LIZARD MODE: ACTIVATED

A note from poolside

Like the idiomatic moth towards the Zippo, I have abandoned the chilly fastness of England and decamped to a baking hillside on most southerly island in Europe.

Crete.

Here, as always, the beer is cold, the air is hot, and the girls get prettier the more of the cold beer and the hot air you inhale. So I am doing very little for the next month other than swimming, guzzling, lazing around like a gecko, ignoring my children, listening to the Test match and reading paperbacks.

After a rather hectic first half of 2023, with an even more hectic second half coming up, it’s just the ticket.

That being said, I’ll keep this brief. In fact, there are only two items on the agenda. Pics, and books.

A NICE LITTLE BYZANTINE CHURCH

I know, other people’s holiday photos are the worst. But I do want to show you a few snaps I took when I walked up a mountain the other day to a tiny Byzantine church covered in thirteenth-century wall-paintings. Here’s one.

The church is called the Pangaia (ie Virgin Mary) of the Two Rocks. To get to it, you have to trek out from the village of Fres, up the side of a ravine, and through a smartly tended hillside garden. Inside, there’s a confession booth and a lectern, and a space the size of a large hotel elevator.

The air is thick and sour, like warm yoghurt. But the paintings on the walls are glorious. The faces and gestures have a peculiar vitality: like the best cartoons from any age, they are simultaneously childish and profound.

Here’s another one:

And one more:

Long-standing readers may know that I take an interest in churches like this: last year, I wrote about the fourteenth-century artist Ionnis Pagomemos, whose work adorns some of the finest medieval churches on the island, including the church of Agios Nikolaos, in the village where I’m staying.

I don’t think Pagomos’s hand touched the images in the church at Fres. (It’s not listed in the best article I can find on his work in Crete.) All the same, I think the works there are quite fine, and I would have stayed looking at them for hours, had it not been for the fact that the youngest of my offspring was smashing me in the face with his tiny sweaty hand and shouting blah wah wah nah blah, which is baby code for get me the frick out of here, bozo, I’m bored.

Perhaps you know the feeling.

HOLIDAY READING REVIEWS

I feel like I’ve screwed up a bit on this holiday, books wise. Before we left I swept my inky arm across the TBR table in my office, and thought pot luck would serve up some gems. There has been one gem, but otherwise it has been a very mixed bag, and I am regretting not having given more careful thought to my choices.

Anyway fwiw, here’s what I’ve read so far this week:

In Memoriam by Alice Witt

This is actually pretty great. Posh boys having it off with each other in the trenches in WW1. I strongly recommend it, though you’ll need a hearty appetite for buggery and mass slaughter if you’re going to make it to the end. The way Witt has captured the Edwardian public school posho voice is really quite laudable, and the characters are both compelling and infuriating.

The Winding Stair by Jesse Norman

This came billed with the most lavish blurbs, lots of respectable writers seemed to be saying it was the new Hilary Mantel. The vibe is: Francis Bacon and Edward Coke both Have Lots Of Ambition in the early seventeenth century. I guess you could call it a political thriller? Although I’m afraid I did not find it thrilling. After 100pp there was no shagging and no fighting. (Robert Cecil got pushed into a pond, but I think that hardly counts.) There were plenty of poised, Mantel-esque sentences, and simile/metaphors in which dark things were coiled like snakes or whatever. But I am coming to realise as I get older that I basically dislike Hilary Mantel’s writing, or at least I resent the fact that this buttoned-up, mannered attempt at bolting psychodrama onto Wikipedia is accepted as the gold standard in historical fiction. Almost certainly this is a problem with me and not with this literary genre. Read the book. It’s not actually bad. It’s just indicative of a direction of travel. Let me know if you’re on that bus.

The Spire by William Golding (with some comments about An Instance of The Fingerpost by Iain Pears)

Okay, so someone - maybe Marc Morris? But very much maybe not - told me this was the best historical novel ever written. Recently a lot of people have said the same thing about An Instance of The Fingerpost by Iain Pears (which I cannot help but call An Incident of A Fingerbang, because I am a dumbass and need to grow up). Having now read both of these books, I can confidently say that no, neither of them is the best historical novel ever. But they are both quite good. The Fingerbang is a multi-perspective science-based mystery set in the reign of Charles II. The Spire is a stream-of-consciousness whackadoodle trip about a religious nut called Jocelin who goes rogue trying to renovate a cathedral. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the best historical novel ever written is American Tabloid by James Ellroy, with an honorable mention for War & Peace by Tolstoy. Obviously Essex Dogs is in third place. For now.

Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West, by John Rapley and Peter Heather

Barely more than pamphlet sized, this presents as an interesting comparative essay comparing the decline of the West from near-absolute economic hegemony in the 1990s to ‘oh shit, is it all over’ today with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD. Does it work, does it work… kind of, but also kind of not. The central thesis is appealing: successful empires start off by exploiting their conquered territories, then exploit a neighbouring band of territories, then inadvertently export their cultural and economic secret soup to those exploited territories, and are then broken up from within and without by their bastard progeny from those exploited territories. Often this happens without warning, and at a moment of apparently unassailable mastery for the empire. This is true, say the authors, of the Roman Empire (check) and very possibly of the West today (um, not check, the West is not an empire, guys, and this all seems very tenuous when you start to break it down). But props for making an interesting case. The last chapter unfortunately, with its prescriptions for helping the West avoiding catastrophe, is Really Bad, as in, worse than something Yuval Noah Harari might come up with. But that’s not exactly a killer criticism - if you’ve got a clear idea of how to Save The West, I’m all ears.

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

I’ve had this on audiobook as I’ve been driving. It’s the hottest thing, since David Benioff and DB Weiss have adapted it for Netflix, the first season is coming next year. I do not read much (read: any) sci-fi so I have no idea if it is good, bad, normal or genre busting. But it’s a lot of fun - zooming about through history in two worlds and a number of dimensions. You get a lot of free lessons in astrophysics and the history of the Chinese communist party. There is… not a lot of plot? And I can’t totally tell if it’s an angry dystopian denunciation of human progress or a satire on dumbass hippies. But it’s all so weird that I have found those things easy to deal with.

What are you reading?

Okay, so that’s where I’m at. As you can see, it’s a hodgepodge. We’re getting to the point where I pull out a Jack Reacher and cut my losses. But I don’t want to get to that stage before I try a few more things.

What are you reading this summer? What should I really have packed? What are you looking forward to among the next few months’ book releases? Leave your reading tips in the comments below - I’m always on the hunt for new stuff…

Okay, my tan is fading as I type. Got to get back to lizarding. Peace out, and I’ll try and write again next week

Dan x