Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Terence Green's Shadow of Ashland is a most magnificent and moving book (if it doesn't make you
weep, you have no soul; you're a robot). Leo Nolan's mother is dying. She is convinced that she has
been visited on her deathbed by her brother Jack who disappeared more than fifty years before. He left
home, looking for work. It was the time of the depression and the whole of North America, it sometimes
seemed, was looking for work. Jack moved to Detroit and was never heard from again. Jack has not
really visited his sister, of course. She dies and Leo is left with a mystery. What really did happen to
Jack? He starts to gather the family history.
And then his quest gains a new momentum as letters start to arrive from Jack in Detroit. Letters dated
1934 and addressed to his sister (Leo's mother), letters arriving fifty years late.
The atmosphere and the feeling of this book are pure Jack Finney. His haunting classic Time and Again
is evoked on almost every page. And yet Shadow of Ashland is no petty homage, no pale imitation of
that precursor. It is a strongly moving, marvellously inventive and thoroughly magical book that happens
to share a theme and a purpose with the earlier work. Both Finney and Green complement each other
perfectly.
When I arrived home with Milo, Ginger took one look at the strange purple monster into which he had
metamorphosed and fled in utter panic. Milo looked hurt at this treatment but what else would you
expect a sister to do? He sat glumly for a while and then got up and tottered weakly sideways like a
crab, taking large exaggerated steps, obviously trying to step out of the enveloping sleeve. When that
failed to work, he cowered by the wall, leaning against it for protection as he walked and refusing point
blank to come into the middle of the room at all. Then he decided to give up on walking completely. His
back legs became completely paralysed and he "walked" by digging his front claws in to the carpet and
pulling his whole body forwards. The Paralysing Purple Pullover (PPP for short) had claimed another
victim.
The stories in Joe Haldeman's anthology Vietnam and other Alien Worlds are not new and if you
have other Haldeman collections you will recognise them all. But the book also contains some journalism
-- articles about his Vietnam experiences, and they make harrowing reading. Included also are some
story poems which appear again in None So Blind. In addition this latter collection includes (yet one
more time!) The Hemingway Hoax which I have now read far too many times in far too many
incarnations. The remaining new(ish) stories are uniformly good (after all, this is Joe Haldeman we are
talking about) but they form only a small part of the total page count and make me wonder whether the
money was really justified. There is so much familiar material in both these anthologies that I can't in all
honesty urge you to go out and buy them.
The late Nevil Shute was not only a brilliant novelist, he was also a skilled aeronautical engineer and a
large part of Slide Rule, his autobiography, is concerned with that aspect of his life. He makes small
mention of his literary career. A major reason for concentrating on the engineering is that Shute was
one of the chief designers of the R100, the last of the great airships. The British Government (for
convoluted political and ideological reasons) commissioned two airships. The R100 on which Shute
worked was designed and built by private enterprise. The R101 was designed and built by the
Government. When the R101 crashed and burned up on her maiden voyage to India, with enormous
loss of life it effectively marked the end of the commercial airship and the R100 was scrapped shortly
afterwards. All the evidence suggests that the design of the R101 was flawed from the start. But the
R100 suffered by comparison. Shute was very bitter about this (with reason, I think). Slide Rule is his
justification of his vision.
After two days of Milo's increasingly piteous behaviour I couldn't stand it any more . The PPP had to go. I
cut it off and Milo was instantly cured of his paralysis. Another miracle! However his joy was short lived
as the PPP was immediately replaced with a rather natty brown sleeve from an old cardigan of Sally's.
This came only half way down his back, thus preventing paralysis of the rear legs, and presumably
smelling of something rather more friendly than the vet. Ginger condescended to come back into the
house and remain in the same room. Milo wore his sleeve for the next two weeks (though it became
steadily more disreputable) and then it was time to go back to the vet for a check up...