Dawn Hawk

Dawn Hawk, Ken Catran, Lothian, 95 pages, paperback, ISBN 0-7344-0468-9

Auckland teenager Hepzibah Rebecca Longfoot is known as Focus because she is focussed on becoming a space shuttle pilot. Her friend Bryce is equally focussed on becoming a writer (of romantic fiction as Brioney Forestvale, of horror as Bryon Groomwald, and of the supernatural as Bruce Graveburg). Suddenly the pair have to focus on staying alive. Ken Catran has concocted a riveting yarn about the search for a valuable concealed sea-plane (the Dawn Hawk of the title) and added some really droll characters. These seem to include two sweet little old ladies, a brash American millionaire, the most boring man in the world, and several people who can only be described as henchmen. As always, in a Catran novel, nobody is quite as they at first seem. Good clean criminal fun, with a rousing conclusion, this story cries out to be filmed.

This review was first published in The Press, Christchurch in 2003.

Juggling with Mandarins, V.M. Jones, 2003

Juggling with Mandarins by V.M. Jones, HarperCollins, Auckland, New Zealand, 2003, 255 pages, paperback, NZ$16.95.
ISBN 1-86950-462-3

Boy facing a challenge

We’ve all seen those red-faced rugby-fathers screaming with rage at the referee on Saturday mornings. Pip is appalled by his father’s obsessive attitude and has the courage to literally walk away from the game. He finds a new sporting challenge, one at which he excels and succeeds in establishing his own independence. He copes with the problems of adolescence with a nice touch of humour. At the same time he has the strength of character and self-confidence to achieve a moving reconciliation with his father.

Vicky Jones is the Christchurch writer whose first novel, Buddy, won three awards last year. Juggling with Mandarins shows her success wasn’t a fluke.

Trevor Agnew

First published in The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand on 27th September 2003

Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson, 2003

QUICKSILVER, Neal Stephenson, Heinemann UK [Random House NZ] 2003, 927 pages, paperback, NZ$49.95. ISBN 0-434-00893-1.

It is not convention to promote one novel while reviewing another but Neal Stephenson is hardly a conventional writer. I was lucky enough to read his best-seller Cryptonimicon (1999) after reading Quicksilver. Both are novels about code-breaking (in the sense that Moby Dick is about the whaling industry) but their real connection is that the main fictional characters in Cryptonimicon have 17th Century ancestors in Quicksilver.

For Quicksilver is a historical novel, volume 1 of the 3000 page Baroque Cycle trilogy, a wide-screen, word-crazed epic of renaissance science and spying, so vast that it’s arriving in three massive chunks over the next year.

Who would dare invent a 17th cryptographer, who was also a member of the Royal Society, a science fiction writer, and the Bishop of Epsom? Stephenson, who borrowed Wilkins’ Cryptonimicon as the title of his own novel brings Richard Wilkins back to life to acknowledge his debt. (If you think this review is discursive, wait till you dive into a Neal Stephenson novel.) Basically, after writing Cryptonimicon, a story based on Allied code-breaking in World War 2, Stephenson had no choice but to write Quicksilver, which is about how people began breaking the code of the universe.

As Alan Turing, the greatest code-breaker of all, wrote “There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe…”. Isaac Newton, the secretive genius who worked hard to portray himself as the world’s greatest scientist, is at the heart of Quicksilver, but around him a constellation of amazing characters travel in elliptical orbits. Hooke, Boyle and Leibniz are only three of the Royal Society members who play unexpected roles in Quicksilver as they decode the laws of the universe.

Newton’s room-mate at Cambridge is Daniel Waterhouse, a minor member of the Royal Society, whose role keeps changing, like mercury. Daniel’s father has endowed him with the full puritan theology required to witness the second coming of Christ in 1666. Instead Daniel sees the apocalyptic apotheosis of his father when Charles II blows up the Waterhouse home to halt the Great Fire of London.

Stephenson has a passion for unusual language and arcane terminology. Here, for example he displays not just his grasp of anatomy and sailing, but his ability to bring them together for Daniel’s flicker of thought as he faces a pirate attack (by Blackbeard, no less): “He dissected more than his share of dead men’s heads during those early Royal Society days and knows that the hull of the skull is all wrapped about with squishy rigging: haul-yards of tendon and braces of ligament cleated to pinrails on the jawbone and the temple, tugging at the corners of spreading canvases of muscle that curve over the forehead and wrap the old Jolly Roger in as many overlapping layers as there are sails on a ship of the line.”

The level of wit is high: “Roger was not so much wearing his wig as embedded in its lower reaches…”. There are many japes in Quicksilver, including a brief appearance by the “daft but harmless Mrs Goose” who amuses the Waterhouse children with “incoherent narratives about cutlery leaping over celestial bodies and sluttish hags living in discarded footwear”.

But this is only the first of three books within Volume 1 of this three-decker saga. In part two Bobbie Shaftoe’s vagabond brother Jack goes looting in the chaos of war-stricken Europe, and forms a partnership with Eliza, a Qwghlmian slave he rescues from the Turkish siege of Vienna. (Qwghlm is another brilliant Stephenson invention – a bleak pre-Celtic Hebridean island group with its own enigmatic history, language and culture.) Eliza’s entertaining tales of life in and out of the harem are matched by Jack’s picaresque memoirs, which include a mounted invasion of a French aristocrat’s costume ball.

In Part 3 Eliza, now Duchess of Qwghlm, mounts a spying mission that takes her through most of the royal courts of Western Europe. Her coded accounts of her adventures, and the finely spun series of intrigues within intrigues, add several layers of ambiguity to almost every historical event of the 1680s.

Science, politics religion, intrigue and counter-intrigue are so skilfully interwoven, and with such plausible and convincing detail that disbelief is suspended, even when Stephenson gets gold-panning techniques wrong or has Charles I executed with a sword rather than an axe. No matter, Stephenson’s scope includes the problem of minting and maintaining a reliable coinage, gunpowder mills, diplomacy, silver mines, theology, physics, symbolic logic, calculus, and the first computing machinery.

Grumpy reviewers might complain that they need lists of monarchs, family trees and maps to follow the plot but Stephenson has supplied all these and several other scientific surprises. In fact I don’t know when I’ve read a novel that was so continuously surprising.

Time and the New York Post call Neal Stephenson a genius He is not, but he is a brilliant story-teller with a fine sense of history, a superb command of language and an ability to keep a story rolling along. These talents are much rarer and more valuable than genius.

Trevor Agnew

First published in The Press, Christchurch, new Zealand on November 29th 2003.

The Hedgehog the Fox and the Magister’s Pox, Stephen Jay Gould, 2003

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox Stephen Jay Gould, Jonathan Cape, 2003, 274 pages, hardback, NZ$59.95. ISBN 0-2240-6309-X

Completed just before he died, Stephen Jay Gould’s last book deals with a single, appropriately wide-ranging topic, although it also draws from some of his essays in the collection Dinosaur in a Haystack (1996). Using the subtitle “mending the gap between science and the humanities” Gould examines the often tense relationship between scientists (a job title only coined in 1834) and society. Galileo and Lavoisier are two of the better-known examples of the tension between scientists and the authorities, whether spiritual or secular, who seek to control thought.

In The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox Gould uses pages from historic science books (some containing fascinating handwritten additions) to illustrate the intellectual upheaval involved in the shift from relying on the classics to seeing that “personal observation must replace ancient testimony”. His shrewd comment - that a sheep is identified as a cloven-hoofed animal because one has looked at the hoof, not because Pliny said so – is a reminder of Gould’s skill at communicating concepts. He also displays his talent for debunking myths, finding odd connections, extolling knowledge, shattering preconceptions and exposing ‘creation scientists’ – “one of the greatest oxymorons of our time”.

Stephen Jay Gould’s final work draws together the odd trio of the title, Edgar Allan Poe as a shellfish-plagiarist, censorship, Pope’s Battle of the Books, art nouveau octopuses, Handel’s genius, burning books and invisible flamingos into a smoothly-linked exposition of ideas. It is a fitting memorial to a great communicator for both science and the humanities.

Trevor Agnew

First published in The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand in 2003

The English Roses, Madonna, 2003

THE ENGLISH ROSES Madonna, illustrated by Jeffrey Pulvimari, Puffin, 2003, 46 pages, hardback, NZ$29.95. ISBN 0 141 38047 0

In ten words: Madonna can sing, can act a little, but can’t write.

To elaborate: celebrities are surrounded by sycophants, become increasingly out of touch with reality, and acquire weird beliefs. Michael Jackson believes he needs plastic surgery. Madonna believes she can write five books for children.

Although the publishers claim The English Roses is for readers “over six”, the five girls are illustrated nearer their teens, mascara-ed and lipstick-ed, catwalk-thin and doe-eyed. (One girl has Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey on her bookshelf, along with Nancy Drew, Little Women and the Wizard of Oz, which dates Madonna nicely but suggests a very weird seven-year-old.)

Four of the girls are pretty and are friends, known as the English Roses. In some rural wonderland they skate together, picnic together, and dance the Vogue (Madonna’s dance) together. They are jealous of Binah who is very pretty (she looks like a young Madonna) but when their fairy godmother shows them that Binah’s mother is dead (like Madonna’s) and she does lots of housework, they become her friends. That’s it. No personalities, no conversations and no plot; just a series of beautiful fashion-plates and an over-cute narrator. It is this last which is important. If Sally Smith had written this book, her manuscript would still be doing the rounds of the publishing houses.

Trevor Agnew

First published in The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, on October 11th 2003.

The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works, Roger Highfield, 2003

The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic really Works, by Roger Highfield, Headline, 2003, Hardback, 374 pages, ISBN 0-7553-1150-7, $29.99.

Wizard Wheeze

“If Marie Curie had not lived, we still would have discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium. But if J.K. Rowling had not been born, we would never have known about Harry Potter.”

You might not expect an Oxford D. Phil, who wrote a best-selling life of Einstein, to pen that amazing thought, but Dr Highfield is also the first person to bounce a neutron of a soap bubble and the author of a book examining the scientific background of Santa’s flying reindeer.

Best of all this immensely readable account of the science behind Harry Potter has the ultimate accolade on its cover: “Not approved or endorsed by J.K. Rowling or Warner Bros.” No better guarantee of integrity could be made.

Dr Highfield invited more than a hundred fellow scientists around the world to comment on aspects of the Potter magic, which as all science fiction readers know brings us to Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum quoted here as “Any smoothly functioning technology gives the appearance of magic”.

The scientific wizards suggested all sorts of connections between magic and muggledom. The Sorting Hat leads to the reading of brain waves by magnetoencephalography, while Madam Pomfrey’s Skele-Gro is linked to osteoblasts and bone morphogenic protein. The Whomping Willow involves the hydraulic technology of trees. We learn about current research in everything from the IQ of owls to the role of taste receptors in judging Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. It’s the ear-wax ones that frighten me but Highfield offers some terrifying alternatives.

The levitating frogs are the best bit; it seems you can levitate frogs in an electromagnet without harm. (Highfield also notes that “no mythical beasts were harmed” in the writing of this book.) There is even a shrewd attempt at locating Hogwarts. The giant squid suggests a Scottish loch with former sea access, but discoveries by our own NIWA scientists may indicate a location nearer to the Chathams Rise (with the aid of a little magic, of course).

Poisons, game theory, everlasting clothes, John Dee, monsters, alchemy, the mathematics of Evil, genetics, Nicholas Flamel, the Big Bang, astrology, time travel and ethnobotany are all introduced with the same verve. The analysis of superstition (and why we cling to it) is a good example of logical prose at its best. “With the urge to link cause and effect in everyday life remaining as strong as ever, the result is superstition – lots of it, mad, glorious, daft and everywhere.” His examples include a baseball player who ate lemon chicken before every game for twenty years!

This is all clear, lively science-for-the-layman writing and we need all we can get of that. Dr Highfield writes well and thinks clearly. He communicates his joy in science but he knows his Wordsworth and his J.K. Rowling as well. The Science of Harry Potter is a pleasure to read.
It is even touching, as when the author concludes, “Science may be special but Harry, as a work of art, is more so. Harry Potter is unique.”

Trevor Agnew

First published in The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, on April 19th 2003

Aunt Effie's Ark, Jack Lasenby, 2003

AUNT EFFIE’S ARK Jack Lasenby, Longacre Press, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2003, 173 pages, paperback, $16.95. ISBN 1-877135-84-4.

Aunt Effie’s Ark, the second in Jack Lasenby’s series about his indomitable aunt, follows on smoothly from Aunt Effie. As the ink-wells freeze and the snow builds up, Effie hibernates, leaving her 26 nieces and nephews to fight off the wolves, bears and man-eating rhinoceroses which sneak down from the Vast Untrodden Ureweras. When disaster strikes, their well-stocked barn serves as a fully-rigged ark, giving New Zealand’s best fabulist a chance to demonstrate his skill at spinning outrageous whoppers. This funny epic introduces the Underground Correspondence School and has guest appearances by Barry Crump, a talking horse and three of Effie’s former husbands. David Elliot’s pictures are gems.

Trevor Agnew

First published in The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand on March 6th 2004

Lin and the Red Stranger, Ken Catran, 2003

LIN AND THE RED STRANGER Ken Catran, Random House, Auckland, New Zealand, 2003, 174 pages, paperback, NZ$16.95. ISBN 1-86941-577-9

Writing for young people in New Zealand is now in what will be seen as a golden age, with many of our best writers at the peak of their powers. Ken Catran, for example, had three novels (historic, science fiction and comic) nominated for this year’s NZ Post Children’s Book Awards.

He shows the same energy with Lin and the Red Stranger, the fast-moving story of a Chinese servant-girl in the Otago goldfields. Pedants might complain that since he has four Chinese women characters at a time when there were none in New Zealand, this book is a fantasy. Maybe so, but Lin’s view of events provides a fresh perspective, while her encounters with the “red stranger” – Declan, a red-haired Irish lad about to start a criminal career – creates an unusual conflict of cultures.

Trevor Agnew

First published in The Press, Christchurch on March 6th 2004.