The 72nd-Best of One Hundred Possible Worlds

For the past couple weeks I've been obsessing over statistics and possible outcomes-- for obvious reasons. Donald Trump is the President of the United States, an outcome that some people attributed a 1% chance to. Now, I am a statistical novice (stats was my least favorite high school math class, except for geometry), but I do like numbers. Put something into an Excel spreadsheet, and I am fascinated

I've been reading FiveThirtyEight since this fall; I know it's been around since 2008, and I discovered it in 2012 (my wife: "he doesn't say it, but I'm pretty sure this guy's a Bayesian"), but it was the utter mess of the Republican primary, and the fact that I felt more invested in the Democratic primary than I had been, that shifted me into being a regular reader of the site. Yet Nate Silver was as wrong as many others, predicting a Clinton win that turned out to be mistaken.

As opposed to Nate Silver, Scott Adams predicted a Trump landslide win. So Scott Adams was clearly right and Nate Silver was clearly wrong.

Or was he? Nate Silver's final forecast was that Clinton had a 71% chance of being elected president. He wasn't predicting a Clinton win; he was predicting that if there are 100 possible president elections, Clinton wins 71 of them. Was he wrong? We could be residing in one of the 29 other worlds. How would we know? How is it possible to know that?

Scott Adams may have said Trump would win-- but he said that Trump would win in a landslide. I'm not exactly sure how big is a landslide is, but I am pretty sure that slightly losing the popular vote isn't one. Also, not to get too ad hominem here, but Silver's prediction was based on polling, and you could have faith in it based on past success-- Adams's claim to fame is writing the comic strip Dilbert. I enjoy the bits where they belittle Asok the intern as much as the next guy, but it hardly requires intellectual rigor. My instincts tell me that despite appearances, Silver was more right than Adams.

The thing that bothers me is that there's no way to be sure. To my eyes, it looks like the final popular vote margin was within the "80% chance of falling in range" section on the final FiveThirtyEight prediction. And, you know, if Silver believed an event he predicted as having 71% probability, that would mean he would be wrong about three of every ten times. This is the third presidential election Silver's predicted, and 71% * 3 = 2. So it seems he was due to get it wrong. I guess if he calls the next seven elections wrong, we'll have more room to doubt him.

It seems very possible to me that Nate Silver wasn't wrong in any meaningful sense. But who knows-- we could be living in one of those 29 other worlds, or we could be living in one of 99 worlds that Trump won. Or maybe the guy who said Clinton had a 99% chance of winning was right, and we're in the one world where Trump won. It seems unlikely... but surely that's what the very meaning of "unlikely" implies, that it can happen.

I'm just waiting for the Nate Silver Plan.*

So I guess this is what bothers me about statistics. We don't just say events will or won't transpire; we assign them probabilities, but we have no way of testing that those probabilities were right. We can only say that the event did or did not transpire. We're a long way off from psychohistory.

Presidential elections just aren't repeatable in the same way as many events we assign probabilities to. In All-Star Superman, Superman has a machine in the Fortress of Solitude where he can create virtual worlds to find out what they would be like. (He does it to find out what a world without Superman would be like.) But short of having one hundred of those on hand, and setting each one to run through November 8, 2016 again, we have no way of verifying these predictions.

Though, maybe, we're in one of those simulations. After all, what are the odds?

* Alternate caption: I guess Trump is just the Mule of Nate Silver's psychohistorical predictions.

Review: New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction edited by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox

Hardcover, 362 pages
Published 2008

Borrowed from the library

Read September 2013

New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction

edited by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox

If I've counted right, this book collects twenty-three essays about "political science fiction." If that sounds like a broad thing to you, as isn't nearly all science fiction political the moment it imagines a different social world, then think of it as being about politics in science fiction. Of course, like any book of this type, some are good, and some are not good. Of the twenty-one essays, there are ten I recorded no notes for, which is its own sort of indictment. But here are some things of note I did record:

• I liked Lisa Yaszek's "Not Lost in Space: Revising the Politics of Cold War Womanhood in Judith Merril's Science Fiction," especially for its discussion of the link between apocalypse and the peaceful/rational future.
• Darko Suvin is always thought-provoking, and though his essay has the cumbersome title of "Of Starship Troopers and Refuseniks: War and Militarism in U.S. Science Fiction, Part I (1945-1974: Fordism)," his points about the way the military dominates technoscience and technoscience dominates the military, and how this plays out in science fiction, are well-taken. I also liked his argument that both Ursula K. Le Guin and Joe Haldeman refuse the "linear time of progress" (135).
• Doug Davis's "Science Fiction Narratives of Mass Destruction and the Politics of National Security" argues that even anti-war sf relies on some of the same assumptions as militarism.

The book also reminded me, as often happens but I haven't yet acted upon, that I should read Iain M. Banks's Culture novels and China Miéville's Bas-Lag novels.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Birds of Prey, Part XX: Team 7: Fight Fire with Fire

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2013 (contents: 2012-13)
Borrowed from the library
Read June 2016

Team 7, Volume 1: Fight Fire with Fire

Writers: Justin Jordan, Tony Bedard

Artists: Jesús Merino, Julius Gopez, Pascal Alixe, Marlo Alquiza, Gui Balbi, Juan Castro, Ron Frenz, Drew Geraci, Scott Hanna, Rob Hunter, José Marzan Jr., Norm Rapmund, Cliff Richards, Jimbo Salgado
Colorists: Nathan Eyring, Nei Ruffino

Letterers: Carlos M. Mangual, Pat Brosseau, Taylor Esposito, Rob Leigh

I picked this up because it covers some of the backstory of the New 52 version of Black Canary, and was released alongside volumes 2 and 3 of the New 52 Birds of Prey. The first and only volume of Team 7 is set five years in the past relative to them, and chronicles Dinah Drake's membership on the U.S. government special ops team known as Team 7. If you're looking to pick up this volume for backstory on Dinah, what you get here is a mixed bag. On the one hand, I liked the glimpses we get of between Dinah and her boyfriend Kurt Lance, especially in the first couple issues, where they go on a few missions together. They have a fun, playful banter, and the convince as a pair who like to both work and play together. Unfortunately, as the team assembles, the focus goes off their relationship, to the extent that it is revealed in an offhand comment from a teammate that they got married between issues.

In fact, the banter between Kurt and Dinah is probably the only good banter Justin Jordan writes. The rest of the dialogue is so generic.
from Team 7 vol. 2 #0 (script by Justin Jordan, art by Jesús Merino with Norm Rapmund & Rob Hunter)

An ongoing thread of Birds of Prey has been that Dinah is wanted for the murder of Kurt, which happened three years prior. Here, he dies five years ago in the heat of battle, when the team pours all its energy into Dinah's canary cry, and Kurt is among those killed in the blast. I can see why she would feel guilty, but there's no logical way she could have ended up wanted for murder based on what happened here. Plus, from a storytelling perspective, the death of Kurt just doesn't have the weight it needs to be effective, their relationship being too underdeveloped and the moment itself being too tossed off.

Review: The Transformers: Regeneration One, volume I by Simon Furman, Andrew Wildman, and Stephen Baskerville

Comic PDF eBook, n.pag.
Published 2013 (contents: 2012)
Acquired August 2014
Read May 2016

The Transformers: Regeneration One, volume I

Writer: Simon Furman
Penciler: Andrew Wildman
Inker: Stephen Baskerville
Colorist: John-Paul Bove
Letterer: Chris Mowry

This is sort of an odd jump. The last volume of The Transformers Classics in the IDW Humble Bundle went up to issue #50 of the Marvel run; this begins with issue #80.5. It's been thirty issues since I left off, and in the interim, peace has been declared, Optimus Prime has grown old and depressed, and the Decepticons are plotting their return to power.

Now, I don't know what Simon Furman's run on the original Transformers comic was like, but this feels much more like a comic of the 2010s than one of the 1980s, with its bloated, decompressed storyline, and unrelenting grimness. Say what you will about Marvel's Transformers comics (and I have), but under Bob Budianksy, at least, they were always fun. This story here-- where we learn, among other things, that the population of Earth is dead, including most of the human cast of the 1980s comic-- doesn't really capture the spirit of the tales it's supposedly a follow-up to. I'm not opposed to darkness in Transformers; some of the IDW stuff I've read so far gets quite dark, but this is darkness without nuance or interest, the sort of adolescent grimness you get if you watch the first two seasons of Torchwood.

Let's take the nicest nice guy of all the Autobots and put him in PERPETUAL LIVING TORMENT.
from The Transformers: Regeneration One #83

I admit that I'm probably not the target audience for this (I've never read a Simon Furman Transformers comic before, though on the other hand, I do love Kup), but I didn't find much to enjoy here.

Next Week: That's the end of the G1 continuity (that I own), so we go back to the beginning, back to the era when Cybertron was under the control of an Autocracy!

H. G. Wells at 150: A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy

Hardcover, 400 pages
Published 2015

Borrowed from the library

Read August 2016

A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy
by Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield

In the Postscript to his autobiography, H. G. Wells discusses when his long-running affair with the Baroness Moura Budberg (1891-1974) should have come on an end. He had met Moura in Russia, while visiting the writer Maxim Gorky. Many years later, she and he were lovers, and he had proposed marriage after the death of his second wife-- which she rejected. She also refused to come back to Russia with him, saying it was impossible but refusing to elaborate. When Wells went to Russia, with his son Gip instead, Wells was chatting with Gorky and his interpreter. Wells said something about how Moura couldn't be there, and the interpreter said it was a shame, because Wells had just missed her-- she'd been by the previous week. And, indeed, had been in Russia multiple times in recent years.

It's a sort of lurching moment: Wells's world drops away from him. The woman he was in love with enough to propose marriage to (and remember, Wells slept with lots of women) had been systematically lying to him for years. Wells can't take it, especially when she can't or won't explain, and he tries to break up with her. Except that every time she comes back into his life, he accepts her again. The end of the Postscript is a sporadically updated diary from the last decade of Wells's life, and Moura keeps on returning, and despite it all, Wells takes her back, and she was with him until the end of his life.

H. G. Wells, Maxim Gorky, and Moura Budberg in 1920
from mourabudberg.com

Wells died not knowing the whole truth of Moura Budberg, but I did a little research upon finishing the Postscript and discovered that she was a Russian spy, and that in 2015, there'd been a biography of her published, collating previously unaccessible letters and archives. It's a fascinating read.

Moura wasn't a spy in the James Bond sense-- she didn't go on undercover missions in foreign countries for the Kremlin. Rather, she was a popular social presence, and that was occasionally mined for the advantage of various parties with whom she needed to curry favor. Through her first husband's family, she had ties to the Germanophile Russian community; after the Bolshevik Revolution, she threw tons of parties for them and funneled information she acquired back to the Russian government. This is the kind of spying she did for most of her life.

Her life is pretty fascinating. She was a member of the upper classes, but managed to survive the rise of Communism by being useful to the new government-- not just through spying, as she became the lover of Alexander Kerensky, leader of the provisional Russian revolutionary government. McDonald and Dronfield paint a bleak and terrifying picture of revolutionary Russia, showing just how dangerous and desolate it was, as well as how politically fraught, as various political factions moved to consolidate power. Moura was both spied on by the Cheka (the counter-counterrevolutionary police) and spied for them.

Moura c. 1930
from Bibelots London

Moura had connections to the U.K. from her youth, and fell in with Bruce Lockhart, the unofficial British ambassador in Russia. (The U.K. recalled its embassy staff because it couldn't be seen to officially endorse Bolshevism, but it dearly needed Russia on its side against Germany, so Lockhart was sent to do what he could unofficially.) The two became lovers (even though both were married), just another of Moura's significant lovers, which would go on to include Wells and Gorky.*

McDonald and Dronfield cover all the extant facts about Moura, weaving them together into a compelling narrative that goes from the Revolutionary days (1916-19 get a whole 280 pages to themselves in a 340-page narrative), to the mysterious death of her husband, from her time spent selling Russian treasures abroad to obtain funds for the Soviet government to her second marriage (one of convenience, to an Estonian baron), from her time working for the BBC's propaganda department during World War II to her postwar career as a screenwriter and script doctor for Alexander Korda. There is a lot of information packed into here, extensively endnoted. I didn't always always read the endnotes, but they show that McDonald and Dronfield worked hard to sift through the many disparate accounts of Moura's life. (Moura being one of the most unreliable sources of all, given her propensity for storytelling.) Many of the endnotes are devoted to criticizing the previous biography of Moura, by Nina Berberova.

Once I adjusted to the density of the book (I always find biographies slow going, but in a sort of good way), I found the book incredibly interesting-- but I don't know that I understand Moura as a person. Perhaps no one can, given how prone she was to exaggeration, and how much she kept secret. What did she think of her time spying? The key moment, it seems to me, is almost completely skipped over, I assume because we just don't know anything about it. Suddenly she is spying on the Germanophiles for the Soviet government. But how was she recruited, and did she feel bad about the deceit this entailed? Moura never said, and neither did anyone else, so we have no way of knowing. There were similar moments like this throughout the book. At one point the authors speculate that she may have had a role in the death of her first husband... but there's no way we can ever really know, just as we will never know what role she played in the death of Gorky and its aftermath.

Moura in 1971
from Wikipedia

Moura kept so much of herself hidden-- except from Lockhart, for whom she threw a lavish Russian Orthodox funeral that no one else attended-- that even when we know what she did, it's difficult to know what she thought and felt of it. But that's a problem beyond McDonald and Dronfield's capacity to solve, I suspect, and not a dint on this well-researched tome.

Next Week: A detour back into Wells's fiction, as I partake of The Food of the Gods!

* That isn't it for Moura's relations to famous folk: her niece/adopted daughter was the grandmother of Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. from 2010 to 2015.

"Aggressive, Adversarial": My Year of Baseball

I am pretty sure I saw more baseball games in the past year than in the previous eight.

I'm not much of a sports person per se-- if I'd still been in high school when the "sportsball" meme was coined, I suspect I'd've been an obnoxious use of it-- but baseball is probably my favorite sport to watch. It requires just the right amount of attention, as it alternates sort of casual moments with scenes of high drama, meaning you can tune in an out as you chatter with your friends. The rules are complicated enough to be interesting, but not so complicated as to make the sport into cricket.

Because of trips and visits, my wife and I saw four games in-person this summer, which already set a record for me: the Cleveland Indians at the Boston Red Sox, the Fort Wayne TinCaps at the Lake County Captains, the Baltimore Orioles at the Cleveland Indians, and the Brooklyn Cyclones at the Connecticut Tigers. The first three were with my in-laws; my wife's father and brother are both big baseball fans. The last one was mostly because my wife and I wanted to see Connecticut's new minor league team, the Hartford Yard Goats, but their stadium isn't done yet, so we had to settle. My wife isn't a baseball fan in the sense that she obsessively follows the sport, but it has a lot of nostalgic associations for her. (My childhood associations are mostly my dad forcing me to play ghost baseball with him. He always won.)

At all four games we saw this summer, the team we were rooting for lost. Sometimes quite badly, as in the case of the Tigers. That game was over so quickly it was embarrassing. But I enjoyed all four games. Though, as someone who grew up in a National League town, this whole "designated hitter" thing is complete bullshit. The whole point of baseball is that the same people do defense and offense. Step up to the plate!

But now in the fall, baseball has reared its head again. No more in-person games, but we watched one of the pennant games and several World Series games on television (or on the radio) because my wife's beloved Cleveland Indians were in it. This gets me excited too. And the fact that the 2015-16 primary election turned me into a FiveThirtyEight aficionado means that suddenly I'm reading tons of articles on baseball as long as they mention the Indians, and now I finally understand the concept of relief pitchers. The Indians have played some great games, and some awful ones, and who would have guessed that Game Seven of the World Series would be so exciting. What a comeback, even if they didn't win in the end.

Outside of the fun of actually attending games, I think I like baseball's sense of history. I remember watching Ken Burns's Baseball on PBS as a kid, and hailing from Cincinnati, I'm of course proud that we're home to the first professional team, even if the current Reds are really the third team of that name, and there are just so many goofy stories in the early days of baseball. (Or even later. I just distracted myself in the middle of writing this by reading about Nippon Professional Baseball on Wikipedia.)

If I was seriously into a sport, it would be baseball... though it's hard to imagine myself being seriously into a sport!

Now this is my kind of baseball.
(Seriously, this is one of my favorite Star Trek episodes, even more so now that I've watched it with my wife.)

Review: Adverbs by Daniel Handler

Trade paperback, 272 pages
Published 2007 (originally 2006)
Acquired October 2008
Read December 2014

Adverbs by Daniel Handler

When I teach genre classes, I like to conclude with an "edge case" for the genre, one that pushes my students to make a claim as to whether or not the book fits the genre, which in doing so forces to them to articulate what the genre is. When I taught The Modern Novel, I ended with Daniel Handler's Adverbs, which you might define as a collection of linked short stories, yet the cover of my HarperPerennial edition, at least, claims the subtitle A NOVEL. Though the book is not unified in terms of plot, a number of characters recur (or seem to recur) between stories, and there are recurrent motifs, like pop songs and birds, that bring unity to the book, beyond the fact that the whole book is a meditation on one topic, that of love.

Handler does tie much of the book together in the chapter "Truly," which is more of an essay about the rest of the book (it reminds me of the half chapter in Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a novel similarly on the edge of novel-ness). In "Truly," Handler suggests both that the book is unified and that you're a bit foolish for chasing the unification:

Nobody keeps score, because there's no sense in keeping track of what everything is doing. You might as well trace birds through a book, [...] or follow the pop songs that stick in people's heads or follow the people themselves, although you're likely to confuse them, as so many people in this book have the same names. You can't follow all the Joes, or all the Davids or Andreas. You can't follow Adam or Allison or Keith, up to Seattle or down to San Francisco or across-- three thousand miles, as the bird flies-- to New York City, and anyway they don't matter. (193-4)

I would argue, then, that the book is unified by its very lack of unity: the reader of Adverbs seeks coherence in an incoherent universe, much as all the characters in the book do. And creating coherence in an incoherent universe, or at least raising the spectre of coherence and then destroying it, is precisely what the novel is all about. (My students liked the book, and did indeed say it was a novel, but I think maybe they just wanted the discussion to end so that class would be over.)

Faster than a DC Bullet: Birds of Prey, Part XIX: Your Kiss Might Kill

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2013 (contents: 2012)
Borrowed from the library
Read May 2016

Birds of Prey, Volume 2: Your Kiss Might Kill

Writer: Duane Swierczynski

Artists: Travel Foreman, Jesus Saiz, Javier Pina, Jeff Huet, Timothy Green II, Joseph Silver, Cliff Richards, Romano Molenaar, Vicente Cifuentes 
Colorists: June Chung, Gabe Eltaeb, Chris Sotomayor

Letterers: Carlos M. Mangual, Dave Sharpe

I just reread my review of Duane Swierczynski's previous volume of Birds of Prey, which indicates I enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm sad to say that the same cannot be said of this muddled, unfocused volume. The book begins by tying up the story begun in the previous volume. I think so, anyway, as it's been three years since I read it, and Swierczynski does little to reorient the reader. It's pretty unsatisfying. I thought Black Canary formed the Birds of Prey to take down some bigger threat, but here the bad guys are just after her-- for murder! (Of her husband, no less.) Which hardly makes them "bad," though their methods are pretty over the top. But one giant fire/explosion, and this plot line is completely over, which seems a little easy.

Good guys without superpowers can jump out of exploding buildings and be unharmed.
from Birds of Prey vol. 3 #8 (art by Jesus Saiz & Javier Pina)

The book then becomes a series of weird detours, made worse by the fact that regular artist Jesus Saiz departs and is replaced by Travel Foreman, who is just... not great. His action is blocky and without energy, and his characters start out looking a little too posed and get worse and worse across the course of the volume. His first story is about a "Talon" of the "Court of Owls": all derived from an exciting Batman crossover, I'm sure, but it comes out of total left field within this book. It hooks into the ongoing narrative of Birds of Prey, though, as it ends with Poison Ivy being grievously injured taking out the Talon, and Black Canary fulfills a promise she made to her ("months ago," apparently, even though I think this team could only have possibly been together a couple weeks by internal chronology) to take her to the jungle. Batgirl comes along too-- I guess she's joined the Birds?

Reading Roundup Wrapup: October 2016

Pick of the month: Exodus by Terrance Dicks. On the one hand, pure hackwork... on the other hand, if you want great Doctor Who hackwork, hire Terrance Dicks. Not the best Doctor-Who-does-the-Nazis story (that's either Just War or one of Big Finish's Klein tales), but if you want the Doctor pretending to be a Nazi plus Hitler is secretly an alien but in a way much better than how they did it on The Tomorrow People, this is your book.

All books read:
1. DC Comics: Zero Year by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, and John Layman, with Greg Pak, Marguerite Bennett, Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, Marc Andreyko, Christy Marx, Francis Manapul & Brian Buccellato, Jeff Lemire, Van Jensen with Robert Venditti, and Kyle Higgins
2. Talkback: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Doctor Who Interview Book, Volume One: The Sixties edited by Stephen James Walker
3. Infestation v.1 by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, and Mike Raicht
4. The Life of H. G. Wells: The Time Traveller by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie
5. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence: After The Long Goodbye by Masaki Yamada
6. Infestation v.2 by Scott Tipton, David Tipton, Erik Burnham, Dan Abnett, and Andy Lanning
7. The Merritt Parkway: The Road That Shaped a Region by Laurie Hess & Jill Smyth
8. DC Comics: The New 52 by Geoff Johns, Dan Jurgens, Brian Azzarello, Francis Manapul & Brian Buccellato, J. T. Krul, Ethan Van Sciver & Gail Simone, Tony S. Daniel, Eric Wallace, Paul Jenkins, Grant Morrison, George Pérez, Scott Lobdell, Michael Green & Mike Johnson, Scott Snyder, Tony S. Daniel, J. H. Williams III & W. Haden Blackman, David Finch, Peter J. Tomasi, Judd Winick, Kyle Higgins, Duane Swierczynski, Tony Bedard, Peter Milligan, Jeff Lemire, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, Paul Cornell, Nathan Edmondson, Ron Marz, Adam Glass, Dan DiDio, Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, Mike Costa, Ivan Brandon, Jonathan Vankin, Scott McDaniel & John Rozum, Sterling Gates, Fabian Nicieza, and Paul Levitz
9. The Transformers: Infiltration by Simon Furman
10. Doctor Who Magazine: Special Edition #15: In Their Own Words, Volume Two: 1970-76 compiled by Benjamin Cook
11. The New Doctor Who Adventures: Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks
12. Smax by Alan Moore

All books acquired:
1. StarShipSofa Stories, Volume 3 edited by Tony C. Smith
2. The New Doctor Who Adventures: Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks
3. Smax by Alan Moore
4. A Lady and Her Husband by Amber Reeves
5. Doctor Who: Time Trips by A. L. Kennedy, Jenny T. Colgan, Nick Harkaway, Trudi Caravan, Jake Arnott, Cecelia Ahern, Joanne Harris, and Stella Duffy
6. Leviathan Wakes: Book One of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
7. Caliban’s War: Book Two of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
8. Abaddon’s Gate: Book Three of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
9. Vas You Ever in Zinzinnati? by Dick Perry
10. Romiette and Julio by Sharon M. Draper
11. 42 Miles by Tracie Vaughn Miller

I was on track for a low month, but then #5-11 came along-- three-month-late birthday presents.

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 633 (up 9)
Books remaining on "To review" list: 74 (down 5)

H. G. Wells at 150: The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

Trade paperback, 90 pages
Published 1998 (originally 1918)

Acquired and read August 2016

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

It's probably a disservice to Rebecca West to read her work as part of an investigation into the life of H. G. Wells. Still, reading about her relationship with Wells made me want to find out what she was like as a writer, as I have never read any of her work, so I picked up The Return of the Soldier, the most popular of her books published during their relationship. (Though I am also curious about The Judge based on Wells's account of its composition in H. G. Wells in Love, and a friend recommended Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.) Like Catherine Wells, West's literary interests are very different from those of her lover, though I was amused when a "Bert Wells" rated a brief mention. (Seemingly no connection beyond the name, though.)

I knew The Return of the Soldier was a Great War novel going in, but that was pretty much all I knew, so I was surprised to find a book that wasn't as much about the war as I thought. Christoper Baldry is a soldier who returns from the front, yes, but his ailment is that he's forgotten his life since 1901, and the novel (or, more accurately, novella) is an investigation into why someone might do this. Sure, the war is the triggering event, but the novel is more a portrait of how the person we thought we ought to be turns out not to be the person we become, and the tragedy that can result from that. West observes character most acutely, and it's in the highs and lows of being where this novel really shines. Not that there's a whole lot else to it, at 90 pages. She sets things up so that the title has a pretty compelling and sad double meaning in the end, too. (Wikipedia reads the ending as much more pat than I think it is intended to be. The wound is healed, but the tragedy lingers.) West is working in that sort of Woolf school of early modernism, and I think one of its better practitioners. Quick, but complex.

Next Week: One last Wells woman, the spy Moura Budberg, who was A Very Dangerous Woman!