Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

On our shelves is a vegetarian cookbook to which I don't usually pay much attention because it is full of
references to stuff I've never heard of. But now was obviously an opportunity to do something about it.
At the end of Dominion Road, just before it enters the city of Auckland proper is The Tofu Shop. It sells
lots of other things besides tofu, of course, and there I bought some tempeh, some tahini, black
sesame oil, chinese turnip, miso and coconut cream. The shop is full of wonderful things, most of them
in packages that don't have a word of English on them, so they must be good. I recommend you
explore it.
When Juliette arrived for dinner I was reading The Last Human by Doug Naylor, a new Red Dwarf
novel. Her arrival gave me a good excuse to put it down which was just what I was looking for because
it's dull and derivative. It re-hashes old material interminably and hasn't a single spark of life in it. I
thoroughly enjoyed the first two Red Dwarf books whichwere written in collaboration with Rob Grant. On
the evidence of this book I would suggest that Grant was probably the more creative of the two.
A few years ago Barbara Hambly was a guest of honour at a local convention. I didn't get to the con and
therefore I never met her which is a pity because after reading her new book Bride of the Rat God I
think I'd enjoy her company. Let's face it, anything called Bride of the Rat God has to be worth
reading.
The book is set in Los Angeles in 1923, the heyday of the silent movie era. Chrysanda Flamande is a
sultry star (she out-vamps them all). The necklace that she wears has marked her as a sacrifice to the
Rat God, and now He is come to claim her for His own. Fortunately she has good friends and three
pekingese (called Chang Ming, Black Jasmine and Buttercreme) to protect her. The book is a gorgeous
romp and I enjoyed every sentence of it.
Why do people write sequels to books that plainly don't need them? Piers Anthony is notorious for this
and with Shame of Man he has done it again. The book is a sequel to the brilliant Isle of Women and
like that earlier book it takes slices out of time ranging from the prehistoric past to the indefinite future
and follows the changing fortunes of a similar set of characters in each era. However the earlier book
said all that needed to be said and in the sequel he is merely going over the same ground in the same
way. What was fresh in the first book is dull and repetitive in the second. His anthropological
observations are interesting and so are the conclusions he draws from them but that is insufficient by
itself to carry the weight of this book. I found it less gripping than its predecessor.
If you like a good horror novel I strongly recommend December by Phil Rickman. The title made it an
appropriate book to read just before Christmas. The book opens in December 1980 when a folk group
are recording an album at an old abbey on the Welsh border. It is reputed to be haunted and they are all
psychics of one sort and another -- so it seemed like a good idea at the time. That night their recording
session goes horribly and tragically wrong, and that same evening, in New York, John Lennon is shot to
death.
The body of the book is set many years after these events and tells what happens to the members of
the group, how they are inveigled into coming together again to complete the black album that they
abandoned that terrible night, and just what the haunted mystery of the abbey is all about.
It is gripping, edge-of-the-seat, nail-biting-down-to-the-elbows material. I haven't been as involved in a
book for longer than I can remember, probably not since I read some of the early Stephen King. As the
blurb remarks, Rickman has made the same discovery that King made -- the secret of a great book lies
in the characterisation. In all honesty the plot details don't matter much; they are standard horror story
stuff. But the characters are so beautifully drawn and you feel such sympathy with them because of the
skill with which they are written down on the page that you simply cannot help becoming involved.
Many, many years ago I read the scandalous books of Leslie Thomas. Virgin Soldiers, Onward Virgin
Soldiers, Tropic of Ruislip, and many others too numerous to mention. Then, as now, I found him a
wonderfully funny, but at the same time serious writer. In many ways he is a mainstream Terry
Pratchett. He is never averse to a silly joke, and you really have to admire a writer who has the panache
to name one of his Chinese characters Fuk Yew. Well, I've bought and read every Leslie Thomas book as