Dental Anaesthesia, Deathlike States and Really Good Reads
I knew it was coming, of course. I heard the thwack, thwack of big horny feet and felt the hot breath of the panting pursuant predator. Occasionally I am not laid out afterward by dental anaesthesia. But not very often. And after the fortnight leading up to last Friday it’s not exactly surprising that this was not one of those times.
It usually takes about twenty-four hours for the full pumped up roaring force of the thing to arrive. Which means that I at least got through ringing handbells with Titus. Finally. I’ve told you about Titus: he had a stroke fifteen or something years ago and while he can just about get around with a cane, he has only one usable hand. He’s also a lifelong demon tower ringer. At my old tower—which is where I met him—he used to take the four or the five, which were closest to the wall, so he could brace himself against it, loop the rope over his good wrist, and ring. Terrifying.*
I don’t know when he started handbell ringing again; I only know that a few months ago Niall started trying to hook me into being one of the Titus ringers. But I lead a complicated life** and I keep having these frelling collapses.*** They also tend to meet Saturday morning and the idea of compelling my brain to think about method ringing on handbells in the morning is fairly dire.† I’ve agreed to it before and cancelled at the last minute—yes, I’m a cow. But even cows eventually get embarrassed, and yesterday there were only going to be three of us, so if I cancelled again Niall†† and Titus wouldn’t get to ring at all.
I cannot begin to tell you how CONFUSING it is ringing change methods on handbells with someone who holds both his bells in ONE hand. CANNOT. BEGIN.†††
Niall had warned me. He had warned me in the light, shifty way he has when he doesn’t want to scare you off. But I know Niall. I know what that light, shifty way means. I was glad to see Titus again, and I’m not sorry, even if the experience did tap out the last glinting driblets of mental energy left on the bare floor of my skull, because the predatory beast was going to take me down anyway but . . .
. . . Since yesterday morning I’ve been in Getting Hellhounds Semi-Hurtled: the Ultimate Challenge mode, subheading: Oh No, What Can I Get a Blog Post Out of?
Sunday mornings at noon there’s a programme on Radio Three called Private Passions.‡ Michael Berkeley (pronounced BARKly) interviews famous people about the music they listen to.‡‡ I listen to it when I’m near a radio. By noon today I knew I was facing another trashed desert of a day, so when the interviewee turned out to be Joanne Harris‡‡‡, I thought, Joanne Harris! Runemarks!
Runemarks in hindsight is probably the reason I stopped doing book reports on the blog. Remember I said that the problem with blogging about books is that books matter? If I frell up my own life on line, hey, it’s my life. If I’m going to talk about a book I totally adored, I want to get it right. Getting it right . . . is too hard for a daily blog. Well, for this daily blog.
I adored Runemarks. Runemarks is very, very, very, very, very, very good. There’s never been any doubt Harris can use the language—I had no idea she was this good. Individual sentences are both sharp and funny, the plot is both irresistible and eye-crossingly intricate, and the characters–! Maddy is a magnificent heroine, confused and clever and brave. All the gods and murky supernatural beings out of the old Norse tales that you half remember (well, that I half remembered) are both strange and familiar, human and superhuman. And—just by the way—I have always hated Loki. I have read a lot of Lokis by a lot of writers who obviously have a soft spot for the eternal bad-boy troublemaker, and I have found all of them loathsome and incomprehensible–why does he get away with being such a bastard? I liked Runemarks’ Loki. He’s just as treacherous and self-absorbed as ever but . . . somehow Harris makes him work as a character and not merely a deadly pain in the ass to keep things stirred up.
Runemarks is what happened a long time after Ragnarok. § And to give you a flavour of its style, this is how it begins:
“Seven o’clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again. Mrs Scattergood—the landlady at the Seven Sleepers Inn—swore it was rats, but Maddy Smith knew better. Only goblins could have burrowed into the brick-lined floor; and besides, so far as she knew, rats didn’t drink ale.”
Maddy is fourteen years old, and, as in the best quest tales, an outsider in the strait-laced and fearful village she lives in, because of the runemark—called a ruinmark—on her hand. The villagers all know it means she’s a witch, although few of them will say it to her face. Fortunately she has one good friend who encourages her talent for magic—a disreputable old vagrant who goes by the name One-Eye. . . .
In my present state of mental health I’m not even going to try to summarize the plot for you.§§ Besides, you don’t need a plot summary. It’s a wonderful, wonderful—and underrated§§§—book. Go read it and spread the word. Here’s one last prompt from me: this is from about two-thirds of the way through, when Loki and Maddy are on their way to Hel. If this doesn’t intrigue you to the point that you have to get your hands on it, well, you’re not the reader of brilliant fantasy that I thought you were.
“Many roads lead to Hel. In fact it could be argued that all roads lead eventually to Hel, the frictionless pivot between Order and Chaos, where neither holds sway, and nothing—and no one—ever changes.
“True Chaos, like Perfect Order, is mostly uninhabited. The many creatures that exist within its influence—demons, monsters and the like—are simply satellites, basking in Chaos as the earth basks in the warmth of the sun, knowing full well the dangers of over-familiarity. Even Dream—which has its laws, though they are not necessarily the laws of elsewhere—is far too near Chaos for comfort, which is why so few dare stay there long. And as for Netherworld—you’d have to be mad to even think about it.
“Loki had been pondering this with increasing unease as he and Maddy followed the long, well-travelled road to Hel. Not a difficult road, for obvious reasons, though less worn than you might have expected. The dead leave fewer tracks than the living. . . .”
. . . Which is reassuring, because at present I’m leaving more tracks than the living: the deep, dragging, shambling tracks of someone being hurtled against her will . . .
* * *
*I think I’ve also told you about the block and tackle the boys created to haul him up and down the ladder into the ringing chamber. More terrifying. But it’s also an intimation of how loyal bell ringers are to their own.
** !!!!!!!
*** I have not yet failed to get the glass to my lips, even at my collapsiest. You really cannot drink champagne through a straw.
† I have enough trouble Sunday morning service on tower bells. Today, for example, was profoundly not one of my better service rings.
†† LIKE NIALL NEEDS TO RING MORE HANDBELLS
††† The fact that (most of) you know (almost) nothing about change ringing is not the defining feature. If you were here in the mews kitchen with me I’d start waving my hands around and attempting to demonstrate with wine glasses. Because visual cues are important . . . and six-note rows^ that (occasionally) have seven or eight notes in them ARE VERY DISTURBING.
^ One for each bell, right? In change ringing every bell must ring once before any bell rings the next time.
‡ http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnv3
‡‡ Yes, it’s usually overwhelmingly classical. You do get a few surprises, but I have yet to hear either Steeleye Span or Led Zeppelin.
‡‡‡ Who has a new book out. http://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/view/168063/Review-Blueeyedboy
Brrrrrrr. I think I’ll stick to rereading Dickens and Diana Wynne Jones. I scare too easily. But I admire Harris, aside from a passionate liking for Runemarks: she’s a best-selling author who risks doing different things. Indeed she bridled when Berkeley said that blueeyedboy was a ‘departure’, replied, oh, you’ve used the d-word, and that she liked to think in terms of career ‘trajectory’. Yes. I get that. And may she go on doing different things. The only other big best seller I can think of who keeps doing different things is Neil Gaiman.
It also perhaps behoves me, speaking of reasons why she’s on my radar, to mention that she gave SUNSHINE a really good quote when it came out over here.
§ You remember Ragnarok. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k
§§ But if you want to read a couple of proper reviewers: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/children/article2307684.ece
http://www.powells.com/review/2008_02_23.html
§§§ I don’t understand why it wasn’t the Next Big Thing. Why isn’t it Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, and Runemarks?
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