Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Fry loves language and he manipulates it well. The delicious, sometimes Wildean wit with which he
weaves his story is enchanting. I suspect I would strongly dislike Fry if I ever met him; his attitudes
annoy me. But his life story is vastly enjoyable and insightful.
Bill Bryson goes for A Walk in the Woods in his latest book. He walks (some of) the Appalachian Trail
which runs for more than 2000 miles from Georgia to Maine. It is a spectacular wilderness filled with
bears, moose, snakes, poisonous plants, ticks and far too many people who want to talk to Bryson
about his terrible choice of camping gear. There is no doubt that Bryson is one of the funniest travel
writers of our time and this book is one of his best. But he also has a serious purpose -- one of his
reasons for wanting to walk the trail is that it may not be long before much of it disappears (or at least
undergoes vast change). The rate of change is accelerating. Trees and animals that were commonplace
less than a generation ago no longer exists. Diseases have been introduced, logging has devastated
vast acreages. There is a sombre sub-text beneath the humour and that gives the book rather more bite
than some of his others have had.
The corridor was lined with windows and through them we could see people coming and going. They
ignored us. I began to think that maybe we would be trapped here for days, if not weeks. Perhaps we
would have to demolish the chairs and build a fire and roast some of the more succulent-looking
passengers on a spit. Doubtless after pounding up and down a playing field the sports team would be
particularly nice and tender.
"Awww, mate. It won't open mate! Mate!"
Nobody would ever miss them.
The Siege of Eternity is the sequel to The Other End of Time and if you haven't read that one,
don't read this one because it won't mean a thing to you. Several clones of the original crew have
returned from the space station along with two Docs and a Dopey. The security forces are on alert, the
aliens are less than co-operative and various complex machinations serve mainly to set the scene for the
next book. Why is it that the middle novels of trilogies virtually never resolve anything?
Single author short story collections are few and far between these days and so I was pleased to find
S. P. Somtow's new collection The Pavilion of Frozen Women. As might be expected, the stories are
subtle though the surface trappings of grue and gore might make you think otherwise. They are also
enormous fun -- Somtow takes a delight in juxtaposing odd ideas to see what comes out of the mix.
Sometimes he returns to the theme again and again, exploring it from different angles. There are three
stories in this collection about theology and zombies, for example.
Eventually a lady dressed in a vivid Day-Glo yellow slicker arrived outside the door. In one hand she
clutched the walkie-talkie without which every airport employee appears half-naked (though I don't recall
ever seeing anybody actually talk into one). In her other hand she had a bunch of keys, none of which
seemed to fit the door, though they all caused it to rattle alarmingly. At last something appeared to
match and the door opened. "This way, please."
We followed dutifully. Our way wound around and between eerily deserted immigration desks with
rubber stamps lying casually where the last official dropped them after the last dramatic thump on a
passport. More toilets (locked!) and a maze of little twisty passages, all alike. These lead to a twisty little
maze of passages, closely followed by a maze of twisty little passages that turned into a little maze of
twisty passages. The internal structure of Wellington International Airport has to be experienced to be
believed.
Eventually we arrived at a door. It was locked.
Mulengro has been unavailable for many years. It is good to see it back in print again. It is a story
about the Romany people, told (of course) by a gaje (a non-gypsy). As de Lint himself says in an
afterword this may weaken the story for doubtless there are subtlties of the Romany way of life that
have passed him by. But who among us would ever notice? This is story vein that is seldom mined -- the
only other one I recall is Robert Silverberg's Star of Gypsies.