I Hear The Sirens In The Street

I finally figured out how the "pages" feature on blogger works (or at least I think I have) so I've uploaded the first four chapters of I Hear The Sirens In The Street, here. This is still a work in progress so the book may change considerably before its appearance in January. (I've already completely cut the chapter which appears as the teaser at the end of The Cold Cold Ground.) But at the very least this will give you a pretty good idea where the novel is headed. You may want to read these chapters on the screen here or you could cut and paste them into a word file and print them out at your convenience, it's totally up to you, but I always prefer to read the paper version. I've included a permanent link to the Sirens "page" on the right hand side of the blog and I may add a few chapters here and there as the book progresses. Anyway, I hope you like it and comments are always appreciated. 

TransAtlantic

It isn't very often that I will point you, faithful readers, in the direction of a story that I've read in the New Yorker. New Yorker fiction is too trendy for my tastes. Alice Monro excepted I find the stories all a bit up themselves. Even languid, ironic detachment gets boring and metafictional narratives just don't do it for me. When the story is told straight it's usually about very rich, white, upper middle class Manhattanites or Brooklynites who simply get on my nerves. As a consequence its not very often these days that I'll finish a fiction piece in the New Yorker. 
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An interesting exception occurred in the latest issue of the magazine which managed to wing its way to my letter box in Australia. It was a story by the great Irish writer Colum McCann who won the National Book Award with his terrific novel Let The Great World Spin. The story is called TransAtlantic and is about the very first aeroplane flight across the Atlantic by two Royal Flying Corps aviators Alcock and Brown. Yes you heard me right. Charles Lindbergh was not the first person to fly non stop across the Atlantic. Nor the second, nor the third or the fourth. Americans don't believe me when I tell them this because somehow old Nazi loving Lindbergh convinced the world that it was important to fly across the Atlantic alone. (As if Neil Armstrong's achievement is any less important because he had a couple of friends with him). Alcock and Brown are still famous in Ireland and no visit to Clifden is complete without a trip to the bog where they touched down/crashed after their amazing non stop flight.  
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Colum McCann's story about this flight is a throwback to the era when people would buy the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers and The New Yorker just to read the short fiction. It's chatty, exciting, economical, old fashioned, with some lovely turns of phrase. I really loved it and I'd like you to read it too. Unfortunately because of the all the New Yorker's firewalls I can't extract it or link to it here, but you can read it in the library (its the April 9th issue) or listen to Colum McCann reading it himself, here. 

Enid Blyton

Enid Blyton's most notorious book. Not racist at all
say her defenders, just good old fashioned fun. 

Some time ago we were given a bundle of books including The Naughtiest Girl In School Again by Enid Blyton whom I had read as a kid but who was effectively destroyed in my mind forever by The Comic Strip Presents: Five Go Mad In Dorset which came out when I had just left primary school. Enid Blyton however is still quite popular in England and very popular here in Australia. Last night, hunting around for something to read to my daughter Sophie before bed I grabbed TNGISA. It begins with a recapitulation of the adventures of The Naughiest Girl In School where, apparently, the young heroine, Elizabeth, is sent off to boarding school at a tender age but is so upset by the experience of leaving home and missing her mummy that she decides to become the naughiest girl in school and get expelled. This sounds like a pretty good strategy and a nice tool for exposing the perverse cruelty of the English boarding school system, but unfortunately at the end of book 1, it seems that, rather like at the end of 1984, Elizabeth comes back not a rebel but a zealous convert to the system. This passage sent chills down my spine: 

Elizabeth had told her mother all about the Whyteleafe School. It was a school for boys and girls together, and the children ruled themselves, and were seldom punished by the masters or the mistresses.  Every week a big school Meeting was held, and all the children had to attend. The head boy and girl were the Judges, and twelves monitors, chosen by the children themselves were the Jury. Any grumbles or complaints had to be brought to the Meeting, and if any child had behaved wrongly, the children themselves thought out a suitable punishment. Poor Elizabeth had suffered badly at the weekly meetings, for she had been so naughty and disobedient and broken every rule in the school.

I'm not sure if this was written before or after Lord of the Flies but as any educator will tell you, children are often far more tyranical and cruel to their fellows than their teachers. But poor little brainwashed Elizabeth accepts and loves this inverted system with its kangaroo courts and summary justice. She feels sorry for the common children who don't get the privilege of being sent away to such a wonderful place as Whyteleafe. 
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In a way the Harry Potter stories are simply a modern update of this rather vulgar idea. That is, the idea of the special child, separated from the dull, common herd and sent away from their parents to a place where they will face trials and tribulations but will ultimately come out steely and strong and ready to rule the lesser breeds of the Empire the Muggles. I'm afraid I couldn't really stomach much more of The Naughtiest Girl Again so I don't know how it turns out, but I can't imagine a denouement where Elizabeth burns the school down or drives the pupils to open revolt like Lindsay Anderson's terrific If (which would have made an awesome ending for the Potter series too). 

Samuel Smith's Taddy Porter

April is the one month of the year when the weather in both the northern and southern hemispheres is pretty temperate. April is often one of the rainiest months of the year too, which is why April is the perfect time of year to drink porter. Until lager took over after World War 2 porter was the drink of the masses in the British Isles. A lot of people drank stout in Ireland, bitter in England and cider in the South West of England but porter was that thing that could be got anywhere. Flann O'Brien famously said that "a pint of plain (porter) is your only man" and Flann O'Brien was wrong about nothing (except perhaps the fact that The Third Policeman is indeed a work of genius).  
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There are lots of great porters out there and the form is making something of a resurgence in the United States. Eric Asimov did a wonderful piece in the New York Times about the new American porters, here.  His favourite (certainly not mine) is the Speakeasy Payback Porter from S.F. but there are other more drinkable brews on his list. Asimov also explains what a porter actually is which I don't have the patience to do here.
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A porter which can be got just about anywhere is Taddy Porter from the Samuel Smith brewery in Yorkshire. They've been brewing bitter and porter since 1758 and they know what they are doing. To me this is an exceptional drink and I've never had a bad one. It's velvety with a rich, full satisfying mouth. There are malt notes, chocolate notes and a plummy oaky aftertaste. It pours as dark as night, has a barley, caramelly smell and like all really good porters it is not over carbonated. If Illegal Pete's Big Potato burrito is my comfort food of choice this is my comfort beer at this time of year. 

Are There 10 Aussie Books To Read Before You Die?

The ABC1 TV programme First Tuesday Book Club is having a vote to pick the "10 Australian books to read before you die". The titles that they have come up with so far make me think that Australia seems to punch a little under its weight in terms of literature. Unlike Brits (but like Americans) Aussies do not enjoy hearing criticisms of their country, even in such trivial spheres as culture and sport. Australia is a wonderful place, with friendly, open, tolerant people; it also has a fantastic overseas reputation and there is no nation in the world that hates Australia (even Kiwis are secret Aussiephiles judging from the number of them who emigrate here every year) but the bitter truth is that Australia has produced very few Earth shattering writers, mainly because, I think, Australians are too busy out enjoying themselves to sit in a dark room and produce great art. 
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When you look at some of the literature nominees over at the First Tuesday Book Club site you'll see what I'm talking about. Clive James's memoirs? The Slap? Bryce Courtenay? Tim Winton? Seriously is that the best you can do, Australia? I wonder how many people have actually read Picnic At Hanging Rock (including the bizarre final chapter?) Compare Australian literature to, say, oh, I don't know, Irish literature, an island that has a quarter of Australia's population and is a hundredth its size you'll see what I'm talking about. Who is the Australian James Joyce? Or Oscar Wilde? Or Samuel Beckett? Or George Bernard Shaw? Is Les Murray really in the same league as Seamus Heaney or WB Yeats? Where indeed is the Aussie Flann O'Brien or Sheridan or Sean O'Casey, Goldsmith or Swift? And if you think its only fair to talk about the twentieth century when Australia became a country, well in that time period Ireland has had 4 Nobel Prize winners in literature (not including Joyce), Australia has had 1. I don't want to go overboard with this; I do like Peter Carey (even though he went to uber snooty Geelong Grammar), Clive James, Eva Hornung, Alexis Wright and David Malouf, but my four favourite Australian books havent even made the ABC list so far. They are Monkey Grip by Helen Garner, about a divorced mother trying to make ends meet in a low rent Bohemian Melbourne; Tracks by Robyn Davidson, an almost unknown travel masterpiece; The Collected Poems of Peter Porter and The Lamb Enters The Dreaming by Robert Kenny, a history of the Christian missions to the Aboriginals in northern Victoria. 
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I'm not trying to upset my Australian friends with this post, as I pointed out Australia is a great place to live and raise a family, and I will say this for Australian literature, at least its better than Aussie pop music. 

A Game Of Thrones Investigation

Magheramorne Quarry became the Great Wall of Westeros through CGI

(A post from last summer)
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I've done a little investigation into the filming locations for Game Of Thrones and it turns out that the Great Wall and Castle Black were  outdoor sets filmed at a disused quarry in Magheramorne. My grandmother was from Magheramorne, a village of about 50 people, near Larne. In fact the scenes along the Great Wall were shot in the quarry about thirty yards from my grandmother's house. It's not very snowy in Magheramorne and making snow would cost a fortune so I assume the snow and ice were put in later by CGI. My father used to work in the quarry itself when it was the Blue Circle Cement Works and I've been in it dozens of times. It's a credit to the set designers that they could have have envisaged this dramatic (and rather dangerous) location as the Great Wall of Westeros. 
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Before I came home I didn't think Game of Thrones had had much of an impact in Northern Ireland. It still hasn't been shown here but a lot of people know about it and have been affected by the production. My nephew Patrick went up for an extra and my brother's wife Dytania also was asked if she could appear as a background player. Ger Brennan's brother did make it into the show and I've read many enthusiastic pieces about GOT in the local papers. Filming GOT has been a very good thing for Northern Ireland which is still in recovery from three decades of low level civil war. 
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And hey I don't want to seem like I'm bandwagon jumping but I set a trilogy of young adult novels on Muck Island (The Lighthouse Trilogy) which is less than a mile away from the Game of Thrones Wall Set on Magheramorne. George RR Martin's books and mine are very different but we both share a love of classic Tolkien fantasy and apparently now we've both spent time in Magheramorne.
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My little brother and I went to investigate The Game of Thrones set which has a fence around it. You can see much of Castle Black covered in tarp and even what looks like the hand pulley elevator up the wall face. The security fence is easily climbable but I wouldn't recommend it, especially at night where the quarry hole appears suddenly in front of you and is a ten story drop to a hard limestone floor. If you want to take pictures the best place is from Mill Bay across Larne Lough on Islandmagee. 

JK Rowling's Crime Novel

The book world is, apparently, abuzz with the news that JK Rowling's first adult book is going to be a crime novel called The Casual Vacancy. This is how the Guardian broke the news:
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The Casual Vacancy, perhaps the most hotly anticipated book of the year, will be published on 27 September and is set in a small town called Pagford, described by her new publisher Little, Brown as an English idyll "with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey". The story is set in motion by the unexpected demise of Barry Fairweather, a stalwart of the town's parish council who dies in his early forties. Pagford's chocolate-box façade hides a town riven with strife, and the struggle to replace Fairweather "becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen", with "teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils," the publisher said. 
As the election to find his replacement unleashes "passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations", the novel puts Pagford's rivalries under the microscope. There had been speculation that Rowling might be entering the genre of hard-boiled Edinburgh crime fiction after discovering that her editor, David Shelley, counts Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Carl Hiaasen and Mark Billingham among his authors.
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I don't know about you but this is not the novel I'm most anticipating this year (that would probably be the new Iain M Banks culture book) but I'm certainly not going to diss this work before it comes out. It does however seem very Barchester Towers to me and I have to say that Trollope's shoes are big shoes to fill. I'm also alarmed that Ms Rowling still thinks names like Fairweather are a good idea. I wonder if the villains will have names like Slimeweasel and Grindstone. Silly give the game away names are fine in childrens books but we expect better in the crime fiction world. I wonder too if the cliche of the English village with sinister goings on underneath wasn't already exploded by Agatha Christie circa 1925. In fact this trope had become so worn out by 1932 (!) that Stella Gibbons was able to parody it in her excellent novel Cold Comfort Farm. It's also the plot of pretty much every Barbara Pym book and the trope even got the Hollywood treatment in Hot Fuzz. Anyway we shall see. I will await her book and give it a fair review. I wont however be tugging my forelock just because Rowling is the most powerful author in the book business.

The City And The City

China Mieville's The City And The City may be the most original crime novel I've read since Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool or possibly all the way back to James Ellroy's American Tabloid. It won the 2010 Hugo Award in a tie with Paolo Bacigalupi's excellent The Windup Girl. It also won the Arthur C. Clarke award and was nominated for the Nebula. It was ignored by the all mainstream crime awards, which is a bit odd (and embarrassing provincial of them) because at heart the book is basically a noir detective story. I was impressed by The City And The City's technical prowess and literary ambitions; Mieville has done a great job taking a new slant on a rather staid and somewhat moribund genre.  
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The book is set in Eastern Europe in the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are actually adjoining city states somewhere close to Romania and Hungary. A different language is spoken in each city and they are culturally and economically distinct. Fracture lines run through the cities and initially one thinks of East and West Berlin or possibly Buda and Pest; but what makes Beszel and Ul Qoma so interesting is that they actually share much of the same topography. Streets that exist Ul Qoma exist also in Beszel, but travel from one city to the other is utterly forbidden. From a very young age children are trained to "unsee" vehicles and people who are living in the other city. This sounds weird and it takes a while to completely buy into it, but Mieville does convince you that this bizarre state of affairs could work. Mieville has been inspired by the work of Kafka and especially Bruno Schulz and that's no bad thing in a noir. 
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The novel begins when Inspector Borlu is called upon to investigate the murder of a young woman in Beszel. He quickly discovers that her body has been transported to the crime scene from the neighbouring city of Ul Qoma and this raises all kinds of difficulties. Crossing the "border" from one city to city is the most serious crime of all in the two cities and once proof of an encroachment becomes manifest the mysterious entity Breach spirits the breachee away to God knows where. The investigation takes Borlu into the forbidden world of Ul Qoma and there the fun really begins as we begin to see conspiracies within conspiracies and the possibility of a mythical third hidden city know as Ocriny. Borlu remains a bit of a cipher throughout but this fits squarely into an old school noir trope and I didn't mind that at all. I loved the scenes with Borlu in Ul Qoma looking across to his home city of Beszel, trying to unsee familiar shops and people and realising just how strange this all was. I won't reveal any more of the plot, suffice to say that although there are no real surprises the third act of the novel is still satisfying within the predictable Kafkaesque conventions of such a narrative. 
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China Mieville is very much the new Iain Banks, comfortable writing in various genres but with a background in science fiction. Like Banks he is prolific. I've read four of his books, two of them very good (Perdido Street Station, The City And The City) and two of them not so brilliant. It probably would have been better for Banks if he had slowed down a little and this might be a good idea for Mieville too. He shouldn't listen to his editors at Macmillan who are only interested in volume, instead he should take his foot off the gas and really relax into one project for the next year or two - I think it would be worth it as I believe he has the potential to join Zadie Smith and David Mitchell as one of the finest of the new generation of English novelists. 

The Cold Cold Ground

This isn't the cover. This was just me messing around on, er, Paintbox
and trying to come up with a Chip Kidd style image...

Great review of The Cold Cold Ground in Sunday's Irish Independent. What's odd is that the Irish Independent already reviewed the book back in January and loved it then too. But I'm certainly not complaining. Here's the thoughtful, careful review by the intelligent and well read Hilary White (below) and honestly if you haven't got Cold Cold Ground by now there's pretty much nothing I or the critics can say to convince you is there?
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The Cold Cold Ground
Adrian McKinty
The Hunger Strikes and subsequent rioting after the death of Bobby Sands in 1981 have been pored over by academics and psychologists, but the arts seemed to lag when it came to making a vocal examination.
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Steve McQueen's 2008 film Hunger was a landmark, asking many questions about the mucky fatalism of the strikers but also how they were driven there. The Cold, Cold Ground is the twelfth novel by migrant Irish writer Adrian McKinty, and it uses that chapter of the Troubles as a backdrop, quickening an otherwise genre work into something that sizzles with ambient dread.
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McKinty's other chief tool is Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy. A finely hewn protagonist, Duffy is a Catholic copper living in a Protestant Carrickfergus neighbourhood. Catholic RUC officers never went down particularly favourably with either side of the sectarian divide, and if Duffy seems analytical and highly aware of his surroundings, it's because he has to be.
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He is witty, cultured and erudite, but our author understands that character flaws are needed in the DNA of any good crime hero. Duffy is thus a functioning alcoholic and weed smoker, is prone to objectifying the women he encounters and shows one or two moments of bemusing insecurity. If you want your reader to take a character to heart, this is how to do it.
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When the bodies of two homosexuals turn up with little clues left near their cadavers, Duffy is suspicious. A serial killer operating in Troubles-ravaged Belfast? You don't bring an apple to an orchard. It is "too gothic for Ulster" and besides, if you happened to find that you were indeed a psychopath, there was a range of tooled-up zealots in the "alphabet soup" of paramilitaries to fall in with. Meanwhile, his gut is also telling him that the apparent suicide of the missing wife of a hunger striker is somehow connected to all this. Red herring cameos are made by Gerry Adams and homophobic Unionist firebrand George Seawright. Duffy's brain itches furiously. He over-thinks the clues and traces left by the killer, which disrupts that part of us that wants to work it out for ourselves. Sometimes a blunt wallop can work just as well as an explosion where finales are concerned. In the perversely hate-filled era in which the tale is set, it is perhaps the only way McKinty could wind things up and still maintain his story's vital sense of place.
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Tropes are tropes for good reason. The important crime-fiction ones are present and accounted for here -- a serial killer who purposely leaves clues, a cop who's on to him, procedural and forensic nitty-gritty. Yet McKinty can startle with bouts of lyrical scene-setting that could only come from the fingertips of someone who grew up in the environment. He tells us of "arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon... The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife". He educates us about shopkeepers boarding-up their windows when a riot was due, or the ritual of paramilitaries leaving a silver 'Judas coin' by the corpse of a bumped-off informant. Your reviewer was born the year The Cold, Cold Ground (a Tom Waits' lyric, by the way) is set in, and such passages work better at painting a picture than any episode of Reeling In The Years.
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McKinty had always intended for this to be the first part of a trilogy about Duffy. He has said that his flawed hero will go on to visit the 1984 Maze Prison escape, the US and the DeLorean car company. It's probably safe to say that Irish crime fiction's current purple patch won't be fading any time soon.

Game Of Thrones S2E1, S2E2, Mad Men S5E2

Lena Headey's good but Peter Dinklage steals the show as usual

It's been 12 years since I read A Clash of Kings which is the second book in George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire sequence. I have only vague memories of that novel but Game of Thrones S2E1 surprisingly brought a lot of those memories from the depths of goodness knows where. The episode begins in the aftermath of Eddard Stark's death as various houses jockey for power in Westeros. The episode nicely captured many of the diverse strands of the novel and brought us up to date with the characters from Game of Thrones. As usual Peter Dinklage stole every scene he was in and in fact, if you'll notice, he's been given top billing. From what I remember of Clash we get to know even more characters than were in GOT and the civil war on Westeros becomes even more complicated. I don't know how the TV series is going to cope with all this without shortchanging some of the actors or compressing some of action.  
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Anyway S2E1 was all about scene setting and recapitulation and it did it pretty well. We got some nice Northern Irish landscapes in S2E1: several different Ulster forests, a piece of beach that looked a bit like Whitepark Bay and snowy volcanic vistas that definitely were not Ireland and must have been Iceland. E2 established a few more characters and laid the seeds for a bit of a story that I do remember about Greyjoy. It was nice to see Richard O'Brien popping up as Greyjoy's dad. Plenty of T&A in episode 2 for the pervy TV reviewers complaining about the lack of it in E1. Good use of British regional accents too in these episodes: as well as Yorkshire we got Geordieland, Welsh, Scottish, mild Ulster and soft Irish, as well as Peter Dinklage's dodgy home counties voice.  
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Not much happened in the two episodes but the strands of future conflict were definitely laid. GOT S2E1 B+ S2E2 B
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Regarding Mad Men E2, like the blogger in the New York Times, I too was surprised to see them go the Frasier route with January Jones's pregnancy. We already had someone close to Don die of cancer so it would have been bathos to give Betty cancer too. There was therefore zero dramatic tension and the lameness of the storyline readily became apparent. I have a feeling that the writers on Mad Men dislike January Jones as a person so they've been thinking up ways to humiliate the character. Maybe. Mad Men S5 E2 C-

McKinty and Doyle For The Win!

McKinty and Doyle is not alas a 70's themed cop show. No, Gerard Doyle in fact is the guy who narrates most of my audiobooks, but he's also a very talented actor who could do a 70's cop show if he wanted. Ger has won several awards for his work on my stuff including Audible's Best Mystery of 2011 (for Falling Glass) and the Audie Award for Best Mystery or Thriller of 2007 (for The Dead Yard). Most of this I'm sure is down to Doyle's dry, impeccable narration...Anyway the partnership of McKinty and Doyle has just picked up another prize from AudioFile Magazine, winning an Earphones Award for the audio version of The Cold Cold Ground. I couldn't be more chuffed. This is the review of TCCG in April's AudioFile magazine: 
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THE COLD, COLD GROUND 
Adrian McKinty...No question, THE COLD, COLD GROUND is an exciting launch for what is sure to be an anticipated crime series. Great detective stories are built on three key elements—setting, story, and protagonist—and this one deploys each one magnificently. The setting—Northern Ireland in 1981, during the hunger strikes—is portrayed with frightening detail. The clever story evolves slowly as plot points are pinned to cultural biases that transcend “The Troubles”—for example, homosexuality and unwed motherhood. Police detective Sean Duffy wins us over chapter by chapter with his tenacity, his swaggering, witty dialogue, and his record collection—he spins The Velvet Underground when in need of a lift. The audiobook exceeds all expectations because of narrator Gerard Doyle. His storytelling is understated, and his dialect work is remarkable. This is the ninth collaboration between author and narrator, and this team totally rocks. R.W.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award  AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2012] 

Two Minds About The Titanic

Harland and Wolff 1911 (The Titanic is the ship in the background)

For many years my father worked in Harland and Wolff, the shipyard that built the Titanic. He worked as a welder and boiler maker and in those days you learned on the job from master welders and riveters, who in turn had learned their trade from the men who had gone before. This was a tradition of craft engineering and apprenticeships that went all the way back to the Titanic and indeed all the way back to the first ships H&W built in the nineteenth century. Later my sister Lorna too worked at Harland and Wolff. Many people I knew worked there until the great and terrible shipyard closures of the 70's and 80's when Glasgow, Liverpool and Belfast lost tens of thousands of skilled workers. It was a hell of a thing to build a ship and watch it get launched by a VIP and then do its sea trials out in Belfast Lough. All that, like I say, is gone now. H&W still exists as a company but its few hundred workers are employed building turbines for offshore wind farms. 
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Like the Troubles, for many years the Titanic was something Belfast was very good about not talking about. Not talking about things is something Ulstermen do better than anyone else in the world and the Titanic disaster stirred uneasy feelings in the blood. There was I suspect a feeling of collective guilt about building the ship that cost so many lives in - still - one of the worst maritime disasters in history. Guilt and shame will close many a mouth. But although not talking about the Titanic was probably a bad thing, in recent years the city fathers in Belfast have gone too far the other way. In the aftermath of James Cameron's successful movie and the looming hundredth anniversary of the disaster, a whole district of East Belfast has been renamed The Titanic Quarter, Titanic tours are being run, an interactive museum caters to the kiddies, interior parts of the ship have been reconstructed etc. etc. Now we're very much in celebration mode about the vessel and an old Belfast joke "well, she was ok, when she left us" has been recycled of late. 
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If there is no middle way available, I think I would prefer the former diffident approach rather than this rather vulgar celebratory stance. The RMS Titanic was a cock up of enormous proportions and there is plenty of blame to go round. The ship was going too fast in iceberg infested seas, the bulkheads and pumps were insufficient to deal with a gash in the hull that size, there were not enough lifeboats for all the passengers and crew. Sinking in calm seas, at night, with a ship within fifty miles, its a scandal that so many people drowned or died of hypothermia. All those engineering failures, all that pointless death. Despite what the Belfast Tourist Board says I do not think this is something we should be proud of at all. If you want to learn about a Harland and Wolff ship with an honourable past I would suggest skipping the Titanic stuff and instead visit HMS Belfast anchored in the Thames as a permanent museum to D-Day and the great warships of WW2.