Books I Listened To/Read In January

Fiction
'Lehrter Station' by David Downing
This is the fourth book in the 'Station' series and is set at the end of 1945 and early 1946. The heroes, John Russell and Effi Koenen are living in London with John's son, Effi's sister and nephew and an adopted Jewish girl. Russell is persuaded to return to Berlin to work as a double agent for the Soviets; Effi accompanies him as she is given a new role in a movie being made in the city. I have come to realise that action does not realise interest Downing. There are brief moments of excitement as Russell deals with his US and Soviet handlers and he and Effi uncover black market dealers in medicines. Russell follows a route getting Jews from Germany to Palestine but only as far as northern Italy and doing so uncovers an SS officer. He has to help snatch a scientist from the Soviets. However, the moments of action are largely that, moments and generally end after a couple of pages so Downing can return to his main focus of interest. Downing loves to simply show Berlin and other locations and to note in great detail the impact of the war on them. Many have made effective use post-war Germany/Austria as the setting for adventures, but this author prefers to have a historical travelogue. I do not know if that is what genuinely interests him or he simply cannot stop himself showing off all the research he has done. As a historian I find some of this interesting, however, if you are looking for a spy or adventure story set in this period read something by Philip Kerr or rewatch 'The Third Man' (1949).

'Seventy-Seven Clocks' by Christopher Fowler
Though this novel, the third in the Bryant & May series is set in 1973, Fowler fails really to communicate a sense of that period. Maybe he would argue that the upper class family portrayed would not behave in such a snobbish way now, but I feel you could put them into 2013 and they would act in exactly the same way. Fowler and his characters clearly love London and in the two preceding novels in this series we get lots of material of quirky details about the city; the mystery at the heart of this story involves and obscure guild and its buildings. When I started this series I had expected much more magic realism and actually when Fowler first wrote this particular novel it had a supernatural element that he later removed. Thus we get nothing more than quirky and given the oddities that many mainstream detectives have to deal with - they always get at least one story with a cult or an ancient mystery - Bryant & May do not stand out as much as I think Fowler would like them to.

I found this story moved more briskly than the previous two, perhaps because as a counterbalance to the grumblings of the two lead detectives. I found the perspective of the hangovers from colonialism which work better in 1973 than now, an interesting angle. Though at times the book has longueurs, I felt it was tighter than the two before it and I am hopeful that I will see an improvement overall as I got further through the series.

'Matter' by Iain M. Banks
This book ironically suffers from some of the same problems as 'Lehrter Station' even though it is set on alien planets and spaceships. I have enjoyed a couple of Banks's science fiction books, 'The Player of Games' (1988) and more recently, 'The Algebraist' (2004). However, this novel does not come close in quality to either of those. Perhaps it is because it is part of Banks's 'Culture' series of super-powerful utopian civilisation. The story features three siblings of a humanoid royal family that live on the eighth layer of an artificial hollow planet. The murder of their father by his chief minister sets the three eventually coming together to resolve the situation. It is a lengthy story (593 pages in my edition) with two of the characters travelling via numerous intelligent spaceships and worlds and getting mixed up with very diverse alien species. There are lots of interesting ideas here, but that is the problem, Banks seems determined to detail every single one of them. There are swathes of the book which are 'info dumps', emphasised by the fact that he has a long glossary of all the different names, even the types of spaceships, towards the end of the book. 'The Algebraist' communicated a complex, alien set-up well, without choking the action off with stopping to inform you how great Banks's imagination was. Another thing is that he baulks away from showing the death of leading characters, that all happens 'off stage'. There is also a jump from the climax to the happy ending of the story which makes it feel weak as we do not see how the apocalypse was averted. Banks had a wonderful imagination and created immense environments. However, with this novel, that overwhelms the story which as a result is diminished. I wanted the book to move on rather than hear more about how a particular spaceship configures with another.

Non-Fiction
'War Underground' by Alexander Barrie
This book covers an often neglected aspect of the First World War - the tunnels dug and the mines laid under trenches on the Western Front. It is very much from the British perspective, though Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders get a look in, the French and the far more efficient German efforts are only mentioned in passing. The story is one which will be familiar to anyone who has read British military history. The units, initially drawn from 'clay kickers' who excavated sewers, were cobbled together by the MP John Norton Griffiths, though largely in response to the work of the highly skilled German pioneer units digging under British trenches and then blowing them apart with explosives. There were mix-ups with pay and the chains of command.

The tunneller units were alternately sought by established units as defence against German tunnelling and dismissed as slackers taking good men away from the front. By the end of the way, combined they were the strength of a division though spread along the frontline in companies. The typical British chaos at war is shown, the low point being the delivery of three diving bells to the frontline.  This is a brisk book which manages to balance focus on the individuals involved and the dangers they faced - not just being buried alive or blown apart, but in the skirmishes with revolvers and hand grenades that took place when German tunnellers were encountered underground. There is also technical detail of the mines and the tunnels that housed them. It is an interesting story and one that is often forgotten. However, it does make you wonder again how Britain ever manages to win a war, given the tendency for snobbery and simply poor organisation, to get in the way. I would certainly be interested to read a book telling of this kind of warfare from the German side.

Audio Book - Fiction
'Death of a Charming Man' by M.C. Beaton [Marion Gibbons]; read by David Monteath
Regular readers of this blog might have noticed that in recent months I have not been posting reviews of audio books. That is because I have been struggling to get through this one. I had heard of Hamish Macbeth as a result of the television series which ran for three seasons, 1995-97, though I had never watched any. Starting in 1985, so far 34 novels have been written in this series and this is the 10th in the series, published in 1994. Details in the story make it feel as if it is set much earlier and I had imagined it dated from the 1960s or 1970s. I have been aware of the concept of 'cosy crime' novels, but this takes the cosiness far too far and in fact murder only features very late in the book.

This is more a soap opera about a police sergeant rambling around parts of the North-East Highlands doing very little; he moans about things, he gets a woman to challenge her abusive husband, he looks at houses to buy and verges on having a relationship with a woman who is not his fiancee. His fiancee, an Englishwoman who works in the family hotel has attitudes that would have looked dated in 1964, let alone 1994 and that gives the whole feeling of this being pretty unreal, Beaton (1936-2019) would have been better off making this a historical crime novel set in an earlier decade. There are lots of old fashioned characters who dully spark off each other, but for large stretches the story does not move forward and you are actually glad when Macbeth dumps his fiancee from another time. This would have been dull at 3 hours as many crime audio books, but at over 6 hours it was very hard to get through. I certainly will not be going anywhere near Hamish Macbeth books again. If I wanted this kind of story I would watch 'Coronation Street'. Monteath does pretty well with Scottish and non-Scottish accents especially as he has to do a wide range of sour women.