Fiction
'Four Days in June' by Iain Gale
While Gale makes it clear that this book, covering the Battle of Waterloo, is a work of fiction, all the leading people, and many of the minor characters, he features, were real. In addition where possible he puts words into their mouths that they were known to have said or written. The book goes round five individuals: Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte; Marshal Michel Ney, Prince of Moskowa, one of the primary French generals; Colonel Sir William De Lancey, the British Quartermaster General; Lieutenant Colonel James Macdonell of the Coldstream Guards charged with defending the chateau of Hougoumont and Generalleutnant Hans von Ziet(h)en who commanded the Prussian I Corps, the first Prussian unit to reach the battlefield.
Overall, it is not a bad book, though rather disjointed. Gale says his intention was to focus on the thoughts of these five men and so we rather see the action in a series of vignettes spread rather erratically across the four days. There is a big jump from the abandonment of Quatre Bras to the British and French being at the battlefield in front of Mont St. Jean. Perhaps the book is best when focused on smaller areas such as the battle for Hougoumont and Ney's repeated cavalry charges at the centre of the Allied line. He is certainly good at portraying how messy the battle was and the horror of the assorted injuries and deaths that many tens of thousands suffered. He also picks up on a couple of occasions when uniforms, especially the blue worn by Dutch troops (some of which he refers to anachronistically as Belgian) and troops from the Duchy of Nassau and the Nassau principalities.
As seems to be common these days with published books there are a number of small but annoying errors. Lieutenant Colonel John Fremantle another of Wellington's aides-de-camp is rendered as 'Freemantle'. A Prussian officer is given the rank of 'Oberstlieutenant' mixing in the English rank with the German rank of Oberstleutnant; the Landwehr are referred to as 'Landwher' and on one of the maps, Hanoverian troops are described as 'Hanovarian'. It is as if the book, at times, has been typed up from a dictation by someone unfamiliar with the actual names. Despite saying he has read 300 sources, Gale also misses the fact that one of the reasons why the Guards at Hougoumont suffered from a shortage of ammunition was that they used a different calibre of shot from other British units, something which had been identified as a problem as early as May 1815.'The Sanctuary Seeker' by Bernard Knight
This is the first in the Crowner John series of murder mysteries. Knight, apparently his real name, was a professor of pathology and been publishing various crime novels since 1963. This novel opens in 1194 and is set in rural Devon and Exeter where the protagonist of the stories, Sir John de Wolfe, 'Crowner John' has been appointed coroner for the region as part of the legal reforms introduced by King Richard I. He is assisted by Gwyn a bulky Cornishman as his enforcer and Thomas de Peyne, a crippled former priest who works as his clerk. He is married to the sister of the Sheriff of Exeter, often an antagonist and has a mistress who runs a local tavern. In many ways I wondered if Knight was intentionally making his hero as different from the Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael featuring in novels set some 50 years earlier, though like John, Cadfael had been a crusader.
This story is around the uncovering of a corpse of a returned crusader and later that of his retainer. The deaths have triggered a number of different crimes, but John persists to get to the heart of the matter behind the two murders, in the face of favouritism and out of hand condemnations of people without evidence.
Despite the setting, the book is effectively a police procedural novel rather than a murder mystery. We see a lot of the formal working of coroner and the other legal officers he rubs up against, e.g. recording executions and setting fines on various villages. Being the first book, I can accept some 'info dumping' both on the main characters and the legal context in which they are working, such as the calling of juries, inquests, sanctuary and abjuring. Though some it seems quite modern, we also see superstition still holding sway, as with trials by ordeal to 'demonstrate' guilt or innocence of a suspect. As is typical with so many crime novels, John runs up against official favouritism or prejudice against various individuals based on who they know rather than any level of guilt. There is some action which John, despite being middle aged in our times, and almost old in those, gets involved with.
There is a bit too much tramping around the countryside and it reminded me of criticisms I have heard of police dramas in which you see people driving around too much rather than actually active at the scenes of crimes or in questioning people. I was unaware of the fact that Knight had been writing novels for 35 years when this book came out in 1998 otherwise I might have been less forgiving when it needs tightening up and does too much telling rather than showing. I have eleven more of the books in this series that were given to me and while I hope their writing is that bit tighter, I am not simply donating them to a charity shop until I have read at least a few more.
'A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' by George R.R. Martin; illustrated by Gary Gianni
This is an odd book. It is set a century before the events featured in Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' series which I read in 2017-18. However, unlike those books which are very 'adult' in nature, featuring brutality and lots of sexual content, this is effectively a children's book. The three stories included are around Ser Duncan the Tall, a squire to a jobbing 'hedge knight' who rides from region to region in the fictional continent of Westeros, seeking short-term mercenary employment and occasionally riding in jousting contests. The book opens with him dying and Duncan trying to make his way as a jouster and hedge knight aided by a 10-year old boy named Egg, who is in fact a royal prince, Aegon. The first story stars very much like the movie, 'A Knight's Tale' (2001), but then develops into a big more complexity at a tournament where typical for Martin's writing there are self-righteous, petulant privileged people who believe in the severest penalties for anything they see as a slight. Smug characters are apparently in at the moment, but it does get tedious reading so many.
The other two stories see Duncan employed by a poor lord in the southern central region of Westeros during a drought, trying to resolve arguments over water supply. The ending though is far too pat and lets down the realistic tensions over old disputes seen throughout the story. The third story sees Duncan further north, taking part in a tournament to celebrate a wedding though it proves to be the background for a conspiracy against the king. We also have two examples of old men marrying much younger women, another unsettling theme in Martin's writing which turns up far too often.
This book will seem very childish to adult and even young adult readers. Basically it is largely pitched at readers of 8-12, who will appreciate the straight forward brisk story-telling. The book is heavily, but well, illustrated by Gary Gianni with line and shading drawings which were so common in historical novels for children of the 1950s-70s that were fed to me. I said this book is largely suitable for children. However, I would include three caveats. One, the type is very small, possibly so that with all the drawings it did not become a very long book. Two, the word 'cunt' features twice and the word 'buggered' once, fitting more with the strong language of Martin's long series.
Third, as is typical of Martin he goes overboard in describing all the various noble houses and their various members. He makes it very hard as so many siblings have names that are only one or more letters different, a Daeron and a Daemon are just one example. As authors we are advised not to have too many characters whose names start with the same letter; Martin goes far further than that and has very, very similar names that can easily sow confusion in the reader's mind. A noble rebellion 16 years before the time when these stories are set and features throughout the background of these stories, especially the third one. Martin seems to have forgotten that while it is fine to spin out various plots and rebellions over many hundreds of pages, packing them into a much shorter story, overwhelms it.
I have the sense that what often happens with very successful authors is that publishers are reluctant to have an editor do a thorough job on their subsequent books. Consequently, it is no surprise that we have ended up with this oddity, a book which is basically written for children, but which includes many of Martin's typical elements that make it hard for even adult readers let alone for younger readers and occasionally including language and behaviour you would want to spare children from until they are old enough to handle it.
'Heretic' by Bernard Cornwell
Though I detected a fall in quality between the first book of Cornwell's 'Holy Grail' trilogy: 'Harlequin' (2000) http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html and the second one, 'Vagabond' (2002): http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/09/books-i-read-in-september.html this final book in the series is far worse by far. I know sometimes, as with his Starbuck tetralogy and in sharp contrast to his Sharpe series, Cornwell loses his way with the story. However, this one is probably the worst of his books I have read and by the end you do wonder why you bothered. In this one, English archer, Thomas of Hookton comes late to the English siege of Calais in August 1347 and sees some of the action there. However, he is then sent to southern France, once a truce is signed, by his lord, the Earl of Northampton to continue his rather erratic search for the Holy Grail. Throughout the series you feel that not on Thomas but Cornwell himself is ambivalent about this MacGuffin and so it is a rather feeble motivator for his character. He travels to the County of Astarac in south-western France which had been part of the Duchy of Aquitaine which had been ruled by the English but was steadily conquered by the French. For some reason he invents the fictional County of Berat whose ruler controls Astarac.
The rest of the novel, bar a short stretch at the end has Thomas and a shifting group of allies and enemies trekking back and forth between Astarac and a fictional castle town Castillon d'Arbizon either trying to control these or seek out the Holy Grail there. Guy Vexille the fictional Count of Astarac (the real one at the time was Centule II) and Thomas's cousin; Robbie Douglas his noble Scottish prisoner and Sir Guillaume d'Evecque, who was part of the raiding party on Hookton and father of one of Thomas's many ill-fated lovers all turn up. The book is then a series of skirmishes and running between the two locations, dealing with Thomas's latest lover, Genevieve a woman accused of being a Beghard, one of the various heretical lay communities in western Europe at the time. Ironically Vexille is in fact a Cathar, another more extensive heresy which had been purged in southern France in the 13th and early 14th centuries, but in a refreshing change from so much fiction set in medieval southern France, they do not take up much of the story.
The fact that Cornwell had to include so many more fictional elements than is usual for his stories, highlights the root of the problems with this book. There seems to be no point to it. There is no epic battle. There is no outright victory for anyone. The grail might still be fiction itself and men fight over simply the box that might have contained it. Almost all the leading characters are killed in skirmishes having switched sides once or twice. Genevieve escapes the fate of Thomas's other women and survives. However, the rapid change in women Thomas is with in the books means each is sketched out poorly and what could have been strong, interesting female characters (which can be a challenge with historical war stories) are not completed and are snuffed out too quickly. The ultimate futility of the book is shown by one incident that I will not reveal as it is a spoiler but even more so by the fact that many of those who survive the monotonous raiding and skirmishes die of the Black Death anyway.
Overall, I am not certain why Cornwell bothered with this book. It appears that having promised a trilogy he felt obliged to provide one rather than it being planned out properly. As a result, he fumbles around for some point to this third book and it would have been better if he had closed the story at the end of 'Vagabond' with some conclusion that seemed to have been worth reading hundreds of pages to reach. This book was very disappointing and I certainly will not bother with the coda volume, '1356' (2012) which is set 8 years after 'Heretic'.
Non-Fiction
'The Pleasures of Peace' by Bryan Appleyard
Despite some flaws, I found this quite an impressive book. It looks at developments in various facets of art in Britain from 1945 up until when it was published in 1990. He does look into the pre-war period and even the 19th Century for ideas and trends that continued after 1945, but as the book progresses, it is the contemporary developments which are dominant. Though Benjamin Britten gets a brief mention, it explicitly does not cover music and in theory does not cover popular culture, though reference to movies and science fiction books are, at time included. The prime focus is on literature, poetry, theatre, painting, sculpture and architecture, breaking the years down into four periods.
Various themes reappear throughout the book such as the tension between a modern world and traditional/nostalgic perspectives and associated with this between the urban and rural. There is discussion of the interplay between art and science, especially the concern that science would overwhelm art or whether art could assimilate scientific aspects. The issue of representation in art whether figuratively or and whether it needs to be seen in order to be art also comes up. There is analysis of language, especially in literature, poetry and plays not just in terms of what is seen as appropriate language and the meanings it communicates, but also in terms of post-modernism of how culture impacts on language and its comprehension. Society and its changes are constantly used as a context for these discussions.
As can be seen just from this brief summary the book powers through a great deal. Comprehension is aided by Appleyard breaking the text into short thematic sections but also making a connection between one and the other, sometimes surprisingly such as going from poetry to architecture and drawing parallels in developments of the 1980s. Appleyard also keeps grounding what he is saying by using examples from the artists he is discussing, typically focusing in particular on one or two pieces of work to illustrate his point. This stops the book being painfully abstract and makes it more accessible to a non-academic reader.
One challenge is, because he focuses largely on those artists who attracted the most attention in their time, there is a parade of white Englishmen. We do get Iris Murdoch, Sylvia Plath, Germaine Greer, Seamus Heaney, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and a few others. There is reference to American and French artists and thinkers, but the prime focus is on Englishmen. By the end I did feel that there was almost a parallel book somewhere to this one in which other contributors to the artistic culture of Britain was included. However, if you want to know who were seen as the 'important' artists and movements of the mid-late 20th Century this is an energetic, detailed book which works well not just to introduce them but to explore why it is felt they produced the art they did.
Audio Book
'Prince Caspian' by C.S. Lewis; read by Lynn Redgrave
As I have not been commuting to and from work, I have been listening to far fewer audio books and indeed, though this one only runs to 4 hours, I started it in March and only finished it this month.
This was a children's book that I got in a mixed bag of audio books. I had 'The Magician's Nephew' (1955) read to me when I was a boy and in I saw the movie of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' (novel 1950; movie 2005). However, as to the other stories in the Narnia series - though a fictional world, named after a Roman region of Italy - I have just been vaguely aware of them. This story happens in Narnia some centuries after the events of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe', and animals have generally ceased to be able to speak and the humans have been overtaken by a nation called the Telmarines, who ultimately turn out to be descendants of pirates from Earth. The story centres around Prince Caspian, in line to the throne, but is usurped by his uncle and flees to try to find help to recover his position as king. He both encounters talking animals who aid him in the war against his uncle and summon the four Pevensie children from England of the 1950s where they had returned after ruling as monarchs in Narnia for many years centuries earlier.
As you would expect from English upper middle class fiction of the mid-20th Century it is very 'jolly hockeysticks' with lots of worthy behaviour and exclamations. The Christian overtones, represented by the giant lion, Aslan who also reappears in Narnia and those having doubt or faith in him, run alongside Classical references, notably to Bacchus who turns up with Maenads and leads a drunken orgy and other folklore like a river god. There are arguments between the various animals which make up the armies, but generally a reawakening of nature, especially tree spirits, as the four children aid Caspian to victory. How the lands have changed in the centuries since the children have been away is interesting. More unsettling are the colonial overtones, indicating that only the wise English brought in from outside can resolve tyrants and other difficulties in 'less developed' lands; indeed through bringing faith in Christianity too.
Despite all these themes which may be off putting in various ways, the story is one of sweeping old fashioned heroics tempered occasionally with the weaknesses of children. Ironically it all ends with the Pevensies being sent back to where they left our world at the railway station and the two eldest, Peter and Susan are advised that they are too old ever to return to Narnia, so somehow representing the loss of innocence for children even while pre-adolescent. That may reflect recognition of how the war and the following austerity still hung over England at the time the novel was written. Lynn Redgrave does a wonderful job of voicing all the characters in that very energetic, very English style which fits the novel and she is called upon to voice a whole host of different animals, which she does with great variety, so bringing those characters to life in all their variety.
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