The Books I Read In August

 Fiction

'Beowulf: A Verse Translation' by Michael Alexander

There have been more recent translations including the prize-winning one by Seamus Heaney in 1999, this is the one from 1973 that was part of a collection of black-spined Penguin books that my father collected. The poetry generally works well, giving a feel of the original styling without really contorting the text or needing loads of footnotes. It also shows how close to the original the movie 'Beowulf' (2007) was. It is an 9th/10th Century  West Saxon story ostensibly set in 5th Century western Baltic, featuring the Danes and the Geats of southern 'Sweden'. However, its formation in this form is made apparent with overblown references to the Christian God even when it is clear that many of the characters featured in the story are not Christian.

The story is simple. It is effectively a superhero story. Beowulf, a Geat hero not only rips the arm out of the monster Grendel who has been slaughtering the entourage of  King Hrothgar of the Danes, but also goes on to kill Grendel's mother who comes to revenge herself on Hrothgar for the loss of her son. She lives beneath a lake and can only be killed by an ancient sword. Beowulf has incredible abilities when it comes to water, recounting other feats such as a swimming race which goes on for many hours. It seems he can fight underwater. His final encounter is set 50 years after the fights against Grendel and his mother when Beowulf faces a dragon and while he kills it, he is mortally wounded.

The story is important for being one of very few stories from the time. It is interesting that Saxons settled in the West of England held on to a story from centuries earlier back across the North Sea while bringing it 'up to date' with the Christian declarations. We will probably never know if there were other stories that were lost. However, this is a superheroic story which has a rather bombastic, strong character at the centre with powers that are beyond the 'normal' warrior hero. Perhaps audiences of a millennium ago were as enamoured with the larger-than-life characters as much as cinema audiences seem to be today.

'The Death of King Arthur' translated by James Cable

This was another book from my father's 1970s collection of what were then termed the 'Penguin Classics' though that term now has a different meaning. It is the third component of what we know as the Arthurian arc, showing events after the quest for the Holy Grail and as the title indicates leading to the death of King Arthur and indeed the whole set-up of Camelot and Knights of the Round Table, which are in decline anyway due to the losses during the Grail quest. The story was assembled in the early 1230s probably in now what is eastern France. 

The time period in which it is set is not clear. It is believed that the basis of King Arthur probably refers to a leader in Britain in the 5th or subsequent centuries following the departure of the Roman legions. There are references in this story to Arthur though just a king ruling over 12 kingdoms. Many are referred to in the story. He is king of Logres which may have been envisaged as overlapping what became Mercia and Wessex. Camelot is envisaged as being in Dorset or Devon. Other kingdoms referred to include Wales, North Wales, Scotland, Cornwall (where Arthur was born), the Distant Isles, the Strange Isles and outside the British Isles: Gaul, Benoic (between Brittany and Gaul, where Sir Lancelot was born), Gaunes (probably covering Normandy and Maine) and Saxony. The Roman Emperor turns up from Rome, towards the end, invading Burgundy and Champagne where he is killed by Arthur. 

Despite this very early medieval kind of political geography many of the details of the weaponry and armour, plus the way the knights fight are clearly drawn from the early 13th Century. The main armour is chainmail and the knights wear metal helmets and carried shields. The initial combat is always through charges with lances which often pierce shields and armour but also typically break, as in jousts. Thus, the knights are clearly using the couched lance approach which appeared in the late 11th Century and are distant from the platemail armour of the later medieval period.

King Arthur has a clearly feudal relationship with the 'kings' of the British Isles and is able to summon them because they hold fiefs from him. His bastard and ultimately treacherous son, Mordred, also enlists many nobles and has them swear fealty to him. We might thus see Arthur and then Mordred as more an emperor or view these other 'kings' more accurately as dukes and counts. There is also a lot of crossing back and forth across the English Channel and prompted by Sir Gawain, seeking revenge for the killing of his brothers, Arthur goes into Gaul and Gaunes after Sir Lancelot. He also owns a castle on the River Tweed right up the North of what would become Northumberland. Thus, this connection between 'England' and parts of 'France' is seen as natural, as would fit the world view of someone writing in the post-Norman Conquest era.

James Cable portrays the story as one of Lancelot's redemption. He does end up as a religious hermit shortly before his death. However, it is his sustained adultery with Arthur's wife, Queen Guinevere which drives on the action and indeed the violence which destroys the whole Camelot structure and leads to the death of almost every remaining knight of the Round Table. Thus, it is difficult for a modern reader to pick up the elements of Lancelot's redemption. Yes, Sir Gawain can be criticised for driving on the revenge by Arthur leading to a sequence of bloody battles but to some degree we can be surprised that Arthur was not pursuing such a path himself. Lancelot had sworn off adultery in the second, Grail section of the arc, but then actually continues with Guinevere even more openly than before, in part to counteract the intense jealousy Guinevere feels when she believes that Lancelot, severely wounded in a joust, is actually now residing with a young noblewoman who has so fallen in love with him she dies of heartbreak when he rejects her. 

We also need to remember that Mordred, who is given power but makes himself king while Arthur is in 'France' is an illegitimate son of Arthur, the result of Arthur's incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Morgause, Queen of Orkney (not to be confused with Morgan, another of Arthur's sisters who he stays with in this story and who reveals much of Lancelot's adultery). It is only towards the end of this story that Arthur admits his paternity. Thus despite all the regular protestations about who fine all these knights are, in fact often they are simply self-centred, lustful fighters.

While there are references to Christianity and to knights being 'fine' and 'noble', in fact if we look objectively at them and especially their behaviour, we see something which is much more akin to a Greek tragedy. For modern readers it might even seem rather like the soap operas of the Dynasty and Dallas era, or the more recent Succession series. There are occasional stretches when we might see what is deemed Christian or chivalric behaviour, notably when Lancelot and Gawain stopped their single combat when both are exhausted. However, most of the time everyone behaves in a vengeful and jealous way. Lancelot's adultery, like that of Paris of Troy, is done for personal lust and yet leads to the death of thousands of people as a result. Yes, Lancelot is praised as the finest of knights, and he is a skilled combatant, but it is difficult to see more than a meagre portion of chivalry in him. Ultimately his unwillingness to stop his love affair with Guinevere wrecks kingdoms and kills a whole generation of supposedly noble knights.

Cable commends the fact that there is minimal magic in this story, something which he feels is unnecessarily overdone in other medieval romances. The lady in the lake, or at least her arm up to the elbow appears at the very end of the story. However, there are regularly miraculous winds allowing rapid crossing of the sea. In addition, despite the fact that they are able to fight for entire days even when wounded, the story explicitly states that Arthur is 92, when the story is set, Sir Gawain is 76 and Sir Lancelot is 55. Queen Guinevere is reckoned to be around 50. Thus they are all elderly for the era when the story was assembled. In addition, Sir Gawain gets magically refreshed as the day approaches noon, allowing him to fight on with Lancelot through the afternoon. This is given a Christian explanation about when he was baptised, but certainly sounds like magic.

Overall, coming to this book means reading something actually very out-of-step with the chivalric portrayals that are commonplace. We see tropes, notably a leading character appearing at a tournament in disguise, which have gone on to be well established in stories set in medieval times. Still, it portrays characters in a way which would have been critically judged in the 13th Century and the repeated emphasis on how noble and fine they are really falls flat. It seems that 'noble' better translates as 'fights skillfully in battle' rather than what we might now attribute to noble. It is an interesting story with lots of bloody battle scenes which rather become repetitive. However, rather than what we might feel to be Arthurian traits, instead it is a story of very base soldiers whose prime motives are lust and seeking power rather than anything more 'worthy'.

'The Shape of Water' by Andrea Camilleri

This is the first book in the Inspector Salvo Montalbano series of police procedural novels which were published 1994-2020 and led to a TV series (broadcast 1999-2021) and a spin-off TV series (2012-15). It should not be confused with the fantastical movie 'The Shape of Water' (2017). You can understand why the books have been so successful. I was passed many of them by my parents who enjoyed both the books and the TV series. The writing is crisp and brisk. Some readers may dislike this feeling they want more 'weight' and to see more of the details of procedure. However, the case is no less engaging for that and actually manages to communicate a lot to the reader without a sense of info dumping. Readers familiar with the writings of Dibdin and Sciascia will feel at home in the context. The setting is in a fictional Sicilian town in a fictional province, but the context of the political situation and the power of various institutions in Italian society is well realised.

This first story is about an ageing politician found dead in a car on wasteland near an abandoned factory, which is called 'The Pasture' known for its use as a dogging and prostitution site. It soon transpires that the man died naturally so it is a question of why his death was made to look as if it was as the result of an encounter with a prostitute. It transpires that perhaps unsurprisingly it is about a political power play in local government and seeking to put the blame on to a foreigner.

The pace and style is refreshing and it is an engaging book. I think other detective authors could learn a lot (some probably already have given the duration of his publishing career) from Camilleri's approach. It is probably a good thing that I feel that way given that I have quite a few of these books lined up to read.

'On Stranger Tides' by Tim Powers

This novel was published in 1987. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland opened in 1967. The first 'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl' was released in 2003. 'Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides' did not come until 2011. Its focus on seeking the Fountain of Youth was apparently inspired by this novel though it goes down very different paths. The term "on stranger tides" comes from the fictional poet William Ashbless, a character Powers and fellow author  James Blaylock invented in the 1970s.

This novel is very well written. It has a lot of tropes that we are now all highly familiar with from the Pirates of the Caribbean series of movies indeed many pirate novels/movies, though with this magical aspect that has come in lately. A lot of the story pivots around I suppose what we might call wizards, including the actual pirate Blackbeard himself, plus two other middle aged men from Britain come to the Caribbean to exercise voodoo magic to gain greater powers. There is a young man, a French puppeteer, John Chandagnac going to reclaim the inheritance he has been cheated out of by his uncle, and a young fellow traveller, Englishwoman Elizabeth Hurwood who is being prepared to be an element of her father's primary magic goal. 

Chandagnac soon rebranded Jack Shandy, and Elizabeth become wrapped up with pirates, initially a Captain Davies and later Blackbeard himself. The various battles with pirate and Royal Navy ships are well described. Powers at times includes as much detail on all the parts of an early 18th Century sailing ship as you would find in a technical manual, though fortunately he does not info dump either on these or the details of the voudou magic which almost all the pirates use. It features a journey to a mystical fountain in Florida, ghost ships, zombie crews and an immortal explorer. Yet, it handles these in a matter of fact way so that the supernatural does not become 'ordinary' but you are soon accepting it as a standard part of what is going on.

Overall the novel is fast paced and despite the fantastical elements, the characters are well developed and credible. The historical detail is blended in well with the supernatural and magic elements. Powers has not written any others in this setting, but certainly the quality of the writing would encourage me to pick up another book by him that I saw.

Non-Fiction

'Social Problems of Modern Britain: An Introductory Reader' edited by Eric Butterworth and David Weir

As the title suggests this is a book of articles and extracts covering broad themes such as housing, race, the elderly, health, etc. as perceived roughly 1959-71. My copy was the 1982 edition of this book originally published in the 1972, though it appears that nothing was brought up to date between those two years despite the fact that the first Thatcher government was in power and was already exacerbating many of the challenges that the book highlights from the 1960s. In particular the concerns about youth unemployment in 1972 seem paltry when set against the situation a decade later.

In addition, many of the writings were produced at a time when it was assumed that social, primarily, council housing was going to play an important part in housing the UK population indefinitely which means that poor quality privately rented accommodation was seen as part of the slum culture of the past or restricted to people in crisis at the very bottom of society. The 'right to buy' scheme in the 1980s was to almost totally destroy the social housing sector putting much more power into the hands of private landlords and an associated fall in housing quality and rise in rents, that the writers of 1972 had been unable to foresee. The same goes for poverty. There was a sense that it would always be around but not that the number of people, especially children would be in it or that steadily we would move towards the US model of the 'working poor'. In 1971, even if not in 1982, it was possible to believe that a family with a man in a job could afford a decent place to live, let alone pay the utilities (still nationally owned then) and buy food.

Some factors in the passages remain a concern today, e.g. graduate unemployment. The 1960s had seen a boom in higher education with the 'plate glass' universities opening up, but this was to be nothing compared to the huge expansion in numbers of young people attending universities after 1992 though also the steady fall in mature students from 2001 onwards. Interestingly there is an articled by T. Szasz which portrays mental illness as a 'myth', something that sociologists of the time would have dismissed as wrong. While acceptance of mental health has received a boost in the late 2010s and through the 2020s, especially coming out of the USA but also in UK work places we have seen a similar dismissal of mental health as not 'genuine'. The authors predictions of 8 billion global population by 2000 and it rising to 10-15 billion fortunately have proven to be out by coming up to three decades. In addition, contrary to the authors' beliefs there has been a fall in birth rates across industrialised countries and even a loss of interest in sexual activity which they thought highly unlikely. Naturally they did not foresee the natalist rhetoric which has appeared both in the USA and UK, as a result.

While there was not a clear awareness of global warming, there is certainly analysis of the challenges of air, water and noise pollution, that remain no less grave today as at the time the book was assembled. Indeed after a period of cleaner rivers and shores in the UK of the 1990s, with private water companies being so negligent, grave water pollution has hit the country again in a way the writers of forty years ago would have quite expected. Despite the slow rise of electric vehicles, noise and air pollution remain grave threats and the latter has been connected to climate change bringing challenges globally as well as the local impacts.

Overall the book does have the kind of 'The History Man' (1975) well-meaning, 'cool' sociologist vibe to it. It sees problems in UK society but retains a degree of optimism that with effort and sensible policies these challenges could be overcome. Of course, policies went in the opposite direction meaning that the social problems identified in this book were to be gravely exacerbated, notably in race relations, health, housing and education.

'The Obscured': A Magic Realism Novel

 The Obscured: A Magic Realism Novel

The Obscured: A Magic Realism Novel eBook : Rooksmoor, Alexander: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

I read 'The Glamour' (1984) by Christopher Priest in 1993, having bought it in a remaindered book store in London along with 'A Dream of Wessex' (1977) and 'The Quiet Woman' (1990) by the same author. Priest wrote straight contemporary set novels as well as science fiction and fantasy. 'The Glamour' straddled genres in that it is set in 1980s UK, but there is one element which is fantastical, i.e. that there are people who have the ability not to be seen by the general public. The term 'glamour' while having a contemporary meaning of glossy appearance in the media, had an older meaning as a kind of spell to cast an illusion of what people saw.

At the time magic realism a genre which had been recognised since the 1920s, was going through a popular phase for authors writing in English rather than translated from Spanish or Portuguese. Thus, this book fitted in quite well, though it differed from a lot of what else Priest wrote, it was a phase of 'quiet' novels by the author before he reached a new peak in his career with 'The Prestige' (1995; movie 2006). While I have read many of Priest's novels, admired his deftness in writing and enjoyed the breadth of topics that he covered, my opinion of him was soured by reading his 'Fugue for a Darkening Island'  (1972) which could be on the reading list for any aspiring Reform party member or apostle of Donald Trump in its racist view on human migration.

Still, in the years after I read 'The Glamour' I remained fascinated by the concept. I kept envisaging various scenes which have now gone on to feature in 'The Obscured'. Alongside 'Death in Amiens' (2018), this is probably the novel which features locations that I know personally. Scenes in West and East London, at Sandown racecourse and other locales in Surrey, plus those in Devon all came from places I had visited. Even some of the striking outfits that Peri wears were ones I had seen in southern England and Germany, worn by real women. Having read work by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and 'The Armageddon Rag' (1983) by George R.R. Martin, in 2024, I decided it was time to bring together the various scenes together into a novel.

I was determined in part to 'get back at' what I felt had been Priest's racist writing in  'Fugue for a Darkening Island' by taking his magic realist concept and placing it in the genuinely multi-cultural context of London, which was multi-cultural in his day as well. Apprehensive about cultural appropriation for some reason I had been drawn to Iranian mythology and in exploring this came across the ideal being to be the originator of the obscured. For the readers of Farsi, the language used in Iran, text on the front cover gives away a clue about how the story unfolds. The novel touches a little on the differences between pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, but primarily from the perspective of Westerners' engagement with the country.

This aspect also meant the novel explores issues around identity and families in the UK worrying about the colouring of their children's children, raised to prominence with questions asked of the Duchess of Sussex when she was pregnant, given her mixed-race background. This then began to connect with the British context, especially those families who had been involved with the oil industry especially living around the Weybridge and Walton areas of Surrey. Furthermore, between me first reading Priest's books and the mid-2020s I had become familiar with Dorset and Devon, the latter of which featured in 'The Glamour' and naturally in a particular form in  'A Dream of Wessex'.

The other prime challenge is how far technology has advanced since the mid-1980s. These days it is typical that you have to gurn at your smartphone to get it to open up for you. Facial recognition software is habitually used in many public spaces. Perhaps I could have gone into this a bit further, but I do look at the advantages and disadvantages of being 'obscured' when so much of our appearance and activity is being judged not by other people but by machines. Another challenge is the decline in the use of cash. This shifted the types of crimes that an obscured person would have to, might be able to, pull off. Simple pickpocketing is less fruitful in 2024 than it would have been in 1984. However, 'shoulder surfing' as people use electronic devices in public and the ability to take such devices, sometimes even just temporarily, can open up access to other opportunities to steal funds. These questions had been part of my mulling over these scenarios in the past few decades and I feel I explore them in this novel without it becoming an essay on identity and technology in our era.

While there is action and jeopardy in this novel, in contrast to many of my novels 'The Obscured' is more a character arc as Tara Houghton comes to learn more about herself and the condition she has had thrust upon her.

The Otto Braucher Stories - Revisiting the Weimar Germany Detective

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Very influenced by the Maigret novels by Georges Simenon plus teaching modern history, back in 1995 I decided to write a series of crime novels set in 1920s Germany. Not only was it a period that I knew a lot about, but it seemed that it offered ample opportunities for crimes given the political and economic turbulence and the availability of guns as a result of the First World War. Berlin would have been a logical location but I realised that as Munich had suffered less as a result of the Second World War, finding out what it looked like in the 1920s would be rather easier. I was very fortunate to be given a tourist guide to the city published in that period. 

You have to remember that back in 1995 the public did not have the internet. Email tended to be restricted to academia. Libraries had moved to computer-based lists of their books, but you still had to go and find the physical book and read it. Having moved to London in 1994, I was in a better position to access a variety of libraries. I had a GCSE in German that I had got three years earlier when unemployed, so with the aid of a large German dictionary I was able to get material from German-language texts too. Friends also lent me books, notably about the German Army in the First World War. I assembled a huge file of notes (which I still have) including hand copied and photocopied maps and long lists of names from the era. 

I was determined that my detective would be in contrast to so many would be a family man rather than a loner. I also felt it was appropriate for him to be a serious Catholic and knew this would impinge on how he went about his work. Him having a family also allowed me to bring in connections to different elements of society through his wife and children. He was to maintain a positive outlook, though given the context it is unsurprising that he becomes cynical. I revisited the idea of a positive detective in 'Death in Amiens' (2016) which drew heavily on my very depressed time I spent in that town and the police detective was an intentional counterpoint to my perspective on the place.

Otto Braucher started out as Otto Beckmann, using the name of a German family I had known in West Germany in the 1980s. It was also supposed to reference the artist of the inter-war Weimar Germany era, Max Beckmann (1884-1950). However, then in 1996 there was the UK TV crime series 'Beck' and in 1997, the Swedish police series also called 'Beck', began. The German series, 'Beckmann' which began in 1999, was a chat show, but still I felt the name was getting too much usage. So, looking for an alternative name, I switched to 'Braucher' which I saw used in the USA but had a German ring to it and as a German friend said to me, it had an analogous meaning which might seem useful/appropriate.

Anyway, through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, I was writing these stories, 15,000-20,000 words, so novellas very influenced by Simenon. I did not have an idea of publishing them and any hopes seemed dashed when I encountered the first three Bernie Gunther novels of Philip Kerr published 1989-1991. Though set in Berlin, I felt I was be seen to be aping his novels. However, especially in the covers of these first three (there was a shift in style when he revived the series in 2006), which echoed the Penguin crime novel editions of the 1960s, I had to go with that green urban style myself. Of course, since then we have seen numerous crime novels set in the Weimar Germany era, the most successful being the Gereon Rath novels of Volker Kutscher, published since 2007. Berlin has primarily remained the focus, but Rory Clements has now left crime in 16th Century England for 1930s Munich with 'Munich Wolf' (2024).

Self-publishing ebooks did not really become a thing until the 2010s. My wife, a published author, suggested I got into it and having already produced 12 Braucher stories and even faked up some covers for them (pretending that Penguin had taken me up), these seemed sensible ones to start with. My original idea had been 3 x 6-story anthologies and I launched 'Braucher's Solution' and 'Braucher's Inheritance' on this basis. However, in the mid-2010s, there was a real fade for short and episodic ebook fiction, stories people could complete in a single train journey, so I disaggregated the stories and launched them as stand-alone novellas. I was rather uncomfortable selling them in that way, but it seemed to work. I continued writing more finally reaching 17 novellas in total.

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In 2015 I finally got around to completing the full-length Braucher prequel novel, set in 1922, 'Munich White' which I had started at the same time as the novellas back in 1995 but had run out of steam. Having worked more with Braucher and his setting, but the 2010s I was ready to come back and complete the novel. Having three story threads that occasionally bisected was probably rather over-ambitious but we can put that down to the confidence of my youth back then. There have long been plans for 'Munich Brown' set during Munich's Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, but, despite lots of ideas for what might happen in it and some of the roots of these being laid in the Braucher novellas, I have been unable to come up with a satisfactory structure whether the three-story strand or a focus just on Braucher. This is often a challenge with historical novels, having an appropriate set of characters able to witness what you need them to witness without them teleporting all over the place or having to employ a whole platoon of characters as I ended up doing for 'Scavenged Days' (2018) and some would argue, unsuccessfully.

Now the fad of the 2010s for short or episodic ebooks seems to have died, indeed ebooks themselves seem to be waning, I still felt uncomfortable when speaking about my books having to say, 'well, of course, 17 of those crime novels are just novellas, not full-length [read 'proper'] novels.' Thus, I decided to reassemble the novellas back into the three anthologies I had originally envisaged. I was short the 18th story to complete the third anthology. For a long time I had intended to write 'Braucher and the Circle' which would be around spiritualism something which was extremely popular in Britain and Germany in the post-First World War period - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was very into it. However, again despite coming at it from different angles I could not get a satisfactory structure. Thus, I decided to swap it with 'Braucher and the Expectation' which I had intended to be set in 1924, but seemed to work instead in October 1923, rounding out the third anthology. I decided to title that anthology 'Braucher's Value' referencing the hyperinflation of mid to late 1923 that is in the background and influenced a lot of what happened at the time in Germany.

Of course, reaggregating the novellas I took the opportunity to check and revise the writing. I realised how far my writing has come since 2012, let alone 1995 and I feel these revised editions are more lucid than the approach I had back then. In addition, it is so much easier to get hold of detailed information about the era especially on political groups and the law. Accessing maps and images is also incredibly easy certainly compared to having to read through scores of books. This has allowed me to expand and indeed correct some of the details that I featured, notably on the A.G.V.K. political grouping which is mentioned in all three anthologies. Details of when certainly newspapers, cars and weapons were available is also so much easier, indeed I can access German newspapers of the time from the comfort of my own desk at home, something that would have seemed very futuristic back in 1995.

Thus, while I have always been proud of my Braucher stories, I do feel these three re-released anthologies do show the stories at their best and the 'train spotters' of historical novels might be more satisfied that anything even mildly anachronistic has been corrected. While the competition is much stiffer now than thirty, let alone thirteen years ago, I do hope that even a few readers enjoy the Braucher books, cheaper and more accessible than before, simply with fewer of those green-tinted photograph covers that myself and others have long enjoyed.

The Books I Read In July

 Fiction

'The Sword Saint' by C.F. Iggulden

This is the concluding book in the Empire of Salt trilogy and is set two years after 'Shiang' (2018). The city of Darien is under threat once again, this time from a new militaristic state, the Kingdom of Feal, that has arisen to its north and is sweeping through regions conquering them. An embassy is sent to insist on trade and is soon trying to manipulate the negotiations with the city's ruling Twelve Families through bribery and assassination. Ultimately given the cruelty of Feal's ruler was proves unavoidable. Now the major characters from the previous two novels, some of which we have seen nothing of since the end of the first book, 'Darien' (2017) are all brought back together in a kind of Magnificent Seven way to defend the city through a series of commando raids against the advancing Feal forces and defending the city's walls, drawing on the various magical and physical abilities they have.

This trilogy is actually post-apocalyptic, there are occasional hints to it being Earth with some memories of our cultures, but with the magic involved it might as well be fantasy. There is some magically operated machinery, as well as pure machines, notably repeating pistols, and as might be guess from the titles of the cities, it draws on East Asian culture, with mainly Chinese elements blended with some Japanese. This is an adventure story so a lot of it is about action. It is gory at times. The main thing is Iggulden deftly dodges what you might expect to happen next. The fact that the Fagin-like character from the first book, Tellius who looks like he is going to not live long ends up running Darien and having an apparently loving relationship with Lady Sallet, head of one of the leading Darien Twelve Families. It is like if an aged Bronn had married Olenna Tyrell in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. There is something unsatisfying about these books, but in general they are sound fantasy and certainly go down unexpected routes with the story which is a refreshing change from reworking over-used tropes.

'Assassin's Creed: The Secret Crusade' by Oliver Bowden

While down the years I have read novelisations of movies and TV series, this was the first time I had read one of a computer game (though it is a shame no-one ever wrote one of the 'Lords of Midnight' game on the ZX Spectrum). It was also the first time in many years, perhaps decades, since I had bought a book from a supermarket, in this case Lidl. Having long been fascinated by the Crusader States, I got into playing the original 'Assassin's Creed' (2007) which is set across 12th Century Syria and Palestine. I managed to kill 7 of the 9 targets before getting a new computer. If you know the game then the book follows the story of the game, with Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad as protagonist, very closely though Bowden makes efforts that each of the nine killings is portrayed differently, some in retrospect. The decent attention to historical detail and the political scene of the region of the time is brought over from the game to the novel. Bowden manages to pull off a reasonably adventurous story which may appeal more if you have not played the game. 

The book continues as a bass for the extensive series of novels which followed this one. As a result the story continues for years beyond the game with Altaïr travelling to Cyprus and fighting for control the Assassins' society. Elements of the story are told by Niccolò Polo (Marco Polo's father) to his brother, Maffeo Polo, in the late 1250s, so as to provide a link for the spread of the Assassins to permit the successive stories. This section is almost like a second book. Again it has drama (and some romance) but feels a little rushed. Overall, not a bad book but may appeal more if looking for a decent medieval adventure without having experienced it already 'first hand' through playing the game.

'Death on the Riviera' by John Bude [Ernest Elmore]

This book was published in 1952, so 15 years after the last book by Bude that I read, 'The Cheltenham Square Murder' (1937): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-books-i-read-in-may.html  It features a Chief Inspector Meredith but I cannot find out what relation he is to Superintendent Meredith who appeared in Bude's earlier novels. He might be that man's son. We do find out he was evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940, so it seems likely he was a young man back then, as the average age of soldiers in the Second World War was 26. Anyway, he has much the same manner as his 1930s superior.

We start off seeing this Meredith and Acting Sergeant Freddie Strang trying to navigate their way out of Dunkirk which some 6 or 7 years after the end of the war is still very disrupted by war damage. They quickly motor through France to the area around Menton on the French Riviera (seeing the title and knowing the preceding books' settings I had imagined this one would be set on the English Riviera in Devon). As is typical I imagine in real life even now (and of course in fiction, if you watch 'The Tunnel' (broadcast 2013-17)) neither of the British detectives have anything more than 'schoolboy French' even though they have been sent to liaise with French counterparts seeking to take down a British money counterfeiter operating in southern France.

This case runs parallel with the intrigues at the French property of a wealthy Englishwoman,  Nesta Hedderwick, her niece and her various hangers-on some of whom in various ways are involved with the counterfeiting and have their own rivalries which ultimately lead to murder. They very much remind me of the set-up we see in Agatha Christie's 'The Mystery of the Blue Train' (1928) especially as it was dramatised in the TV series 'Poirot' in 2006. 

As is characteristic for Bude novels, a lot of theories are thrown up and there is satisfaction in following Meredith who aided by a pair of very capable French detectives chases up the various clues and decoys before being drawn into also investigating a killing in the Hedderwick household. That trait that Bude develops so well, is combined with his acute eye for place. In all the books of his I have read, the location is as much a character as the people and so it is here, really conjuring up an assortment of locations along the Riviera very atmospherically.

Naturally the story is of its time and some tropes, such as the speed of the romance would likely to be resisted by a modern author even writing about 1952, the fact that Bude does paint such a rich picture of location and provides such a surfeit of feasible options, means it remains engaging for a modern reader. Unfortunately this was the last of the Bude books that I have. I do still have quite a number of others from the British Library series or crime novel reprints.

'The Peripheral' by William Gibson

I have been reading books by Gibson, one of the 'fathers' of Cyberpunk since the 1990s. Back then while we admired his imagination, I did feel as if his story construction was rather 'clunky' as if you could see all the pieces being moved into place, very conscious of the author at work. This book, published in 2014, is almost at the other extreme and I would have been able to engage with it if there was more clarity and structure. As you would expect, the concepts are sound. 

A woman called Flynne lives in the USA in the early 21st Century but at a time when the economy has decayed so much that the only real rural employment is in synthesising drugs. She lives with her brother, Burton, who has lost lots of his body serving in the Marines and has a meagre pension.  The siblings make money by playing games on behalf of wealthy customers so they can advance without having to put in the grinding time. Flynne takes over one job from Burton and in the game has to fly around a futuristic building keeping miniature paparazzi drones away from a party being held in the building. While doing this she witnesses the murder of a woman guest by a man.

Subsequently Flynne finds out that this was not a game but effectively a portal into things happening in London 70 or so years into the future. People from that time, notably Wilf Netherton a publicist and Ainsley Lowbeer, a police detective, wanting to identify the perpetrator begin to connect to Flynne's time. By manipulating the economy back then they are able to produce equipment which allows Flynne, her brother and others to project themselves into synthetic human avatars (the so-called 'peripherals') in the future London and so interact. The objective is to 'correct' things so that the 'Jackpot' a slow-developing apocalypse does not occur or so severely, so creating a different timeline from the one Netherton and Lowbeer inhabit. In both times people are seeking to kill Flynne and those supporting her, which leads to various action scenes.

Gibson's portrayal of the society and its technology in the two times, is interesting. The sense of projection through a vivid computer scenario reminded me of Christopher Priest's novel 'The Extremes' (1998) and the movie 'Source Code' (2011) but Gibson's approach is fresh. His 'slow' apocalypse is very believable and in fact has become more so as things have steadily unwound in the world in the years since this novel was published. Despite these positives, the book is a nightmare to read. Even when you are familiar with which time the current chapter is focused on (and some are only 1-2 pages long) there are so many characters and then ones from one time slot appearing in the other or communicating surprisingly easy between the two that it is a real challenge to follow where the story is going. 

Gibson is great at thinking up corporations and slang, but often it makes the dialogue really difficult to follow. I suppose he wrote it for multiple readings because once you have finished it, you understand it well enough to start reading it. However, life is too short for such an approach, so what you have is a real mess with the odd gems shining out from it but for a lot of the time the reader is bewildered about what is going on and when. Thus, it is a very frustrating read.

Non-Fiction

'Charlie Brooker's Dawn of the Dumb: Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline' by Charlie Brooker

I had rather expected an analysis of UK or Western society along the lines of what Michael Moore produces. Instead this is simply a collection of short articles that Brooker wrote for 'The Guardian' newspaper, television review section 2004-07. If you know Brooker's style he has a weirdly amiable but acidic tone and outlines grave violence towards those he despises but in a way that sort of washes over you so you do not really take on board the severity of what he is saying (unless you were a US supporter of President George W. Bush in which case you felt Brooker should be executed). Looking at these articles from 18-21 years later, it is interesting how prescient they were. Brooker even starts mentioning Donald Trump. This book also reminds us how many of the traits we see in the Trump presidencies were already been established under the Bush administration, notably the apparent acceptance that the US President can be proud of his cluelessness.

Brooker spends a lot of time talking about reality TV programmes, which did not originate in this period but were really getting into their stride. Unsurprisingly what he was saying back then has simply continued to manifest, in fact going to greater extremes than he even cautioned in those days. You feel he loves to suggest he hates the people in the reality programmes but actually carries a lot of affection for the formats and at least some of the individuals in them, plus an enduring curiosity about them. The final thing to say about these articles is especially in the more pensive and speculative ones you see Brooker snagging on lots of developments which would go on to form the basis of the 'Black Mirror' (broadcast 2011-14 & 2016-) the dystopian TV series that has now run to 7 seasons with most episodes featuring a unique story/concept. Many of these are clearly grounded in what Brooker was thinking/writing about in the mid-2000s.

The Books I Read In June

 As the two books I read this month had a total of 1,295 pages, I unfortunately only got through them and no more.

Fiction

'The Interpretation of Murder' by Jed Rubenfeld

I remember this book being everywhere when it came out in 2006 but I being passed a copy I only got round to reading it. Rubenfeld is a US law academic. The book is set during the genuine visit of the psychology pioneers Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to New York in 1909 to give various lectures. They are fictional characters get mixed up in a murder of a young society woman and an attack on another both involving sado-masochist elements. There are a couple of protagonists, Dr. Stratham Younger, a fictional young US psychologist who is one of the hosts of Freud and Jung but is asked to counsel the second victim, Nora Acton. He tells his elements in the first person. The second is a New York detective, James Littlemore who struggles to get the cases investigated against the resistance of influential men in the city.

As you might expect the story involves a lot of psychological aspects and is a bit of a primer into Freud's thinking and how he an Jung began to diverge. It also features historically true opposition to the whole practice of psychologists by neurologists who believed that the treatment of mental health issues they believed to be solely neurological would be set back by 'talking cures'. Freud and Jung do not come off too well from this story. Freud is portrayed as an amiable incontinent old man and Jung a disturbed philanderer. Certainly Freud is shown as dogmatic and his insistence of just one approach to the sexual perceptions of children of their parents is shown to lead him astray in interpretations of what is going on and to be honest the reader is liable to agree with Rubenfeld's take on Freud's approach if not embracing the hostility of the neurologists.

There are strengths to this novel. The portrayal of New York in the era and the kind of society it had is very well done with lots of rich descriptions of various buildings and locales in the city and the surrounding countryside and of the corrupt, privileged and poverty-struck social picture. The plot is very twisty which I guess you would expect from a crime novel with psychology at the centre. However, you do feel that it is all wrapped up rather pat at the end and the psychological issues resolved too smoothly while resolution of another murder which comes to light is rather swept aside. I know as much about Freud's theories as the average general reader, but they seem to simply add weight to the patronising misogynistic attitude towards women and their 'neuroses' to the extent of repeatedly victim blaming. Though a pioneer Freud was very much of his time. However, you do feel that as a result Nora Acton's genuine feelings, especially her sexuality, is simply dismissed as something that could be quickly and easily 'resolved'. A romance is levered in too. Thus, I came to the end feeling that despite the involvement of this different aspect it simply reinforced what we would have seen in a novel set in that context without psychology featuring.

There are some good action scenes and as I say some fair twists. However, the narrative is very fragmented and we jump between various characters very rapidly even within a single chapter. There is a constant gear shifting especially as only Younger's narrative is in the first person whereas all the others that actually make up the bulk of the text, are in the third. I can see why the novel appealed at the time. However, you come away rather feeling it is 'ragged' and while the jerking about certainly adds dynamism, it does mean the book is not as strong as it might have been. In addition, while I am personally a fan of historical notes, Rubenfeld really undermines his own novel by extensively going into all the things he altered from the genuine history or simply invented. I imagine this comes from him being an academic but I felt it really undermined the reader's faith in the novel and could have been contained but handled without that undercutting of what had been written.

Non-Fiction

'The Benn Diaries. New Single Volume' ed. by Ruth Winstone

This is a single volume edition of the first six volumes of Tony Benn's diaries, for the most part focused on his political career 1964-1990. The compression does cause some issues as so many issues of the era when he was an MP and especially those when he was a minister too, are covered very quickly and at times you want to find out more. His 'journey' from being a technocratic Gaitskellite who actually socialised with Enoch Powell, to an outspoken anti-racist and opponent of nuclear power is hard to track in this book. You see it taking place, but there is less sense of why and what brought it about. You can certainly see him losing faith in technology as a solution to Britain's and the world's problems, certainly by the mid-1970s. His anti-royalist outlook is clearer throughout, though he remains polite to the Queen. To some degree only as a result of seeing him speak in the 1990s and 2000s, rather than from this book, could I tell why he moved so far on the European communities as he saw what became the EU as a defender of workers' and indeed simply citizens' rights. His sense that the structure especially the European Commission lacked the necessary democracy, is apparent from the outset and made him in the 1970s and into the 1980s hostile to what was at the time the EEC, per se.

One puzzle remains how so many of the newspapers were able to portray Benn as being a hardcore radical Socialist, indeed even a Communist. While he could see some elements of note in the Soviet bloc countries he visited, he is far from being a flag waver for those regimes and was critical of their behaviour especially over Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. In addition while he portrays himself as being on the Left of the Labour Party, he does not go along with Militant Tendency, though he likewise is unhappy with Neil Kinnock's steps against them.

I accept this is an edited and curated version of his life, but the policies featured here actually come across as often more Christian Socialist and indeed Liberal of the early 20th Century, like his grandfather. I suppose especially in the 1970s and 1980s he was an easy person to beat in the media, to portray as some crazed monster because he was unapologetic for his views. I think the fact that he spoke amiably though at times with anger behind it, made him very slippery to challenge than if he had been a ranter. Still, his candid views of some politicians do expose a harder side.

It is interesting that like Richard Crossman who Benn served alongside: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-books-i-read-in-april.html  Benn sees Harold Wilson as both nasty and ineffectual to a much greater extent that he was perceived by the public. The successive Labour leaders Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock are excoriated in this book, contrary to Benn's interactions with them in public. While he did not press party unity over everything, it is clear he would go a long way to try not to give ammunition to their opponents. To some degree given plans to overthrow Wilson were mooted it does show actually how little tolerance privileged figures were willing to give any policies which looked as if they were moving to a genuine meritocracy and even these have been clawed back since. Benn like Crossman has quite a dim view of many of the ministers of the time, but is fulsome in his praise of those he approved of, many of them now forgotten names of the Labour movement. He was also staunch in his attendance at working class events up and down the country.

The one aspect which perhaps is not a surprise is the personal side. His wife Caroline to whom he was married for 51 years until her death, was very capable and stalwart, but also critical when needed. She correctly predicted Benn's attempt to become deputy leader of the Labour Party in 1981 was a grave error for him and he grudgingly recognises it. Naturally as a father of four children he comes over as a family man, an aspect not referenced in the media as they were seeking to portray him as a monster, rather than anything like someone who might be your neighbour. In fact when people speak about political dynasties especially in the USA but also in the UK, no-one ever seems to mention that four generations of Benns have been MPs: Sir John Benn (1850-1922; MP 1892-1910), William Wedgwood Benn (1877-1960; MP 1906-42); Anthony Wedgwood Benn (1925-2014; MP 1950-60 and 1963-2001) and Hilary Benn (1953-; MP 1999-) again because they may worry it normalises them, perhaps makes them look like the Kennedys or the Bushes.

Overall this was an engaging read, but I think if I wanted to dig into any particular phase again I would go back to the original six volumes for the detail. I came away feeling that Benn had been normal though with a prickliness I had not picked up before. In many ways he comes over as an ordinary man granted insight to the top levels of politics and seeing how divorced so much of it is from the bulk of the population but with a massive and frightening impact on their lives. Even more than the troubles of the Cold War the utter bleakness of the early years of the Thatcher governments come out raw in the diary entries.

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.

The Books I Read In April

Fiction

'Agent 6' by Tom Rob Smith

I picked up this book in a charity shop, but should really have looked back at my review of Smith's previous book, 'The Secret Speech' (2009) but it had been eight years since I wrote it: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-books-i-read-in-january.html so I had forgotten my previous warning. This book turned out to be as bad as I had expected back then. It is portrayed as the final book in a trilogy after 'Child 44' (2008) and 'The Secret Speech' featuring the former secret police officer Leo Demidov. As reviewers at the time noted, Smith fails to recapture the crispness and insight of the first novel. This book is a real mess. The premise is really contorted. Demidov has left the secret police but in 1965 his wife who we see him first encounter and pursue and his adopted daughters are permitted to travel to the USA to take part in a singing event at the United Nations. While there his youngest daughter and then his wife get mixed up in a successful plot to assassinate the black, Communist American singer Jesse Austin. This leads to the killing of both Austin's and Demidov's wives.

The rest of the book, taking place into the early 1980s is about Demidov trying to get out of the USSR so he can travel to the USA and find out who was responsible for the assassination and killing of the two women. However, this takes many years. There is a tiny chapter in which he tried to get over the border into Finland but a lot of the book is taken up with him operating in Kabul as an agent, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and then trying to get with a local agent and an orphaned Afghan girl to the USA where he finally finishes off his investigation before returning to imprisonment in the USSR.

The novel is effectively a series of fragments of story that are ill-connected. The portrayal of the situation in Afghanistan seems convincing but as Smith favours, very vicious in nature. Reviewers at the time commented on how it is often lifeless. The novel at 545 pages is far too long and like 'The Secret Speech' is gritty and yet really stretches credulity. Smith has gone on to write two other novels and has moved into scriptwriting for example for the TV series 'London Spy' (broadcast 2015). You often heard it said that 'everyone has a book in them' and it is clear that for Smith, 'Child 44' was that book and nothing he has produced since has come close to the quality of that. For some reason he lacks the ability to be in control of his material. He has the historical research but seems at a loss what to do with it and so goes for 'alarums and excursions' apparently with the view that these make a novel engaging, whereas in fact they reduce its coherence and feasibility. I will try to remember to stay well clear of his other novels if I see them on sale in a charity shop.

'Shiang' by C.F. Igguden

This is the second book in the Empire of Salt trilogy and is set two years on from 'Darien' (2017) which I read in February: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-books-i-read-in-february.html  However, most of the main characters from the first book are only mentioned or encountered briefly. Only the Fagin-like character Tellius and his now lover, Lady Sallet, head of one of Darien's Twelve Families feature to any real extent. Most of the novel is about two groups of swordsmen travelling from Shiang to Darien. One lot led by sword saint Hondo are seeking revenge on Tellius for sharing the Mazer form of sword fighting, with people of Darien. 

The second group is led by a man called Gabriel who has been brought back from the afterlife to inhabit the body of a leading swordsman who was suffering a cancer and was being experimented on using one of the powerful stones which fuel a lot of magic in the world. As a result, Gabriel and the three others returned from the afterlife with him are gifted with superhuman powers. Gabriel seizes control of Shiang before moving to take Darien.

As with the first book we receive a passing comment which shows us that this is Earth, but clearly some distance into the future when so much has changed. It is not made clear but Darien [Dalian] and Shiang [Xi'An] are old Western names for actual cities in China. 

Both groups venture through mountainous regions, bickering among themselves and with people they encounter, with this breaking out into violence, especially for Gabriel's group. Hondo's group faces more casualties. In sequence both reach Darien where with the help of a premonition from an elderly noblewoman the city has been prepared to face some kind of grim invasion. Eventually Hondo's group allies with Tellius and the Families of Darien to fight the superhuman attack of Gabriel and his group. The final battle is substantial.

The fact that only a few elements are carried over from the first novel, makes this one really feel like standalone. It would have been nice to find out what had happened to many of the other characters in that first book as Tellius for much of it was on the sidelines. Overall, it rather feels a bit like a Marvel movie, with two groups of super-powered  rivals working their way to a final showdown. It is not bad for that though none of the major characters are sympathetic. Really the only person who is engaging is Marias a slave and admirer of the man whose body Gabriel possesses.

The novel is not bad and has some fresh ideas. It is mature rather than YA in the way it does not pull its punches in terms of the viciousness of what the characters suffer or how challenging working relationships can be especially with two men who 'know' they are the best at what they do. I do have the third book, 'The Sword Saint' (2019) to read and hope it recaptures the freshness of the ideas, situations and characters seen in 'Darien'.

Non-Fiction

'The Crossman Diaries. Condensed Version' by Richard Crossman, edited by Anthony Howard

Note this is the condensed version covering just the period of the two Labour governments, 1964-70. Unusually for the time Crossman made audio recordings rather than wrote a diary. In full as Howard notes, these run to 3 million words. Of these 1.06 million have gone into the published 3-volume version of his diaries. This version still runs to 300,000 words (compared to about 90,000 words for an average novel) and in my edition, including references, ran to 764 pages, the longest book I have read this year so far. When published in the 1970s they attracted a lot of attention and indeed condemnation, but were seen as the best insight into the running of the UK government that had been made available.

Richard Crossman (1907-74) entered Parliament in 1945 as a Labour MP and rose to be a Cabinet minister when Harold Wilson came to power. He was successively Minister of Housing, Lord President of the Council/Leader of the House of Commons and finally Secretary of State for Health and Social Services. The fact that Crossman recorded his thoughts means that the text flows in a brisk way when compared to the  'The Robert Hall Diaries, 1947-1953' (1989) which I read in February. However, this does settle down as the diaries progress through the years and it is clear Crossman who was 63 by the time Labour fell and an elderly father of young children, was becoming tired. 

At first he is a very clear admirer of Harold Wilson, but his impression, especially due to Wilson's persistent prevaricating and game playing with a range of ministers, erodes this. Him pressing on with the necessary but highly flawed 'In Place of Strife' approach working really just one-to-one with Barbara Castle alienated so many. Crossman's portrayal of the ministers notably of George Brown, but also people like Michael Stewart, Peter Shore, Fred Peart, Ray Gunter and especially James Callaghan highlights just what poor quality there was in the higher levels of the governments. So much of what he outlines shows the government floundering, ironically even more so after it had achieved a decent majority in 1966 than when it had a tiny one 1964-66.

While the Starmer government coming into office in 2024 had a much larger majority it is interesting to note how many of the same problems it faced compared to what the 1964 Labour government and its successor had to tackle. Notable was how far Labour were constrained by the Conservative approach to the economy of the previous 13 years and to a large part this choked off any real new directions in terms of policy and this is something true in 2024 as it was sixty years earlier. Of far less concern these days is the balance of payments and the exchange rate. However, there was recognition back then how the IMF and Swiss bankers had far greater control over the UK economy than the government itself. These days multinational corporations fill that role. 

Though Johnson was far from being a Trump there was a difficult relationship throughout with the USA as it threw itself ever deeper into Vietnam. The issue of immigration as now, was also a big topic at the time, in part of the expulsion of Kenyan Asians with British passports.  There was Enoch Powell's explicitly racist rhetoric in place of nowadays Farage and the online bigots, but still presenting a challenge at elections both for Labour and the Conservatives. As a result the good intentions of Wilson and his ministers, for Crossman especially around reform of parliament, particularly the House of Lords, but also in public housing and the health system were simply drowned in these other 'crises'. Crossman barely touches on what are seen as the successes of the period in terms of rights such as abortion, homosexuality, divorce, etc.

It is an insightful but disheartening read. As has become apparent with the current government, those of 1964-70, we hemmed in so much by Conservative economics and right-wing rhetoric which was amplified by such a large portion of the media. Reading it gave me the clear impression that Starmer, even with a decent majority from the outset, will be unable to achieve anything substantial and will be channelled in to being simply a watered-down version of the preceding Conservative governments and serving the needs of those already with immense wealth rather than the mass of the population, whose appropriate ire at how they continued to be treated is distracted by the focus on immigration. Of course, times have changed a great deal, but there is much in these diaries which can be seen as a warning to the current government and Labour supporters of how little success they should anticipate.