Non-Fiction
'The Awful Secret' by Bernard Knight
This is the fourth book in the Crowner John series set a few months after the melodramatic trial by tournament that ended 'Crowner's Quest' (1999). Sir John De Wolfe has largely recovered from the broken leg he received at the tournament and is back investigating. There are two main stories, one about the murder of a man washed up on the northern shore of Devon and then him being pressured to help a former Templar he knew in Palestine, who himself is murdered. One might expect that whenever Templars are mentioned these days there will also be something about the Holy Grail and the descendants of Jesus Christ.
Though this book was published in 2000, ahead of 'The Da Vinci Code' (2003) it shows people holding the same views on Jesus's bloodline as in that book. However, unlike in most books of this kind, De Wolfe being a good Catholic of the late 12th Century sees the entire idea as blasphemous. This brings in interesting tensions as to how far a man will go to aid old army comrades, ones he did not know particularly well. While he assists the first former templar, even concealing him at his family's home, he feels obliged to aid the second, despite ultimately despising the line that he preaches. In many ways, De Wolfe is tricked and this makes him seem that much more human than all the laboured philandering which fill so much of these books. There is tension as he tries to help the second templar get away from Dorset.
There is an additional sub-plot with an invasion of the island of Lundy held by pirates though promised to the Templars and in subduing another village on the mainland coast indulging in piracy. These provide action scenes that Knight seems to have felt were necessary now in each of these books. Some modern commentators feel the secret is 'dull' though I think that is because some twenty years on these speculations about Jesus are very well known and not as surprising as was the case even back in 2000. I feel, though, that despite some flaws, this is a good book. De Wolfe does blunder and holds to attitudes which are appropriate for his time and background, rather than being a sudden convert to some radical new belief. I still have quite a few of these books to read. I hope Knight kept to the more realistic approach rather than making his protagonist an action hero and also toning down the unnecessarily high number of sexual encounters.
'City of Glass' by Cassandra Clare
While there are further two books after this one in Clare's Mortal Instruments series, this one does feel like the closing of a trilogy. It comes to a big climax with the antagonist, Valentine and a lot seems to resolved. Starting in New York like the previous two books, this one soon moves to the fantastical world of Idris (capital Alicante, but not the Alicante of our world) which has a kind of Victorian bucolic setting as if envisaged by William Morris. All the main characters from the previous books end up there. Given this context it does feel, even more than the previous two books, as a branching-off from the Harry Potter series. The various debates among the shadowhunters of Idris are reminiscent of the conflicting views around dealing with Lord Voldemort. Again it is teenagers who settle the situation and also work to bring an alliance between the shadowhunters and the 'downworlders', i.e. vampires, werewolves and fairies. There is the same kind of mixture of political debates and teenage relationship crises.
I have commented how unsettling the underage sex (the main character is 14, rather than 18 as shown in the television series) and the incestuous thoughts between a brother and sister, which though, fortunately, is revealed to untrue. I do not know why Clare felt a need to include these elements. The incest in this book is part of a very well done subterfuge by one character, but it was unnecessary and I wonder why the publishers accepted it for a book aimed at the 'young adult' audience. There is some decent writing in this book and aspects which stand above the rather derivative ones. However, it is not a book I can like due to what I feel are inappropriate foci for it. Ironically I feel curious to see where Clare went with the remaining two books since she killed the incest and effectively had the prime antagonist vanquished.
'The Concrete Blonde' by Michael Connelly
This book was published in 1994 and is the third in Connelly's Harry Bosch series. I think it is the best of those that I have read so far which seems to confirm what for me seems to be increasingly true: that you need to give a crime novelist at least 3 books for them to get into their stride with a character. The book with video cassettes, pagers and US Vietnam veterans in early middle age, feels very of its time. What is galling, though, is the highlighting of black suspects being choked to death and unarmed suspects being shot dead by police feels like elements taken from the current US news, even 27 years later. Some things never seem to change in the USA.
Unlike the previous book, 'The Black Ice' (1993), this one is very taut. In part this is because much of the action takes place in the courtroom. Harry Bosch is facing a civil case brought by the widow of an unarmed serial killer known as The Dollmaker that he shot and killed four years earlier when the man was reaching for a toupee rather than a gun. This means Bosch is kept on quite a leash at times having to rush back to court. To confuse matters it comes to light that either he killed the wrong man or there is a copycat killer who has been active at the same time. The jeopardy that Bosch faces in investigating whether he did make a mistake with his suspicions or not adds another layer to the story. There are some decent twists and it is good to see the detective as being as flawed as anyone else. There is also the extra elements of his antagonisms with both the prosecuting attorney and his own rather ineffectual lawyer. We also see the complexities that his position makes in terms of his developing relationship with Sylvia Moore, the widow of a colleague whose murder he investigated in the previous book.
Overall, the novel manages to balance having twists and various layers without losing the reader. It gives what feels like a decent picture of Los Angeles, both the upmarket and seedy sides of it and in showing how dangerous it is for citizens at risk for their lives both from criminals and the police. Unfortunately in almost three decades, that situation has not changed. However, it does mean that Connelly's book has a currency rather than beginning to feel entirely like a historical crime novel.
Non-Fiction
'My Favourite People and Me, 1978-1988' by Alan Davies
I saw the documentary programme, 'Alan Davies' Teenage Rebellion' (2010) in which Davies went back to where he grew up in Essex and met with people he had known in his youth as well as celebrities he had followed, notably Paul Weller. I imagine a lot of that is based on this book published the previous year. It is a kind of free-flowing autobiography in sections concerning a single year in this period, but with chapters using people that Davies was interested in as the hook. Often, though, he does not really come to the individual until the end of the relevant chapter.
Davies is less than two years older than me. He went to a private school, his mother died when he was young, he was abused by his father (the focus of his most recent biography but there are shadows of that in this book) who remarried a neighbour and they were much richer than my family, e.g. having fly-drive 3-week holidays in the USA; he was bought both a motor scooter and a car as soon as he could have them; I did not have a car until I was in my mid-30s. Davies was far more successful with women than me and far more into sport, especially football, but also tennis and motorbike racing, so those celebrities mean little to me. However, pop stars, the people in the news and what he thought about them, campaigns of the time, such as around nuclear weapons and animal rights, are things I know about. He tells his involvement in these things and what he thought about these people I can understand them. Though we were poorer than his family, we still felt ourselves in the middle class milieu and I knew people like him.
As you would expect from his TV performances, Davies recounts the topics he focuses on with wry humour than made me laugh out loud occasionally. If you are interested in him as a person this is a good read and is very accessible. It would particularly appeal if you remember the era yourself or if you are interested in how (relatively well off) young people survived in an era before smart phones and social media and what issues concerned many of them, some of which now seem pretty forgotten. It would be nice to see more autobiographies using this approach which I find very refreshing and engaging.
'The Spanish Civil War' by Hugh Thomas
I was advised that as the years progressed from the first publication of this book in 1961, that Thomas revised it to move increasingly towards sympathy to the Nationalist side in the civil war. The edition I read was published in 1965 and though he had corrected some errors from the previous two, it did seem that his sympathies while supportive of the Republican government side are actually pretty balanced. He does not hold back from criticism of the Republicans' multifarious divisions that so weakened them and the vacillating attitude of the Moscow-backing Communists.
Thomas really benefited from the fact that he was writing when many of those who had been involved in the war from both sides, let alone eye-witnesses, were still alive. He is very good at balancing up the different perspectives, especially when it is difficult to know the truth and giving the reader a fair impression of what happened.
This is a comprehensive book, my edition was 911 pages long. Thomas gives background going back into the 19th Century and making it clear that the violence of the 1930s was part of a long history of such occurrences in Spanish history. He also shows how the fact that Spain had not been involved in the First World War had left many in the country ill-informed of the nature of war. Coming at the end of the 1930s, it was to experience all the horrors of the latest military technology, especially in terms of the aerial bombing of civilians. Before discussing the war itself, Thomas goes through the different political groupings. While the divisions on the Republican side are well known, he shows those among the Nationalists too, given the range of groups which joined what had been primarily a military uprising.
The book is good on the social and economic aspects of the war, yet also provides detailed accounts of the various battles, aided by dome simple but informative line-drawn maps. It makes clear that those who somehow pretend that General Franco, progressed slowly to avoid damaging so much of Spain are mistaken. He stated this but it is clear that even with massive support from Italy and Germany, his soldiers were often struggling to make advances but when they entered towns they carried out massacres which Spain had long become accustomed to. I had not realised how close the Nationalists came to grinding to a halt. Even in 1938 if the supply of German war materiel had dried up then, the war most likely would have come to a stalemate.
Thomas is good on all the various individuals who were involved and highlights things such as Irishmen fighting on both sides and the black American soldiers and commanders who fought in the Republican International Brigades, fighting alongside white comrades when the US Army was still segregated. Someone needs to make a movie about ex-Corporal Oliver Law, the black commander of the Washington Battalion. The age of the book is shown up by how Thomas feels to seem physical details such as how fat someone was or whether they had a lot of sex, are important for ascertaining their character.
The British come out of the story very poorly. I know some wanted the Nationalists to win, on the basis that while democracy was fine for Britain other countries were better under dictators. However, a lot of the British policy, blocking the elected government from buying arms and yet introducing a non-intervention policy so poor that tens of thousands of Italian troops fought for the Nationalists, just seems to be incompetence. It is only in the light of Neville Chamberlain's utter failings as prime minister that his predecessor Stanley Baldwin could seem even mildly competent. In many ways Britain's actions ensured that the Nationalists won, especially in the context of how close the fight was throughout, contrary to what now tends to be the popular view of it.
Overall, despite its age, this is a very good book if you want to really get into seeing what happened in the Spanish Civil War in detail. It remains a good counter-balance to rather lazy assumptions about the war which have slipped into popular history portrayals. It certainly shows that there are many more stories to the story of the war than is commonly recognised. Americans in particular seem to be missing out on the role which their nationals played in the conflict, at a time when, in other historical aspects, the role played by black people is being highlighted.
Audio Books - Fiction
'The Da Vinci Code' by Dan Brown; read by Jeff Harding
It is ironic that I ended up listening to this at some of the same time as I was reading 'The Awful Secret' (2000) as they feature the same theory about Jesus Christ being married and having children. When this novel came out in 2003, I was irritated at the efforts that people went to prove how 'wrong' Brown was, down to minute details about where a particular stone is in a corridor at the Louvre gallery in Paris as this somehow 'proved' he was something - lazy, misguided, trying to trick people - I am not sure. They seemed to forget that he had written a work of fiction and if they had dug into the details in a Jack Reacher novel, let alone a James Bond one, they would have found much the same. Listening to the book - having seen the 2006 movie years ago, in part, I realised why they felt compelled to set up such 'uncovering' of the book.
While there is chasing around Paris, London and parts of Scotland, the book is less an adventure and more a lecture. There are huge sections of exposition by one or more of the main characters to others. Fortunately, at least it is not all mansplaining as Sophie Neveu, police cryptoanalyst, is knowledgeable in her field and about Paris. However, what tends to happen is the characters go to a location, decipher what they find there and then talk at length about how the story of Jesus's wife, Mary Magdalene was suppressed, especially after the Council of Nicea which decided that Jesus had been a son of God and not entirely mortal. Added to that, down the centuries, the Christian churches, in this case primarily the Catholic Church saw benefit in underplaying or even dismissing the role of women in early Christianity so ensuring an entirely male Christian priesthood until recent changes in some Protestant churches.
There are some reasonable set pieces of action, escaping from the authorities. The role of Opus Dei looms large with a monk-assassin, Silas, aided in hunting down the protagonists and an Opus Dei member, Captain Fache, leading the French police investigation and granted great powers in doing it. There are a couple of twists with people not being who they seem which are fine. However, I would not say that the book gripped me. The exposition is interesting enough but in the years since the book was published, it has become common knowledge so it probably a lot less surprising than it might have been back then. I had always thought it a surprise that Jesus, as a 34-year old Jewish workman of the 1st Century CE, had not married. I did wonder if he was a widower, so the fact that he had a wife at some stage or another was never really a surprise to me. The fact that he was supposed to have come from a Jewish royal family as Brown states, seems more surprising as, surely, then he would not have spent his life working as a Nazarene carpenter. Anyway, overall the book is not bad, it is more that it is an adventure story used as a basis for delivering a series of lectures.
Jeff Harding is an American and has that rather breathless narration that seems so common with US audio book readers. His French accents do rather sound as if they are from the comedy series, ''Allo, 'Allo', but maybe that is what a lot of listeners expect. He does the female voices surprisingly well.
