Mark Twain does time travel

I've been reading around time travel quite a lot lately, and have just finished Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It came as quite a surprise.

I'd read the usual suspects when it came to Mark Twain, but my memories of this time travelling tale mainly came from seeing the old 40s/50s movie on the TV as a boy and very much enjoying it. At least, I thought I did. While I remembered the time traveller's use of a handy solar eclipse he just happened to know about to save himself for death, most of the rest of my memories were false. This is because I'd conflated the film with Danny Kaye's superb medieval vehicle The Court Jester. So in my mind, Kaye was the time traveller, and the film featured the catch phrase 'Get it? Got it? Good!' and that wonderful tongue twisting schtick about the vessel with the pestle/the chalice from the palace and so on. In fact it was Bing Crosby in the real film, totally wiped from my memory by Kaye.

However, either way, the movie was a frothy confection of lightweight fun. Not so the book. Twain uses it to lecture us repeatedly on a number of his bugbears. He takes on slavery (still extant in the Southern US during the early part of his lifetime), supports the free market over protectionism, knocks down the whole business of someone being more important because of birthright - and perhaps most vitriolic of all, leads a frontal assault on the Catholic church. He's not anti-Christian, but wants to replace it with a wide range of non-Established protestant sects so the church can't do any harm.

There is humour - a fair amount of it. But there's also hanging, burning at the stake, slaves dying in chains,and in the apocalyptic finale, the hero with 53 helpers takes on and slaughters 25,000 knights, using dynamite, electric fences and Gatling guns. This is certainly no Once and Future King style 'right is better than might' - here it's 'high tech might is better than swords and armour might.'

There are few bits it's necessary to skip over, but mostly it's still highly readable, and a fascinating mix of story and social/political tract. If you haven't read it, dig out a copy - it's still in print. See at amazon.co.uk and amazon.com

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

Search This Blog