Books I Read in April

At present with the virus crisis, I am not commuting so am not listening to audio books. In addition, though many people are reading more than usual, my reading patterns are pretty much the same as always, so this month's post is not going to be very different from one back in 2017 before I got into listening to audio books in my car.

Fiction
'Time's Echo' by Pamela Hartshorne
This is a largely well-written book with lots of attention to detail, but I found it very heavy-going. It features Grace Trewe a woman who travels the world, occasionally teaching English and who survived the 2004 tsunami. On the death of her godmother from drowning in a river in York, Grace comes to the city to sort out her affairs. She is quickly haunted by a girl called Hawise who lived in the city in the late 1570s until she was drowned by vigilantes for being a witch. Grace's godmother was an unskilled witch herself and opened up a connection that proves difficult to close. It is not really a horror story, but it is hard reading. On one side we see what Hawise experiences especially at the hands of her brother-in-law who tries to rape her and then sets her up to be convicted as a witch only to lose patience and by her sister who seeks to poison her. In many ways this is a very feminist text because it shows how even a clever, prosperous woman of the Elizabethan period could have agency taken from her by jealous and simply malicious people, particularly men. Then we have Grace increasingly losing control of herself as she mentally slips into the past at random occasions but her body continues in today. She is also trying to prevent a neighbour's daughter being sucked in by a dangerous cult.

I felt the pace was ill-balanced. Much of the book is heavy going as I noted, but the closing sections are frenetic and you almost feel Hartshorne had tired of the book and now wanted to get it finished. It is all wrapped up too quickly and too neatly. I think she could have accelerated the pace a little, from say, three-quarters of the way in rather than jumping it up in the final tenth of the book. I have not read any of her books before, but from what she writes it appears she has primarily written romance. I do not disparage that genre the way some do, but I would question why she felt it necessary to have a romance in the modern time. Grace ends up in a relationship with her next door neighbour, Drew, a man who is old enough to be her father, perhaps even older still and has a daughter closer to Grace's age than he is. He gets Grace pregnant and she throws up her world-travelling life. You feel almost at the end, that no matter what the age, men are still portrayed as being able to swipe away a woman's agency when Grace seemed for much of the novel to offer a more positive path for women in the 21st Century than was the case in the past. It is as if Hartshorne flirts with a feminist perspective only to abandon it in favour of a tradwife one at the end.

Hartshorne does need to be commended, despite her 'copping out' at the end, for the attention to detail. She really brings 16th Century York to life, mixing in some people who are known to have existed for real, let alone the churches, streets and orchards that are so richly portrayed. She undermines this with her final note in which she says that the plague portrayed in the novel, never occurred during the period shown, even though it is an important element of the story. You do wonder why she did not then pick another era, for example just thirty years later or used a different form of illness to kill off characters given there were a lot to choose from.

'Child of Vengeance' by David Kirk
Though it is not apparent from the start, this is in fact another origins story for the famous Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. We see him in his adolescence, as Shinmen Bennosuke, Bennosuke being his personal name and Shinmen being the clan name his estranged father has adopted. Bennosuke's father, Munisai and then himself embarrass a petulant member of the Nakata clan, allies of the Shinmen which then brings everything crashing down on the two of them. Munisai is no hero and we find murdered his wife and burnt to death Bennosuke's genuine, peasant father. Much of the book is very claustrophobic, set among a handful of characters in the village overseen by Munisai. Then, when compelled to become a monk, Bennosuke flees and becomes a thief. This allows Kirk to show the horrific nature of punishment in Japanese society of the time. In his attempts to get revenge, Bennosuke is drawn into the army of the Ukita, the overlords of the Shinmen clan and he ends up at the Battle of Sekigahara in October 1600. The battle is usually taken as the starting point of the Musashi story, for example in the telling by Eiji Yoshikawa.

This is a reasonable book and tries to provide a balanced picture of the challenges and choices that Bennosuke faces. No-one is a hero in this book and that seems to be part of Kirk's objective, to stop readers unquestioningly accepting the standard portrayal of samurai society, which in fact has a bleak view of the world and fetishises death while dismissing sacrifices by ordinary people. You almost feel that times Kirk is going to stomp off and say 'no, in fact this was wrong, it was a sick way to live'. He does not, but this is certainly an antidote to those novels which portray samurai behaviour without ever questioning how far it had lost sight of humanity and simply was about a very contorted view of glory. Kirk is good at portraying the time and the settings. Apart from with the Nakatas, he avoids stereotypes and instead has characters that the reader questions. There is apparently one follow-on book, perhaps more. However, basically I do not think I could stomach any more, though that is perhaps a reflection of how Kirk's scenarios get to you.

'White Corridor' by Christopher Fowler
With other books in this Bryant and May series, especially the preceding one, 'Ten-Second Staircase' (2005) http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/03/books-i-listened-toread-in-march.html I have complained how Fowler drowns the books in details making the text very stodgy. He also has a lot of toing and froing by the characters, which again makes them feel laboured. This book is set up in a different way with the two lead detectives stranded for most of the novel, well away from their home ground of London, on the edge of Dartmoor in a snowstorm. After quite a while they find there is a murderer operating among the stranded cars which then connects this stream of the story to another one which seemed unrelated, that of an abused young British mother, who seeking refuge in southern France starts a relationship with a petty thief and killer. The third element features Bryant and May's colleagues back in Mornington Crescent in London and circles around the discovery of a dead drug addict and the murder of their soon to retire pathologist.

Either of the two main strands would have been sufficient for a crime novel, but though he has toned down on all the fact jamming, Fowler clearly cannot hold back from pushing in as much as possible, so reducing the impact of each. As it is, these novels fall into a strange position. He tries for lightness rather than real humour and yet even this comes over as very forced. Featuring two detectives in their 80s might have led to a 'cosy crime' novel, but there is too much reality and gore for it to belong in that category. This is not as hard going as some of the previous novels and there are a couple of good twists in it. However, overall this book is too much of too many things and too little of others to be really satisfying. Showing the ability to get sustained mobile phone reception from the edge of Dartmoor in a blizzard certainly is unconvincing.

Non-Fiction
'Last Talons of the Eagle' by Gary Hyland and Anton Gill
This is a fascinating book about all the innovative aircraft designs that were envisaged or even produced during the Nazi Regime in Germany. It does not recap those jet-powered craft or the V1 or V2 weapons with which most people are familiar, but rather looks are less common designs. These include gyrocopters and helicopters, rocket, jet, asymmetrical, space-scraping, forward projecting and delta wing aircraft. It is well-illustrated and though at times it has to go into technical details, it handles this well for the non-specialist reader. The book does make an excellent point about how much imaginative thinking there was in Germany aero-engineering at the time, even when raw materials and fuel were difficult to get hold of. Yet, very few of the ideas were ever adopted and all the aircraft around in the late 1990s, when the book was published, both commercially and used by the military would not have seemed incredible to German engineers of fifty years earlier. As they highlight, perhaps the US stealth bomber unveiled in 1987, making use of the delta wing design the Germans experimented may explain why so many ideas taken out of Germany in 1945 'disappeared'. A very interesting book with lots of good ideas if you want to feature distinctive aircraft in an alternate history or dieselpunk novel.