Books I Read In July

 Fiction

'Revelation' by Bill Napier

This book is pretty much like 'Nemesis' (1998) by Napier that I read in April: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/04/books-i-read-in-april.html It combines heavy duty science, in this case the possibility of deriving power from zero-point energy with a kind of Dan Brown academic-in-an-adventure story. This one has chemical formulae in it. Napier is pretty good at explaining the science but it does leave a very peculiar book. In this one a glacier scientist is brought in to help extract a frozen Soviet aeroplane from a breaking up ice sheet in the Arctic. It seems to hold diaries from Lev Petrosian, an Armenian scientist who worked on the US atomic and hydrogen bomb programmes before suffering persecution by the authorities during the McCarthy era. The hero of the book, Dr. Fred Findhorn, rushes all over the planet along with an translator of Armenian, trying to find out what Petrosian discovered. They face an array of enemies from US intelligence to a Japanese corporation to millennial cult, all seeking to get their hands on what Findhorn has uncovered. We also go back to see what Petrosian suffered and the book is pretty decent on the paranoia of 1950s USA and to some degree how it actually drives Petrosian towards the Soviets.

The book is frenetic, going between Scotland, the USA, Greece, Japan and Switzerland. There is a lot of casual but brutal violence. A scene in a Swiss chalet is particularly violent. As with 'Nemesis' there is a lot of expositionary conversations and Findhorn tracking down specialists at a conference on a small Greek island who are happy to talk about the possibilities of what Petrosian may have found seems very contrived. Findhorn who has a brother with a secure flat and happy to fund flights all over the place; two young translators happy to go along with an older man whose life is constantly in danger also stretches credibility, but I know from many thrillers, not just Brown's but also Ludlum's that these are well established traits. Napier seems to feel obliged to add in tons of science in a way that most thriller authors are not. I guess it is nice to learn something real from fiction, but it does conflict with the frenetic pace he is also seeking, leading to a very 'bitty' feel to the novel. This was the only remaining Napier book I had and while both were curiosities I am certainly not seeking any more of them.

'The Manor of Death' by Bernard Knight

This is the 12th of the 15 books in Knight's Crowner John series. The 15th is a prequel. However, this book really feels like closing the sequence. The novels have not covered a great deal of time, so far running from November 1194 to April 1196. However, at the end of this one a lot of what we have become familiar with in the books is brought to an end. Sir John De Wolfe is to be sent from Devon to work in London. His bitter wife, Matilda has again withdrawn to a convent, but this time probably for good; his Welsh mistress, Nesta, has married a stonemason and returned to Wales, selling up her inn, which is then passed to John's Cornish bodyguard, Gwyn and his family to take over running. Thus, all the things that have been built up over the previous books are no longer as they were. It is naturally rather bittersweet, but I guess by this stage Knight felt he was rather going round all of the old established patterns once more. Given the society of the time, there were few options short of killing off one or more of these characters. As is made clear, John cannot marry Nesta and she is not happy to remain simply a mistress; he cannot divorce his wife even if she becomes a nun.

All of this only comes to fruition towards the end of the novel, though the groundwork is laid throughout. Most of the book focuses on pirates operating from the port of Axmouth which while a small seaside town was a significant port in the Middle Ages. De Wolfe has a very frustrating time trying to get any information on what is happening. With the priory that owns the town and various officials standing on their privileges they constantly rebuff his attempts even when the number of murders of witnesses increases. Ultimately De Wolfe pulls of a 'sting' operation and we finally get through to him dealing out some justice.

I am tempted to seek out the three remaining books to see what happens. However, you could finish the series on this one because it is clear that what follows will be very different from the 'police procedural' with an established 'cast' of characters in and around Exeter.

'Resistance' by Owen Sheers

I saw the 2011 movie of this novel, which had been published in 2007, about ten years ago and was not overly impressed. It is superficially an alternate history story set around the Second World War. In contrast to many using this as a starting point it is not set in 1940/41 with a German invasion then, but rather one coming in 1944 following the defeat of the Normandy landings that June. The biggest change in fact is a one far less explored and that is that by 1944, the Soviets have been pushed beyond the Urals and while they break out during the course of this book, the ability to shift troops from the Eastern Front to France and then Britain has allowed a slow German conquest of the UK.

The novel is set in a small isolated valley in eastern Wales where the Mappa Mundi medieval map from Hereford Cathedral has been concealed. A team of six German soldiers, let by a captain Albrecht Wolfram, who was a scholar of such work in Oxford before the war, are sent to locate the map. This brings them into contact with the women on the handful of farms in the valley who at the start of the novel have been left by their husbands who are all part of the Auxiliary Units, particularly the Special Duty Branch, to act as a guerilla force and as intelligence agents, respectively, in the event of an invasion. We see very little of the men, only a George who lives nearby but was not from the valley and his recruiter 'Tommy Atkins' who is taken by the Gestapo and later killed by Wolfram's unit.

I can see why the movie was very uninspiring because very little happens in the book, so the director, Amit Gupta, had little to work from. The book is a very different thing. Where it shines is not in terms of the alternate history. This is really only required to set up the 'bubble' of the cut off valley populated by women and girls and their interaction with a very small unit of occupiers. Sheers is a poet and the strength of this book is that for much of the time, it is effectively a prose poem describing the valley through the seasons; its plant and animal life, seen through the eyes of various characters. We often jump quite quickly from one to the other and witness things though almost all of them during the course of the book. Even the developing (inevitable) romance between the captain and Sarah Lewis appears very slowly and is rather rushed to the end, rather weakening the choices that both make. Much better are the other interactions between the two sides, notably the modus vivendi that the soldiers develop with Maggie, effectively matriarch of the valley.

In terms of narrative there are many things you might challenge. However, it just about hangs together. The reason why I would recommend this book, though, is not for the story, but for the beautiful images of a particular place from how the light moves through the valley, how the ice and the water moves and changes, how the animals behave, even the buildings and their contents, the nearby ruins. The descriptions are so rich it is a pleasure to read them. It does not make an exciting book and certainly not a great movie, but as something else, much more poetic, it works well to engage you.

Non-Fiction

'Macmillan. A Study in Ambiguity' by Anthony Sampson

It is interesting that while contemporary Conservatives will talk about Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill and even Stanley Baldwin, I cannot recall any mentioning Harold Macmillan. This is despite him serving as prime minister for 6½ years during one of the most prosperous periods of modern British history. I guess for many in his party his criticism as Lord Stockton of the first two Thatcher governments has made him a pariah. Certainly with the zealous anti-EU attitude prevalent in the party of the 2020s, him being a link in British European policy between Churchill's attitude into Heath's and a period when collaboration with other capitalist neighbours seemed to be something almost inherently Conservative, can make him seem a 'traitor' not just to the party but even to the country as a whole.

As a consequence, there is now rather an ellipse in how the Conservatives see themselves as if the period probably 1956-1975 has been edited out. It does mean that strands of what would have once been seen as mainstream Conservatism, with actually a modern perspective, is absent from current thinking. Anything that comes even marginally close to anything Macmillan might have pursued is deemed to be 'weak', even 'unpatriotic'. Given how much the party has turned the clock back to attitudes Macmillan would have seen in his youth (he was born in 1894 and fought in the First World War) I imagine if alive today he would have felt even more detached from his party than he did in the 1980s.

Writing in 1967, Sampson measures Macmillan against standards that are far higher than any which we could expect to be applied in the 21st Century. The failures in terms of establishing a superpower summit, difficulties with the EEC and with moving African states to independence would be seen as just everyday foreign policy challenges. The so-called 'Night of the Long Knives', a strong Cabinet reshuffle and even the Profumo Scandal, rather than being isolated incidents analysed to a great extent are often occurrences that can happen in a single week in UK politics today. Given the books towards the end of his life, I am sure he had detected the qualitative deterioration in British political life. Thus, while the tone of Sampson's book is one of disappointment, as much for Macmillan himself in not achieving his goals, the record set against say, the last three Conservative prime ministers actually seems quite decent.

The Conservatives have a lot to be grateful for from Macmillan. In particular Sampson shows how, despite his age or maybe because of it - he was 62 when he first became prime minister, he was able to deftly heal the rifts which had developed over the Suez fiasco which had threatened to rend the party apart. He was then able to get it through two elections so as to cap 13 years in office. Macmillan was also alert to the requirements of modern politics and the uses to which snappy slogans, television and aircraft could aid him not simply in speaking to the electorate but also showing the UK prime minister as still someone notable in the world.

Sampson provides good detail without drowning out the story. I was particularly interested in Macmillan's approach to economics and his engagement with planning which stretched across the political spectrum in the 1930s and 1940s and ironically was an attitude that brought him closer to the French approach of the post-war period than the British one. He did lay the groundwork for Harold Wilson's engagement with planning. It is important to establish this context, to fill in the ellipse not just simply in terms of Conservative policy, but also the wider course of British economic policy which in just over a decade saw a move from boosting Keynesianism via corporatism and planning, to, even under a Labour government, under Callaghan, the winning out of monetarist approaches that then caused so much of the pain of the 1980s and beyond for large chunks of the British (and indeed American) population.

Overall, this was a book of its time in terms of its basis for judgements. It is a useful reminder of a neglected, pretty important component in both Conservative and British history in general. It is also a reminder of the kind of standards politicians were expected to work to, that now, especially in the past 3 years, seem utterly forgotten and even somehow portrayed as not 'truly Conservative'. That sense of responsibility not just to one's personal benefit but to the wider community is utterly absent now in a way which was not the case when Macmillan was in charge.