The Books I Read In March

 Fiction

'The Amulet of Samarkand' by Jonathan Stroud

This is a children's book that is often likened to the Harry Potter series. Stroud actually makes a passing jibe at apprentice wizards being sent to boarding schools to learn their craft. Though there is a sense of a world of magic, it intrudes more into the actual world than in the Potter novels. The British parliament is entirely run by wizards who provide ministers. There is that kind of mid-20th Century undefined time period, though used in many British novels, not just fantasy ones; at times it seems to have hangovers from the Victorian era, echoed by the fact that Britain is the centre of an empire run on magic and fighting on continental Europe with its arch-rival centred on Prague.

Magic in this world is centred on the use of demons/spirits of various strengths, thus what wizards can predominantly do is summon such creatures and put them to work. This culturally appropriates Middle Eastern spirits including djinn and afrits, with no explanation how Europeans came to be using them.The hero of the story, Nathaniel, apprenticed to the ineffectual Arthur Underwood at the age of five manages to secure a djinni, Bartimaeus, a middle-ranked creature in effect to exact revenge on those who have been cruel to him throughout his childhood. However, this then draws him into a conspiracy to trigger a coup d''état. The treatment of Nathaniel is very reminiscent of Victorian novels too but by the end it turns into a magic adventure story in a contemporary setting with which we are familiar.

While you can draw parallels to the Potter books, Stroud works hard to distinguish them. Nathaniel for much of the book is driven by revenge. Unlike Harry Potter he is also very isolated, his parents having sold him into apprenticeship and others he relies on briefly being killed. The main strength though is the fact that the alternate chapters are told by Bartimaeus a rather world worn and cynical creature who is ancient and has his own antagonisms going back many centuries; he is able to shape shift too. It is interesting the trilogy is named after him rather than Nathaniel.

While more juvenile than I had expected, the novel is engaging and I enjoyed it. If I see the following two books in the series I would buy them.

'The Friends of Harry Perkins' by Chris Mullin

Like a lot of people of my generation I was very influenced by the dramatisation of Mullin's book 'A Very British Coup' (novel 1982; TV series 1988 available still to watch on All4: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/a-very-british-coup). Harry Perkins was the left-wing Labour politician elected Prime Minister in that previous novel, before being forced from office by the Americans. This book is set in the 2010s following the Brexit vote. Mullin in the introduction outlines the challenges of trying to have this novel feature characters from the first, some 35 years before. He has to make some of them have very long lives. I feel it would have been much better for him to set one or more books sometime in those three decades or to bring in a new cast, even if they were children of the previous characters.

The novel is effectively a 'what if?' history. Perkins remained in parliament and it has gone through many years of Conservative rule, leading to the referendum and Brexit withdrawal but under different politicians to those we know in our world. Labour at the start of the novel is led by a woman. Fred Thompson who was a minor character in the previous book rises to be Labour leader, though to the left of Sir Keir Starmer and manages to win an election in the late 2010s. Overall the book feels very rushed with so much to cover - including Thompson's private life - in a short book.

The climax is telegraphed well in advance. It feels rather like a book which Mullin has to work out various irritations. Thompson and his coterie still mourning Perkins meet in an Austrian restaurant very akin to 'The Gay Hussar' where Michael Foot and his gang used to dine regularly. Mullin is clearly distressed by the killing of Jo Cox and felt that he had to look at that danger for politicians too. Thus, there is a real mish-mash of elements which are straitjacketed into the framework he had created for 'A Very British Coup' while failing to have the genuine jeopardy of that context.

There was a lot which could have been done better in this book. It would have been interesting for him to explore the challenges of a left-wing leader in the current age, even if he avoided comparisons with Corbyn. It would have also been interesting to look at why Labour has never actually had a female leader, whereas the Conservatives have had three who have become prime ministers. The personal violence against MPs would have been another area to explore. However, Mullin seems to have felt shackled to his earlier successful book and in this one as a result has a context in which he cannot really handle all the various elements successfully or, as he effectively admits in the foreword, feasibly.

'Dead Souls' by Ian Rankin

This is the 10th Inspector John Rebus novel and it is strange that only getting this far through the series, I am feeling that as an author Rankin is reaching the standard that he was strangely acclaimed for almost right from the outset. 

This is a very messy novel, with Rebus back on alcohol; his daughter temporarily confined to a wheelchair after the accident in the previous novel, and in an on/off relationship with his lover Patience. There are a number of components which it takes a long time to see are related, but in many ways this makes it feel rather more like an account of genuine detective work. Rebus is angered when he finds a convicted paedophile who has served his time in prison has been housed in the area and effectively sets out to take revenge by 'outing' him. While he begins to regret this decision later, he is too late. There are also the suicide of a colleague and the disappearance of the son of old friends, one of whom Rebus dated when a young man in Fife and he finds he remains attracted to, while also has questions about his own path triggered. There is also a murderer repatriated from the USA to Edinburgh who is allowed to get away with playing with both the police and a journalist; a very slimy character who seems largely untouchable even when he beats up Rebus and later a retired detective too. Added to that there is case against two child abusers at a children's home and who the third man was with them on a particular occasion.

The book has quite a toing and froing, but Rankin manages not to lose the reader. There are long sections of self-reflection but again he just manages to keep these from getting repetitive or tedious. While most of the questions are resolved, there is no big conclusion and that adds to the sense of realism. Rebus even more than before comes over as a world-weary detective running up a string of horrific incidents, injustice and the unsolvable. This novel might frustrate readers looking for a clear tying off of elements, but I feel it is one of the better ones in the Rebus series.

'Talon' by Julie Kagawa

A lot of fantasy, especially that written by women gets 'dumped' into the YA category no matter its focus or the characters. This novel, is very clearly both fantasy and YA. It is one of numerous books in recent years featuring dragons living in contemporary society who are able to shift to being humans. The last one of these I read was 'Chasing Embers' (2016) by James Bennett (not the one by Rachel Skatvold): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/03/books-i-read-in-march.html and this is a now well-established sub-genre.  

Kagawa includes the urban fantasy/dystopian tropes of sinister authoritarian organisations - Talon which rules over dragons putting them into a rigid caste system when they mature but eliminates 'weaklings' and renegades and the Order of St. George a human organisation of highly trained soldiers whose mission is to kill all dragons they encounter. Kagawa gets in a lot of YA tropes - teenaged sister and brother sent to spend the summer on the beach in California, surfing, star-crossed first loves, at the mall, at the funfair, two handsome dudes for the heroine to be torn between, one a mysterious biker.

Ember and her twin brother Dante - rather giveaway names for dragons! - are sent to Crescent Beach for their last phase of training before allocation in the Talon caste system. They have to prove that they can blend in with humans and naturally make friends. The focus is primarily on Ember who falls for another visitor to the town, a 17-year old called Garret, unaware that from orphaned child he has been trained as an excellent soldier for the Order and has been sent to Crescent Beach to hunt down new 'sleeper' dragons. You can probably tell how this unfolds in a very Montagues and Capulets way. Biker Riley, also attracts Ember's attention as he is a 'rogue' dragon, Cobalt, who has broken away from the authoritarian rule of Talon and is hunted by both them and the Order.

I read this book expecting it rather to go through the motions. We see first person through the eyes of Ember and Garrett and later Riley too. However, Kagawa's writing has to be commended that even with so many tropes, she rises above them to provide a genuinely gripping, fast paced story which appears to have genuine jeopardy while also grappling with the challenges that 'ordinary' US teenagers face as they approach adulthood. In addition, there are unexpected twists and I felt she ably dodged some of the possible expected outcomes. While I would not rush out and buy the next book, if I came across I would buy it. Kagawa certainly makes a strong argument for people not looking down on fantasy, even those books, which aim clearly to appeal to a YA audience.

Non-Fiction

'Nazism 1919-1945. Volume 4: The German Home Front in World War II' ed. by Jeremy Noakes

This fourth volume came out in 1998 so while the document numbering continues on from the previous three volumes (the page numbering does not) it is a bit apart from those volumes published 1983-88 (themselves drawing on 1970s volumes organised differently). They all got new covers in the 2000s. In addition, while Geoffrey Pridham is still alive today, this fourth volume was edited only by Jeremy Noakes.

This book might seem to have a rather narrow focus but in fact is a really useful supplement especially to Volumes 2 and 3. For example, Volume 4 looks at the concentration camps whereas Volume 3 focused on the extermination camps. Volume 4 picks up from the pre-war analysis of Nazi Germany's economy and society seen in Volume 2 and so on. Thus, while coming late, it really rounded out the series. There are chapters in Volume 4 which cover aspects often neglected by general surveys of the Nazi regime, notably welfare, attitudes to youth and women and indeed to sex. Things such as the NSV welfare body; the evacuation of children from bombed cities and morale, all are handled well and provide a useful counter-balance to portrayals of these aspects of the British wartime experience which have been covered more extensively.

One point is that while there are lots of useful documents and sources referenced in Volume 4, they tend to be included in full, which can lead to extensive (small print) sections that you sometimes feel are not adding and that the smaller extracts pointing to the kernel of the issue to be discussed, used in the earlier volumes were often more effective.

Another point which I meant to raise when reviewing Volume 3 back in January:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-book-i-read-in-january.html was how scarily current the rhetoric which appears throughout these books seems to a reader in the early 2020s. I know it is easy to label alt right politicians and commentators as 'Fascists' or 'Nazis' but reading through the texts translated into English, you keep hearing echoes of what you might hear if you turn on the television these days. 

The whole attitude from Hitler, Goebbels, et al, that they were at the same time, supremely powerful and assured of victory yet always insisting that they were the real victims; that others were responsible for the conflicts, is so often used nowadays and it is very unsettling when a turn of phrase you read meshes precisely with what you can hear or read quoted from contemporary politicians. I guess the BBC TV series, 'The Nazis: A Warning from History'  (1997; my emphasis) had it spot-on in that title. It is not a question of bandying about terms like Nazi, it is much more about seeing these unsettling parallels and knowing to what they can lead. As I used to remind students, every single step towards the use of Auschwitz was bad; right from the ending of German democracy and removal of civil rights from Jews.

This has been an excellent series of books and while there is a lot to cover, if you really want an insight to the Nazi regime, because of the use of many hundreds of original sources, I would heartily recommend these books.