As I was walking by the section office at work the other day, I heard a voice from within: “Uh-oh”. I glanced inside and saw a circle of administrators and secretaries, and they were all looking at me.

This is not a good sign, when all of the section administrative and secretarial staff say “Uh-oh” when they see you walk by.

It turns out that they were planning the section “Holiday Party”. And they wanted to know if my friend Dave and I would be willing to play some Christmas music on our recorders at the party. Nice idea. Really nice idea. Except that I’ve never played my recorder in public, and although Dave has he only does it when he’s got a nice big group to hide in. I pitched it to him, and he said absolutely not. They hit me up again, and I said, “Dave won’t, but OK, I guess I can.” So tonight I’m going to be going through my songbooks and deciding what pieces I want to play–nothing too fancy–and hoping that on Friday, our usual recorder day, I’ll be able to persuade Dave to join me.

I’ll say, “Dave, are you really going to leave me hanging out to dry? One recorder by itself is a pitiful thing; can’t you at least bring your tenor and play it in unison?”

The party is next Tuesday, at lunchtime. We’ll see how it goes.

This is the second book in Modesitt’s long-running Recluce series; I
picked it up the other night when I was tired and felt like reading
something pleasant and familiar.

Young Creslin has a problem. He’s a young man of position, the son of
the Commander of the Fortress of Westwind, a fortress established near
the peaks of the Westhorns which controls all trade through the
mountains. As such, he’s the eldest son of a head of state.
Unfortunately for Creslin, Westwind is one of the countries of the
Legend, which are ruled and run by women. His sister will inherit
the command of Westwind; and he himself will be married into the family
of some other eastern ruler for the usual diplomatic reasons.

Creslin doesn’t much fancy being a pawn, and one can hardly blame him;
there are many who dislike Westwind, and Westwind’s control of trade, and
anywhere outside of Westwind itself there are those who will attempt to
use him to get at his mother, the Commander of Westwind–and chief among
them are the white wizards of Fairhaven, who are busily conquering the
eastern half of the continent.

But there’s more to Creslin than meets the eye. Trained by the
armsmaster of Westwind, he’s a demon swordsman–and though he doesn’t
know it yet, he’s a budding order-master with a knack for controlling the
weather. His enemies don’t know it yet, but they’ll find out.

One of the peculiar aspects of the Recluce series is that it’s written
backwards. In the first book, The Magic of Recluce, we meet a
young lad named Lerris, born when Recluce is at its height. In this book
we travel back some centuries to the founding of Recluce, a nation born
out of the ashes of Westwind and out of Creslin’s determination to control
his own destiny. Subsequent books fill in the middle of the story; and
then Modesitt goes back even further, and the process repeats.

I don’t intend to re-read the whole series at this point, but I might
very well re-read one or two of the other books.

Some while ago, my son was given a mysterious artifact as a present. It was supposed to be–the giver believed it to be–one of those play tents that start out as a flat circular object but unfold and pop up into a surprisingly large structure. It is rumored that wizards walk among us, disguised as normal folk, wizards who number among their arcane skills the ability to restore these things to their original flat and circular form. I am not among them.

But I digress.

When unfolded, the mysterious artifact turned out to be a mysterious artifact. It does not pop up at all, but instead is flat, and about five feet across. In shape it is roughly square, with rounded corners. It appears to be made of nylon, though the top surface sports three areas covered with some softer material. Two of the areas are small ovals, less than a foot in diameter, placed next to each other on one side; the third covers most of the remainder of the top surface.

The artifact has a zipper, which goes around most of the edge.

My only conjecture, given that the thing was procured at some kind of outfitters, is that it’s a lightweight mattress for camping. When you make camp you unfold the artifact, unzip one side, and fill it full of leaves, pine needles, dry grass, and what have you, until you have a nice, soft, springy mattress. Apparently it is large enough for two people to share. This is a conjecture only, and I have my doubts about it.

A little after bedtime this evening, I went up to the boys’ room to find out why they were talking instead of sleeping. I found the two of them sitting on the artifact, while the elder read a Dr. Suess book to the younger. When I came in they both popped back into bed, which for the elder was a sort of nest on top of the artifact; he likes to sleep on the floor, for reasons unknown to me.

As I was leaving, I noticed that the artifact looked positively inflated, which was odd as I didn’t recall it being inflatable. Possibly it had mutated spontaneously, so I asked the question.

“David, is that thing inflated?”

“No, Dad. It’s full of stuffed animals.”

“You’re sleeping on stuffed animals.”

“It’s really comfortable.”

Dad shakes his head, and goes downstairs.

Two men sit in the library of a darkened London club. It’s night-time; the air raid warnings sounded some time ago, and everyone else is in the basement shelter. The two men, one old, one young, sit in comfortable chairs and sip Marsala; and slowly, during the course of the night, the old man tells of his recent ordeal in France.

It was early in the war; the course of hostilities were not yet clear, and there was still hope of a diplomatic solution. The old man, a devoted fly fisherman, went to the Jura in France for a restful fishing vacation. He avoided the news the best he could, but one of the other guests was the wife of an English official at the League of Nations in Geneva; there is great concern that Hitler will invade Switzerland. She must return to her husband, but she prevails upon the old man to take her two young children back to England with him.

The old man sets off on the train to Paris with the boy and girl…just as Hitler invades France. They were to be in England the next day. It’s going to take a little longer than that.

What follows is a gripping and reasonably harrowing story; the suspense is mitigated only by our knowledge that the old man will survive to tell his story. The detail, not surprisingly, is spot on.

Ian Hamet gave me this book two summers ago, when I happened to be in Ann Arbor on the occasion of my 40th birthday; and if he asks nicely (and sends me his mailing address in China) I might conceivably send him the new Lois McMaster Bujold when it comes out.

Unlike most mystery writers, Barnard seems never to repeat himself; each
book has a new setting and new characters. This particular effort is
remarkable less for the mystery and more for the time period–rural
England in the interval between the Wars. The main characters, the
Hallams, are a well-to-do family dedicated to Peace and the League of
Nations. And though this was written in 1987, I found that a number of
passages resonated with the events of the last several years. Here,
one of the younger Hallams has just heard of the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil War, and is on fire to go enlist in the fight against Franco. His
father Dennis responds thus:

“Will, dear old thing,” said Dennis earnestly, “I know how one reacts
at first to things like this: one wants to fight back. It’s an almost
irresistable urge. But one has to resist it! Fighting back never
settled anything.”

“Fighting back settled the Spanish Armada,” said Will, obviously
clutching at the first historical example that came into his head.
“What good have all your motions and resolutions done for Abyssinia? Did
they stop Herr Hitler from marching into the Rhineland? They’re just
impotence with a loud voice.”

“That’s a very fine phrase, Will,” said Dennis quietly. “But is that
really all your mother’s and my work means to you?”

Will looked momentarily shamefaced, and Helen said quickly:

“No, Dennis, you shouldn’t put it like that. This is not a personal
thing. The point is that if the governments of the world put their
hearts into economic sanctions they really will work. And they’ll work
without the terrible senseless slaughter we went through in the war.”

“If, if, if,” said Will impatiently. “But of course they won’t put their
heart into sanctions. Half of them will be hoping Franco wins. Just
watch Cousin Mostyn tomorrow. He’ll be positively purring at the
prospect. And he’s in the government.”

Substitute Iraq, Saddam, and the U.N. for Spain, Franco, and the League
of Nations, and you’ve got a conversation that could have happened just
months ago…and probably.

I have my doubts about economic sanctions; from what I can tell, economic
sanctions are simply a way to hold the common folk of a country
hostage for the good behavior of their leaders–and if their leaders
truly cared about the common folk we probably wouldn’t be thinking about
sanctions. But clearly they won’t work if some of the nations levying the
sanctions are cheating. And from what I hear about the Oil-for-Food program
and the actions of the French and the Russians in the years during which
sanctions were in place on Iraq, it seems pretty clear that young Will
Hallam is right on the money.

Other than that bit of political observation, though, the book was rather
ho-hum.

Ian Hamet has one of his usual smashing writeups of the documentary film Forgotten Silver, which tells the story of the New Zealand photographer Colin McKenzie, a man whose invention and genius was equalled, so far as I can tell, only by his bad luck and personal fecklessness. Had things gone better for him he’d be a household name today, like Thomas Edison; instead, he’s virtually unknown. Food for thought, really.

The Forager has a post about Erle Stanley Gardner and the real Perry Mason. If you like classic murder mysteries, click thou thither.

Woo-hoo! Starting January 10th, Barnes&Noble.com is going to be hosting an on-line book discussion group on Terry Pratchett’s book Going Postal–and Terry Pratchett himself is going to be participating. This could be some serious fun. († Brandywine Books)

Each section of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill begins and ends with a poem; I rather enjoyed one called “Smuggler’s Song,” which, as it’s in the public domain, I shall now proceed to relate:

If you wake at Midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,

Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,

Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie.

Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

Five and twenty ponies

Trotting through the dark –

Brandy for the Parson.

‘Baccy for the Clerk;

Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,

And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

Running round the woodlump, if you chance to find

Little barrels, roped and tarred, all full of brandy-wine,

Don’t you shout to come and look, nor use ’em for your play.

Put the brushwood back again — and they’ll be gone next day!

Five and twenty ponies………..

If you see the stable door setting open wide;

If you see a tired horse lying down inside;

If your mother mends a coat cut about and tore;

If the lining’s wet and warm – don’t you ask no more!

Five and twenty ponies………..

If you meet King George’s men, dressed in blue and red,

You be careful what you say, and mindful what is said.

If they call you “pretty maid”, and chuck you ‘neath the chin,

Don’t you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one’s been!

Five and twenty ponies………..

If you do as you’ve been told, ‘likely there’s a chance,

You’ll be given a dainty doll, all the way from France,

With a cap of pretty lace, and a velvet hood –

A present from the Gentlemen, along o’ being good!

Five and twenty ponies………..

Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie –

Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

In this delightful book, Puck (yes, that Puck) introduces a couple of
English children to people from the past history of their neighborhood.
They meet a Norman knight who came over with William the Conqueror and
hear how he received a Saxon barony as his fief–and how he managed to
cow and then win the hearts of his Saxon subjects. They meet a Roman
soldier who was born near their home and later went on to command the
Roman forces on Hadrian’s Wall. They meet a Renaissance stonecutter
who built the neighborhood church. And through it all they begin to
get a sense for the sweep of English history.

There’s a problematic segment at the very end, when Puck introduces them
to a Spanish Jew named Kadmiel, the son of a banker. Kadmiel tells them
how men, bankers and messengers of other bankers, would come to his home
when he was a child, and discuss with his father where they should lend
their money to best serve their people–in short, to which rulers
should they give money, and from which should they withhold it. So
immediately we’ve got the notion of the Jews as behind-the-scenes
string pullers, one of your basic anti-Semitic stereotypes.

What troubles me is, I’m not sure that Kipling’s depiction isn’t a
fair one. It’s certainly true that at the stated time (the reign
of King John of England and Magna Carta) most of the bankers in
Europe would have been Jews. Christians were not allowed to lend
money at interest, and Jews were allowed to do little else. Kadmiel’s
father is clearly supposed to be one of the pre-eminent bankers in
Europe. And I rather suspect that the more powerful Jewish bankers tried
to use whatever influence they had to benefit themselves and their
fellow Jews–and quite possibly they thought they had more influence
than they really did. And if Kadmiel himself is a rather sour, bitter old
stick, who’s to say he hasn’t earned the right to be?

Certainly Kipling isn’t trying to whitewash anti-Semitism–the children
remember from their own schooling that when Jewish bankers refused to
loan money to King John, he’d have their teeth pulled out. And, by
Kipling’s story, Kadmiel is rather a hero–he claims to be responsible
for ensuring that King John could borrow no more money, and having no
money was forced to submit to the barons and sign Magna Carta at
Runnymede.

Now, the tale of how Kadmiel does this involves a horde of gold brought
to England by the Norman knight after an African adventure, and it’s
unlikely in the extreme. It’s a good tale, but it never would have
happened that way. So, even if the portrayal of Kadmiel and his father
is a fair one, was Kipling being anti-Semitic by bringing Kadmiel into
the book in this context? I think not, after due reflection…but your
mileage may vary.