells us important information about them–I swear he was making it up as he went along–which can make the Illiad challenging for modern audiences who don't already know who everyone is. Barker isn't having any of that, and uses all the lessons we have learned in the past two thousand years to tell the story more fluently and effectively than Homer did.

This is a good book, but not as good a book as it would have been had it been better.

My understanding of the genesis is that the original concept was Pratchett's from the ‘80's, and the execution was truly collaborative. The writing has definite Pratchettesque moments, and the book starts out very well, but in the end I get the feeling that this is a story that wants to be written by a collaboration between Brian Stableford and Baxter's sometime collaborator Arthur C Clarke, not Sir Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.

The positives are pretty considerable: the authors tell the story of a huge shift in physical possibility (“stepping” between alternate Earths) over the few decades following it from multiple points of view, interspersed with amusing anecdotes regarding particularly unfortunate encounters with the unknown, often involving the Four Horsemen of the New Apocalypse: Greed, Confusion, Inability to Follow Rules, and Miscellaneous Abrasions (or something like that.)

But the evolutionary speculations are a walking shadow of Stableford's far deeper insights, and the eerie evocation of lost civilizations and alternate solar systems fall short of Clarke's inimitable (apparently) poetry.

“Not as good as Stableford or Clarke” is admittedly fainting with damned praise. I'm not familiar with Baxter's stand-alone work (and I've avoided Clarke collaborations since the Gentry Lee debacle) so I have a tendency to assume it's all his fault, which is hardly fair. It may well be that it's really the fault of the story itself, which does seem to want a particular type of telling. On the other hand, the Disc World stories wanted a particular type of telling too, and it took a few runs at it for Pratchett to develop that voice, so I have every expectation that future books in this series will take us in new and interesting directions as the authors find their feet in the remarkable universe they have created.

Ever wonder why politicians behave the way they do?

This book will go a long way toward answering that question. It isn't a work of “political theory” in the traditional sense so much as a presentation of a theory of practical politics. It doesn't focus on lofty ideals or just states, it focuses on what people in various political systems have to do to gain and keep power, and how broadening the required footprint of support tends to produce better public policy, while narrowing it tends to produce autocrats who are propped up by a relatively small circle of essential supporters (often in the military/security forces) who are bought off with bribes, favours, and privileges.

It isn't just about dictators, though. The principles of practical analysis can be applied to any political leader in any system of government by asking whose needs they have to really satisfy to achieve power and retain power. I've found it has enhanced my understanding of–and ability to predict the behaviour of–Canadian and American political leaders.

It falls short of five stars because I think the authors sometimes are muddy in their use of their own conceptual framework, but that is a small quibble against a very good book.

The long stern chase in this book is one of the most dramatic and compelling stories of war at sea ever told, and of all the Aubrey/Maturin novels its final resolution is probably the scene that sticks with me most strongly and clearly.

The whole book is one long, slow, build, with enough sources of tension and interest to remain engrossing throughout. The whole series is worthwhile (this was a read-read for me) but this book is definitely one of the highlights.

My initial thought is that Tim Burton should've made a movie out of this. A quick check of IMDB turns up this production instead, which looks brilliant: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0197154/

Gormenghast isn't so much horror–although if you mediate for a few minutes on the lives these people are trapped in you'll find plenty of that–as it is a grotesque, the literary equivalent of an old-style circus freak-show, which it's characters all pushed to the far extremes of caricature. Peake manages for all of that to make them human, although I found none sympathetic.

This book really wasn't my cup of tea, but that's not it's fault: if you enjoy rich, often funny, grotesque historical fiction, it's worth a look. And I can't really compare it to anything because it really isn't like anything. It's original. The love-child of Lovecraft, Dickens and Poe is probably the closest comparison. I get the impression Peake has been an influence on Pratchett: Stearpike or Flay or Swelter would be well at home in Anhk Morpork, but Pratchett doesn't quite have the cruel streak required for Gormenghast, and that's just fine by me.