Fiction
'A Study in Murder' by Robert Ryan
This is the third book in Ryan's Dr. Watson (and indeed Sherlock Holmes) series, following on from 'Dead Man's Land' (2012/13) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html and 'The Dead Can Wait' (2014) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/09/books-i-read-in-september.html which I read earlier this year. At the end of 'The Dead Can Wait', Dr. Watson, serving as a major, was hauled from the wreck of a British tank and ended up in a German prisoner-of-war camp. This story continues through the latter part of 1916 and into early 1917. It features a number of characters from the previous books including Ernst Bloch, the leading German sniper from the first book and ruthless assassin Ilse Brandt, from the second and Georgina Gregson from both of them. Von Bork, a German agent from Conan Doyle's own story, 'His Last Bow' (1917) also makes an appearance. However, this is not the last book in the series, there is 'The Sign of Fear' (2016) though I have not been given a copy of that one.
On the instigation of Von Bork, not only is Watson refused leave to be exchanged into neutral Netherlands, despite his age, but he is sent to a far harsher camp, rather than close to the Dutch border, up in the Harz Mountains. It is called Harzgrund and is somewhat based on the real camp of Holzminden run to make a profit out of the prisoners. As with the previous two books, different threads run in parallel. In the camp Watson tries to find out why three prisoners killed themselves at a séance and then what is going on with supposedly escaped prisoners. Meanwhile back in Britain there are two schemes to exchange him, one involving for Sherlock Holmes and one for Ilse Brandt. There are some improvements on the previous two books. Sudden jumps in the character the story is being seen through, are generally avoided. There is one revelation that someone is not who they are pretend to be, but handled far better than in the previous book in particular in which three characters are revealed to be different people even though we have seen their thoughts.
As with the previous books, this is more a spy thriller than a detective novel, though Watson does unravel what is happening to "escaped" prisoners from Harzgrund. The story suggests that he comes to believe contact with the spirit world is possible, something Conan Doyle believed in very strongly. The main problem with the book is the build up to a preposterous climax at the fictional Knok bridge. This involves two sets of Britons, one bringing a German agent (freed using not only a hot air balloon, but a screen suspended in the air on to which a projection of an escaping woman is made and from the balloon a corpse of another is dropped!), one a German sniper and Sherlock Holmes, on one side and Watson, Von Bork and an UFA film crew on the other. The exchange at the bridge is far more suited to a Cold War spy novel than a First World War one. To add to the ridiculous nature of this stage of the novel, a British submarine - one designed but never built - emerges from the river.
I have no idea why Ryan felt obliged to pile on so many unbelievable elements. The book is not intended as a spoof as the brutal killings throughout make clear. Yes, authors do play around with time, but Ryan seems to do it far more than is necessary. He could have easily used a different Dutch bridge. There was no need for such extravagant, probably impossible, escapes in London and Venlo. He seems to be scrabbling around for details and is compelled to alter the naming of the Connaught Hotel to fit his story rather than finding some equivalent detail at that time.
I have a sense that Ryan is a better writer than he has shown in these three books. The short story Watson writes while in the prison camp, 'The Girl and the Gold Watches' and that maybe because he has distorted 'The Man with the Watches' (1922) and sent it back in time a bit. Ryan seems to get some pleasure in what he calls 'remixing' Conan Doyle stories, but unfortunately seems to learn little from that author's work, in terms of quality of story-telling as opposed to atmosphere. I wonder if he is blinded by his fandom. I certainly had far less difficulty with his 'Empire of Sand' (2008) which I read in December 2018: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2018/12/books-i-listened-toread-in-december.html It looks like, as is increasingly common these days, that Ryan's success has bought him exemption from his work being properly edited as I am sure that any developmental editor would have questioned a number of Ryan's decisions. Perhaps one or two in isolation would have been fine, but in this book they accrete to make it seem silly really undermining what could have been a gripping book if only he had made more feasible choices in how it would run. Overall, a missed opportunity.
'The Long Cosmos' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
This is the final book in the 'Long Earth' pentalogy. Baxter finished it off alone after Pratchett died in March 2015. I do not know whether that explains why there is a bit more control over this book than the preceding ones. The death of a few major characters at the end of the fourth book, 'The Long Utopia' (2015) probably also helped. There is a little less jumping abruptly between perspectives. We mainly follow one strand developing a continental-wide computer 'The Thinker' and a sabbatical by Joshua Valienté, a character now 68, who we have followed since being a boy in the first book. There is a sub-plot of Nelson Azikiwe tracking down his grandson. However, all these threads come together, ironically given the chaos of so much of the series, in a very pat way.
The series has always struggled with plot. The main focus of the two authors has been the immense amount of ideas they had for their infinite variants on Earth, Mars and indeed the wider universes. Even in this book, you feel the disappearance of a couple of characters including Dan-Rod, Joshua's son are largely to take the characters to some interesting places, indeed in this novel, to see giant trees running on hydrogen. The exploration to the 'north' of the chain of Earths takes characters nearer to the core of the Milky Way galaxy. However, it is very under-developed. There is no great revelation of who has been contacting humans and other species along the long Earth to join them. They go and come back again. As with the previous books, it seems as if Pratchett and Baxter have dodged writing the climax that they have spent so long building up to.
Some of the most annoying characters were fortunately killed off in 'The Long Utopia' but there are still too many who spend a lot of patronising other people. I know it is a tendency of books in the 2010s to fill their pages with smug characters, lecturing others about how naive they are. I guess this reflects our society as you daily find such behaviour especially in social media but also in the news. It seems these days you cannot feel right in something unless you are telling someone else very vigorously how wrong they are - or often simply how wrong you assume they are. Yes, one or two characters like this is fine, but especially with science fiction in which the danger of simply slipping into a lecture is high, this becomes tedious. These are not only characters you feel no affinity for, but they are characters you do not want to be around. The reference of the elderly 'troll' Sancho, being a librarian and resembling an orang-utang is a nice reference to the librarian in Pratchett's Discworld novels, is a rare example of a character you feel you can engage with, even though he has limited dialogue.
While I was surprisingly underwhelmed by David Downing's 'Station' series, I have never felt so disappointed by a series of books as with the 'Long Earth' pentalogy. I know Pratchett's solo books got 'flabby' in the 21st Century, but teaming up with Baxter, who often overwrites anyway, made this tendency far worse. There were enough ideas in these books for the authors to have produced twenty or thirty well developed novels. However, they clearly felt obliged to pack in every last idea they had, not simply in terms of numerous versions of Earth, but species and political developments. As a result, rather than a coherent, engaging series of books, you end up with a scrapbook containing a morass of material which while interesting of itself, does not make successful novels. I certainly regret buying these books new, something I rarely do. I have stopped reading work by Pratchett and certainly will steer clear of anything by Baxter. This was really an expensive disappointment.
'The Witch of Portobello' by Paulo Coelho
Coelho is one of those authors like Thomas Pynchon or Gabriel García Márquez who you will have on the edge of your consciousness without really knowing what they have written. I bought this book, published in 2007 unread at a car boot sale last year, in part curious what kind of book it was. There are a lot of 'extras' at the back of this book as if it was a DVD, so you can find out quite a lot about Coelho, his career and beliefs. I had no problem with the first half of the book and in fact found it quite engaging. It is about a Roma woman who was put up for adoption in Romania the 1970s and was adopted by a Lebanese couple and given the name Sherine. The couple were later refugees to Britain where Sherine grew to adulthood and used the name 'Athena'. She had a short marriage resulting in a son, but there was divorced. She worked in a bank and then as an estate agent in the Middle East. Rather than a straight narrative, the book is written as a series of interviews with people who knew Sherine, including her adopted and birth mothers, neighbours and teachers. This bit is fine and engaging. Sherine returns to Romania and finds her birth mother.
Where I lost patience with the novel is when Sherine increasingly develops an engagement with New Age practices. Initially this is through dancing and calligraphy taught to her by amateurs. Then, however, she meets a Scottish woman, Deidre, who pretends to be some kind of spiritual guru. In fact she shows Sherine how she can take up a similar role as a charlatan through teaching things she actually has no idea about and wrapping them up in various jargon about the feminine side of God. Sherine ends up training actors and they form the hub of a growing cult around her until she faces opposition from church leaders and is murdered. I was bored by all the droning on about the spiritual aspects when we know Deidre and Sherine are in fact engaged in a confidence trick, largely for their own sense of self-worth. What I found worse at the end is that Coelho actually believes in much of the stuff he shows Sherine proselytising with a lack of any genuine knowledge and increasingly deluded. You really lose faith in the story. What is perhaps worse is the epilogue, suddenly a character mentioned in passing and constantly dismissed turns out to be a prime mover of the story, kept from the reader throughout.
Having worked through this book, I can understand why people stay away from literary fiction. The author does not play fair with the reader. Though he has skill in terms of characterisation and the structure of the plot is refreshing, half the book is basically a New Age sermon through the voices of two characters even though we have been shown they are charlatans. Reading more about the author it is clear these pseudo-religious texts are at the heart of his writing and I can understand why the original buyer/receiver of the book sold it on unread. Somewhere in this there is some skilled writing, but certainly the second half of the book is as exciting as listening to a sermon by a deluded fanatic. I will not be looking out any more books by Coelho and struggle to find what attracts readers to him. Ironically he seems to have become very much like the charlatan guru characters he portrays in this book.
Audio Book - Fiction
'Dying Light' by Stuart MacBride; read by John Sessions
It was ironic that I chose to listen to this book when I did, just before John Sessions's death. He was born in Scotland but was moved to England when only 3. However, he proves very capable in his narration of providing a range of Aberdeen and some Edinburgh voices, both male and female and really making them distinctive from each other.
This book is only the second of those written by MacBride featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae. That surprised me as there is a lot of back story. McRae has a pathologist as an ex, is dating a fellow police officer who has had her arm broken in a previous case, is under investigation as a result of the death of another officer during a raid he led and so on. It felt as if the character had been running for a number of books already. I guess that sums up MacBride's style. This book packs in four cases in parallel with McRae working to two inspectors as well as dealing with all the issues raised above. There is a murder of prostitutes, turf battles over drugs dealing, a missing husband, mutilated dog's bodies and corruption over a housing development. Some of these do begin to interlock, but you do really need to pay close attentions as McRae and his colleagues flit between the different cases. There is also a lot of jealousy and claiming the credit, especially in the media, is a big motivator for many of the various detectives' actions.
The book is very gritty with brutal murders, dismemberment and a range of torture. MacBride was clearly seeking to bring a 'hard-boiled' approach to Scottish crime writing and goes at it to an extent far harder than, say, Ian Rankin or Val McDermid - though her stories are often set in England. Overall it is not a bad story and while scenes will make you wince and feel frustrated, you have to admire the author for balancing a whole host of strands reasonably well. However, I think it is probably best to read rather than listen to this book, unless you can listen to the 6 hours in one stretch as there are occasions when you want to flick back to see who was doing what to whom, when a strand is picked up again. With that caveat I might be tempted to pick up more in this series if I see them in my local charity shop, preferring book form over more audio.
Non-Fiction
'The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation' by Ian Kershaw
There are probably few eras/events in history which have been so written about at an academic level as the Nazi regime, perhaps the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, could come in for the kind of scrutiny that Kershaw gives the Third Reich. As he makes clear at the start this is neither a history book, though he does mention some occurrences in the Nazi period, and though it references some hundreds of books and articles on the regime, it is not a historiographical book either, it is somewhere between the two. As the title suggests, Kershaw looks at how historians, some social scientists and political commentators, have interpreted what is known about all that occurred under Nazism. I read the second edition of the book which came out in 1990, five years after the book was published. However, from 1986 onwards there had been the so-called Historikerstreit - a row between various West German historians on how far the regime could be 'historicised', i.e. seen as part of ongoing, 'normal' history and how far those 12 years had to always remain treated as something almost outside history, disconnected from what went before and what followed after. This edition was expanded to encompass that row, which unlike most historical disputes, spilled out from academia into the media.
Throughout the book, drawing on extensive resources, Kershaw looks at the big questions around the Nazi regime, such as whether it was a form of fascism or something unique; whether the term 'totalitarian' is applicable to it; whether it was a centrally-driven regime or more a cluster of competing power blocs in Germany; how far Hitler drove or simply permitted radicalisation notably in persecution of the Jews; whether Nazi foreign policy fitted a plan perhaps developed a decade earlier or was primarily opportunistic; whether political or economic concerns drove the actions of the regime; whether the Nazis were a reactionary or a revolutionary force, holding up or advancing modernisation tendencies in Germany and whether the Holocaust must always been seen as something somehow apart from history or can be connected into trends beforehand and afterwards. Kershaw thoroughly analyses these lines and shows his own view on them, though also notes that the gaps between different 'sides' are not as extreme as the different viewpoints made out, even before 1986. He provides a refreshing hybrid approach, for example, arguing that while Hitler did not give direct orders for the extermination of the Jews, his rhetoric of racial hatred, his willingness to tolerate and even foster activities by the various blocs in his regime, created an environment where a steady progress to the death camps could occur, even if this had not been planned at the outset, and certainly not before 1941.
The book, now 30 years old, could seem rather dated. At the end, Kershaw notes the appearance of the ultra-nationalist Front National in France, but he did not foresee the populist leaders willing to bend democracy that have become such a feature of the world of the 2010s. Though these regimes today are not fascist, reading the book today, throughout you spot many small elements that seem to be echoed in contemporary political life such as creating and demonising the 'other' and bombastic claims for creating something so superior to what has ever come before. While still relevant in these times, the book has become a useful historical resource in itself. Kershaw was writing at a time when there were still two Germanies and he takes care to include the East German perspective and the views of marxist (he uses lower case for leninist too) of the time, which have largely now been lost from view in current discussions of the Nazi regime. Germany has moved on since then, not simply in terms of reunification, but in terms of the long shadow cast by the Nazis and almost characterising the Germanies simply as not-Nazi, rather than having intrinsic worth of their own. Thus, though dated, this remains a thorough, stimulating book asking questions that anyone, especially English-speakers studying the regime, can get a lot from.
As an aside, I met Ian Kershaw only once (he still lives, but is long retired) and that was in 1988. Funnily enough I cannot remember anything of what he said, instead all I can remember was that he wore a knitted tie, something I was unfamiliar with; it also ended in a straight line rather than a pointed one as is always the case in the UK and from the end hung a small metal button on a chain. To me he looked to be the archetypal West German scholar of the time, rather than British. My mind was obviously wandering if I paid so much attention to minute details and I imagine I missed out on stimulating input given he was updating this book at the time.
'A History of the Vikings' by Gwyn Jones
This book was published in 1968, though I have a 1973 edition. It approaches the history of the Vikings, effectively the peoples of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, 780-1070 though he connects into the history of Europe and indeed North America, before and after that period. What characterises a book of the time, is that whilst there is a lot of academic detail from sources in a wide range of languages, often listed in footnotes dominating the page, it is presented very much as a story. The text flows along briskly, sometimes, especially in the confusing wars of the 11th Century in Scandinavia and Britain, too fast. The narrative style, especially at the beginning with long lists, perhaps makes this book, despite its academic weight, more accessible to the general reader. Perhaps he makes more character judgements on the leading individuals than would be the case even with a popular historian writing nowadays let alone a semi-academic one. It is illustrated with those line drawn illustrations and maps, plus black-and-white photos, throughout and they often give flavour as much as information.
While broken up into three largely chronological blocks, sensibly Jones separates the social and artistic history from sections focused on developments in particular regions. This is sensible as especially the progress of the Scandinavians in Russia and the Middle East is far removed from developments in Iceland, Greenland and North America. At the time, the authenticity of the Vinland Map, found in 1965, was still under discussion. However, as Jones makes clear, it did not really matter as the archaeological record shows without doubt that Vikings visited and stayed some time in North America. One of the strengths is this linkage between what archaeology has shown and the history of these people and Jones keeps make useful connections between them, notably in terms of coins but also burials, uncovered towns and houses and especially carved stones.
Overall, though dated, this is a good introductory text to the full scope of Viking history and is particularly useful if you are interested in the history of Britain before the Norman Invasion. Though at times frenetic it helps sort out that period between King Alfred the Great's rule and 1066. Importantly the social history sections, including an additional one on the Danelaw region of England, not only goes beyond cosmetic portrayals of Nordic life, but shows how it was different in various regions and altered over time rather than being stuck in one model. The ebbing and flowing of Christianity impacts on this but also enters into the political history sections, reminding us not to fall into the trap of seeing Vikings as monolithic or unchanging, but in fact, in part due to how much of the western world they interacted with, a gauge of developments across many societies beyond Scandinavia itself.
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