The Books I Read In May

Fiction

'Berlin Alexanderplatz' by Alfred Döblin

This is one of the books to add to my list of ones I regret reading. I was drawn to it because it is set in the Weimar period of German history. It focuses on ex-convict Franz Biberkopf who on release for prison for the manslaughter of his girlfriend tries to find work. He ends up various street hawking jobs and falls in with criminals. However, their distrust of him leads to them trying to kill him and him losing his right arm. He seeks revenge on them when they kill one of his girlfriends, he seems surprisingly adept at getting them despite poor prospects. It does have interesting elements about Berlin and its society at the time and goes off at weird tangents about the slaughtering of livestock. The main problem is that it is a stream of consciousness novel with any kind of plot only occasionally peeking through from the flow of text often not clearly punctuated. It feels as if a lot of good ideas are utterly lost in random 'banter' in pubs and on the street that reduce coherence and make it very difficult to engage with. You do really feel it represents a lost opportunity. Published in 1931, I accept Döblin was seeking to be experimental but to a modern reader it is simply tiresome. 

The only good thing was that reviews on the back of this novel likened it to John Dos Passos's trilogy collected as 'U.S.A.' (1930-36) which my father had a copy of and I was considering reading. However, once I saw it likened to this book, I disposed of it to a charity shop immediately. Overall I would recommend you do not waste your life reading either of these books.

'The Cheltenham Square Murder' by John Bude [Ernest Elmore]

This is the fourth of Bude's novels I have read and indeed was the fourth crime novel he published, coming in 1937. Like the previous two, this features Superintendent Meredith, this time away from his usual base of Lewes in Sussex, staying with his crime author Aldous Barnet in Cheltenham, a place where Bude had lived himself for part of his life. This naturally has an urban setting though as in the previous novels Meredith gets to travel back and forth in the surrounding countryside, including working out whether certain suspects could get back to the square for a particular time.

The residents of the square provide Bude with a set list of suspects in the way that a country house murder story might. There is an insight into middle class snobbery and how lower class people can become relatively rich and the middle classes fall on hard times. Some of it does feel rather contrived as the murder is committed using an arrow fired through an open window from elsewhere on the square. Many of the residents are members of the local archery club and some have the skill to kill the victim. However, as is typical with Bude's novels there are a lot of theories which are dismissed and replaced with others and it soon becomes clear that the caddish murder victim may not have been the intended target. Blackmail and an illegal gambling club also get involved, so it does have a real classic 'golden age' melodrama, which perhaps Bude, also a playwright, takes a little too far for us to totally believe in. However, for evocation of time and place and the mores of the era it is an interesting read, though a little less down-to-Earth than the preceding three.

I have one more of his novels to read, but this one is for 1952, so it will be interesting to see how Bude's style had evolved in the intervening 15 years.

'Fight them on the Beaches' ed. by Katherine Foy

I must declare a conflict of interest when reviewing this collection of 11 alternate history short stories and 1 article. The book is published by Sea Lion Press who currently publish 8 of my novels. The stories vary considerably. The basic premise is looking at a German invasion of Britain in 1940/41. However, different divergences mean this is interpreted in a wide range of ways.

'Totalen Krieg' by Paul Hynes, for example, sees a German invasion during the First World War and with London under occupation in 1920 when an assassin is sent against Herman Göring based there. This has no discussion of the feasibility of an invasion at that time and one could easily argue that the Royal Navy in the 1910s would have more easily have beaten off a German invasion fleet than in the 1940s. However, the story is atmospheric. 'The Big Bang' by Ryan Fleming follows a similar line of a female British Resistance assassin but in the 1940s.

'The Last Service' by Tom Black, the owner of Sea Lion Press, sees an even more substantial change with the Spartakist Uprising in Germany having been successful so that it is a Communist Germany rather than Nazi Germany which is going to invade, seeking to make use of the Channel Bridge, something I have not encountered in fiction since The History of the Runestaff tetralogy (1967-69).

Other stories are more what you would expect. 'Fight Them on the Beaches' by Nigel Waite is clever in that it takes the actual history and shows how in fact what we know of it, may have been intentional 'spin' in order to tempt Hitler into planning the abortive Operation Sea Lion. This is a very short but engaging story. 'Nothing Half as Melancholy' by Angelo Barthélmy sees the failure of a German invasion of Britain from the French perspective so opening up questions about how such a situation would have impinged on occupied Europe. 'Tee im Schwarzwald' [Tea in the Black Forest] written in English is traditional about the interviewing of one of the generals who led a failed invasion of Britain and managed to get the farthest in southern England before defeat.

A few of the stories look at the cultural legacy of the invasion. 'Bloom Once More' features a visit to a cemetery for those killed in the brief occupation of parts of Kent including Jews murdered during it.'The Collector's High' by Lena Worwood looks at someone seeking to secure a copy of a text produced by British collaborators during the short-lived German occupation. This provides an interesting angle and touches on the sense that as in other occupied countries, there would have been people willing, perhaps even happy to work with their invaders. I found this an engaging approach.

'Die Seelöwe-Kontroverse' [The Sea Lion Controversy] is also in English and features a Berlin museum which shows the history of the failed Operation Sea Lion. However, it spreads its scope much wider and asks question of prime relevance to today when people question what is the 'proper' history of various events and whether the populist version is close to what actually happened and how much of it is in effect propaganda. I found this story particularly interesting.

'The Most Competitive Sea Lion - in the World' by Andy Cooke is silly. It envisages that continental equivalents living in the 1940s of the three former presenters of 'Top Gear' (in episodes 2002-15) and 'The Grant Tour' (2016-24) are each assigned to find a way to invade Britain for Nazi Germany. It rather sounds like some weird speculation had in a pub and depends on knowing the characters of these three presenters something which will be less familiar to readers as time passes and indeed many would be ignorant of them anyway.

'Article: Operation Sea Lion - the Unmentionable Sea Mammal' is by Andy Cooke drawing on an earlier online article by Alison Brooks and David Flin. Flin makes much of his interaction with the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom and sees it as his mission wherever he can to utterly dismiss any attempts to discuss a German invasion of Britain, in a very smug way. Unsurprisingly Cooke picks up not just Flin's often repeated details, but adopts his tone as well. Yes, it is accurate in terms of the challenges of the invasion and the respective strength. However, coming at the end of a book of stories which see at least some such invasions, it makes the reader feel 'what was the point, then?' of the entire book. This is a challenge that alternate history writing whether analysis or fiction faces a lot of the time anyway and it is bitterly ironic that this book from the leading alternate history publisher should add fuel to that challenge. 

The aversion of Brooks, Cooke and Flin, is very focused on this one incident when it could be applied to many other popular 'what if?'s that feature in books. In addition, it misses the point that fiction authors need to engage readers and sell books and the two most popular alternate history scenarios in numerous books, a victory for Nazi Germany and a victory for the Confederacy, are two of the least likely outcomes to be envisaged. Consequently this article really felt inappropriate for this collection and hammering home a message that many readers would already be tired of hearing.

'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' by John Le Carré [David Cornwell]

I have read and listened to a few books by Le Carré, but more his murder mysteries rather than his out-and-out spy novels. This one was published in 1963, as Le Carré's third novel and proved to be a global success, being turned into a movie starring Richard Burton, in 1965. I have seen two versions of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' (novel 1974, TV series 1979; movie 2011), so knew what to expect in downbeat, desultory atmosphere. The time and place is very important to the writing in part because of the political set-up that fostered the spying her features in his plots.

This one sees British agent Alec Leamas effectively retiring from working for MI6 following the capture or killing of his team operating in East Berlin. The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 so creating what we see as the almost archetypal setting for such novels and movies. Characters still refer to East Germany as 'The Zone' as it had been formed from the Soviet zone of Germany and they did not recognise the state the Soviets constructed as legitimate. Another factor of the time is the character of Liz Gold, a young librarian who is active in her local branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain. So devoted to her politics she is manipulated by the East German authorities and used against Leamas with whom she has had a sexual relationship - that is the least convincing element of the story. I suppose these days the closest equivalent would be a young woman being manipulated to work for Islamic State. 

The other characteristic of the time which really colours the novel, is how desultory everything is. Britain is better off than East Germany, but still both countries, 18 years after the end of the war, still have the wartime austerity and lack of hope, hanging over them. You can see this still in Le Carré's books of the 1970s. For people who lived in the UK in these periods, this seems much more authentic that the glamorous, bloated consumerism that is how the decades tend to be portrayed now, and might explain why the book was so popular at the time. Now it makes it feel like a genuine historical portrayal.

While some things do come over as stretching credibility a little, the central plot, delivered briskly and with focus, very much so when compared to contemporary spy novels, is really engaging. The reader is never certain who is tricking whom and how far Leamas's decline into alcoholism and treachery is real or engineered and the story twists and twists again. Le Carré's skill is taking you along and making these twists without you questioning them. In addition, the ending remains uncertain until you get to it. I can see why the book was acclaimed at the time and while publishers want thicker books these days (my edition was 253 pages of actual story), it is a good example to show writers how to work adeptly with your material. I have gathered in a number of old Le Carré books and now quite look forward to working through them.

Non-Fiction

'Warfare in the Age of Bonaparte' by Michael Glover

This book is split into two unequal sections, on land warfare and on sea warfare. It provides the background to the conflicts right from the French Revolution to Waterloo, but not comprehensively. There are reference to various aspects of weaponry, types of soldiers and vessels, but not in great detail. Rather most of what is discussed is done via looking at a handful of specific battles: Tourcoing, Castiglione, Marengo, Eylau, Salamanca and Waterloo on land then Algerciras at sea. It is well illustrated with contemporary and subsequent artwork and maps when needed. It is particularly strong on some areas overlooked by other books of this kind, such as logistics and the naval warfare scene after the Battle of Trafalgar. It is sound introductory book but there are times when you wanted Glover to give more examples and explore some of the topics in greater detail.