Confessions of a GP: Benjamin Daniels

There's a bit of a trend at the moment for books based on blogs based on people's experiences of their jobs. Personally I blame Belle de Jour. At some point, it became very easy for the blog to become an ebook which might then even get a publishing deal. Since then, every teacher, policeman and binman has been regaling the world with their wit and wisdom and tales of the workplace. It's light reading and I've read a few. The quality is variable.

The main faults in this genre are:

a) Drivelling on about bits of your job which nobody gives a shit about. This usually manifests as a prolonged rant about forms, guidelines and accountability. While the red tape stuff may drive you a bit nuts, writing 200 pages on exactly how the system works isn't entertaining, and people are paying you to entertain them. If you think it's boring, I'm not sure why you'd expect readers to find it interesting. This is particularly the case where people have used the original blog as a way to let off steam about whatever it is they most hate in their job. Using a blog to let off steam is a valid way to do it, but again, a letting-off-steam-blog is very different from an entertaining-and-informing blog. The former really doesn't need to be made into a book for others to read.

b) Putting in stuff that you clearly didn't say or do, to make yourself look like "what Oscar Wilde would have been like had he worked as a paramedic." You clearly didn't think of that rejoinder at the time - that was something you came up with two weeks later in the canteen. That's fine, but don't think I can't tell that. Even worse, please don't finish a chapter with that line as a kind of "and I had the final word, bitches" thing. Generally, your witty oneliners wouldn't even be that impressive if you had actually said them.

c) Treating the people with whom you work with such utter disdain that you come across as unlikeable. I once came across the blog of a social worker who clearly hated every single one of his clients. Granted, it must be a frustrating job and some people must drive you nuts, but if you have that level of animosity it's time to find a new job, not write a whiny blog about the one you have.

So that's my general roundup of the genre. This is one of the better books in it, in fact. It's managed to avoid these flaws for the most part, which is a relief. This isn't an overly complicated book. It won't change your life. It is light reading and is mildly entertaining and funny in places. It gives you a little bit of insight into the world of a GP, and the guy is likeable enough. In a couple of places it's even laugh-out-loud funny and (a blessed relief, and very unusual for this kind of book) the author likes his job and doesn't feel hard done by.

Read this whilst lying in bed with flu: this is my recommendation.

The Unicorn Crisis (The Hidden Academy): Jon Rosenburg

Whenever you read about people writing novels and getting published, there are always mutters about the strange new phenomenon of self-publishing, which has only become a feasible marketing option (distinct from the vanity publishing of old) in recent years, with the advent of print-on-demand novels and e-readers. Naturally, there is some suspicion about this kind of publishing, since it involves doing without the paid services of all those fine people who proofread, check quality, support authors, make suggestions, remove rubbish chapters and tell the truly talentless to please abide by the restraining order. Self-published authors have a reputation for being the ones who are just not good enough to be published in a conventional way. I was curious to know if this was indeed the case, and as this book comes with excellent reviews on Amazon, keeps popping up as a recommendation next to books I love, and (perhaps most importantly) costs less than £1 to download, I thought I'd give it a go.

The first thing that hits is that it badly needs proper proofreading and editing. It's not that there are spelling mistakes everywhere but there are errors in punctuation on pretty much every page. There are many stylistic flaws which a decent copy editor would notice: run-on sentences, ambiguous sentences, sentences which throw in a completely redundant repetition of the one before. This kind of thing happens too often:

"After all, my master had been born when Henry VIII was on the throne and by Llewellyn's standards he'd still been fairly young when he'd died, earlier this year, but I wasn't entirely convinced that he was telling the truth about that."

(And by too often, I mean it happens at all.) Okay, I think I can figure out what he means by that sentence, but I do need to figure it out, and that shouldn't be the case. At first glance it looks as though Henry VIII died earlier this year and then had the nerve to come back and lie about it.

It's not formatted as a novel, either: usually in a novel the paragraphs are indented rather than double spaced, unless the author is trying to convey some kind of hiatus in the action which is somewhere between a new paragraph and a new chapter. That's not so much of an issue except it suggests that the author doesn't know how a novel should be formatted. Which in turn suggests that he doesn't know much about novels. Which doesn't inspire much confidence. It also means that the pages start flying by at a speed which becomes annoying whenever there's a lengthy conversation.

The next mistake which is made is throwing in new characters one after another. Each character is given a name, role, and physical description, but I'm pretty sure that most of these characters are not very important. This is just as well, because most are annoying. The thug has to say "fuck" in every sentence, just as the Welsh elf has to say "boyo" in every sentence. And then some historical chappie goes for: "Amorous Christina, it is well that you should so converse with us, perhaps a dalliance as in days gone by?"

OH SHUT UP ALREADY. YOU CAN'T DO REGIONAL VOICES OR HISTORICAL VOICES. PLEASE STOP TRYING.

Amazon reviews are full of people saying things like "I never normally read fantasy but I thought I'd try this one. Whoever thought of Welsh elves? Marvellous!" Well, actually, there's a massive genre out there which does exactly this kind of thing. All the time. Much better than Rosenburg manages. It's difficult to be different from everyone else in this genre, but here's a piece of advice: if you're going for the "silly fantasy" genre, avoid using "The Hidden Academy" as the title for your series, unless you're really fine with every single reader going:

"Hang on, aren't those two words basically synonyms for  'unseen' and 'university'? Haven't I heard of that somewhere?"

In all, I'd say that this author obviously has some creativity in him, but most of what is good in this book has been done better elsewhere, and most of what is bad really shouldn't have made it past the first draft. He needs to go away and read a lot more and study the craft of writing, and come back in a few years. I'd like to say that he's not doing the reputation of self-published authors any favours but by all accounts he's one of the better ones. God help us.

Rivers of London: Ben Aaronovitch

I'm a sucker for the old Amazon recommendations. I read a lot of different stuff, so sometimes they get a bit confused. That said, when someone I've never heard of shows up I generally pay at least some attention. When it's an "if you like X, you'll probably like Y" I pay more attention. And so, faced with "if you like Neil Gaiman, you'll probably like Ben Aaronovitch" I nodded my appreciation and downloaded this little beauty of a book.

"Rivers of London" (which you should read, by the way, so I'll try to avoid too many spoilers) is the first in what may turn out to be a lengthy series following the adventures of Peter Grant, a regular West End policeman. As it opens, he's guarding a police line at the scene of a murder, when he runs into a ghost. This leads to a chance meeting with Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, and culminates in Grant becoming an apprentice wizard at The Folly, which is the section of the Met responsible for all things magical and supernatural. In the events that follow, he has to get to the bottom of a series of bloody murders involving many people's faces falling off. He also has to track down and kill a few vampires (of the non sparkly variety) and sort out a long running feud between the god and goddess who are in charge of different bits of the Thames. It's very witty, very creepy in places, and pretty much unputdownable. I attempted to get into two other books after reading this one, before saying "sod it" and downloading the sequel (which is called "Moon Over Soho" - don't go for "Midnight Riot" as this is merely the American title of "Rivers of London". Book 3 to come out next year dammit).

The book is clearly very well researched. Every detail about London is spot on, as far as I know. Most of the places within this book (and even more so in the case of the sequel) do actually exist, in the streets where they are supposed to be, and the interiors are accurate. Aaronovitch can sum up a whole area of London in a few pithy sentences. In "Moon Over Soho" he has some rather unflattering comments to make about Cheam, which were nonethelesss hilarious. Given that this is the case I suspect that his research into the workings of the Met is probably pretty accurate too, although obviously I don't know so much about this, being a small felt car.

The one thing which I don't like (and this is a very minor quibble) is the sometimes desperate self-referential attempts to be very clear that this is Not Like Other Urban Fantasy. It's unecessary, distracting and to be honest simply reminds you of parallels rather than distracting you. Like this (p45)

"So magic is real," I said. "Which makes you a. . . what?"

"A wizard."

"Like Harry Potter?"

Nightingale sighed. "No," he said, "not like Harry Potter."

"In what way?"

"I'm not a fictional character," said Nightingale.

Cringe. Not only is that a lamearse attempt to differentiate the two, put in for the benefit of the reader, but immediately you're set thinking "is this like Harry Potter? Is it a Pottery ripoff?" And the annoying thing is, it really isn't much like Harry Potter at all. It's certainly not a children's book, for one thing, and it has more in common with a regular thriller, but this exchange drags you out of an immersive storyline, reminds you that Nightingale is a fictional character, gets you to run a swift comparison and then when you're thoroughly distracted, lets you jump back in. Like I say, it's a minor quibble, and probably wouldn't annoy me if I didn't like the book so much.

Enough quibbling though. Truly it is an awesome read. Go forth and enjoy.

Watership Down: Richard Adams

It is a well-known fact that all right-thinking people, the world over, love bunnies. And if they don't there's something seriously wrong with them.

The truth is that I put off reading Watership Down for a long time, largely because of the usual OH GOD THAT IS SO SAD YOU WILL CRY which comes up every time it is mentioned. I have no tear ducts, being made entirely out of felt and stuffing, and I thought this might prove problematic. I wouldn't want to accidentally drown myself from the inside. But then again, the prospect of a really good story about bunnies was appealing so off I went.

Here comes the pretentious part then. It's not a book about bunnies, really. Well, it is. But it's really a kind of epic adventure, featuring companionship, brotherhood, love, war, politics, life and death... and freaking BUNNIES. The same species that will kill themselves chewing through your electrical wires.  The same species that gets happier at the sight of cabbage than anyone has any right to be. And it's true to bunnies and bunny behaviour (well I say that. I actually don't know that much about wild bunnies so I may be all wrong. Maybe they actually live on sauerkraut and like to play shuffleball under the full moon). The whole story takes place over a few miles, over a few weeks, and features insights into destiny, folklore, human nature and the horrors of totalitarian rule. Which does rather make you wonder what Adams would have managed with a slightly larger and less stupid species as his protagonists. Plus it teaches you how to say "eat shit" in Lapine.

The main point I want to make, though, is that this raises the bar a touch. All you idiots out there (*cough C. Golden cough*) who set out to write an epic, with a full compliment of humans, orcs, elves, dwarves and so on, in a world with every possible kind of terrain and culture, with a ton of back story - and only manage the kind of dull, cliche-ridden bilge that makes me want to chew my own hubcaps off can hraka silflay as far as I'm concerned.

Warcraft: Lord of the Clans: Christine Golden

Drop by the Fantasy forum during nanowrimo and you’ll find an absolute obsession with clichés and how to avoid them. Thread after thread of “can I do this? Is it okay to have a farm boy becoming king if he’s not very good at it? Yadayadayada.” I have looked on with bemusement. After all, decent writing can turn cliché to archetype. Tell the damn story, I thought. Almost worse than the obsession with clichés is the obsession with (apparently) subverting clichés. Mortal elf underlings! Stupid dragons! Not having elves and dwarves at all – but instead having newly invented races which aren’t elves and dwarves! Except that they kinda are, but they have different names! Tell the damn story I thought. Write well, and it won’t matter. I’m a sucker for a mystical ancient sword and a wizard with a big beard. You can only remove so much of the rich supply of tried and tested fantasy materials before it ceases to be high fantasy at all. Tell the story.

And then I read “Lord of the Clans.”

And now I take it all back. Cram this many clichés into a paragraph and you should be impaled on an ancient elven sword and left in the woods to be raised by a wizard who will send you on an epic quest to discover your true destiny as a checkout assistant, or refuse collector, or frankly anything other than an author. Although anyone who writes a novel with a title which differs in only one word from the title of the best-loved fantasy saga of all time is probably not too hot on originality.

Now, now, Neddy. That is rather mean. What is so bad about this book? Well, I’ll tell you. The first problem boils down to the most basic flaws in writing technique which should be removed by anyone who’s been on a creative writing course or read Stephen King’s On Writing (and if you haven’t read this, and want to write, you should read it so that you never become Christie Golden) or even read a lot of books. Lazy similes jump from the page like a cloud of exploding green marmots. First rule of the simile: don’t ever use one you’ve seen before. If you’re tempted to say something idiotic like, oh I don’t know, “he picked up a goblet of red wine, red as the blood which was soon to be shed on the arena floor” [Golden, 2003] then drop the laptop (oh, I’m sorry, was that expensive?) and put your hands in the air. Not only is this simile more overused than random bad flute solos in the middle of Mamas and Papas songs, but red wine doesn’t look a fucking thing like blood anyway.

Golden is a rent-an-author. She writes for various sci-fi and fantasy tie-ins (including Star Trek apparently) and so her creations are not her own. She writes about characters people know. This is the story of THRALL, SON OF DUROTAN, HEIR TO LEADERSHIP OF THE FROSTWOLF CLAN, ULTIMATE EPIC WARCHIEF OF EPIC EVERYTHING GRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!oneoneelevenone!!111! In other words, a Big Damn Hero. You may recognise the traits of the Big Damn Hero species from other fantasy books. There are also a handful in this one: Grom Hellscream is also a Big Damn Hero, and therefore the two of them agree on everything because they have no other personality, much to the chagrin of all the other, stupid and cowardly individuals who surround them. You know exactly what Thrall is going to do, for two reasons. Firstly, he is a completely unrealistic character with no flaws of any kind who can always be relied upon to act like a Big Damn Hero, and secondly the entire storyline revolves around setting up scenes in which Thrall can be a Big Damn Hero. Golden couldn’t do much about the cliché ridden background story (you mean, “a baby has noble parents who get killed for standing up for what they believe in, leading to the baby being raised by utter bastards who mistreat him until the day he escapes and fulfils his destiny” has been done before? Say it ain’t so!) which was given to her by Blizzard. Fair enough. But one contrived situation after another pops up:

Thrall: No! I will not kill this helpless human child you have placed before me! I believe in mercy, apparently!

Stupid, cowardly orcs: Then we will kill you, for no apparent reason!

Thrall: So be it! I know no fear of being killed for no apparent reason! I am also happy to go with the fact that you think you can kill me after I have just beaten up all four of the best warriors in this camp at once, even though they jumped me, with full weapons and armour, and I was only armed with this piece of mouldy lettuce!  

Stupid cowardly orcs: Yes, and then you refused to kill them. Which makes us angry, because apparently we want all our best soldiers killed off.

Grom Hellscream: What is going on here? Can’t you see that this guy is a Big Damn Hero, like me? I set up this situation so that we could see this is true. You idiots! Release the human child!

(I paraphrase). Thrall can’t even eat meat without there being some wounded animal who desperately wants to die being provided to him and happily offering up its succulent body as a yummy flame-grilled sacrifice. He kicks ass at the right time, is humble at the right time, and then we learn it was all set up by the boss to demonstrate how epic Thrall is. Over and over and bloody over. You can’t have any sympathy for Thrall because you know he’s going to be fine even if the plot has to tie itself in knots to make this happen. In his career (forced upon him by the Evil Bastard Blackmoore) as an arena fighter, he loses one fight. Fair enough – no athlete wins all the time. Ahem. He loses the fight because he’s just won seven other battles, back to back, is tired, and has to fight an ogre twice his size who is far more heavily armed than him. And then we are told, very firmly, that he would have won if it had only been his sixth fight of the day.

Blackmoore is of course the evil bastard who has to do evil things all the time, even if they make no sense, because he’s the Evil Guy. Other writers might like to have a more complex character who is brutal to slaves but kind to his children, or has a mistress but really cares about her happiness. Lesser authors might deem this necessary. Not Golden. There are four personalities here: Big Damn Hero, Evil Bastard, Stupid Cowardly People Who Exist To Make The Big Damn Hero Look Heroic, and of course one Sacrificial Virgin in the form of Tareha, who has to go around being beautiful and tragic and good. I only got 70% through the book but I’m pretty damn sure something very bad is going to happen to her, possibly with a massive cry of NOOOOOOOOOOOOO from Thrall. Perhaps I’m wrong: maybe there’s a twist. I’m willing to bet that Golden doesn’t have it in her though.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Mark Twain

"A classic is a book that everyone wants to have read, and nobody wants to read." - Mark Twain.

Anyone who thinks Americans are irony-impaired needs to discover Mark Twain.* In fact I think it's possible that he stole far more than his fair share of irony, so for every humourless rightwinger we have Twain to blame. I'll be honest with you: this isn't exactly a new release. You could say. It's been out for. . . a while. However, it's available to download for free on the Kindle app, as many classics are, and I've been meaning to read it for a few yonks now.

And you should read it too, because it's utterly brilliant. I'm aware that the title of this blog is Neddy's Awesome Reads, and so far I have failed to describe anything as an awesome read. No longer! Huckleberry Finn is an awesome read. It will also make you think you're floating down the Missippi on a raft, eating cornbread, looking at the moon and listening to the local wildlife. And believe me it's weird the first time that happens. It has fantastic characters, settings, a great plot, it'll make you laugh, it'll make you panic, and it has a really interesting take on society. Which is, of course, the society of working class southern US in the 1840s. So if you're squeamish about the word "nigger" this is not a book for you. Every few years, as I understand it, someone sets up some kind of campaign to do a find and replace in Huckleberry Finn and change each "nigger" to "slave." Which is, of course, entirely missing the point. It's not pretty; it's inexcusable to speak that way now, but it is how people spoke then. Deal with it.

The basic storyline is: Huck is a tearaway boy in his early teens who is being held prisoner by his abusive alcoholic father. He escapes, fakes his own death and sets off down the Mississippi River on a raft. He meets up with a runaway slave called Jim, and they travel together and have various adventures. And here's the interesting (and heavily irony-laden) message of this book: Huck often does the right thing, even as he berates himself for it because he thinks it's wrong because of the society he lives in. What's more, he can do the right thing only because he's a complete outcast from society and has nothing to lose. Unlike, for instance Uncle Tom's Cabin, (itself a good read, and much misunderstood book) in which people are basically either saintly or depraved, and remain so throughout, the characters in Huckleberry Finn are a sticky mess of contradictions, and always only a moment away from realising what an absurd situation they're in.

As I say, it's brilliant. Read it now.

* Or, if they prefer, The Simpsons also works. I like the episode in which whatsherface who wrote the Bridget Jones books explains in very patronising tones about how Americans have no sense of irony and so British humour is far superior. Then suddenly she goes into a Benny Hill fast forward chasing round bushes routine. Utterly beautiful.

The Virus Hunters: Joseph McCormick and Susan Fisher-Hoch

Okay, everyone loves a weird disease that makes people's limbs fall off and blood pour from their eye sockets. Or is that just me? Perhaps it is.

The Virus Hunters deals with a bunch of these kinds of diseases. It was written by the guy who discovered/named the Ebola virus, and has spent most of his career running around chasing viruses and trying to prevent them from spreading and such, in his job for the US Centre for Disease Control. It's co-written by his wife, who is in the same line of work... but to be honest I found her writing style quite annoying for some reason, so I skipped those chapters.

Blood pouring from eye sockets aside, the real story behind this book (which the authors themselves don't even seem to have realised) is the relentless tension between the latest scientific advances which these chaps know, and the way medicine is practised in some of the poorest parts of the world. There's something slightly dismissive about the way McCormick refers to "The white man's medicine" and the awe in which it's held by the diseased masses (the action mostly takes place in various countries in central and western Africa). I know what he means to some extent - the infrastructure isn't there at the front line, there's a lack of trained doctors around (some of these countries don't have a single medical school), and all the time you have some thoroughly nasty diseases doing the rounds. Hospitals are in a dire state.

But it's not "the white man's medicine". It's evidence-based, modern, scientific medicine. When done properly it does a lot of good, but the major problem in the background of these stories seems to be that a little bit of modern medicine is a very dangerous thing. Frankly "traditional" medicines may not do much good (except for the occasional discovery of something that actually works) but they don't tend to do all that much harm either. Once people get the idea that sick people need to have injections, because that's the western thing to do, and there isn't a supply of sterile, disposable needles available... well you can imagine where it goes from there. (I should add that this was published around 1995, so things may have moved on. Hopefully they have. If nothing else, the situation with Aids may have taught people that using the same needles on everyone in the ward isn't a good plan. Hopefully.)

So what's interesting about this book, I think, is that it doesn't seem to be about what the authors think it's about. They present it as sexy science, weird diseases, and a bunch of dead people. What comes across, though, are these cultural tensions. You are very, very conscious that there are double standards. The horror of a member of the CDC squad being accidentally exposed to infection is supposed to chill you to the bone, while all the time Africans are getting sick and dying. I suppose that's the way of the world - aid workers surely eat better than the refugees they're helping, or they wouldn't offer to go out there in the first place. There's no doubt that these CDCers aim to do good, and do save many lives. I think it's the fact that it doesn't get commented on that bothers me. Or perhaps the fact that I wouldn't want to leave the comforts of home to go out there and do it myself.

Mogworld - Yahztee Croshaw

This book, sadly, doesn't really work. Here's why.

The main character is beset by a variety of confusing circumstances which he doesn't understand and which he is trying to investigate. So far so good. This is a mystery to be solved then? Well kinda. The thing is that mystery in fiction works in a particular way, and Mogworld comes across as written by someone who doesn't understand that.

If you look at some really well-written mystery fiction, such as Agatha Christie (or J.K. Rowling for that matter - let's not be snobby about it), you usually find yourself in a race against the main characters to discover the answer to a puzzle. What makes Christie such compulsive reading is that you know that you and Poirot have the same information to work on, and there's a hope that you might figure it out before he does. And of course Christie manages this information like a magician: every time she throws in the vital clues and then immediately distracts you from them so that you only half notice them, if you notice them at all. Then when Poirot gets there before you do, you're kicking yourself because you had the information, and you should have figured it out, but you didn't.*

Arthur Conan Doyle is a bit different in that there's no way you could possibly get there before Holmes, because he always has information that you don't. These stories are less about the mystery itself and more about the joys of shady characters, damsels in distress, and Holmes looking moody. Holmes tends to figure out the answer at warp speed, and then explains how he did it, involving a newspaper story from twenty years ago, a gang of information gathering street urchins, and the fact that he instantly recognised that waiter as Kentucky Jim, the infamous gangster. It's not pure mystery in the way that Christie is, but it's good in a different way.

In the case of poorly written mystery, the author often underestimates the reader's intelligence. This can lead to the reader figuring out who the murderer is halfway through the book and then waiting another agonising 200 pages for the characters to catch up. Ben Elton tends to do this with the murder mysteries he keeps writing. Not once has the murderer come as a surprise to me. Usually it's so obvious it's painful.

So now we come to Mogworld and why it doesn't work. Jim finds himself in a strange situation - a land in which nobody can die without quickly respawning; stuff gets deleted and everyone seems to be heading for the same quest. The issue of why nobody can stay dead could be an interesting mystery to solve. Except it's not, because the reader knows the answer from page one: this is a story set inside a computer game. So you're not going with Jim as he tries to figure it out. You've effectively solved the case and wandered off at the very beginning.  What's more, if you wanted to set up a character it's virtually impossible to give a damn about, this is how to do it. Firstly, make a character who can't die or suffer any permanent damage: way to make dangerous situations lose any kind of interest and become tedious. Secondly, issue constant reminders (via the computer game cliches) that this character isn't real. There's a reason why novelists don't do this. Hell, there's a reason why people who write video games don't do this. None of the NPCs in WoW say things like, "you know, it's weird: Cairne Bloodhoof has been killed by the Alliance loads of times, and he always came back unharmed a few minutes later, but then one day he was deleted and remained dead."

There are some amusing moments, mostly around subverting cliches and drawing attention to the absurdity of some of the stuff that goes on in an MMO. Yes, on some levels, this stuff is quite funny. But here's the catch: it would fit into a stand up comedy routine, or a web comic, quite well. It doesn't work in a novel. Dara O'Briain does a great routine about Snake from Metal Gear Solid, and how his image as an elite agent doesn't fit with how badly Dara plays him. It's very funny. It would make a terrible novel. Novels are supposed to draw you in and make you forget that what you're reading is the product of someone else's imagination - not draw attention to it constantly.

This book reads, unfortunately, like a book which was written by someone who likes video games a lot more than they like novels; someone who doesn't understand how a novel works and what it's supposed to do. It's a shame. I really wanted to like it.


* Actually there is a knack in working out who the murderer is in Christie, and I'm very good at it. It has nothing to do with the information given, and everything to do with her writing style and the way she deflects attention from the real murderer - you get used to it. But that's kinda a given with someone who's written that many books.