The Books I Read In April

 Fiction

'A Second Chance' by Jodi Taylor

This is the third book in the Chronicles of St. Mary's series (though with the additional 'between books' added in subsequently, it is now the fifth) about a British university unit which uses time machines. As noted with the previous ones, the tone of these books is uncertain. It opens with the heroine Max having been captured at the Fall of Troy waiting in a line of women who are being raped and then killed or shipped off to slavery. This harrowing scene, more of which appears later, contrasts with the jaunty, sometimes humorous tone of the book. 

The light-heartedness certainly jars when genuine grave decisions are called for and when tragedy hits. I have mentioned before that while Max is an adult, probably in her thirties, with a doctorate, her attitude is very much like a girl half her age. Taylor does take the stories off in unpredictable directions. While there are "rules" she is happy to break them and at the end of this story Max ends up in a parallel universe.

Despite this awkwardness, the stories move along briskly. The portrayal of the various scenes in history is well handled. Poor Sir Isaac Newton gets interfered with (as he did in a recent 'Doctor Who' episode and it seems that without the input of time travellers he would never have achieved anything much except determine the date the world was created. Though grim, the scenes in Troy are done very well and provide an excellent historical interpretation of the various myths around the war. 

I have now got quite a lot of the books in this series second hand so while I have some uncertainties about them, I am liable to be reviewing more over the next couple of years.

'Doing Time' by Jodi Taylor

This is the first book in Taylor's Time Police series. It runs parallel to and sometime bisects with her St. Mary's books. They are all set in some undeclared near future though one where mid-20th Century technology seems still to be in use too. This one is set a couple of decades ahead of the St. Mary's stories and answers some of the glaring questions from those books, notably how come only a small British university unit are the only ones to have time machines. This book is set after the Time Wars in which different nations tried to rewrite history to favour them leading to chaos. The international Time Police have been set up, conveniently for a UK author, based in London and seeming to feature exclusively British staff.

This book is more clearly YA in tone, featuring three young people: Jane, Luke and Matthew who for various reasons have had difficult upbringings. Once we find out who Matthew is, it provides spoilers for the St. Mary's series so I suggest ready well beyond Book 3 in that series before being tempted over to this one. While Taylor's outlook fits well with YA protagonists there is still a jarring between the brutal and the chummy/light-hearted. The Time Police have the authority to execute anyone doing illegal time travel and a brutal murder is also at the heart of this novel. As typical of Taylor's work, the pace and attention to historical details - they go to see the assassination of Julius Caesar - rather carries you over the cracks.

'Espedair Street' by Iain Banks

On the surface, the premise of this novel, published in 1987, about an ageing 1970s rock star living in a converted church in Glasgow reminiscing, seemed unpromising. However, I think it is the best book by Banks that I have read so far. Dan Weir recounts his rise from his early days in Glasgow to being the bassist and lyricist with globally successful Frozen Gold. It alternates between the present when he hangs around with local oddballs and the history of the band. Readers often liken the band to Fleetwood Mac, though in music style more to Pink Floyd. Banks himself has said Dan is rather like Fish from Marillion. However, there are elements such as a tragic death on stage and enraging Christians in the USA that come from the pool of rock myths/legends so seem familiar from the stories of The Beatles and 'This is Spinal Tap'  (1984). There are probably references that I have missed.

I recognise that I have come to this book very late and 37 years ago when it was published it probably seemed fresh, even satirical. Yet, despite the tropes and the familiar situations, I really feel this is where Banks's skill shines through. At times you feel he is over-rated but in this case I could understand where admiration for him shines through. There is a real deftness in the writing of this book which carries you on briskly and makes you genuinely interested in the character.

'The Body in the Dumb River' by George Bellairs

This is another of those forgotten mystery authors - he published fifty books in his life, this is the 35th in his Thomas Littlejohn series - that was featured in the British Library reprint collection. I picked up quite a few more at the weekend so there will be more coming up. This was published in 1961, but set in rural Cambridgeshire and Yorkshire, aside from the reference to council estates and the Second World War, it could easily have been published between the wars. The novel begins during heavy flooding when the body of a man identified locally as James Lane is found in a flooded embanked river. He is known as a man who runs a hoopla stall at travelling fairs across southern and eastern England. However, it is soon revealed that he is in fact James Teasdale a seller of arts supplies from a small town in Yorkshire close to Sheffield.

The book is a very good representation of social class in 20th Century English society. The dead man is entangled with a generally nasty wife and father-in-law who despite their decline in fortunes think very highly of themselves. Teasdale's alternate, somewhat freer life seems to be set in contrast to the more 'respectable' one he had lived, though he was having an adulterous relationship with a younger woman who also worked the fair. The mystery is soon resolved and it becomes more an issue of interlocking personalities. The strengths of the novel are less the mystery and more the portrayal of desultory decaying settings and a range of unpleasant people each with their own myths and drivers.

Non-Fiction

'Industrial Society: Social Sciences in Management' ed. by Denis Pym

It might seem strange to be reading a book published in 1968 about management practices. However, if you look back down the non-fiction books I have reviewed over the past few years you can see that I had an interest in the economic developments of the post-war period 1945-75. This book was published at a time when sociology and psychology and their application to industrial and economic practices was growing. There had been a couple of decades of research since the war, more applied than the theoretical work inter-war, which allowed analysis to be applied. This book takes on a whole host of topics and some seem very dated now, though the expectations of computerisation were prescient. Market research and ergonomics were also becoming commonplace. This such as concerns about restrictive practices and corporatism with trade unions, do feel very historic.

Perhaps the most interesting chapters for a modern reader are the early ones. The fuss about restrictive practices and why they occur is a good reminder from Alan Fox about how different the post-war workplace was. However, Dorothy Wedderburn on redundancy, the Belbins on retraining older workers and in later chapters, D.G. Clark on the industrial manager, P.J. Sadler on executive leadership and Peter B. Smith on training and developing executives, unfortunately have perceptive things to say, that seem to need to be repeated even some 56 years later. Perhaps the two most acute chapters are by the editor himself. Pym has a chapter on the misuse of professional manpower (one thing that dates the book is that all workers and managers are 'he' unless seamstresses or waitresses) and on individual growth and strategies of trust.

Much of what is recommended in this book written over half-a-century ago, would be what we would expect to see in the best functioning, inclusive companies today. The examples of poor management practice, the dismissing of the development of workers and hierarchical behaviours, unfortunately are all too prevalent even in the 2020s. One situation and set of approaches by managers leading to poor outcomes, shown by Pym, is identical to my workplace experience under such a manager, just last year.

I suppose what Pym and his colleagues did not foresee was the rise of the New Right in the mid-1970s and how the Thatcher governments were not simply going to eliminate what were identified here of difficulties with working with unions, but to reassert a very old fashioned, 'Victorian values' approach to the workplace that employers naturally felt liberated to adopt. The authors in this book could not accept that mass unemployment would ever be allowed again, let alone be engineered to return in order to 'discipline' the workforce in the way that was to follow within 12 years of this book being published.

It is interesting to look back to see what people analysing industry, thought. However, it is highly disheartening to realise that the things that they identified as making the British workplace dysfunctional and inefficient, indeed quite toxic to work in, have not just continued largely unchallenged but have been reasserted as the 'only right way' to run capitalist industry.