Freckles & Doubt

A recent Smart Bitches post mentioned, in passing, the pleasing superstition that one cannot die while one's bedside table contains unfinished books. I am clearly meant for multiple-century, vampiric, eternal life.



From the bottom up:

• Michael Marshall Smith, What You Make It (almost finished). Borrowed from stv nearly a year ago, mostly read, very good, but it freaks me out so I have to psyche myself into going back.
• John M. Ford, The Last Hot Time (half-way through). I ordered some Ford works because his comments on Making Light are so witty, acute and funny - the man has an accomplished and extremely irreverent way with language, literature and culture. Last Hot Time is a sort of alternate-America with a very strange, gritty, surreal element of magic, faerie and what have you, all mixed in with a Chicago-gangster feel. Recommended, but slightly bewildering, which is probably why I haven't finished it yet.
• Kai Meyer, The Flowing Queen and The Stone Light (finished). These I bought more or less by accident, but they're very interesting: young adult fantasy, alternate-world Venice in a sort of 18th/19th-century state, but with most of the rest of the world taken over by the airships and ravening undead hordes of the Egyptian gods. Elements so far have included magic mirrors, living stone lions, a water-goddess and a descent into a completely bizarre version of Hell. I haven't seen the third book in the series anywhere yet, but will definitely grab it when it turns up. These aren't brilliantly written, but they're competent, and the world is wildly original enough to be compelling.
• Peter Dickinson, Walking Dead (barely started). I love Dickinson's young adult fantasy, which is intelligent, innovative and slightly dark. This is my first foray into his adult work, here a sort of colonial thriller with zombies. Apparently. It's weird enough that I haven't got far.
• Margaret Mahy, Maddigan's Fantasia (finished). This was a birthday present from pumeza, it's next to my bed because I want to re-read it. Mahy is always interesting, psychologically taut and imaginative. The weird post-apocalyptic time-travel vibe of this one is explored through a story which is perhaps slightly episodic, but I loved it anyway.
• Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Maybe, etc (finished). The McSweeney's-published collection of off-the-wall kids' stories, about which I rambled here, so shall not again. Also here because I want to re-read it.
• The September issue of Asimov's (almost finished). Quite a good month - solid, interesting stories, although nothing that really blew me away. On the pile because I bogged down in the heavy politics of the last story.
• Wilkie Collins, Armadale (just started). Feeding my fondness for Victorian pulp melodrama. This is amusing me intensely - it reads like soap opera or bad romance, with mysterious women, doubles, identity theft and old men making deathbed confessions, and I'm only in the first chapter.
• Michel Houllebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (about halfway through). This is an amazing piece of writing, but his slightly luminous prose demands to be read very slowly.
• John M. Ford, Heat of Fusion and other stories (halfway through). Short stories: this man is all over the show in terms of voice, style and form. Recommended, but slightly dizzying.

This eternal life of the literary variety gives me lots of time to sort out the career crisis. And, thank-you to everyone for their insights, which have been fascinating, insightful, terrifying, illuminating, humbling and generous.

Last Night I Dreamed: incautiously time-travelling, I ended up stranded in the past with a whole group of people, including, for some reason, George Clooney, who was being quite efficiently In Charge. Bits of the past were very beautiful gardens inhabited by friendly gazelle, but fortunately we realised in time that the whole thing was a DEADLY TRAP! Returning to our own time involved taking over a giant Egyptian-style temple and setting fire to it explosively so that the central room in which we were enclosed would spin fast enough to launch us into the future. At some point in all this I had to interrupt future-launching projects to buy shoes. Quite nice shoes, actually. I'd totally buy them in reality.

One of the drawbacks of the academic lifestyle (apart from frustration, futility and intellectual snobbery) is, quite simply, paper. Piles of paper. Enormous tottering piles of books, printouts, photocopies and scribbled pages of notes occupy every surface in my study, and occasionally come slithering down in even more confusion under the paws of the cat that curiosity killed. Even worse, such pillars of prose tend to bury beneath the verbiage those less muscular works of innocent fiction that can't fight back.

Which is why I've only just now unearthed, from beneath the feral strata of Angela Carter criticism, China Miéville's Un Lun Dun, a copy of which tsukikoneko gave me for my birthday, lo these many moons ago. I'm half way through, and it's amazing! While not quite having the political kick of his adult fantasy, it's a powerful ecological fable framed as an alternate-world narrative whose closest relative, I think, is Alice In Wonderland: word games, social inversions, precise nonsense illogic, quirky illustrations and all. The heroine is currently questing madly in the company of a trio of embodied word-creatures (Cauldron, Diss and Bling) while dodging packs of evil carnivorous giraffes.



Also, there are binjas:



I am a very happy reader.

Last Night I Dreamed: that someone hired me to play a fairly major supporting role in a TV sitcom, in full knowledge of the fact that I have the acting ability of a stunned herring with stage fright. Apparently I only needed to play myself.

How entertaining. Wrestling the techno-jinx this morning (random complete failure of campus login) I found lurking on our local directory tree a UNIT directory, no doubt top secret and classified and full of innocent, misdirectory gumph. I await in breathless anticipation (shared only by the very few total Dr Who geeks who actually get the reference) for the arrival of the strange blue box to take me the hell away from all this.

Finished Cassie Clare's City of Bones yesterday. Interesting read. She is, for the uninitiated, the A-list fanfic author responsible for both the Very Secret Diaries and the Draco trilogy (angsty H/D emotional slash which she has excised from Teh Internets on receipt of actual publishing contract). City of Bones is her original urban fantasy novel, YA slanted, first in a trilogy. I don't have a lot of affection for urban fantasy, mostly because it's very fashionable right now and I'm just a mite bored with all the vampires and werewolves and faeries, oh my, most of whom are unrelieved by any smattering of originality.

The first chapter of the novel is, alas, horribly clichéd - demon-hunters in night club - and gave me a bit of a sinking feeling when I read it. However, it picks up amazingly, and ends up proffering a quite intricately-woven and interesting conglomeration of people and plots. It shares with her HP fanfic a fascination with slightly over-emotional relationships and misunderstandings, lavishly decorated with pretty boys and pretty gay boys, and drove me demented at a couple of points by lifting motifs wholesale from the Draco trilogy. This lady singularly fails to lack imagination, surely she can do her published work the courtesy of not actually recycling stuff? Nonetheless, it's a surprisingly readable and enjoyable contribution to a subgenre in which I have no damned faith at all, so go Cassie Clare. I'll definitely acquire the rest of the trilogy.

Last Night I Dreamed: exhaustingly. As a fire-breathing entity of some sort, I was pursued through attractive fantasy landscapes by bad guys who eventually chained me to the ceiling. We escaped by emigrating to California, although without ever meeting up with our pre-escaped allies: I was somewhat miffed by the lack of closure supplied by the ending. Later, I masterminded a convoluted plan which entailed breaking into the lower levels of a giant, industrial research complex of some sort. While my ploy of dodging the laser security with split-second timing worked perfectly, the whole thing was sabotaged by the fact that I had to bring the whole research team with me. Mostly absent-minded professor types, they innocently stuffed the works by getting accidentally locked inside, leaving incriminating notes for each other, and trying to smuggle out radioactive tomatoes. In a series of poignant vignettes they then all committed suicide by leaping off tall buildings and into rivers. Gods, no wonder I'm zombified this morning.

Yesterday I picked up the last in Joan Aiken's Wolves of Willoughby Chase series at the cheap book place (currently No. 1 on my Credit Card Assault And Battery Suspect List). The Witch of Clatteringshaws is notable for a sort of friendly giant dragony creature with the body and face of an otter. I want one. Also Hobyahs, a word I remember from childhood to describe a naughty, goblinoid monster. Here they cheerfully eat people. I was saddened, though, to see that this is the last book in the series, as I somehow missed the news that the author died in 2004.

In a biblophilic life notable for sudden mad and comprehensive enthusiasms for particular authors, it has always disappointed me that I never actually managed to infect anyone else with my love of Joan Aiken. Part of the problem, I think, is that she's really a kids' author, although she also writes amazingly self-conscious fairy tales and rather pleasantly shiversome ghost stories. Despite their label, however, I find the pleasures of the Wolves series to be unexpectedly sophisticated. For a start, they're nineteenth-century alternate histories: in the 1830s the British throne is taken by King James rather than King George, relegating the Hanoverians to the status of evil spies plotting to depose the rightful king. I really enjoy the Hanoverian plotters, who tend to the unsavoury, callous and generally inept, with a particularly grandiloquent and unlikely approach to overthrowing the monarchy. My favourite plot is the one where they mount Saint Paul's Cathedral on giant rollers and attempt to roll it into the Thames during the Coronation (The Cuckoo Tree). In another book they build a giant cannon on Nantucket Island, and aim it at the Royal Palace in London (Night Birds on Nantucket). The Nantucketers, salty individualists all, refuse to intervene on the grounds that British succession squabbles are none of their business, until it's pointed out that the recoil from the gun will push the island back against the tacky and undesirable mainland. The South American Celtic kingdom-in-exile, with an obese and unnaturally-immortal Guinivere waiting for the return of Arthur, is also particularly bizarre (The Stolen Lake).

I suppose the quality I enjoy in these books is one of whimsy: they are anything but clichéd, with a quality of amiable, witty and off-the-wall weirdness which renders them both unpredictable and charming, and which at times gives their plots a pleasant but slightly unwieldy randomness. At the same time they're also pretty dark, with a definitely Gothic edge: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase has a perfectly wonderful Gothic villainess who throws innocent orphans out into the wolf-infested snow in order to steal their inheritance. At various points in the series characters are eaten by wolves, Hobyahs or giant eagles, burned to death, blown up or shot. Like Dickens, Aiken also has a fondness for really awful institutions, and for the richly horrible eccentrics who control them and their starving, hapless inhabitants.

The recurring hero and heroine of the series are at completely opposite poles: Dido, tough but good-hearted Cockney urchin, and Simon, Duke of Battersea, a dreamy painter and for a time reluctant King of England; but both come from backgrounds of deprivation, alienation and other nineteenth-century unpleasantness. Dido's father is a brilliant musician whose songs infuse the series, but he is also a monstrous, amiable sociopath whose Hanoverian plotting regularly sacrifices his daughter. Both heroes nonetheless set about their often bewilderingly odd problems with a refreshingly logical directness.

Sigh. Joan Aiken is a very specific pleasure, and reading this back I'm not entirely surprised I don't know any other affictionados - or at least any who've admitted it in my hearing. Nonetheless, I launch this slight paean hopefully into the blogsphere. May it catch a curious squid or two.

Other notable events of the week: isn't it amazing how you can show your favourite hairdresser a picture of the cut you want, and after an hour of hacking have them produce something that is almost but not quite entirely unlike the image? I think it must be because of quantum.

Off to book club tonight, to drown various sorrows (mostly academic, book revisionary, non-achieving, for the use of) in wine and literary chitchat. Darn.

P.S. No mole has transpired, despite four hours of furniture removal and leopard-crawling along the floor with a torch. I fear it may be dead in an inaccessible corner. You'd think four cats in the house could lay paws on it, but no. Damned dilettentes.

OMG! I'm, like, totally addicted to The Princess Diaries! If someone doesn't rugby-tackle me now and take my credit card away from me, I'm going to hie me straight forth to the publishers' remainders sale and buy me books 4-to-infinity in the series. And then read them back-to-back, drinking tea and giggling. When I should be marking third-year essays on Disney and Shrek.

Meg Cabot actually writes refreshingly well: at last, a journal-keeping protagonist who isn't the kind of total, hopeless, ineffectual ditz who makes me want to slap him/her. (Evidence in point: Adrian Mole, Bridget Jones). She has her teenage angsts, but they're relatively realistic (which I never thought Bridget Jones was), as intelligent as possible under the influence of adolescent hormones (which BJ absolutely isn't while not even having that excuse), and interposed with moments of actual agency. And the princess/celebrity stuff is kinda cute (whereas in BJ it's simply agonising*). As cult teen lit, we could be doing a lot worse.

I owe a vote of thanks to khoi_boi, who rescued me from intense toast dialogue and Iburst battery yesterday by inviting me out for lunch in Obs. I realise, somewhat belatedly, that I actually don't hang around enough with people of my own vintage, who recognise the same 80s music as I do and can sagely bemoan the moral degeneration of the younger CLAW crowd from the same vantage point. Not that I derive anything but enjoyment from the less agéd among you, but the cultural references aren't quite the same.

Also, courtesy of wytchfynder, a new webcomic. Scary-Go-Round. British, whimsical, understated, off-the-wall. You have to relax and let it gently sneak up on you.

* Did I mention how much I loathe and despise Bridget Jones? In either book or film form. In the latter, she's definitely not worthy of Mr. Darcy.**

** Cue stv at this point: "Oh, Mr. Darcy!" . He gets quite camp.

What a nice doctor. She has given me two different kinds of antibiotic and a cortizone spray for sticking up my nose, thus elevating me in one nasal bound to the company of the manifold Shire ladies who spray cortizone around the show at the drop of a hat. I feel... well, actually not better as such, but as though the possibility of feeling better is definitely around the corner. Supposing, of course, that these great galloping drug herds don't thunder across the embattled plains of my body, leaving me trampled in their wake. Evil stuff, antibiotics, and cannot entirely be trusted to confine their evil to the decimation of my throat and sinus infection. Still, as evil goes, I definitely espouse it. Bring it on.

There's a new bookshop in the Riverside Centre, selling the most bizarre and motley collection of publisher's rejects at low prices. I celebrated clambering on the antibiotic-wagon by spending a happy bibliophilic half-hour, marvelling at the nerve of the organisers, who cheerfully stack Maya Angelou next to Dragonlance and conceal Edgar Rice Burroughs beneath a cheery stack of pastel chick-lit. This afternoon thus featured me re-reading A Princess Of Mars, in defiance of my pile of marking. I don't know what it is about Mars pulp: despite being racist, sexist, colonialist and as violent as all get-out it pushes a sizeable selection of my happy buttons. Perhaps it's all the extra arms. However, I also found Mary Gentle's 1610, Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain (yay eco-fiction!) and Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, a young adult weird fantasy about which I have heard good things somewhereorother I can't remember. Plus a new Gwyneth Jones which is apparently a sequel, necessitating the speedy acquisition of the first one. Also eco-fic, actually. It seems to be going around.

In other news, cool clouds.

For once, I'm not talking about the SCA, particularly given that I do more or less constant 14th century. What's with the sudden mad urge for fantasy and SF writers to immerse themselves wholesale in the social and intellectual life of the English Renaissance? Darned morphic resonance. Neal Stephenson is doing it. Mary Gentle always did it. Even Philip Pullman sort of does it. (I know that there are others, but it's late and my hot rum toddy, gently but wholesalely, is assaulting my ability to recall any of them just now. Suffice it to say that it's an ongoing impression of Renaissancery).

Anyway. Robin Jarvis? Anyone run across this... person? writer? (My guess, solely from reading one YA novel, would be man, but gendering writing is dodgy. Anyway, the James Tiptree Principle notwithstanding, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the bits of the novel that annoyed me were peculiarly male. *resorts to Google...* Yup, male. It was a 50% chance). He's a young adult fantasy writer and illustrator, with rather a darkly Gothic line in both narrative and pencil-sketches. His first series, the Deptford Mice, at least sounds vaguely familiar, although I've never read it.

I've just picked up Deathscent from a second hand shop, and am forced to confess myself somewhat impressed. It's an incredibly outre, vivid, original world, in which Gloriana's England has been transmogrified into a series of floating islands, held together by chains, domed and sealed against the void of space. All animal life is dead, replaced by amazing wooden and brass constructs with lots of cogs and wheels, powered by ichor. Elizabethan politics is in full swing, complicated by the fact that Gloriana herself has been reigning for 178 years and is not in any way losing her force of personality. There are aliens. Several species of aliens. With spaceships, and alien agendas, and what have you.

I was rather blown away by the world, at any rate: it's bizarrely appealing and nicely drawn. The writing style shades into melodrama and stereotype at times, but is workmanlike and at times well crafted: the dialogue even has a valid Renaissance feel. Lots of death and blood, which is the bit that annoyed me at times. But overall, a rather startling find.

And, while we're not quite on the subject of James Tiptree, there's a new biography out. John Clute recommends it. Must acquire!

Who'd be a grrrl? Damned 2-day hormonal headache. Mutter. Not helping is the fact that I'm (finally) finishing up this wretched Disney encyclopedia entry, which entails digging around on the Disney site, which is (aargh) all Really Slow Flash Animation, punctuated with relentless advertising and cunning concealment of actual information. Deeply annoying.

I have, however, read a couple of rather enjoyable young adult fantasies this weekend. Holly Black's Valiant has just won the Andre Norton award, a new category in the Nebulas for young adult fiction. It's the gritty urban faerie thing she does in Tithe, but here is edgier, dealing with issues such as teenage drug addiction and running away from home to live homeless on the streets of New York. Nicely done: her faeries are downright nasty, even the Seelie ones, and way more sexy than they have any right to be. Also, judging from the fact that I wanted to slap them quite often, I'd say her angsty teenagers were fairly spot on.

Book Club last week netted me Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, another in the long line of contemporary Greek godscapades. I didn't have high hopes of this, which represents a Very Done theme. However, Riordan, whatever you might want to say about his originality, has a good sense of pace and character, a somewhat off-the-wall sense of humour, and a completely stunning ability to actually write full sentences. (The full sentence is a dying art, had you noticed? More and more writers who really should know better are scattering their work with these poor, mutilated, verbless things, which are presumably meant to sound punchy and with-it. There was a verb-deprived M&G article by Khadija Magardie this week which made me gnaw my own foot off in sheer irritation). I wouldn't say The Lightning Thief was great literature, or even great kids' literature, but it was a fun read, I wouldn't mind reading more in the series.

I also scored the next in the Lemony Snicket series, which I am still, in defiance of everyone else I've lent them to, really enjoying. Book 11: The Grim Grotto. Submarines, tap dancing, evil fungus, a missing sugar bowl, and more than you ever really wanted to know about precipitation.

Finally, in the Department Of There May Actually Be Something In Astrology*: I apparently share a birthday with Joss Whedon. It's not my fault I'm a devoted fan, the stars foretold it.

* not really.

Narnia! Well, now. What a remarkably faithful adaptation: hardly a moral platitude out of place. In preparation for one of my lone, self-indulgent cinema jaunts this morning, I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe again last night, as a refresher. It's one of those books I must have read twenty or thirty times, and every time I re-read it, I've forgotten both how enchanting the world is, and how flat, stale and basically priggish the message. I still haven't recovered from the betrayal, at about 14, of suddenly realising that the bastard was pushing Christian allegory under the guise of fantasy, all along. Aslan, shmaslan.

That being said, the film does a remarkable job of avoiding drawing overt attention to the allegory, while still being true to the moral message. Hell, it even pulls off the impossible task of making those four cardboard cut-out Nice Moral Children into actual human beings, and rationalising the really dreadfully thin psychology behind their actions. (Allegory does tend to reduce everyone into a Single Moral Aspect. Lousy genre). One of the reasons the book has adapted so well to cinema, though, is that it's so thin and flat; it reads like a not particularly good film script, anyway. When you get down to it, the events it describes are almost exactly right for a longish movie; no need to cut stuff out, and in fact there's space for padding with the actual interactions of actual people. And as good little Hollywoodised movie-watchers, we tend to expect a certain degree of allegorical reductionism in mainstream movie characters, anyway, so it's all good.

That being said, visually, Narnia stunned: kind of the kiddie-safe, cosy, domestic version of Lord of the Rings, battles small and manageable, no nasties too nasty, but some truly lovely realisations of the book. Things I really liked:

• The contextualisation in the blitz. Scary, and important.
• As aforementioned, the character development in the four children; Lucy, in particular, is a little charmer, and Edmund actually made far more sense than he does in the book. I liked the added depth given to Peter, too.
• Tilda Swinton was possibly born to play the White Witch; she was interestingly true to the terribly vulnerable evil of Jadis in The Magician's Nephew.
• The fauns were devastatingly cute, occupying the recently-recognised Endearing Hobbit Sidekick Niche immortalised by Merry and Pippin.
• Father Christmas was wearing slashed-sleeved Tudor! and wasn't the ho-ho-ho Coca-Cola version, which was a tremendous relief.
• Favourite Narnia image E-VAH is the battle charge with all the big cats among the horses and centaurs. Man, I love those Narnian big cats. Too cool.
• The merfolk jumping in front of Cair Paravel. Absolutely the quintessential Narnia moment.
• The fact that the last five minutes of the film retained the four kids as adults, despite the considerable confusion this must have caused to the average non-Narnia-sussed brain-dead cinemagoer. Not that I'm a snob, or anything. And they were beautifully cast, too. I was terrified they were going to lose that bit.

Things I wasn't so happy about:

• The White Witch's truly odd hunchback. Honestly, her costume designer should be hauled over coals and then shot. What the hell was with the massive, upstanding, deformed collar thingies? Looked like hell.
• Aslan. Not golden enough, too real, not magical enough. Liam Neeson's voice worked, though.
• They rather short-changed the scene with Aslan restoring all the statues in the castle courtyard. Pity, it's one of my favourites.
• Random expansion of fox character. Unnecessary, even if it was a good Rupert Everett cameo, and tended to confuse things. Although I have to admit that, deep though my loathing is of CGI'd talking animals, these were very well done. Especially the beavers. And Aslan smiled like a great big cat - he kept on closing his eyes.
• A sort of lame Thomas Covenant miasma, in which they had to have the children attempt to deny their destiny as kings and queens. Dammit, if the magical world is giving you sudden, inexplicable skills with archery and swords (as it damned well ought to), the least you can do is relax and go with the flow. One of the things Lewis got right in the books was the way the Pevensie children simply accept Narnia. It worked.

Overall I am pleased with the film, rather than being blown away; not sure why it all felt a bit flat to me. Possibly a touch of Potteritis: the adaptation was perhaps too faithful, to the point of being a bit unimaginative. Or maybe it was the effect of watching it before my first cup of tea of the day. Bit of a toss-up, that; not sure if the full bladder is more or less distracting than the caffeine withdrawal.

As a brief tangent: every time I go to the cinema, I am honestly appalled that they are still running that ghastly, patronising, lame, limp, deeply reactionary Spur ad. The one where all the dear little South African children run wild with the Noble Native American Savages, across the whole gamut of drums, face-paint, dancing round the fire, wild natural landscapes and feathers in the hair. And don't forget the apparently Great American Cheetah Cub, clearly a vital part of the Native American Experience. It's getting to the point where other people in the cinema are being badly distracted by my offended snorts.

I was, however, pleased to note that the latest Disney trailer (the one about cars) has come out of the closet and announces Disney and/or Pixar as the "manufacturer" of films, rather than the more arty "maker". A pleasingly honest acknowledgement of their essentially commercial purpose, I feel.

Cape Town has, alack, suddenly woken up to this Spring thing, and, in a burst of misplaced enthusiasm, is being summer. It's stinking hot, with emphasis on the stinking - that classic Capetonian windless hot-day pong. Of course, it may help that our beloved city is clearly afflicted with bi-polar affective disorder (it's hot! it's cold! it's hot! it's sulking in the basement!) and a multiple personality. Right now, once again, the voices in its head are telling it it's the highveld, and the heat is building up to thunder and rain*. I live in hope. Inured to the vagaries of the climate, the city's floral denizens are making the most of the few hot days and are pumping out pollen with misplaced zeal. My eyes are scratchy, my sleep is disturbed, and my existence is wracked with explosive sneezing. Sigh.

On the upside, it's the last day of term, and some of my classes even have students in them. However, I am receiving about as many excuses as actual essay hand-ins. The problem with the end of term is that everyone is so stressed and brain-dead that the reasons for lateness aren't even inventive. Inventive student excuses are one of the few consolations of an academic's life. I feel cheated, but am also too fundamentally in sympathy with the poor little buggers to make much of an issue of it.

My reading matter has been desperately varied lately. In between battling with Mieville's Iron Council, a difficult read, I'm still catching up on the reading list for my Honours student who's writing on classic girls' fiction. This means that in the last three days I have read all the Little Women series, all three of the What Katy Did trio, two particularly nauseating doses of Pollyanna, and a random selection of Anne of Green Gables. If I take up spitting, cussing, rampant promiscuity and kicking puppies in the next little while, you'll know why.

On the other hand, I was very impressed with this article, which discusses, at some length and with insight, the problems the demands on our attention made by our madly technologised lives. It's a lovely set of excuses for non-productivity, and I shall adopt it forthwith. Victims, that's what we all are. Victims.

* Diana Wynne Jones has that amazing novel called The Merlin Conspiracy in which cities have giant personalities who both inhabit and represent them. Cape Town's would be a massive, stern, serene, Athena type whose robes are fringed equally with sea-foam, and the tatterdemallion rags and scraps of a baglady, and who occasionally breaks her monolithic calm in order to cackle and dance.