Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

hero because of them. I read Frank Richards' Billy Bunter stories and was grateful that Quelch was not
my teacher. (Bunter himself has a minor mention in the book). Almost every sentence resonates with
symbols. It is the quintessential twentieth century novel and yet it could not exist without the nineteenth
century romantics that Moorcock loves so much. In style it is firmly a hundred years old. In content it is
pure Moorcock. Which is to say, brilliant.
If there is a theme to this essay, then so far the theme seems to be sequels and to this end allow me to
point you at Executive Orders by Tom Clancy a sequel to his monumentally boring Debt of Honour,
but don't let that put you off. The book opens where the previous one closes. Jack Ryan assumes the
mantle of President of the United States after the incumbent president and most of the Congress are
killed by a kamikaze piloting a 747. Ryan is politically naive and several world leaders take the opportunity
to settle old scores with the USA, secure in the knowledge that they know more about the way the world
works than Ryan does. The plots are Machiavellian and the book is 874 pages long and the tension never
lets up. This really is a good old fashioned page turner, Clancy back on the top of his form (his last few
books have been almost unreadably tedious). Towards the end, when the obligatory war breaks out, the
book degenerates into incomprehensible military jargon and interminable descriptions of planes taking
off and ships manoeuvring. You should stop reading on page 798 and resume again on page 868 to get
the full flavour of the highly satisfactory ending.
My major complaint is that throughout the book, characters drive around in an HMMWV. Does anybody
have any idea what one of those might be?
You do, of course, read Dilbert, don't you? If you don't, you are missing one the funniest of
contemporary cartoons. Go immediately to your bookstore and browse the humour section for the
cartoons of Scott Adams. You will meet Dilbert, Dogbert, Ratbert and Catbert, and in books with titles
like Bring me the Head of Willy the Mail Boy you will find an hilarious expose of life in the modern
office. You will find your fellow workers here, you will find your boss. If you are unlucky you will find
yourself.
Adams' contributions to that stultifying shelf of books on management theory are The Dilbert
Principle and Dogbert's Management Handbook. To give you the flavour, let me quote from the
latter:
When we are born, all humans are clueless, self-absorbed and helpless. Most babies grow out of it.
Those who don't become managers.
I can't get away from it -- so far this month has been sequels and connected stories. I went back to
Lord Dunsany and another instalment of the Jorkens tales. Age has not treated these well. The
sophistication of life at the end of the twentieth century has caught up with and passed these stories
from its youth and sometimes they seem naive. But there is nonetheless a period charm about them
that is hard to deny.
Talking of Dunsany, I recently came across Fifty One Tales. This slim volume (the tales are VERY short)
was originally published in 1915. Mine is the second edition, published in 1916 and wartime austerity
shows in its cheap binding and untrimmed edges. Still I doubt if many of today's novels would be as solid
as this one is after such a long passage of time. They built them to last in those days. The frontispiece
shows a very young Dunsany dressed in his army uniform. He looks quite gallant and dashing. The
photograph is adorned with a facsimile signature. In style, the stories follow on from his earlier Gods of
Pegana. In substance they are very slight but the language (flowery and purple though it is) is quite
powerful and moving. These vignettes (they are not really stories) are regarded by many as being his
finest works. Certainly they are his oddest -- and I am not sure he ever reached such heights of intensity
in such a small space ever again.
Lindsey Davis' latest novel about Falco (her private detective in ancient Rome) bids fair to be her best. I
wasn't all that fond of Last Act in Palmyra, but I put that down to having read five of her novels in a
row and becoming somewhat jaded. However subsequent discussion with other Davis fans revealed that
I was not alone in that opinion so I approached Time to Depart with a certain trepidation. I needn't