Troy - By David Gemmell

Its Troy Jim but not as we know it. A retelling of an ancient legend from characters you would not expect

On and off over the years I have been a big fan on David Gemmell. He is a man that often writes high fantasy books. There are battles and wars, honourable (and not so honourable) knights, fair maidens etc - I am sure you are familiar with the genre. There has to my mind however been one thing that has separated Mr Gemmell from some of his other contemporaries - and that is that he makes the decisions that other authors will often not make. He will take a character, build him up in the readers mind. He will be the guy that you see as being the hero and you will wish a happy ending for him. Nothing new there you may think - but then you get to the middle of the book and it is all change. Your hero is in a battle, (no doubt to save fair maiden) and then - he gets killed and the story carries on without him. It is not one of these 'Bobby Ewing' moments. The guy will not come out of the shower later on near the end to make everything ok (probably for 2 reasons, one of which being they don’t have showers) he is gone.

In my humble opinion that takes balls. You characters are one of the reasons that people will continue to read your book and finish it, you kill them off and you run the risk that you kill off your readers as well (reading back that sentence is all a bit Never-ending Story).

Anyhow that is something that has always attracted me to David Gemmell’s books, that and the fact that they are always moving along at a fair old pace which helps. However in my time of reading his books I had never taken the time to read any of his historical fantasy, then one day while mooching in Borders looking for something new I saw a novel called Troy - The lord of the silver bow and that all changed.

The basic premise of this novel is take everything that you know, or think you know, about the siege of Troy and the events that lead up to it - take a good tight grip - now screw it up and throw it in the bin. Now you are ready to read this novel. All of the characters that you will have read about (Odysseus, Paris, Hellen, Hektor) are still in the novel but a different view is given of them. The main focus is on Aeneas (who likes to be know as Helikaon - if you look about you will find him in your Greek legends) and what happens to him in the run up to the seige of Troy.

As with all Greek tragedies there is unrequited love (enter Andromache of Thebe-Under-Plakos), the warning from the seers, kings who are bitter and angry and will be punished by the gods, yet this time Gemmell manages to intorduce you to these characters and takes you on a path that lets you understand why they do things the way they do.

There are some down sides to the book. If you have read a lot of David Gemmells work then you will see that there are some strong similarities in the protagonists and there are those that have said they don't like this. Personally I don’t have an issue with it. There are others that have said that the book needed more action. This could well be the case but in this instance I felt that the pace suited the aim of the book. For me it felt like the aim was to introduce the characters that you will become familiar with over the next 2 books (it is the first part of a trilogy) as well as giving you another insight through other characters as to how they were affected by the upcoming siege.

For me this was an enjoyable re-telling of a well known story - and truth be known you really cannot beat that (in my humble opinion that is)

Book Report

Ok so over time I have picked some things that I was going to talk about. These have been things like general topics such as cool stuff I have seen to more specifics like what I do for a job.

Well I was having a wee think about stuff to talk about and I realised that there is one thing I love that I had not really spoken about. That one thing is reading. Both Rob and I are avid readers. in fact we now own so many books that we do not have sufficient shelf space to keep them anywhere. I figure that I like to tell people about books that I have read or am reading and whether or not they thing they are any good. To this end I have created a new category of post and will put down some info on books that I have encountered, and whether or not I thought that they were any good.

A lot of the books will be fairly similar in type - I am a creature of habit - but I will share anyway. If you have any questions about the book then just drop me a mail or send a comment.

The great scanning project

Just a quick note to say that if things are a bit quiet on the blog etc it is because I am currently about to start a new project.

As you will have seen I have been using flickr for photo uploads and storage and I have decided that I need to get the rest of the images loaded as well as scan in some new ones of upload.  Usually I don't have to scan in the images but we have decided that it would be good to have backups of the wedding photos and they need to be scanned.  We may even add in some of the other photos we have of the early years - we will see (though I fear that they will be too scary)

The last post

Just in case you are wondering..................

No point to the last post at all other than the idea tickled me

The context of things - A Theory

Ok so here is a thing that we were talking about last night and rob figured I should post on it so here we go.  It kind of goes back to how context affects things.  
Basic premise - context affects the way that we view things (this is true as it is what my thesis is on, well it is not on this particular context thing - it is about dual meaning words in sentences - but I digress). 

Context can be why we find things, funny, sad etc but there are some universally funny things - such as mittens.  Now mittens in and of themselves are not funny to me but they are to Rob (I don’t know why he cant explain) but I think that they only become funny when there is a person wearing them (again I don’t know why - they just are).  So here we see context playing a role.  Ok so consider what mittens are - they are little bags for your hands.  So this being the case why are socks not funny?  
 See if you look at socks as an item - not funny (unless they have a funny cartoon or joke on them) but as an object - not likely to make you chuckle.  If you look at socks in context (on feet) then - nope still not funny - which goes against the mitten theory.

 I then pointed out a somewhat valid point - socks - not funny - toe socks - funny as all hell.  What you may ask are toe socks - they are like little gloves for your hands.  So toe socks as an object - quite funny, in context (on feet) friggin’ hilarious.  
Ok so what about gloves - nope not funny as objects or in context - much like socks.  So it is just when we have an object that is not used in a way you expect it becomes funny (or at least ridiculed)

 Ergo I propose - foot gloves and hand socks - very funny things.  I think I will call this the foot glove, hand sock theorem. 
 See look how my university education was not wasted .... I wonder if I can get a grant for further investigation!