“Mapping the World: A History of Exploration” by Peter Whitfield

 

263 pages, The Folio Society

If you’ve never heard of Mapping the World: A History of Exploration by Peter Whitfield it might be because you already own New Found Lands: Maps in the History of Exploration, of which this edition is a reissue. This version, put out by The Folio Society, is stellar (as you’d might expect), printed on buckram paper with a dedicated slipcase. But it is much more than that, for while your typical exploration narrative can be a tale of adventure and endurance, a technical account of navigation and seamanship, or a political history of the overseas empires that were built up in the wake of the explorers, Whitfield took a different approach by focusing on the maps that the explorers themselves used and revealing how both the explorers and their patrons understood their expanding world and their place in it, what they were seeking and how they thought they could achieve it, and how they integrated new knowledge into their evolving world view.

The maps in Mapping the World present the geographical ideas of the time, making plain the power that came with increasing technical and geographical knowledge. They also serve as evocative and poignant reminders of the limited knowledge of these explorers, for up until very recent times (as these maps show) there have been areas of the world remaining to be explored and new found lands to discover. This lavishly illustrated book progresses chronologically, starting with the explorers of the ancient world, covering the East, the New World, the Pacific, Australia and the Modern Era. It will enrich our understanding of the voyages of discovery undertaken over the past 2000 years and will delight any map or history lover (like me). I’m very pleased with myself for renewing my Folio Society membership in whatever year this book was offered and am glad that this ornament to exploration now adorns my bookshelf.

“Legends from the End of Time”, by Michael Moorcock

347 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041899

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. Legends from the End of Time was the thirteenth in this series featuring a variety of characters, and includes the tales Pale Roses, White Stars, Ancient Shadows, Constant Fire and Elric at the End of Time. Now, if you read Moorcock’s The Dancers at the End of Time (reviewed on July 30^th, 2024 – and shame on you if you didn’t), then I really can’t say what your reaction will be to this volume, seeing as it is mostly a continuation of that earlier work. While the stories work as stand-alone tales, you really lose something in their telling if you are not at least a little familiar with the backgrounds of these characters from Dancers.

 

Evidently taking time-off between grandiose Epics, Moorcock here offers a five-novella collection of stories that all take place in the oh-so-delightfully decadent End of Time that he introduced in his first collection, The Dancers at the End of Time. It pains me to say it, but getting through this collection was, most of the time, a trial, and I can’t put my finger on just why that is (it also explains why I haven’t individually reviewed the tales in question, like I did for Dancers; I just don’t have the heart, it would seem). These five stories all take place in the same time and setting that Dancers did and during the voyages undertaken by Jherek Carnelian and Amelia Underwood away from the same (thus, neither character really features in any of the tales, apart from one character or another referring to them now and then).

 

The stories themselves take some work, especially seeing that Mavis Ming – a very boring, very real (sadly) character that is difficult if not impossible to warm to – is at the center of so much; it’s as if she were the most-annoying character on a reality TV show who was then given her own spin-off show for no other reason than to desperately try to make her more relevant. It must be said that, in comparison with much of Moorcock’s work, Legends from the End of Time displays a lighter (dare I say, humorous?) touch; one reviewer even described this work as “Woodhouse crossed with Brecht”; don’t know about that, but anyway…sadly, the turgid writing style rather limits whatever lightness there may be, so that the farther you go in the collection the more you feel like you’re running a marathon through knee-deep mud in iron-banded shoes.

 

And all the while I kept reading and dragging myself through book after book, like the demented treasure-hunters on Oak Island, absolutely convinced that with the next book, the next page, the next paragraph I would strike gold – but sadly, all for naught; not even the Fireclown was a godsend, seeing as it was a distortion from the original series. The whole time I read on through some sense of obligation; I mean, Legends from the End of Time is book thirteen out of fifteen, and I’ve come this far, haven’t I? While the whole Eternal Champion mythos is present in a limited form in this work, this book is more of a side-hustle for Moorcock, a kind of literary attachment to his other, more grandiose books with their linked-but-separate stories and mythos. Many characters from those other works appear but, really, these stories really just feel like filler.

 

Except for Elric at the End of Time, which has the honor (?) of being the last Elric story written by Michael Moorcock (although we all know that isn’t true, don’t we?). In this story Elric arrives at the End of Time (having accidentally ejected himself from his native plane during a sorcerous battle; happens to us all, right?) and naturally assumes that he has ended up in the realm of Chaos. He has the misfortune of landing in the middle of a vast sculptural installation by Werther de Goethe, the Last Romantic: a giant skull in which a desert and a snowscape represent “Man’s Foolish Yearnings…His Greed, his Need for the Impossible, the Heat of his Passions, the Coldness which must Finally Overtake him” (the capitals are all Werther’s, which should give you an idea of how pretentious he is). Moorcock’s vivid imagining of the sybaritic society at the End of Time and the prose inflected with late Victorian aestheticism and comedy really works in this story, so different in tone from the other works found in this particular collection. It’s also fun to see Moorcock send up his own creations with genuine affection; the juxtaposition of Werther de Goethe’s innocent Sturm und Drang and Elric’s own heartfelt anguish is irresistible.

“And After the Fire”, by Lauren Belfer

 

464 pages, Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0062428516

Berlin, Prussia, 1783. Amid the city’s glittering salons aristocrats and commoners, Christians and Jews, mingle freely despite simmering anti-Semitism; here Sara Itzig Levy, a renowned musician, conceals the manuscript of an anti-Jewish cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, an unsettling gift to her from Bach’s son, her teacher, a work with a disturbing message that will haunt Sara and her family for generations to come. Berlin, Germany, 1945. At the end of World War II, American soldier Henry Sachs takes this same music manuscript from a seemingly deserted mansion. New York, America, 2010. Henry’s niece, Susanna Kessler, struggles to rebuild her life after a devastating act of violence on the streets of New York City; when Henry dies soon after, she uncovers the long-hidden music manuscript and becomes determined to discover what it is and to return it to its rightful owner, a journey that will challenge her preconceptions about herself and her family’s history while granting her an opportunity to finally make peace with the past…

When I assigned this book for the Fraser Public Library’s “Books on Tap” book club it put me in mind of Cloud Cuckoo Land (reviewed on September 7^th, 2023), what with its multigenerational tale of a work of artistry that transcended the ages and affected all who handled it in ways unimaginable to them. Whenever an author mixes real-life characters with invented ones, it can become problematic, as, along the way, they seem to forget that they did not invent them but that they actually existed and spoke and behaved in ways that do not conform to your story. But I didn’t get that with Belfer; her interpretations of historical figures, from Wilhelm Friedemann Bach to Sara Itzig Levy to all the others, acted – I think – the way in which the historical, real-life people would have in the situations Belfer put them in. More than just her interpretations, they were people whose motivations and purposes were spelled out, not by the author, but by the flesh-and-bone personas they really were; all Belfer had to do was plug them into her tale to make them live again.

But I do have some…issues with the writing. At times it has the feel of a juvenile romance, especially when Susanna Kessler (a stand-in for Lauren Belfer?) is being courted by two men at once; I mean, good for her and all, but the whole thing felt rather forced. Or when one character states that they prefer the Simone Dinnerstein’s interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” to Glenn Gould’s feels rather like Belfer is showing off her erudition. Or again, when she brings up Beethoven’s Cello Sonatas it is strange that she references the Cello Sonata No. 3 in A major (Op. 69) with Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 4 in C major (Op. 102) when No. 3 stands alone, both musically and temporally, suggests the author may not know as much about music as she thinks she does. And don’t get me started on the out-of-left-field pro-abortion rant, or the Lutheran professor spontaneously turning atheist or her pointless dig at the “supposed” American melting pot…ah, enough; there’s enough divisiveness in  the world, I should have been spared it in an escapist novel.

And After the Fire was, then, clearly written and always interesting, although I can’t shake the sensation that it fell a little short in some way. The various plot strands are all neatly tied up without too much drama or passion and the various conflicts get resolved or die down until we settle down to a very peaceful ending. A good book overall, if not a great one.

“Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator”, by Roald Dahl, illustrated by Joseph Schindelman

 

202 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0394924724

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is Roald Dahl’s sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (reviewed last week) and continues the story of young Charlie Bucket and Willy Wonka as they travel in…the Great Glass Elevator. Originally published eight years after Chocolate Factory, Glass Elevator picks up with Charlie and family aboard the flying Great Glass Elevator after Willy Wonka has rewarded him with the ownership of his chocolate factory.

The Elevator accidentally goes into orbit and Wonka docks them at the “Space Hotel USA”. Their interception of the hotel is mistaken by approaching astronauts and hotel staff in a Commuter Capsule and listeners on Earth – including Nathanial Greene, the President of the United States – as an act of space piracy and they are variously accused of being enemy agents, spies and aliens. Shortly after their arrival, they discover that the hotel has been overrun by dangerous, shape-changing alien monsters known as The Vermicious Knids – sound familiar?! – who cannot resist showing off and revealing themselves by using the five hotel elevators (with one Knid in each of them) and spell out the word SCRAM, giving the group time to evacuate. As the group leaves, a Knid follows the Great Glass Elevator and tries to break it open, but to no avail, which results in the Knid receiving a bruise on its backside and hungering for payback.

I could go on…but I won’t. While Dahl’s two other books have stayed with me because of their inherent maniacal madness, Glass Elevator…hasn’t. Honestly, I had to look this thing up and read the synopsis before an inkling of the book reasserted itself in my memory. I guess because it just doesn’t have the emotive power of the previous books. As a work on its own merits it’s alright, but it seems to be trying too hard to recapture the madcap magic of its predecessor and, in so doing, fails all the more. It all feels rather as if Dahl is just going through the motions by putting his characters through one outlandish situation after another and introducing one outrageous character back-to-back; while all of this worked for whatever reason in James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it just doesn’t here. The magic is gone and the crazy hijinks are all just puff and powder.

Ah, well, we still have two Dahl gems to cherish.

“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, by Roald Dahl, illustrated by Joseph Schindelman

 

176 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-9026110290

I don’t remember what I experienced first: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the book or “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” the movie adaptation of the same; what I do recall is that both latched onto my psyche in some way and hasn’t let go. Which is good. I guess. I hope…

Okay, then. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory concerns 11-year-old Charlie Bucket, his parents and four grandparents, who all live in poverty in a small house outside a town that is home to Willy Wonka’s world-famous chocolate factory. One day, Charlie’s Grandpa Joe tells him about the legendary and eccentric chocolatier and all the fantasy candies he made, until the other chocolatiers sent in spies to steal his secret recipes, forcing Wonka to close the factory. He reopened three years later but the gates remained locked, and nobody is sure who is providing the factory with its workforce (incidentally, Dahl based his story on his own childhood in the 1920s when Cadbury and Rowntree, England’s two largest chocolate makers, often tried to steal trade secrets from one another by sending spies, posing as employees, into the other’s factory). The next day, the newspaper announces that Wonka is reopening the factory to the public and has invited five lucky children to come on a tour after they find five Golden Tickets in five Wonka Bars…

You know the rest, right? Thought so. Just what is it about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, anyway? I mean, if you change the tone just a little bit it could be a horror story in which a maniacal chocoholic entices children to enter his factory where they are systematically murdered and used as the Secret Ingredient in a variety of addictive sweets. What I do know is that, just like Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (reviewed on _) it is a prototypically English work that is both mad and glorious. The setting is magical, the characters are outrageous and their fates certifiable – and I loved every second of it (book and movie, I must add). And to think it could have been even madder, as Dahl in fact cut some characters: Clarence Crump, Bertie Upside, Terence Roper, Marvin Prune, Wilbur Rice and Tommy Troutbeck didn’t make it, while Miranda Mary Piker became the subject of the short story Spotty Powder. And some locations didn’t make it either, like The Vanilla Fudge Room, The Warming Candy Room and The Children’s-Delight Room.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is just one of the reminders I sometimes need that I had a magical childhood filled with sunshine and daffodils in which nothing ever went wrong.

“James and the Giant Peach”, by Roald Dahl, illustrated by Nancy Erholm Burkert

 

160 pages, Alfred A Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0-394-91282-0

Sooooo…I should be honest and say I have not, in fact, read James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl; it was, rather, read to me in the 4^th Grade by Mrs. Roberts. But I figure that counts. Anyway…Dahl’s modern-day children’s classic is as eccentrically English as one could hope for, as you’ll see (*ahem*):

James Henry Trotter is a boy who lives happily with his parents in a house by the sea – until, that is, a carnivorous rhinoceros escapes from the zoo and eats his parents when he is 4-years-old (I know, right? Imagine hearing that shit when you’re only ten). James goes off to live with his aunts, the tall, thin and cruel Spiker and the short, fat and greedy Sponge, who, instead of caring for him, treat him with utter contempt, feed him improperly and force him to sleep on bare floorboards (could Dahl have made a more awful experience for his protagonist?). When he is seven, James meets a mysterious man who gives him a bag of magical crystals, instructing James to use them in a potion that would change his life for the better (I guess Dahl doesn’t know enough not to talk to strangers). However, on the way home he trips and spills the crystals, whence they dig themselves underground. This causes the nearby peach tree to produce a single peach which soon grows to the size of a house, and from there…

Well, you really should read the book yourself. As for me, when Mrs. Roberts read this to my class I think we all thought that it was bonkers…but in a good way. Giant peach? Talking insects? Peregrination via Prunus persica? It’s all good, man. The outrageousness of it all just seemed – I dunno, normal. I’m sure there were subtle insights and hidden meanings to a lot of what Dahl wrote, but I’ll be damned if I could discern them when I was 10 – or 50. What I recall was a jolly good time in which we followed the travels and travails of a boy the same age as us as he escaped a dire homelife to seek adventure with a supporting cast the likes of which we had never even dreamed of. And it worked; don’t know why it worked, but it did. And perhaps, just perhaps, this mad work of English whimsey awoke something within that allowed me to open up and see the world differently, a world in which a giant peach and insect friends was not mad but rather all too rational and, even, desirable.

Or maybe giant peaches populated by large, sentient insects was just cool.

“Peoples and Places of the Past: The National Geographic Illustrated Cultural Atlas of the Ancient World”, by The National Geographic Society

 

424 pages, The National Geographic Society, ISBN-13: 978-0870444623

My Dad got Peoples and Places of the Past: The National Geographic Illustrated Cultural Atlas of the Ancient World from somewhere when I was a kid and I liked it so much that, when I moved out of my parent’s house, I took it with me. Without asking. “Stole”, if you want to get all legal about it. And am I ever glad that I did. As a kid, I would take this book and just open it to a random page and marvel at what I was looking at. Being new to history as I was, I was astounded that the world didn’t begin the day I way born; indeed, seeing as how human history stretched back far longer than I could have imagined, some nights I just became numb with how ancient we were and wonder what happened to all of those vanished civilizations and how one could spend their life studying one or the other and still only scratch the surface of what they were seeking.

And now that I am seeing this book once again with adult eyes, I have to say that, while the nostalgia factor is strong, the book itself is rather weak, overall. This comes as no surprise as, with the number of oversized books like this one that are conglomerations of pictures and facts and charts and so on, they all tend to be just introductory works meant as broad overviews of their topics that are designed to whet the appetite of the prospective scholar. So in that regard, it is a brilliant success for, while not going in-depth into any one culture, it at least gives one general sense of the same. Mission accomplished, for while I’m still rather ignorant of many of the peoples who inhabit this work, this book was one of many that opened my eyes to the past and compelled me to banish my ignorance and learn more – something I am still doing today.