Book: 'The Eye Of Zoltar' by Jasper Fforde (2014)

Okay, here we go, and once again it's time to squeeze out a meaningful passage in a comparatively short period of time! Fortunately I've finally belatedly read the latest Jasper Fforde so there's an easy barrel to roll down the hill. What has my favourite living author been up to this time?

When last I wrote on things Ffordean, it was for the opening salvo of the 'Shades of Grey' series, which sadly sold a bit badly so the following books haven't quite materialised yet. That is a shame, as it was a pretty intriguing premise. Instead, he launched the 'Last Dragonslayer' or 'Jennifer Strange' series for younger adults, of which 'The Eye of Zoltar' is the third. Don't take that 'young adult' tag as a discouragement though as these books are teeming with as much imagination and wit as the other books, perhaps in spite of the slender limitations that exist, which are mostly gotten around with euphemisms in any case. Jasper is so funny.

This third novel, which is hugely chunky in comparison to the other two, is quite the mix of ideas. The arching plot of the evil and elaborate scheme of the mysterious Mighty Shandar continues in a very dark machination, while Jennifer is decoyed away with a small party to find the mysterious Eye Of Zoltar. Within the story's universe, Great Britain is the UnUnited Kingdoms, composed of myriad smaller countries which unite sporadically to engage in a Troll War or two. Despite the whole series being in some sense a joke, it is all intricately assembled and delivered, despite quite probably being mostly improvised on the run. That's one of the great things about Fforde books, that they move quickly in reading just as they probably did in writing. That's not including the horror of editing, of course!

The tome-like nature of 'The Eye Of Zoltar' was discouraging to begin, knowing as I did that the history of inflation in Pratchett and Rowling novels was rarely a good thing. However in this case it is surely a side effect of the original idea being so huge that it ended up being being split between this and an originally unplanned fourth part. Hopefully it will be just as intricate, and funny, and interesting as this one. Sadly, one character won't be returning though and you'll have to read it to find out which.

It is quite difficult to write about something without writing about something! Let's sum up what this story actually is. It's a search, which escalates into a quest, culminating in a Pyrrhic victory and ensuing massive defeat. It's also a twisted take on 'The Prince And The Pauper' combined with a lesson on what happens when you rubberise your accompanying dragon. More than that I can not tell, except that with one part still to go the story of 'Jennifer Strange' is still well worth catching up on.

O.

Sleepy

Sleep! Yes, sleep! It has returned, like a cascade of nothingness from atop the highest pillows of the grand temple to sleep that is the bedroom! Even now, hundreds of miles from that bedroom, there can be heard the little nothings of pitters and patters of sleep from so far away. Hopefully the local temple chosen for this occasion will serve the same purpose, that grand repose will resume without delay, lest the Quirky Muffin's slightly reduced schedule persist into perpetuity. Oh, that Quirky Muffin which promises such delights and then merely turns in the wind after being flung furiously from speeding motorcars!

And with all of that aside, with all the puny denials and excuses for missing a post ringing in my ears (and fingers), it is time to bring it all together once again and reach out to the minimal audience (last surveyed as a dog called Chip and a perturbed wombat) with something... coherent. Is coherence too much to ask for? Probably, but lets try anyway. And today's topic for coherence or incoherence is not going to be the horror of the upcoming World Cup for non-footballistas, nor angst over significant birthdays, or even the woes of going on a bit of a diet (be gone, KitKats, be gone or I shall surely eat you to my own discredit and further weightiness!).

Ah, weightiness, I have a plan for you. A hillwalking plan in Ireland, which is only being blocked by the hideousness of that indignity they call the 'single supplement'. This will not escalate into a rant, but I would like to point out that it would be far more fair for places to provide single rooms for people than extort supplements. If anything, travellers should be compensated for there not being a single room available. A curse on 'single supplements'! Why not just label them as 'victimization supplements' and be honest with it all? I swear that was not technically a rant.

--

There was a story once, and this was long before lecturers began to go missing in Llanbadarn campus and they had to close it down due to all the singularities, about the great biscuit shortages of 1973. It was a dark time for universities and that shortage caused the great Bourbon Mutiny of little known infamy. Thousands of lecturers, including the usually torpid tenure professors, raged furiously up and down corridors strewing paperwork left and right. Students reeled away after receiving nonsensical and derisive hoots to the simplest of questions, and secretaries huddled under their desks desperately waiting for the torment to cease. So great had the sugar imbalances become that even legends of calmness like Shuffling Sidney Wiffenstein would be driven to bizarre rages beyond all comprehension (Wiffenstein started stapling pages from The Guardian to the clothes of students sleeping in lectures and cackling). Several universities in the South East were occupied by military forces under martial law until order could be restored, and all for wont of a biscuit. The great biscuit shortage, after some investigation, was traced back to sabotage from overseas academics seeking unfair advantage against their British brethren and resulted in the Grand Cold Cupper period of the late 1970s. This period will be covered in greater detail or simply thrown in the dustbin of madeup history in coming posts.

--

If only this could all be traced back to the head blows.

O.

Testing. Testing. Does it still work?

Two head blows in a week, a probable throat infection, and now a regular cold... Is this a blatant argument for never going on a trip again? Have there been any long term consequences? Do the words still stumble out in incoherent fashion from the fingers of fickle folly? It seems okay right now, although the headache is still quite concerning. Hello, headache, you old friend you. You'll not stop the emending if it happens, no!

Can disrupted sleep and headaches stop the incredible flow of the Quirky Muffin? Yes, in this case, as the flow is barely a dribble. Oh, what woe is this? What horrific sham of the natural state of affairs? The spring of narrative vitality has become drowned under a lake of mud as yet uncleaned by Orpheus. Oh, Orpheus, you and your silly ditties! I shall persevere though, mainly by using the random word approach to get something useful to write about.

Golly, I hate being sick, even just a little sick! Being sick can cause a very common extreme version of cognitive dissonance, that grand disagreement between our ambitions and actual performances that causes most forms of mental distress. Ever felt really disoriented or upset when you've done something that you really felt was wrong? Well, it might have been cognitive dissonance. Actually I suspect it is more apparent across patterns of behaviour rather than single actions but I'm not a psychological expert. What on Earth did they do in the old days when it was commonplace for people to do things against their own inclinations or even health?

Is it also cognitive dissonance if you watch a foreign language movie dubbed into English? I've never understood dubs as the lack of agreement between movement and sound is so distressing as to be painful. How could anyone choose a dub over a subtitle track? It remains a mystery. There are even worse things than a dub though, as experienced on a length coach trip to Poland a few years ago. Some countries favour the translated narration device instead of a dub, which is a truly hideous thing, destroying as it does any value for people who can speak the film's native language. Also, the movie was 'Troy', already making the whole endeavour extremely hazardous to the health. (The dub I watched was 'Mothra vs Godzilla' which was terribly terribly weird even without the dub.)

Alas, there can not be much more on this occasion, as the energy has been spent and exhaustion has set in again. It's time to revert to a classic episode of 60s Star Trek and then collapse into a heap.

O.

Movie: 'The Great Race' (1965)

If I haven't talked about Blake Edwards, Tony Curtis's career as a starlet, feminism and Wacky Races by the end of this post then something will have gone wrong. Please send a cake with a file in it, and some throat medicine as I am of course sick on this, my birthday.

We begin with the movie itself, which is a profoundly ambitious and apparently lesser known epic comedy about a great race between the incredibly handsome Great Leslie, played by Tony Curtis, and the dastardly and crooked Professor Fate as portrayed by Jack Lemmon, with arch-feminist press woman Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood) careening between the two in a bid to get the best story and secure her job against the background of the suffragette era. It is very much a cartoon-style movie years before they came into fashion and Professor Fate and his sidekick Max must surely be a direct inspiration for Dastardly and Muttley in Wacky Races. The whole movie is an incredible and inescapable precursor to that cartoon. The only major difference between Dastardly and Fate is that Fate got distracted from the race by someone else's scheme which Dick Dastardly would never do. Apart from that one aberration all the self-destructive trickery and madness is fully in evidence, including a maniacal laugh.

'The Great Race' was directed by Blake Edwards, who I adore not for any of the things you might guess, but for his work on the radio show 'Richard Diamond Private Detective' in the 1950s (freely available at the Internet Archive). His tenure on that show just smacks of comedic writing and directing skills beyond those of lesser mortals. He is the man who allows all the physical and slapstick comedy (I abhor the term 'slapstick') to function over an epic two and a half hours in this film and coordinates the impressive food fight and Western saloon brawl sequences to the point of being pitch perfect. He is the invisible fourth lead character (fifth or six if you count Peter Falk's Max and/or Keenan Wynne's Hezekiah). Edwards had experience with Lemmon in 'Days Of Wine And Roses' and Curtis in 'Operation Petticoat', which surely motivated the bravura casting of the 'Some Like It Hot' stars as living cartoons. I still haven't mentioned Maggie Dubois, which is troubling, but then she's a tough character.

While Lemmon hams it up to the ceiling, Tony Curtis plays Tony Curtis as the Great Leslie. This is really what he did most of the time back then, and it is only clear in hindsight that Tony Curtis had the career of a male starlet: He turned up looking handsome, and then mostly vanished before turning grey, only to turn up in a few tv shows and 'The Boston Strangler' in later years. He was very good at what he did, but what he did was to be Tony Curtis, which is a much narrower range than what Jack Lemmon or a much more similar star such as Cary Grant could do. It's really rather interesting but outside the scope of this post. Jack Lemmon plays to two extremely different caricature roles in this movie, leading into the one great problem of the film: The long and slow 'Prisoner of Zenda' spoof that dominates the last thirty minutes. There's nothing essentially wrong with this segment except that is differently paced and missing most of the great wacky aspects of the rest of the film. Lemmon and Falk are separated, for one thing, as are Wood and Curtis. Also, Lemmon's second role as Prince Friedrich is so large as to be annoying, and it has been so over my whole life. Intellectually I know it to be the way it is so as to differentiate his performances as Friedrich and Professor Fate but it is still hard. However, despite all the problems of the Zenda sequence, it does have an amazing sword fight and the greatest pie fight in movie history. I'm not joking, it really does have the greatest pie fight in cinema history, rendering Natalie Wood's scantiness totally irrelevant!

Oh, Natalie Wood, after a lot of thought I must concede you did a good job in this movie. The role of a strident and somewhat manipulative suffragette is an almost impossible one to portray while still remaining likeable. Consistently argumentative people are never likeable in films, which is a problem as female assertiveness in any kind of historical period movie requires that self-same quality. Wood manages to pull it off, only being genuinely and woefully annoying on perhaps two occasions. The cause is true, but difficult to do well, and difficult to do in especially in a comedic mode. Fortunately they have a whole subplot at the newspaper office to tackle it properly and funnily, which leaves Wood to be... Fascinating. I have an ongoing internal dialogue (or monologue if you prefer) on whether women can be funny in the same way as men, or should even try to be. In this Wood becomes funny by rising above it all, and doing so with some bizarre kind of sparky class that is very difficult to categorize. So, she does well, especially for someone who ends up with that many cream pies in the face.

In many ways this is a landmark movie that seems to have been forgotten, with magnificent music from Henry Mancini (who worked with Edwards a lot) and some spectacular production values and direction. The cars on the steadily shrinking ice floe sequence alone are wonderful, and when compounded with the brilliant designs are delightful. This is a highly recommended movie for those who can handle very long films without collapsing into the floor in an attention deficit slump, and can take an anomalous sequence and keep going into the sun. And, to be clear, it is funny.

O.

Story: The Glove, VII [REPLACEMENT] [Obsoleted]

(Part I , VI , VIII )

The twin cities of Edin and Burgh were superficially similar, Steffan realised, after he disembarked from the air ship and looked out at the view from the airport. It was magnificent, and shiny in the sun, despite all the traditional stone buildings. After the walk into the ctty proper, he realised that the differences were more in the work than the people. Where there would be musical academies and studios in Burgh you would find scientific institutes and laboratories in Edin. It was overwhelming and liberating, and scary and bewildering. Somewhere there would be music and art too, the essentials of thoughtful life.

In the city, he examined a holo-map of his immediate surroundings and worked out a route to a nondescript hostel his father had recommended. Then, mindful of his pennies, he walked to the hostel and dropped his bags. Then, emerging back into the grand and dank outdoors, Steffan considered what to do. His plans had been vague and unmotivated, driven by a need to know whether Octavius had told him the truth, his perception of the truth, or something quite quite different. And to do that, a journey to Edin had been essential, but what now? Where would the truth be?

Dissent and unrest were said to be propagating here in the grand scientific capital of the moon but to all outward appearances it seemed to be at peace and prosperous. Steffan set off to find food and become enmeshed in the life of the city for a few hours. There was no better way to settle into a city than to explore it by foot and this he did. He spent two days ostensibly wandering, looking for work, but really exploring it and chatting to people in the taverns and canteens. As those days went by, the absence of all the members of his profession became obvious. The pipers did not dare enter Edin. Why? And where was the unrest? Certainly not on the news or on the streets. Why would Octavius have tried to send him here for no reason?

The third day dawned prettily, and Steffan decided to go out into the country. The wonders of the city had held no interest for him, and the mystery of Octavius's quest had paled. The monorail deposited him in a town called Canterbury, named for a great holy place on Old Earth, and he rambled around, feeling more and more comfortable. Inside a cafe, a cup of tea had almost made it to his lips when a troop of armed men ran by outside the window. Steffan rushed outside, and barely noticed when the cafe owner locked and shuttered the door and window behind him. The troops were running down the street, toward the church.

The church was silent and deserted, as almost all churches were at that point in history. It seemed nonsensical until the first shot, the shot that changed it all. The shot that was witnessed by him, the troops, and by a piper.

To be continued...

Out of practice

Blast, I'm out of practice. Rusty. Sometimes you can just sit at the keyboard and tap away easily and other times it becomes so forced as to become an almost meaningless exercise. There I was for several hours today, wondering what to write about and forgetting the maxim: 'Just write'. So let's go old school and write for a bit, about whatever pops into mind. That philosophy is the whole shaky basis for the whole Quirky Muffin, after all, apart from a long dormant baking odyssey and occasional mathematical natterings.

The twelve plus hours of travelling to get back to Nottingham were quite fun, especially as it was by coach. For reasons diverse I am quite converted to coach travel from my previously preferred train journeys. I wonder if there's an obscure overriding reason that will never be uncovered or if it's just that the luggage is safely stowed away and that you can see the driver is paying attention and not playing games on his smartphone. In any case I managed to skip through books two to four of The Belgariad and remembered why I loved it to begin with back in the halcyon days of the 90s. The Belgariad is an awesome little series, and surprisingly progressive in places. You could even recommend if for girls?

<stream interrupted>

Recovering a stream of consciousness is like paddling upstream towards a waterfall. It's not impossible but you have to try very very hard. Travelling to Nottingham reminded of course that it's almost holiday time. Wherever to go, whyever to go? And how to squeeze a boat trip into it? In an aside, the original 1954 'Godzilla' was pretty good but quite the downer, so approach with caution if you require a certain amount of leavening in your dramas or if you have a boat journey in the future. Never forget the importance of factoring in giant post-atomic monsters into your travel plans!

Apart from 'The Belgariad' there is also a reread of the ever incongruous Peter David 'Supergirl' comic book series in progress, the comics that together with the Giffen and DeMatteis 'Justice League' really defined what the medium was to me. There's really nothing like those series anymore, or the 'Sensational She-Hulk' that I retroactively added to the list. 'Supergirl' was fascinating, running for eighty issues, and transitioning from an 'Earth Angel' protagonist in the first fifty issues to a road trip quest in the next twenty four and then to a retro time travel and dimensional flip in the final six. The road trip was where I entered and is what is being reread, and remains an awesome little run. There might be more on this some other time...

Oh, comic books, why do we all have to outgrow you? And 'Star Trek' novels too? How unfair, and frustrating in the grander scheme of things. It's quite the problem in many media now as I have simultaneously gotten a teensy bit older while television and cinema has sunk its audience target almost to kindergarten level when it comes to genre stories. How annoying. Fortunately there's a wealth of archive television and cinema to loot, but it would be nice to have a modern author in addition to Jasper Fforde. Jasper is lovely but he can only write so much. Brandon Sanderson is occasionally good (see 'Mistborn') but also so very grim. And I've run out of bookmarks.

Where have all the leather bookmarks gone? There used to be some at every landmark and tourist attraction in the country and now none anywhere. Is it a conspiracy? Please world, I need more bookmarks!

O.

In the park

(Posted a day late)

Parks are wonderful, and country parks even better. If there is one thing that we surely have more of than anywhere else in the world then it must be the gentile parks, estates and green space of all descriptions. It is the greatest legacy of all those generations of noble and aristocratic families that we now get to enjoy those wonderful spaces all over the country (for a fee of course), with the multitudes of nature trails and paths that make them little holidays of exploration on every visit. Do you think those generations of landowners would approve? I certainly do, having spent so much time at Gelli Aur, Pembrey and even University Park at Nottingham. (Also, Longleat.)

Was that serious enough? Is it time to move on? Are the purists happy? Good. This post is being written in Newstead Abbey, historical home of the legendarily wild Lord Byron. I must at this point categorically state that there are no giant Lord Byron robots stalking the grounds and occasionally doing duck walks. That is absolutely not happening, and any such news reports are certainly wrong. As part of 'responsible person' training, imposed by the municipal authorities after being caught dancing round streetlights in the rain, I am in Nottingham visiting my leafdaughter (atheistic goddaughter) for a couple of days and once again being reminded of the various Nottingham-related things left behind long ago. It's fortunate that Aberystwyth is much prettier as a town than the city here is!

So, Newstead Abbey, a typical country park and estate. What are the best things to do in these places? In general there are gardens and nature trails and occasionally deer or birds of various unusual kinds. Again, there are not usually Lord Byron robots bearing down on you with laser light building up in their glowing giant buttenhole flowers. That's just a nonsense. Also, the tufted ducks were not genetically manipulated by aliens to confuse us all into submission. In country parks the best thing to do is to stumble around and follow the various coloured trails until there is nothing left to see and your legs are so tired that you have to collapse on the grass and watch the clouds drift over without end until everything feels better. After that you can then go to the cafe and not buy any thing due to it all being cake and look fruitlessly for bookmarks in the shop before preferably going home. I wish places still sold bookmarks. It's sad they're gone. You used to be able to get a leather bookmark from everywhere! Oh, pointless nostalgia, I slay you now.

Of course all country parks and rural retreats are harder to access for non-driving individuals. In opposition to all things written here I horribly haven't visited a country park or been able to for many years. Perhaps the proximity of so many to Nottingham is one of the few things that Nottingham and its area can truly hold over Aberystwyth. That and having a Wilkingson.

O.

PS At some point it would be nice if someone wrote a series of novels about a space travelling Lord Byron, the scourge of the cosmos, and his misadventures and scandals travelling the spaceways in search of inspiration.