Books I Read In July

Fiction

'Friends in High Places' by Donna Leon

Perhaps it is because she is an American that Leon has an interest in issues around social class. Her protagonist, Guido Brunetti is the son-in-law of a Venetian count. Social standing and protecting it is an element of a number of her books, but becomes very apparent here. By this stage in the series, this is the ninth book, Leon had become very adept at starting with disparate threads, in this case informing us of the rules around construction in the restricted space of Venice and the associated corruption. However, with a bit of a jolt we then find how Brunetti's problems with his own apartment connect into murder. It comes together well and it is a little refreshing to have a different kind of motive which while it appears initially to be more Italian corruption, is one we can believe motivates people even more now twenty years after this book was published. I have the tenth book to read and then some other random ones from the series I have picked up from charity shops. However, I must say, despite sometimes the narrative seeming to jump a little or spend too long on unimportant aspects, these are easy to read crime dramas which come up with often refreshing solutions.

'Kaleidoscope' by Harry Turtledove

This is another collection of Turtledove's short stories, published in 1990 with stories dating back to 1984, it is older than 'Counting Up, Counting Down' which I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html  'And So to Bed' features an alternate world where earlier versions of humans co-exist with homo sapiens and have found refuge on North America which, as the story is set in 1661, is being opened up by Europeans. The story is told from the perspective of Samuel Pepys and shows how the existence of these other versions of humans allow him to propose evolution some three hundred years earlier. 'Bluff' is an interesting science fiction story set on a planet where humans arrive to find a humanoid species which sees their inner thoughts as being the voice of their gods. This is a fascinating premise and is handled well. It is a good reminder to those writing science fiction that alienness is not simply physical. 'A Difficult Undertaking' is a straightforward story of a siege in Turtledove's Videssos setting, a kind of Byzantine Empire and is pretty entertaining. '

The Weather's Fine' takes an interesting premise that time is like weather and so different parts of North America on different days can be in different 20th Century decades. The protagonist had a good relationship with his girlfriend in the 1960s but not in the 1970s so it is about how they work around this. Time conditioning can keep a building at a certain decade. I think more could have been done with this story and it was a bit depressing that the couple could not work through their issues or separate properly but were condemned to live in fixed behaviours dependent on the decade they were in. 'Crybaby' is a horrible story, a typical demonic child one which really would fit better in a 'Tales of the Unexpected' setting than here. Apparently, Turtledove's wife will not read this story and I can understand why.

'Hindsight' set in the 1950s about a science fiction author who is writing stories before the authors have managed to complete them and is revealed to be a time traveller who is trying to steer the USA down better paths than it followed in our 1960s and 1970s. The story is well handled, not just in terms of the technology, but the different behaviour of someone from the 1980s to those from thirty years' earlier. The blurred line between science fiction and science writing is well done too. A nice story all round. 'Gentlemen of the Shade' is another good one. Turtledove is always sharp when he brings a new spin on vampires as can be seen in his 'Under St. Peters' which is available to read free online now. In this story a club of vampires in late Victorian London hunt down Jack the Ripper who is one of their kind. It is well handled in terms of practicalities and in terms of the atmosphere of the time and place.

'The Boring Beast' is a silly spoof fantasy story which annoyed me. 'The Road Not Taken' is an interesting exercise in looking at how a species might acquire some technology that we see as hyper-advanced but lack technologies that we see as mundane. The encounter with alien invaders equipped for war as if it was the 17th Century is interesting and again reminds writers not to go down easy or lazy paths when portraying alien civilisations. 'The Castle of the Sparrowhawk' is a kind of fairy tale/parable about a challenge in a Middle Eastern land, which did not appeal to me; 'The Summer Garden' is very similar with the protagonist paying a bitter price for their 'victory'. There is a lot less sex in this book than in 'Counting Up, Counting Down' but 'The Girl Who Took Lessons' - it is actually a woman not a girl - is sordid and feels more like a 'joke' a man would tell in a bar. It is a pity it was included in this collection.

'The Last Article' is the other main alternate history story, featuring the German invasion of India in the 1940s, having defeated the British, and coming up against the passive resistance of Gandhi and Nehru. It might be controversial these days to paint British colonial rule as any better than Nazi hegemony, but Turtledove cleverly does highlight the differences and why that would enable the Nazis to defeat Gandhi when the British authorities failed to do so.

Overall an interesting collection with some great highlights. Importantly I would recommend it to science fiction writers to remind them where you can go when portraying aliens similar but different to us.

'Harlequin' by Bernard Cornwell

This is the first in a trilogy set during the early phases of the Hundred Years' War in the 14th Century. It follows an English archer, Thomas of Hookton from fighting a raid by the French on his home village on the south coast of England through battles in Brittany and Normandy coming to a climax at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. As you would expect with Cornwell the portrayal of life at the time and the battles are rendered very well. Unlike some historical authors who cover wars, Cornwell is also good at including a range of interesting female characters with distinct motives. I am concerned though that one who becomes Thomas's 'wife' towards the end of the book is clearly stated to be 15. He might argue it was seen as appropriate at the time but it is uncomfortable to see as a modern reader.

There is a lot of intrigue with lots of people out to kill Thomas, though he also makes friends among the opposite side. This is a strength of Cornwell's writing in that while combat plays an important part he does not skimp on characterisations which make his books that much richer. The sub-plot about seeking the Lance of St. George, let alone the Holy Grail, seems unnecessary and I can only think he included this either as a McGuffin or because publishers asked for it. I have the other two books in the trilogy and am looking forward to seeing what the characters do next.

'Dead Man's Land' by Robert Ryan

This novel features Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson solving a series of murders on and behind the frontline of British forces in Belgium during the First World War. Ryan has done meticulous research but unfortunately at times, especially in the early parts of the book, he tends to 'info dump', given immense detail about the hierarchy of treatment of the wounded rather than revealing it to us. The date when the novel is set is difficult to pin down. The book starts with Watson being commissioned as a major in October 1914, but as the book progresses, with reference to the Gallipoli Campaign (February 1915 - January 1916) and Winston Churchill serving as a lieutenant colonel on the Western Front (November 1915 - May 1916) as well as references to particular gases and aircraft, it is not clear when the action is happening. Given the involvement of Churchill and particular weaponry, notably poison gas, this is important and this uncertainty was an irritant as I was reading.

At times the book feels fragmented, in part because of the serial killing in different parts of the front. Added to that Sherlock Holmes makes odd appearances back in England and these elements are not integrated well into the story. They make him appear even more of a deus ex machina that would be the case anyway. The same can be said for the German sniper. We read about his attempts to assassinate Churchill and his various roles. However, he is not really a full part of the story and his role in the denouement could easily have been filled by an unknown character. The sections covering these two characters feel bolted on. Overall, however, the book improves as it goes on and Ryan provides a good motive for the killings fitting with the time. It could have been a much stronger book if the structure was streamlined and in other places what was happening, when, was made more explicit. The detail of the medical provision, especially the conveyor belt for the wounded, was fascinating especially at times when Ryan shows these things rather than lectures us on them.

'The Long Mars' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

There is a comment on the cover of this book from a reviewer at 'SFX' magazine saying '"Pratchett and Baxter ... skipping along their quantum string like giddy schoolboys ...'" That sums up the problem with not just this book but its predecessors http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/05/books-i-read-in-may.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/06/books-i-read-in-june.html  Pratchett and Baxter seem to have a thousand ideas for alternate versions of worlds and as more of the characters travel into many tens of millions of variants away from our Earth, they get to look at many of them. However, in large part it is like flicking through a catalogue and we only see them briefly. The action when it happens is like a number of vignettes which are only distantly connected to each other. In fact with three characters exploring alternate versions of Mars, even less exciting as most versions are desolate deserts, there is a real detachment between the returning characters. 

As in The Long War when we seem to be building to an important climax, the authors turn away. We just hear reports of them not finding the team they left on an Earth which is a moon of a larger planet; we see nothing of them deciding to bring The Next - a group of arrogant super-humans back to our Earth and minimal detail of how imprisoned Next are got out and get away to some unknown version of Earth. It is as if the most gripping elements of the story have been cut out so as not to distract from the beauty of all the geological, even astronomical variants, the authors could think up. I think they would have done better to have anthologies of short stories in different contexts rather than piling them all into what is supposed to be a single novel.

The other problem that continues from the previous books is how unsympathetic so many of the characters are. In this book smug Russians are added to smug Americans and smug Chinese. Then the Next come along and they are very smug humans who feel it is their right to enslave the 'dim-bulb' population which encompasses the rest of humanity. While it is good to have irritants and antagonists, when even the supposed 'heroes' are not people you could tolerate spending five minutes with because they would constantly patronise you, it is difficult for the reader to get a handle on the story. Again it is like flicking through the brochure or, even, someone else simply flicking through in your sight, expecting you to be invested in something that does nothing really to engage with you.

Non-Fiction

'A History of Modern France. Volume 2: 1799-1871' by Alfred Cobban

As I noted when reviewing Volume 1, for Cobban it seems that Louis XIV was the perfect leader of France and anyone else will struggle to come close to him in ability. I suppose that it is no surprise that a history written in the mid-20th Century focuses has a 'great man' history perspective. However, as Cobban judges so many of the country's leaders harshly, even ridiculing them at times, it really distorts what he is trying to cover. He views Napoleon Bonaparte as a Corsican bandit who could do nothing good for France. He sees Louis XVIII and Louis-Philippe as ineffectual, muddle-headed rulers. He gives a little to Napoleon III but then sees him as ineffective from quite an early period in his reign and as in fact utterly marginalised in the closing years of his rule. Cobban outlines all the political manoeuvring but seems impatient with it as if frustrated that no-one in France could appoint an effective king. 

This level of subjectivity and the repeated derogatory comments on the various rulers and politicians not only makes reading the book irritating, it weakens his accounts of the complex situations of what was happening in this period. The best parts of the book are when he (occasionally) steps away from the peak of the political system and looks at societal and economic aspects. With these he does reasonably well in showing the exceptionalism of France, why it did not modernise the way some neighbouring states did and its population stagnated through the 19th Century when others were growing sharply. Completing the book, I felt I had learnt little especially on the post-1815 period which tends to be neglected in general histories of Europe. Allowing Cobban to judge so much on the basis of his particular animosity to certain men, really undermined this book.

In the Absence of Powder: The Napoleonic Wars without Gunpowder

 

This book is available for sale via Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08CD1RMCZ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0 

This is my second book published through Sea Lion Press: https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/ I do not even recall where I heard the quote which is attributed to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, implying that he said he would have been better off having a corps of archers at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, rather than more men armed with muskets. I do not even know if he actually said it. However, it was a sufficient seed for an idea about writing a story where this could have happened. The novel covers not only the fighting named after Waterloo, though occurring quite a bit further south, but also at Quatre Bras and to a lesser extent at Ligny, in the preceding days.

I also watched the Alternate History Hub podcast on the issue of a world in which gunpowder was not invented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycEZIbQqA8A Interestingly that made me see that even with such an apparently large change to history many events would still have run as they did in our world, for example, the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This led me to see that writing a parallelist novel, i.e. one in which there was a big difference to our world, but in which people got to (roughly) the same position as in ours and followed similar if not identical policies was feasible. This parallelist approach has been challenged with people arguing that my novel is not a 'proper' alternate history story, but rather simply a 'thought experiment'. This is because it is assumed that the moment you introduce such a change there are numerous 'ripple' effects, meaning that no-one would end up doing the same thing as in our world, and indeed, many of the characters we know would not have been born. This tends to overlook the attitudes and behaviours of people in the past, and for example, in early 19th Century Britain there was a limited number of families who had opportunities to rise to power or to gain high positions in the military, something the absence of gunpowder would not have altered.

In 'Thinking of Writing Alternate History?' (2020): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/03/thinking-of-writing-alternate-history.html I make what I feel is a legitimate case for parallelist alternate history. By only altering one aspect but maintaining the others as they were in our history, you can really test whether that change would have made a small difference, a major one or effectively no difference at all. If you begin to substitute other men for Wellington and Napoleon, let alone all their generals, you cannot be certain whether the outcome portrayed would have been the case due to there being no gunpowder or some flaw or skill in the generals and overall commanders and so on. Thus, I kept all the people who were at the battle in the situation, though the different weaponry did mean the battle ran differently and in some cases people were injured rather than killed. The battle did see a large number of deaths among high-ranking officers on both sides.

Researching both the use of what was effectively medieval weaponry and the forces and individuals at the battle, did throw up some difficulties. There is certainly no agreement, for example, on how far a medieval crossbow could throw a bolt or quarrel and the differences between effective and maximum range. People are often bemused by why onagers, which had a shorter range, replaced ballistae, neglecting that it was far easier to manufacture and repair an onager than a ballista. 

Even with individuals there is dispute over their stories. The gravestone, the portrait and other sources, imply that Lieutenant Colonel John Fremantle one of Wellington's aides-de-camp was born in 1780 or 1790 or 1792 and died in 1845 or 1847 or even 1854. If he had died in 1847 at the age of 55 as quoted, he would have joined the Coldstream Guards in 1805 at the age of 13, supposedly, according to some, having already attended both the Royal Military College and Lüneburg University already. I can accept he might have been 23 and a lieutenant colonel at the Battle of Waterloo, given ranks could be bought and a Guards captain would serve as a lieutenant colonel when seconded to other units. So far I can find no-one able to reconcile the different information. I assume he died in 1847 aged 65, rather than 55 as his gravestone (destroyed in 1944 by bombing) apparently said. His rank at death is also disputed with some saying he was a Major General and others, a rank higher, a Lieutenant General - this confusion though may be explained by the fact that he was a Guard and they generally held two ranks, a lower one among the Guards and a higher one when serving with other units. Anyway, this is a classic example of when people say you must write the 'actual' or 'true' history that it is not always easy to do!

One thing that I did enjoy was looking at the different units in the battle and seeing what the equivalent armour and weapons would be if gunpowder was not available. The Guards, as an elite unit, end up with longbows, as they need dedication over many years and distort the body. The Rifles, have arbalests, like rifles, having a long range and penetrating power, but like them too, slow to load. Napoleon's skirmishers, the voltigeurs, given Napoleon's use of Roman iconography, have become javelin-throwing velites. In our world those French cavalry wearing metal breastplates, were called cuirassiers. However, this comes from 'cuir' meaning leather after the boiled leather breastplates of the Classical world and in my alternative a lot of people are wearing them, so those in real metal breastplates have been given 'ferassiers' from the French word 'fer' for iron. One thing that has always attracted wargamers to the Napoleonic period is the wealth of different uniforms and weapons used and I hope readers will find interest in what I have substituted these with in this alternative, only a few of which I have mentioned here. I used this very useful diagram for naming different types of helmets various used.

One challenge with any war story or alternate history is being able to show different aspects of the context to the reader. Initially I thought to do something like Iain Gale's novel of the Battle of Waterloo, 'Four Days in June' (2006). He has five characters he follows. However, I was conscious of criticisms of 'Scavenged Days' (2018) which to show a range of changes that France experienced in that alternative, I used a multiplicity of characters whose eyes we see through at various stages of the novel. In contrast, readers largely want just one main character and expect that you will also write all the details of the minor characters' stories right to the end. This was, in the end, why rather than select a soldier in the line, the story is seen through the eyes of a 'galloper' one of Wellington's battlefield messengers, in this case Cornet Ruper Aske. This allowed me the opportunity for him to be sent to various parts of the battlefields and to witness what the Duke of Wellington and other commanders were doing as well as seeing how the ordinary soldiers were faring. I hope having this perspective gives readers a feel for what was going on and, for this alternative, how the absence of gunpowder weapons altered the battles. This novel is fast paced and I am optimistic that I have made an adventurous story while at the same time exploring how much of a difference changing one aspect of warfare would have made, meaning that the book is far more than simply a 'thought experiment'.