A few recs

[tree_and_leaf]

I've just read the most Thrilling and Diverting book to cross my path in a long time - it is Philip Reeve's Larklight, a tale of conspiracy and threats to the British Empire, not to mention all Life on Earth, set in an alternate Victorian era where an alchemist's fortunate discovery allowed the exploration of space to begin in the seventeenth century. It's narrated by the hero, a boy strangely reminiscent of Oswald Bastable, and features terrifying monsters and villains, dashing pirates, intersting alien life forms, and a wonderful account of the origins of the earth, all told with wit, splendidly Victorian prose, and a host of literary in-jokes (why not visit the Goblin Market? Why not, indeed). It's a children's book, but none the worse for that, and the illustrations add a great deal to the feel of it, especially the mocked up adverts provided in the end-papers.

Temeraire by Naomi Novik, in which the Napoleonic War is proceeding much as it did in our universe, only with the addition of dragons, is almost as much fun. An officer of His Majesty's Navy finds himself coping with an initially unwanted career switch to dragon rider. The heart of the book, which is somewhat episodic, is really the developing bond between Our Hero and his dragon, Temeraire, which is rather movingly done. The author, an American, attempts and generally pulls off modified nineteenth century style, though the Brit picker thanked in the acknowledgements missed a few rather grating phrases (I find 'accomodations', in the sense of lodgings, odd enough, and I can't imagine it on the lips of Jno Aubrey). But it's a really imaginative idea well executed, and I personallu can't resist the combination of ships of the line and dragons.

On another note entirely, even though we're into the latter part of Christmas this year, I can't forbear to recommend the North of England radical folk singers Coope Boyes & Simpson with Fi Fraser, Jo Freya & Georgina Boyes two Christmas albums, 'Voices at the Door' and 'Fire and Sleet and Candlelight'. They offer a mix of the Yorkshire pub carol tradition with more modern music, much of it with a good radical slant, as in their chilling rendition of the Charles Causley poem 'Innocents' Song' Their spirited renditions of the pub carols bring to a wider audience a tradition of music which is not widely known outside its immediate context, and which continues to this day: musically distinctive, and offerning a different perspective on Christmas from both the Nine Lessons and Carols service and the commercial inanities of the high street - though it's obviously closer to the former, but much less refined and tidied up. In fact, it's what the mostly Anglo-Catholic championing of carols was trying to tap into - but it's good to see that the enrichment of church music and life by the adoption of the carol style at Christmas didn't mean that the tradition didn't cease to exist everywhere in its original form, the slightly anarchic wassail.

All the same, please don't believe the story, propagated by Thomas Hardy in his otherwise excellent Under The Greenwood Tree that it was the Tractarians who destroyed the old style of carol singing. By and large industrialisation that did that. The C of E, or at least certain parts of it, having belatedly realised what had been lost by driving out the old music at the Reformation, actually saved the carol, though it has to be admitted that they tidied it up a lot. Better than oblivion, all the same...