the Infinite and the Divine

This book is a Warhammer 40,000 novel by Robert Rath, and I have to say it's hands-down the funniest book from within that fictional universe that I've read.

    Without wanting to give too much away... Trazyn "the Infinite" is a collector of things. He has entire planets that are basically his own private museums. Any nifty or esoteric new artefact that he can acquire is highly desirable. Meanwhile Orikan "the Diviner" is a fore-seer of futures. He has honed skills in temporal manipulation to the point that the line between him predicting a prophetic truth and him making it happen is - well, blurry. Both of the characters are necrons, and though in their original organic forms they were fairly close friends, over the millions of years of soulless existence their relationship has turned into a bitter and spiky rivalry. When the promise of a new treasure emerges, one that Trazyn craves for his own collection as deeply as Orikan suspects he can wangle to be instrumental in the future of the race, the pair enter a series of calamitous and frankly hilarious clashes of one-upmanship in trying to get their hands on this mysterious object, and while as you probably expect from a 40k novel about beings who are literally millions of years old the story does build to a shocking and epic climax, the meat of this novel is in the games Trazyn and Orikan play in outwitting and outmanoeuvring each other over literal millennia. The lives of lesser beings such as humans are used as far as they can be and then discarded without a century's thought. I'm not joking when I say how funny this book is - some of the dialogue is solid gold. I'd always thought of the necrons as characterless ancient-Egypt-wannabe robot whatevers but Rath in this novel really drives home how crazy eccentric you can get as an immortal stick kicking about in the Milky Way when they last time you had actual flesh stegosaurus was still doing its thing on Earth, and here you are, still just building a museum full of cool stuff you can find, or devising algorithms to see a few millennia into the future. There is a particularly funny moment when Trazyn, in one of his historic visits to a human world, was mistaken for a Space Marine and so had a statue to him built by the grateful locals; Orikan is unimpressed and the pair have a very silly argument about ego. There is an even funnier moment when Orikan has set up a convoluted ritual and Trazyn sabotages him by using a Pokéball* to unleash a genestealer on him for a prank, which not only ruins Orikan's ritual but means that they next time the pair visit that planet a few decades later the genestealer has successfully planted a tyranid cult and doomed the world. Sorry if these are spoilers but I felt like I needed to give a couple of examples of exactly what these guys get up to. They're essentially just a very elderly pair of close friends who have been through enough dumb stuff alongside each other over the years that they kind of hate each other but love to do so because they find the rest of the galaxy dumb enough in comparison to themselves that, both always ending up generally on top of it, they can bear each others' interference in their own inclinations. They kind of remind me of that duo of old men in The Muppets who are just constantly heckling from the balcony. They're the equivalent of those guys for the 40k universe.

    Anyway - even if you have zero familiarity with Warhammer 40,000 if you're halfway able to dive into unfamiliar science fiction and let it just wash over you, I reckon you'd probably really enjoy this. You'd probably enjoy it more if you are familiar with the universe - it doesn't have a great deal of wider lore implications but there are a bunch of easter eggs in there, but whatevs if that's not what draws you to it and you just want a funny story about a petty feud between a pair of ancient robots having dramatic unforeseen consequences.

* Necron tech is so ridiculously advanced. Yeh basically Trazyn has these tiny little cubes of matter-condensing meta-space that do function more or less exactly like Pokéballs - mind you, Pokéballs that can capture entire armies to be stored at Trazyn's behest until he's in a tight spot and needs to fart out six random enemy cohorts to distract whatever's inconveniencing him. Dude doesn't give the slightest of shits.

Poems on the Underground

This book, edited by Judith Chernaik, Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert, is a collection of the poems that have been being displayed on the London Underground for the last few years. It's a brilliant means of injecting enjoyable, brief spurts of accessible art to the public sphere and I am greatly in applause of it as an initiative.

    The range of poems are all quite short, as one would expect, as they are all selected to be readable by people who might merely be hopping onto the Tube for a stop or two, but they are all powerful pieces of poetic form and their diversity in theme is satisfyingly broad. Though I can't estimate how many actual poems have graced the walls of the Underground since this scheme came into being, the two hundred or so of them scraped together for this published collection are organised neatly into a sequence of categories: love, London, the wider world, exile and loss, seasons, the natural world, families, "out there", dreams, music, sense and nonsense, the darker side, war, the artist as "maker", the poet as prophet, and finally a defence of poetry itself. There is a rewarding diversity of names benefiting this collection too, from such Romantic stalwarts as Williams Blake and Wordsworth to more modern figures like Carol Ann Duffy or William Carlos Williams to four or five dozen artists I'd never heard of.

    While obviously the preferred mode of encountering these poems would have been when one is bleary-eyed, coffee-hazed, and lacklustrely dreading another drudging day of work in the grim smog of our capital, and thus in great need of a random poem to drag your mind into spaces more transcendent than it currently finds itself - reading them all together in a book like this was still a special experience. I liked imagining how my commute may have been transformed in profoundly different ways depending on whether I'd read Siegfried Sassoon's Everyone Sang or Judith Wright's Rainforest on a particular morning, and the subtle (or not!) impact that may have had on my mindset for the rest of the day. A daily injection of poetry, especially for those who might not consider themselves especially fans of the art form, can be something unpredictable and transformative, and so I am very excited that this is a thing that happens. I look forward to my next trip to London on the off-chance that I see one of these plastered in-between the Tube maps above the doors of the subway trains, in place of an inevitable advert for a department store sale or an insurance firm. Even in lieu of reading them in their intended habitat however I think this book is a worthwhile and well-selected collection of quality poetry. Recommended for enjoyers of the form.

the Damnation Document

This book is - well, it's actually a report from the organisation called thirty-one eight - who are specialized in investigating abuses within churches. I'm including it on this blog as it was at least as long as many books I've read and has far more content. As regular readers will know, I am a committed Christian - and as more attentive readers may know, my relationship with the church I grew up in deteriorated quite viciously toward my exit from that congregation.

   I'm not going to make a huge song-and-dance about everything in this post. I left The Crowded House for my own reasons, though I'm sure they were folded into manifold other factors going on within that church that made it spiritually unsustainable for me to stay. Anyway, the title of this post is simply what I've been thinking of this report as - I read the first quarter of it way back when it came out and broke down in tears, but I've finally psyched myself up to read the whole thing so I could have a coherent backwards opinion. And I am sure I made the right choice in leaving. This is a book review blog, not a church-dissection blog, so I'm going to eschew any personal commentary here; if you are interested in what was awry in my home church the link is right there above.