The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange - Mark Barrowcliffe

Coventry, 1976. For a brief, blazing summer, twelve-year-old Mark Barrowcliffe had the chance to be normal. 

He blew it. 

- From the cover blurb of The Elfish Gene.

In his sometimes comic, sometimes painful and often lovably geeky memoir, Mark Barrowcliffe writes of a youth misspent around the Dungeons and Dragons table. Misspent, you wonder? OK, it's a hobby, and not one generally considered cool, but it's just a bit of fun. People do it. So what if it's not "cool?" Still, Barrowcliffe chronicles the way that this game took over his life, stirred up his imagination and led to him living more in the world of make-believe than reality.

I felt rather sorry for the teenaged Mark, awkward and obsessive, someone who, like all teenagers, was keen to find his niche in the world, who, if he must be a misfit, would be a misfit with all his might and main, but who wasted so much time and energy trying to impress people who clearly despised him. It made me feel rather sad to read of how much he idolised Porter, the dungeonmaster of his D&D group, who never pretended to have any time or respect for Mark. Come on, kid, I wanted to yell through the pages and across the years, you can do better than that! Worst of all was when he would side with Porter in a sad attempt to win a smidgen of approval - or, at least, not have Porter kill off Mark's D&D character! - against his true friend, Billy.

The Elfish Gene was full of outrageous stories of boyish experiments gone horribly wrong and Mark's attempt to try to weasel his way out of ridiculous situations. I could sympathise with his all-encompassing obsessions. Friends and family would confirm that I usually have something that's always in my mind, and at one time it was The Lord of the Rings - which, of course, had a huge influence on the world of Dungeons and Dragons (and subsequently on Mark Barrowcliffe, with several chapter titles being lifted from the novel.)  Barrowcliffe claims to have read Lord of the Rings seventeen times, and yet he claims that there are no females in the whole novel except ethereal elf-maidens and cuddly hobbit-wives.

Excuse me?!


Ethereal elf-maidens, cuddly hobbit-wives and Eowyn, the asskicking shieldmaiden of Rohan, if you please!

(Calm down, Edwards!)

Similarly, although I have never D&Ded (though I came close a couple of times,) I took exception to Barrowcliffe's claim that girls just didn't - although I can appreciate the lack of appeal to females in the groups he described in his memoir. Because, quite frankly, Barrowcliffe presents his teenage self as rather a brat: irritating, obnoxious, pretentious and too much intent on idolising other obnoxious brats, although amusing to read about, from a safe distance. It was actually quite embarrassing to read in times, and although Mark's love for the game was clear, I felt that there was a sneering undertone in the narration. I felt that this was a bit dorky to be associated with and am a little embarrassed even writing a review of a book about Dungeons and Dragons - and I am geeky and proud! I think the adult Barrowcliffe's ridicule rubbed off on me from the pages, and it's upsetting that someone should feel this way about something that they used to devote so much love to.

Barrowcliffe is honest and unflinching in sharing a slightly embarrassing past which nonetheless made him who he is today - and yet, I suspect he doth protest too much when he tries to persuade the reader that he's left this life behind him.

Diamond Star Halo, Tiffany Murray

On my last visit to Foyle's bookshop on Charing Cross Road, I was determined to find something brand-new. A book I hadn't seen in high street shops, that jumped off the shelves and shouted "buy me!" An impulse buy. After all, there's no point making a trek all the way up to London to buy something I could have got from my workplace. On my previous visit I discovered Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver - I didn't buy it then, but I was immediately drawn to it and knew I'd like it. Then, last month, it was Diamond Star Halo.

Halo, or to give her full name, Diamond Star Halo Llewellyn, lives at an old farm that is now used as a recording studio. When she is about five years old a band called Tequila arrive; eight golden-haired, bearded brothers and Jenny, the sixteen-year-old wife of the lead singer. When a tragedy occurs, Tequila leave behind them Jenny and Abraham's baby son, Fred. The years go by and as a teenager Halo realises she is in love with Fred - but although they are not related by blood, he might as well be her brother. At seventeen Fred follows in his parents' footsteps and becomes a rock star, while the family faces further sorrow.

Diamond Star Halo is a quirky novel about family, rock'n'roll and Crazy Love. The narrative feels slightly skewed, with everything seen through rock'n'roll and myth-tinted glasses. Important family events are muddled up with big events of musical history, such as Elvis's death. Halo is named after a line in a T.Rex song. The Llewellyns, especially Nana Lew, tell colourful and improbable versions of the family history that leave you wondering what is real and what is a fabrication - rather like the stories of Edward Bloom in Big Fish. For example, the official story is that Halo's mum was born in a dressing-table drawer (placed there by her birth mother, an unwed hotel maid, during the Blitz, and found by her adoptive mother.) Halo, everybody says, was literally born to be a drummer. The narration becomes a little strange when Halo, the narrator, speaks in such great detail about the ghosts of her three great-uncles killed in the First World War, that I didn't know where the line was to be drawn. Are we expected to believe in the literal existance of these ghosts, or is her imagination working overtime? In the end, it doesn't really matter.

I found myself reminded of Mari Strachan's The Earth Hums in B Flat, another Welsh novel, with a child narrator who presents the world as she understands it, with truth and imagination blurred, and sometimes misunderstanding what is really going on.

I found some aspects of Halo a little uncomfortable to read. Fred is too nearly her brother for their relationship with each other not to feel wrong and a bit squeam-inducing. Characters are sexually precocious, behaving like adults while young teenagers, and teenagers when pre-teen. Conversely Halo's narration seemed to be that of a younger child until she was sixteen. Perhaps for this reason, I found the timeline a little difficult to follow, especially around the teenage section. Although Part II is subtitled 1988 (when Halo is 16) there are flashbacks to a few years previously, and I found it ambiguous whether the flashback covered a single scene or a longer passage, if the narrative hopped back a few years before hopping forward again, or shuffling gradually through the 1980s towards the "present" time.

Overall I give Halo 3 and a half stars. For personal engagement with the story, I give three - perhaps there were just too many quirks to the Llewellyn family to make them quite real - but I award an extra half star for the work's literary merits, as it is a well-written, original and intelligent novel.

TV: Life on Mars

My name is Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever’s happened, it’s like I’ve landed on a different planet. Now, maybe if I can work out the reason, I can get home.

Despite myself living practically on a different planet when Life on Mars was first broadcast in 2006 (I was a student in a house with no TV,) I was aware that it was a refreshingly original drama series: a new take on an old genre, the 70s cop show, but with a mystery. However, it wasn’t until this year that I finally sat down and watched the two series of Life on Mars and three of Ashes to Ashes in about a month.

Life on Mars began as the sort of TV programme that you really couldn’t make these days! A modern-day police show is far removed from the high-action cops-and-robbers chase shows that were around in the good old days, or so they say. Police officers have to be careful, professional and respectful - all well and good, but not so much fun to watch.

Until they get hit by a car, sent back in time to the ‘seventies and introduced to the Gene Genie. Make no doubt about it, although Sam Tyler (John Simm) is the protagonist of Life on Mars, Gene Hunt is who we watch the show for. Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) is Sam’s new boss, and he has very different ideas about how a police force should be run. Rather, Sam’s ideas are the new ones: Gene runs his department on the tried-and-tested method of brute force and ignorance… and an unlimited capacity for creative and outrageous verbal - and physical - abuse. The differences between their styles of policing is most concisely shown when trying to gain access to a flat: while Tyler fumbles around attempting to pick the lock, Hunt kicks the door in: Crude, but efficient.

While at first 1973 seems a rather random date for Sam to be sent to, with great music and lots of nostalgia for a rather iconic era, as the story unfolds it is revealed that something significant happened to the Tyler family at that time and it’s up to Sam to change his family’s history. But is time changeable? In some ways it seems possible: in the very first episode, Sam manages to influence a chain of events that eventually help to save his girlfriend in 2006. But other events are inevitably, tragically doomed. Evidence suggests that one can’t change one’s own timeline in this version of time travel.

Life on Mars isn’t, however, a straightforward time-travel show. Even while in a fully-formed 1973, with flared jeans, awesome music and a lot of brown, Sam experiences strange, out-of-place phenomena that make the series far more complex, thought-provoking . The Test Card F girl comes to life and walks out of his TV screen to talk eerily to him, and he hears voices that he recognises from his life back in the 21st century.

So, is he mad, in a coma or back in time? Is 1973 real or in his mind? (Or, as Dumbledore suggests in the final Harry Potter book, both? Life on Mars in some respects reminded me of Terry Pratchett’s book Night Watch. If it weren’t for the fact that the novel was published before the TV series, you could be forgiven for thinking that Pratchett had borrowed some aspects of his story from a roundworld equivalent. Watchman Commander Sam Vimes is sent back in time by a freak accident where he has to survive a major incident in his past, and in this case, mentor his younger self with his modern-style policing to keep him from being influenced by the dodgy coppers. Interestingly, it is in Discworld where there is a straightforward morality in the Watch, while in Life on Mars, although we really can’t condone everything anything - that Gene Hunt says or does, it has to be confessed, he gets results and his heart is (more or less) in the right place.