Fever

Recently read and massively enjoyed Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve. It’s a prequel to his brilliant ‘Mortal Engines’ quartet of novels. Without wishing to spoiler, it’s set a few hundred years before the events of those novels, telling the story of how London stopped being a stationary city and started to become a city that rolled around on caterpillar tracks.

I don’t gush often but when I do I gush a lot. What I love about these books is Philip’s extraordinary imaginative powers in building such an awe-inspiringly vivid, detailed and original fictional universe. I mean, I make up stuff, but I’m not this good. It’s not really fair to compare, but I’d say I got more pleasure out of the ‘Mortal Engines’ books than I did out of either the Harry Potters or 'His Dark Materials', and I loved both of those. Without wishing to raise unfair expectations, I can’t recommend these books enough. I’m always buying them for people as gifts. Buy them for your kids if you have kids and if you don’t have kids, either have kids and buy them the books or skip the whole having kids part and buy the books for yourself.

He’s written a couple of other book series, and as much as I enjoyed the cyberpunk stylings of ‘Larklight’ I prefer the ‘Mortal Engines’ as they’re written for a slightly older readership which means I can pretend they are novels for grown-ups merely written in a very clear and concise style.

The other great thing about the books, though perhaps not so great for Philip’s bank account, is that they are pretty much unfilmable. I mean, you could do it, but you’d need hundreds of millions of pounds. It’s a story which will always be more spectacular on the page.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

I’ve never smoked. Well, not quite never. I’ve had a puff on about as many cigarettes during my life as I have fingers on my left hand, but I as I didn’t inhale and didn’t smoke the cigarette to the end (apparently you have to do both of these things to count as having smoked a cigarette properly in the eyes of cigarette smokers) I’ve never smoked and will therefore never die.

Looking back, it’s odd that I never started smoking, because when I was 16, virtually every one of my friends smoked. Even the ones with asthma. Even the ones without lungs. And yet, firmly and stolidly, refused to take participate.

It’s not because I didn’t like the taste, I’d never tried it so I never knew what I was missing. If anything, the smell brought back fond memories of my grand-parents front room in Allowenshay and be allowed to watch Bullseye on ITV.

No. It’s because peer pressure didn’t work on me. I was either, to put a positive spin on it, a fiercely independently-minded teenage iconoclast, or to put a less positive spin on it, relentlessly geeky and unfashionable. I will leave it to you, and the considerable photographic evidence, to decide of the two it might be.

The other reasons – not that I needed reasons to be self-important and holier-than-thou in those days – were that my grandfather, the one with the TV set that picked up the third channel, had recently died of lung cancer, and seeing him in hospital a few weeks before he died made a rather strong impression on me in terms of smoking’s causes and effects, as you might expect.

And secondly, to be indiscreet, by that point I’d kissed a girl who smoked and had found the experience utterly revolting.

Never Clever

Read a review of a thing I wrote, many years ago, where the reviewer said the ‘story wasn’t as clever as it thinks it is’. Now, I’m not going to disagree with the statement, arguing with bad reviews is like trying to persuade a girl to go out with you after she’s turned you down – pointless and counter-productive. But I found this statement intriguing, irrespective of the fact that it was about one of my things.

Firstly, how can a story ‘think’ itself to be anything? A story is a load of words relating a series of events, ideas, emotions or amusing misunderstandings with an Antique Cow-Creamer. It has no sentience. Yet it’s not uncommon for stories to also be described as smug, or patronising, or lazy.

Obviously what’s happening here is that the reader or viewer is compounding the motives they ascribe to the author to the piece of work itself. Which in one way is kind of daft, but in another way it’s interesting to consider ‘the mood’ of a piece. I’d say, for instance, that The Two Doctors feels like the work of somebody who’s having a really bad day. Robert Holmes may have actually been typing away full of the joys of spring, but that’s not what he put on paper.

The other confusion is the idea that a work – or an author – isn’t being as clever as they think they are. Now, I consider myself fairly intelligent, but also to be nowhere near as intelligent as I’d like myself to be. Being clever is, after all, having a highly-developed sense of your own ignorance (because stupid people think they know everything). I suppose it means there’s a feeling of ‘Do you see what I did there?’-ness... and in writing, there is no crime greater.