Category: books

Mr Darcy, you disappoint me!

Well, I finished “Mr Darcy, Vampyre” a few days ago, and I have to say, my initial impressions of it didn’t improve much.

*Spoilers below*

I’m no writer myself, or book critic, but I really didn’t think much of this. It seemed a bit of an awkward attempt to shoehorn in phrases that would have suited at the time when Pride and Prejudice was written, but don’t quite sit properly in with the rest of the writing.

There are a LOT of sections where everything’s rushed through with very basic description, eg. they unexpectedly have to cross the Alps, by mule, after an escape from a mob, wearing only what they had on. This would take a fair chunk of time, and be difficult, but what you get is a page and a half of “we went past glaciers…in a valley..up steep slopes, oh, it’s really pretty’ etc, with no information on timescale or how they made it over.

When they get to the other side there’s a bit about Elizabeth looking so wild and dirty that if Darcy hadn’t been known there they’d have been driven away from the Inn as vagrants. So she didn’t wash? Were they months crossing these mountains? Weeks? Days? It’s frustrating that this bit (which in itself should have been a massive adventure)

is skipped merrily over.

Time is totally odd…they start their wedding tour, and seem to spend months either travelling to locations, or living there, but it’s an eternal summer…even in Italy in November things are flowering and the weather is lovely. I have no idea what timescale this book is supposed to cover: 6 months, 9 months a year? More? We get ‘time passed in a swirl of soirees’ etc sort of statements, but never anything more detailed.

I was also driven nuts by all the brooding expressions, flickers of ‘darkness’ and tortured moments Darcy seemed to go through. Look – your book says he’s a vampire / vampyre in the title…we KNOW what he is, only Elizabeth doesn’t, and I’m pretty sure that by the time Darcy’s 150 years old he’s well able to control his facial expressions.

Elizabeth acts strangely – she randomly decides on complete strangers to ‘confide’ in, at points where the author must have decided that she needed to have Elizabeth ‘reassured’, so she won’t blow the plot too early, before she can be taken through some more nice stereotypes – the isolated, scary castle, the attack of the baying mob…

There is of course a looming menace in the form of the Old One, who is apparently the oldest vampire, and nobody knows where he came from or anything more about him. As expected, Darcy must fight him to save Elizabeth…and guess what? He doesn’t win, but the Old One is injured, enough that they can escape. And what gave Darcy the strength to battle this hugely powerful fiend? Oh yes: love. *yawn*. And that’s the last we hear of the Old One – the threat that’s been following them around Europe, trying to steal Elizabeth, is bested in a small fight in the forest and they escaped easily. Oh. That was it then?

And ageing. Darcy and his sister (and, it would appear, most of the world) are vampires. Darcy was 14 when turned, his sister much younger. Yet they’re both now either adult or thereabouts. Did they just decide to age to a certain point that they liked the feel of, then stop. But they state that part of the vampire curse is that they don’t age, so they couldn’t do that.

And the finale? Oh. Dear. God. We’ve entered cliché-ville: a ruined monastery / hidden Roman temple at an unknown location, marked by a distinctive tree and view (of course unknown to the aged and fragile teller of this tale (on his own a whole special cliché), but it just so happens Darcy fell into it while playing there as a child…dear God, did Darcy live everywhere in the world as a child?!? And was this as a vampire child, or a human child? Cos as a human child he lived in London, not Italy…oh, I give in), the chance to lift the curse Darcy’s under, an ancient cave, a fight with unseen monsters (which Darcy and another do, off screen as it were, and arrive back dishevelled but won’t speak about it..so WHY even put that in!!), petrified forests, unearthly glows, earthquakes, separation from the faithful guide / helper, a split second choice to be made, and in the end, of course, love triumphing over all.

Yadda yadda.

A new recession indicator in law firms?

Missing books.

You know the Library bought them.
You know they were on the shelf.
Now they’re missing.
And they ain’t been signed out on the system.
But someone out there has them.
So…first, you do a shelf check in the areas surrounding where it should be. People have a tendancy to see a gap in the approximate area where the book they borrowed came from, and just shove it back in there. Apparently, an alphabetical system of spine letters, and shelf edge guides stating the topic books in that area cover is too taxing on the brain. Obviously employment law books are just as at home nestled in with planning law as they would be with their other employment law book friends.
Then…you do the desk check of the likely culprits, all of whom deny ever having seen any book at all, let alone that specific one, or god forbid, that they actually used it. Sometimes they’ll even deny knowledge of its existence, and demand that it be passed to them when it’s found, as I’ve let them down by not reading their mind that they wanted it, and personally placing it in their hands the moment it arrived. It would appear that my mission in life is merely to falsely accuse innocent people of using books, and hide the books that come in from them so they can never use them. I am a bad librarian.
Then…you do the office-wide email, putting the author and title in the email headline so peeps can skim and delete the email without opening if it’s not relevant to them, to save them time. Now you sit back and wait for the flood out out-of-office emails to calm down before you can get on with anything.
Then…you get the “hilarious” email responses. Top replies include: I’m using it as a doorstop; I’m using it as a pillow; I took it home cos it’s my favourite; I took it home cos I have insomnia and it’ll help me sleep; I sold it on eBay; My dog ate it.
All of these are new and fresh, every time.
Then…you trawl around the local area via email, seeing if any nearby, friendly librarians would let you borrow their copy for a short time. This involves making winsome faces and partial begging. The things we do for our users…
Then…you go to an institutional, membership library, and borrow their copy…if they have it in. You may have to go and collect it personally, or it may be posted out to you. Either way, it’s not going to be with the requester instantly.
As you can imagine, all of this eats up time. So…while I’m happy that things are picking up, judging by the volume of books constantly being asked for…I WISH THEY’D SIGN THEM OUT!
😉

Darcy’s here…and he’s a vampyre

I received my copy of Mr Darcy, Vampyre on Wednesday, so made a start on it last night. So far, I’m not overly impressed: the writer seems to rush through things, hardly any description of what’s going on, more “he said, she said, they did”, but I don’t know if that’s just because they’re trying to hurry to get to the vampire bit, or if this is how it’s going to be throughout. And there’s all sorts of tortured expressions being displayed for fleeting moments, and brooding. I hate brooding, I do.

Also, there’s a LOT of familiarity assumed with Pride and Prejudice – it starts pretty soon after Pride and Prejudice finishes, so you’re assumed to know all the characters and names that are thrown in. I’m glad I had read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies not too long ago, so who most people were came back to me, and those characters are left behind by the end of the first chapter, but I did slow me down a fair bit: racking my memory to work out who people were!

Only 36 or so pages in though, and now they’re en route to Paris, so we’ll see if it improves.

Edinburgh International Book Festival – Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer

So, on Monday afternoon, it was time for the now-annual Scottish Law Librarians Group jaunt to the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Every year, the Committee try and decide on an event that’s as relevant to the members as possible (law related, Scottish issues, publishers with a Scottish interest), and at as convenient a time as possible…and that we can get enough tickets for. As you can imagine, that’s not always an easy trick, but I think we did well this year, and even managed to get a day when the mud was minimal, despite the signs warning us about it!

The event chosen was Michael Mansfield. The info’s gone from the site now, but it was:
Michael Mansfield Mon 31/08/2009
4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
From Ruth Ellis to Jean Charles de Menezes, Bloody Sunday to the
Marchioness disaster, Michael Mansfield has taken on many of the most
difficult cases of our times. The Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer recalls a
career defending the innocent (and sometimes the guilty), infuriating
the establishment and championing human rights, with wit, passion and
honesty.

He’s hit the headlines lately with his claims in his book that Princess Diana’s death was not an accident, but on Monday he was more concerned, as were the audience, with the implications of the recent release of Abedelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, or the Lockerbie Bomber. Michael Mansfield was in attendance at much of the original trial, and indeed, his book begins there, and he read to us a small sample to illustrate, so he has a wealth of knowledge about the case.

In advance of the release of the related documents on Tuesday, and the Parliamentary debate / motion today, he made various points about unanswered questions which he hoped would be raised in the debate:
Why was Megrahis appeal not expedited when it became clear that his condition was terminal, as it would have been in England. He waited 2 years for his appeal to go through, and in the end it was dropped. Who or what stopped the case being reviewed as a priority?
What was the evidence the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission on which based the referral of his case to appeal?
Why was he not returned to Libya on the Prisoner Transfer Agreement?
He also read from trial transcripts of the Maltese shopkeeper identification of Megrahi as the man who had made purchases in his shop. The shopkeeper seemed very unsure of himself, as is understandable. His initial identification of Megrahi was made 9 months after the alleged purchases, and the trial was 10 years after that event. As Mr Mansfield said, this is an incredbile timescale to be able to identify a man you served for 5 minutes. There was also confusion over when he saw photos of Megrahi, and the fact he identifed another individual, and changed his description of the suspect from interview to interview.
Mr Mansfield explained the concerns about where exactly the bomb had got onto the plane, and how it had got through security, wherever it had got on.
He believes no issues will be cleared up until there’s a proper, judicial enquiry, something which he feels the current Brown/Blair government will try to block.
Woven amongst these discussions (and often linking to his belief the Megrahi was failed by the system) were other interesting snippets. He spoke of the Oscar Slater case, a Scottish miscarriage of justice which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was heavily involved in righting, and which helped lead to the founding of the Scottish Appeal Court in the 1920s(apparently the English one had been founded earlier in response to a similar miscarriage of justice there in the 1900s – I’ve not got time to fact check either of these statements).
He was heavily involved in the Stephen Lawrence case, representing the family in the private prosecution, and wearing a ribbon during his appearance at the event. He again raised the issue of being able to identify properly a suspect, not only in Stephen Lawrence’s case, but also Megrahis. In both cases, idenitfication was based on one witness identification, and in Lawrences case, this was not enough.
Mr Mansfield then took questions from the audience.
The first asked about the Bloody Sunday enquiry, sitting for 10 years and not yet reporting, and whether this was why the Government tries to discourage public enquiries. His response was that that was a massive, historical enquiry involving thousands of witnesses, all of whom needed to be treated as being as important as each other. It was set up to fix what was seen as the whitewashing response of the first enquiry, so must be totally wide ranging. It’s now almost ready to report, and has acted almost like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and other countries, to allow those hurt to face those who inficted the hurt, and let their voice be heard.
Another (slightly odd – there’s always one) questioner pointed out the discrepancy in the height between Megrahi and the description given by his Maltese shopkeeper identifier. Mr Mansfield said that the height difference was understandable, few people are experts on height estimation, but his other descriptions were more seriously flawed.
Finally, he was asked about who’s in charge of security, and where does “the buck stop” when it goes wrong. Mr Mansfield agreed there were serious questons needing answered about who knows what, and when. He gave the example of the London bombings, when initially all the security services denied knowing anything about the lead bomber…and it’s since leaked out that at least some agencies did know about him…so why did’t they tell the others? And if it was true that they didn’t know anything…then what was the point of having these agencies at all?
So, despite the attempts of various police and ambulance sirens to drown him out at least three times (one of the joys of being in a marquee), Michael Mansfield treated us to an interesting discussion on the ins and outs of the legal process, and the innocent victims it can sometimes create.
And Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, supervised it all from above…I think his horse was a bit tired by this point…it’s been a long Festival.