The Books I Read In January

Fiction

'Azincourt' by Bernard Cornwell

As the title suggests this novel is set around the events of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. While the French village nearby is called Azincourt, it has gone down in British history as Agincourt and that provided the US title of this book. Published in 2008, it owes a lot to Cornwell's novel 'Harlequin' (2000), the first of The Grail Quest series which I read in July 2020: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html  That featured the 1346 Battle of Crécy. As in that book it features an English archer, this time Nicholas Hook rather than Thomas of Hookton, who after a bloody rivalry in his village and trying to stop the rape and execution of some Lollards is sent to be part of the invasion of France that went so badly, especially due to the prolonged siege of Harfleur. There are many parallels with that earlier book, such as the hero fixing up with a woman in distress though this one survives longer than ones in that previous series.

Even for Cornwell, the book is very bloody and he does not hold back on the brutality of war at the time. The novel starts with the massacre at Soissons which gives Nicholas additional motives for his fight. It is better for being free of the mysticism seen in the holy grail books, though at times Nicholas does hear the voices of saints that guide him at vital moments. I guess, though given the beliefs of people at the time this can be seen as realistic. As usual, Cornwell provides a great deal of historical detail about battles but everyday aspects. However, this does not bog down the book, in part because the tensions between the characters are probably just the right side of overblown. While I did not enjoy this book as much as 'Fools and Mortals' (2017) which I read last year: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/04/books-i-read-in-april.html it is a decent novel and certainly better than the second and third books in The Grail Quest sequence.

'The Hanging Garden' by Ian Rankin

This is the ninth Inspector Rebus novel and in contrast to the preceding one, 'Black and Blue' (1997) which I read in November: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-books-i-read-in-november.html is much tauter. There is some confusion with it going back in time after the outset. However, the plot which involves Rebus going both after a new crime lord, Tommy Telford and investigating a potential Nazi war criminal living in Edinburgh is better focused without him gallivanting all over the place, rather it is more character focused. His daughter being harmed in a hit-and-run is another element, but in this novel Rankin balances them well and teases the reader with what is involved with the others. 

That element of wanting the novel to have a Hollywood feel, as he aimed to with 'Let It Bleed' (1995), http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2022/08/books-i-read-in-august.html is apparent here when there is a raid on a medical narcotics factory. The introduction of the Yakuza might be a step too far, but proves to be a necessary device to provide leverage when dealing with gangsters starting a gang war across Edinburgh and neighbouring locations. There is reference to the war in Bosnia and a trafficked refugee from it. Despite Rebus's connection to the woman, the engagement with her is rather unresolved and I did wonder if she turns up in subsequent books. Overall this was one of the more satisfying books in the Rebus series.

Non-Fiction

'Nazism 1919-1945. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination', ed. by J. [Jeremy] Noakes and G. [Geoffrey] Pridham

The title makes the focus of this book very clear. Like the preceding two volumes it draws heavily on a range of sources to provide translated primary material and connects this with historical analysis. That approach, hearing such a diverse range of voices is vital in this book because there are still included all the horrendous statistics of the German terror and extermination programmes. It is easy when reading of tens of thousands and then millions of victims to become numbed to what you are reading about. This is grounded in the human input.

This book is effectively a survey rather than focused explicitly on the Holocaust. It does however as with the previous volumes raise points that tend to get forgotten in a lot of general books on the Nazi regime which mean that though published in 1988 it remains of great value to students of the period. As with Volume 2, it continues to highlight how chaotic the regime was and is very adept at showing up the competing forces. This is an important counter to the portrayals of the regime as an efficient totalitarian machine. Looking at the foreign policy, the war and the racial policy, it shows the absence of clear plans beyond sweeping statements and the importance of local initiatives in moving forward activity, usually by men seeking Hitler's attention. The tensions that arose between wanting to exploit Jews, Poles and Russians for the war economy and wanting to slaughter them, comes out clearly. 

Karl Schleunes wrote of the 'twisted road to Auschwitz' and this book shows you that there were also many side turnings from that road. Though focused the book covers the 'euthanasia' programme, known later as T4, for killing disabled people and how, much stronger than I realised, it fed directly into the extermination camps. It looks at ghettoisation and Operation Reinhard and how the challenges of mass extermination combined with the wish to clear regions of Jews, drove the campaign on, but even then how much was chaotic and ad hoc. Overall, this book while chilling, successfully balances detail with the human perspective and I commend it now as a source even more than a third of a century on from its publication.

Books I Read In April

 Fiction

'Fools and Mortals' by Bernard Cornwell

Having been disappointed by the Grail Quest (2000-03) books I read and finding 'The Fort' (2010) and the Starbuck (1993-96) tetralogy alright but not outstanding, I was eager to see Cornwell getting back to the kind of quality that is seen in his Sharpe series. This book, set in 1595-96 and seen through the eyes of William Shakespeare's brother, Richard, proved to be both engaging and refreshing. For Cornwell to be writing about a group of actors at the time when William Shakespeare was working on 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is a departure from the war stories he typically writes. There is intrigue and some fights, but the rehearsing and running of however, Cornwell puts his attention to historical detail - which can he never neglects - to really good use in this novel. It highlights the challenges of setting up and sustaining a theatre company; the challenges of being censored and negotiating with patrons. Richard is a performer of women's parts, as women were not permitted to act until 1660 but is ageing and is seeking ways to continue his career as he has to shift into male roles. All round, Cornwell balanced all these factors very deftly, while giving a real sense of jeopardy and at the same time richly conjuring up London of the late 16th Century. I think keeping it to quite a narrow focus allowed that richness to come out. I certainly feel that this was the best Bernard Cornwell book I have read in a long time and would certainly recommend it.

'Void Moon' by Michael Connelly

This is the last of the Connelly novels that I have been given. This one features Cassie Black a woman who with her lover, used to rob successful gamblers at Las Vegas casinos. On probation she has got a good job working for a Porsche dealership in Los Angeles. However, news about her daughter she was compelled to give up for adoption drives her to seek the 'one last job' to get funds. This job turns out to be much more complex than it first appears and soon involves two organised criminal bodies competing for the money. Connelly is very adept at representing the Nevada and California areas he clearly knows well. This novel is fast paced, alternating between Cassie's perspective and that of Jack Karch who is put on Cassie's trail by the owner of the casino that she robs from this time. It does manage to avoid slipping into many of the tropes we know around Las Vegas crimes, though there are perhaps one too many crashing through the glass roofs of casinos.

It is a stark, hard boiled environment. The details of Cassie breaking into the target room and overcoming all the security measures, is rightly praised by reviewers. The tone of that 'clinical' approach is repeatedly brought home as Karch tortures and kills without compunction as he hunts down Cassie. However, the US penal system is also an antagonist. Cassie is seen by her probation officer as being ambivalent in her responses, even though she is holding down a good job and this is sufficient for her to get an unannounced; armed visit from the probation officer. Cassie's partner on her last robbery was killed by being thrown from a hotel room window. While Cassie was far away from him at the time, under US law, because they were together on a criminal activity it is her who gets charged with his manslaughter. This sense that the justice system latches on to perpetrators and piles on whatever charges seem in even quite removed vicinity to the criminal and seeks to punish at all stages, rather than rehabilitate comes through very sharply in this novel. That harsh regime does provide motives but will jump out for UK readers as being alien.

Overall a crisp thriller that aside from a few points comes over as credible and engaging. It would make a great movie. While she is probably too old for the role now, but if Jennifer Lopez had played Cassie in line with her performance in 'Out of Sight' (1998), it would have been something worth watching.

'God Save the Queen' by Kate Locke [Kathryn Smith]

This is sort of a steampunk novel. It is set in the 2012 but in a world in which the Black Death mutated turning aristocratic people into vampires or werewolves. Queen Victoria, a vampire, is still on the throne of Britain. There are 'halvies', people born to concubines with traits of a vampire or a werewolf but also of humanity, like a 'daywalker' in the Blade series. There are also 'goblins' who combine werewolf and vampire traits but are confined to cannibalism in the sewers. The bulk of the population are humans who after a failed uprising in 1932, live very Victorian existences in a desultory world in which the aristocracy party. Technology has advanced but is different in style, so mobile phones are 'rotaries'. Clothing is still very Victorian or 1980s Gothic. 

The protagonist, Xandra Vardan is a member of the Royal Guard and her siblings work for the police and a private security firm. Children of a lord, they have a privileged existence, but in detective work and security are faced with the challenges of this society. Xandra is drawn into investigating the apparent murder of her sister, Dee, after being confined to the New Bedlam insane asylum. She is soon mixed up in an entanglement of conspiracies with some seeking to overthrow the regime and others experimenting on halfie children to try to produce better strains. Throughout she is uncertain both on who to trust and who she might betray herself. There are dramatic scenes as she tries to find the truth and hares through London to do it. There is also a nice romance between Xandra and the Scottish lord who is head of the werewolves, which in the hands of another author would have been handled differently, but Locke handles honestly, so providing a nice counterpoint to the entwined conspiracies.

Locke is Canadian and a professed Anglophile. She almost goes too far in levering in London slang and phrases. However, for non-British readers, I imagine this adds to the sense of this alien world. I spotted to elements that jar with this. In the UK 'French doors' are actually known as 'French windows' and no-one over here pours syrup on bacon! Aside from that, I found this novel growing on me as I went through it. At times it seemed a bit too much but steadily it comes together. The world building while drawing perhaps on some over-used tropes, is successful. However, Locke does not need to provide all the details, especially the complex genetic stuff at the end, to justify what she has portrayed. She needed to have more faith that the reader could come along with her without having a lesson. Locke is a prolific author, under a string of names, producing 39 novels, 2001-2022, mixing romance, modern fantasy and steampunk. If I come across any more of her books I would certainly buy them as, if nothing else, an old Goth cannot resist the styles in them!

'Nemesis' by Bill Napier

While Locke gave quite a bit of detail on genetics in an appendix, Napier piles in mathematical formulae in the body of his text. This is a weird mixture, being, if it was a movie, along the lines of  'Armageddon' (1998) meets 'Seven Days in May' (1964) and in part 'The Da Vinci Code' (2006 from 2003 novel) though that was produced after this book was published in 1998. It appears that the Russians, following a military coup in the 1990s, have altered the course of an asteroid so that it crashes into the centre of the USA. A team of Americans, along with a British astronomer Oliver Webb whose point of view we most see through, are brought together to identify the asteroid and work out how to divert it. There is a great deal of tension in the team, which is not handled subtly. 

There is a lot of science and mathematics in the early sections of the book as we are told about asteroids and meteorites; the damage such a collision would provide; what the impact on sea in terms of different levels of tsunami and climate would be and why you cannot simply blast an asteroid apart. There is not simply exposition, but there is also formulae as if we might want to work it all out for ourselves. As the book progresses, the thriller element increases. One of the team is murdered and we see Americans conspiring to use the incident to trigger a nuclear war anyway and then Webb goes to Italy to track down the manuscript of a Renaissance astronomer who may have identified the most likely candidate for the asteroid. He gets mixed up in brutal killings, with prostitutes, a cabaret and everything Napier can throw at it. 

There is perhaps a good idea somewhere in this book, but there is simply far too much going on and Napier does not seem to be entirely in control of it. I could almost imagine this book being written by a team each trying to get their bit in. Yes, we want to see that the disaster portrayed in the book is a credible one and that suggestions we might come up with would not work. However, we do not need mathematics and extensive sections about energy calculations in water and so on. The idea of it being revealed in a historic text works well, but Napier goes off on such an extreme situation that it morphs into yet another kind of book. We are not really sure of his age or his nature. At times he is bookish and geekish at others more of an action hero than Robert Langdon with a librarian throwing herself at him in messages who we do not ever see in person. There is probably enough in here for two or three different books. I have another thriller by Napier on my shelf and I wonder if it is handled any better than this one.

Non-Fiction

'Gestapo' by Rupert Butler

Published in 1981 this is one of those populist history books, often about aspects of the Second World War, that were numerous in the 1970s. While what it says is accurate, the style is far from academic. It is really a series of vignettes about the Gestapo and its activities across the life of the organisation. If it was a television programme then it would be a 'docu-drama' as Butler produces incidents and especially dialogue that we can guess occurred but of which there is no record. As the book progresses, the focus on the Gestapo itself becomes looser and we see things from the side of the Abwehr; the Resistance especially in France and Denmark and the assassins of Reinhard Heydrich as much as we see things from Gestapo perspective. Many of these incidents are well known anyway. Perhaps the most interesting elements are the less commonly aired ones. 

There is interesting material on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 and on the struggle between various German agencies in the running of France; the coverage of the Venlo Incident and Operation Valkyrie are pretty well handled too. It might seem odd to say that a book about such a sinister organisation is easy to 'dip into', but because of this vignette approach, that is the case. This is a useful book if you were thinking of writing a story set during the Nazi regime and wanted to get up to speed about the secret police machinery without going into more detailed, academic sources. I guess books like this which used to be sold as more in Woolworths or newsagents than bookshops effectively have been replaced by Channel 5 and Netflix documentaries these days hence them not being published in the way they were 40 years ago.

Books I Read/Listened To In October

Fiction

'Four Days in June' by Iain Gale

While Gale makes it clear that this book, covering the Battle of Waterloo, is a work of fiction, all the leading people, and many of the minor characters, he features, were real. In addition where possible he puts words into their mouths that they were known to have said or written. The book goes round five individuals: Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte; Marshal Michel Ney, Prince of Moskowa, one of the primary French generals; Colonel Sir William De Lancey, the British Quartermaster General; Lieutenant Colonel James Macdonell of the Coldstream Guards charged with defending the chateau of Hougoumont and Generalleutnant Hans von Ziet(h)en who commanded the Prussian I Corps, the first Prussian unit to reach the battlefield. 

Overall, it is not a bad book, though rather disjointed. Gale says his intention was to focus on the thoughts of these five men and so we rather see the action in a series of vignettes spread rather erratically across the four days. There is a big jump from the abandonment of Quatre Bras to the British and French being at the battlefield in front of Mont St. Jean. Perhaps the book is best when focused on smaller areas such as the battle for Hougoumont and Ney's repeated cavalry charges at the centre of the Allied line. He is certainly good at portraying how messy the battle was and the horror of the assorted injuries and deaths that many tens of thousands suffered. He also picks up on a couple of occasions when uniforms, especially the blue worn by Dutch troops (some of which he refers to anachronistically as Belgian) and troops from the Duchy of Nassau and the Nassau principalities.

As seems to be common these days with published books there are a number of small but annoying errors. Lieutenant Colonel John Fremantle another of Wellington's aides-de-camp is rendered as 'Freemantle'. A Prussian officer is given the rank of 'Oberstlieutenant' mixing in the English rank with the German rank of Oberstleutnant; the Landwehr are referred to as 'Landwher' and on one of the maps, Hanoverian troops are described as 'Hanovarian'. It is as if the book, at times, has been typed up from a dictation by someone unfamiliar with the actual names. Despite saying he has read 300 sources, Gale also misses the fact that one of the reasons why the Guards at Hougoumont suffered from a shortage of ammunition was that they used a different calibre of shot from other British units, something which had been identified as a problem as early as May 1815.

Not a bad book, but trying to cover so much from so many viewpoints means it loses some of its strength and it may have been better for Gale to have a tighter focus as Bernard Cornwell shows works well in books covering this time period and indeed this battle, even if Gale used a real soldier to have this viewpoint.

'The Sanctuary Seeker' by Bernard Knight

This is the first in the Crowner John series of murder mysteries. Knight, apparently his real name, was a professor of pathology and been publishing various crime novels since 1963. This novel opens in 1194 and is set in rural Devon and Exeter where the protagonist of the stories, Sir John de Wolfe, 'Crowner John' has been appointed coroner for the region as part of the legal reforms introduced by King Richard I. He is assisted by Gwyn a bulky Cornishman as his enforcer and Thomas de Peyne, a crippled former priest who works as his clerk. He is married to the sister of the Sheriff of Exeter, often an antagonist and has a mistress who runs a local tavern. In many ways I wondered if Knight was intentionally making his hero as different from the Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael featuring in novels set some 50 years earlier, though like John, Cadfael had been a crusader.

This story is around the uncovering of a corpse of a returned crusader and later that of his retainer. The deaths have triggered a number of different crimes, but John persists to get to the heart of the matter behind the two murders, in the face of favouritism and out of hand condemnations of people without evidence.

Despite the setting, the book is effectively a police procedural novel rather than a murder mystery. We see a lot of the formal working of coroner and the other legal officers he rubs up against, e.g. recording executions and setting fines on various villages. Being the first book, I can accept some 'info dumping' both on the main characters and the legal context in which they are working, such as the calling of juries, inquests, sanctuary and abjuring. Though some it seems quite modern, we also see superstition still holding sway, as with trials by ordeal to 'demonstrate' guilt or innocence of a suspect. As is typical with so many crime novels, John runs up against official favouritism or prejudice against various individuals based on who they know rather than any level of guilt. There is some action which John, despite being middle aged in our times, and almost old in those, gets involved with.

There is a bit too much tramping around the countryside and it reminded me of criticisms I have heard of police dramas in which you see people driving around too much rather than actually active at the scenes of crimes or in questioning people. I was unaware of the fact that Knight had been writing novels for 35 years when this book came out in 1998 otherwise I might have been less forgiving when it needs tightening up and does too much telling rather than showing. I have eleven more of the books in this series that were given to me and while I hope their writing is that bit tighter, I am not simply donating them to a charity shop until I have read at least a few more.

'A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' by George R.R. Martin; illustrated by Gary Gianni

This is an odd book. It is set a century before the events featured in Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' series which I read in 2017-18. However, unlike those books which are very 'adult' in nature, featuring brutality and lots of sexual content, this is effectively a children's book. The three stories included are around Ser Duncan the Tall, a squire to a jobbing 'hedge knight' who rides from region to region in the fictional continent of Westeros, seeking short-term mercenary employment and occasionally riding in jousting contests. The book opens with him dying and Duncan trying to make his way as a jouster and hedge knight aided by a 10-year old boy named Egg, who is in fact a royal prince, Aegon. The first story stars very much like the movie, 'A Knight's Tale' (2001), but then develops into a big more complexity at a tournament where typical for Martin's writing there are self-righteous, petulant privileged people who believe in the severest penalties for anything they see as a slight. Smug characters are apparently in at the moment, but it does get tedious reading so many.

The other two stories see Duncan employed by a poor lord in the southern central region of Westeros during a drought, trying to resolve arguments over water supply. The ending though is far too pat and lets down the realistic tensions over old disputes seen throughout the story. The third story sees Duncan further north, taking part in a tournament to celebrate a wedding though it proves to be the background for a conspiracy against the king. We also have two examples of old men marrying much younger women, another unsettling theme in Martin's writing which turns up far too often.

This book will seem very childish to adult and even young adult readers. Basically it is largely pitched at readers of 8-12, who will appreciate the straight forward brisk story-telling. The book is heavily, but well, illustrated by Gary Gianni with line and shading drawings which were so common in historical novels for children of the 1950s-70s that were fed to me. I said this book is largely suitable for children. However, I would include three caveats. One, the type is very small, possibly so that with all the drawings it did not become a very long book. Two, the word 'cunt' features twice and the word 'buggered' once, fitting more with the strong language of Martin's long series.

Third, as is typical of Martin he goes overboard in describing all the various noble houses and their various members. He makes it very hard as so many siblings have names that are only one or more letters different, a Daeron and a Daemon are just one example. As authors we are advised not to have too many characters whose names start with the same letter; Martin goes far further than that and has very, very similar names that can easily sow confusion in the reader's mind. A noble rebellion 16 years before the time when these stories are set and features throughout the background of these stories, especially the third one. Martin seems to have forgotten that while it is fine to spin out various plots and rebellions over many hundreds of pages, packing them into a much shorter story, overwhelms it.

I have the sense that what often happens with very successful authors is that publishers are reluctant to have an editor do a thorough job on their subsequent books. Consequently, it is no surprise that we have ended up with this oddity, a book which is basically written for children, but which includes many of Martin's typical elements that make it hard for even adult readers let alone for younger readers and occasionally including language and behaviour you would want to spare children from until they are old enough to handle it.

'Heretic' by Bernard Cornwell

Though I detected a fall in quality between the first book of Cornwell's 'Holy Grail' trilogy: 'Harlequin' (2000) http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html and the second one, 'Vagabond' (2002): http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/09/books-i-read-in-september.html  this final book in the series is far worse by far. I know sometimes, as with his Starbuck tetralogy and in sharp contrast to his Sharpe series, Cornwell loses his way with the story. However, this one is probably the worst of his books I have read and by the end you do wonder why you bothered. In this one, English archer, Thomas of Hookton comes late to the English siege of Calais in August 1347 and sees some of the action there. However, he is then sent to southern France, once a truce is signed, by his lord, the Earl of Northampton to continue his rather erratic search for the Holy Grail. Throughout the series you feel that not on Thomas but Cornwell himself is ambivalent about this MacGuffin and so it is a rather feeble motivator for his character. He travels to the County of Astarac in south-western France which had been part of the Duchy of Aquitaine which had been ruled by the English but was steadily conquered by the French. For some reason he invents the fictional County of Berat whose ruler controls Astarac.

The rest of the novel, bar a short stretch at the end has Thomas and a shifting group of allies and enemies trekking back and forth between Astarac and a fictional castle town Castillon d'Arbizon either trying to control these or seek out the Holy Grail there. Guy Vexille the fictional Count of Astarac (the real one at the time was Centule II) and Thomas's cousin; Robbie Douglas his noble Scottish prisoner and Sir Guillaume d'Evecque, who was part of the raiding party on Hookton and father of one of Thomas's many ill-fated lovers all turn up. The book is then a series of skirmishes and running between the two locations, dealing with Thomas's latest lover, Genevieve a woman accused of being a Beghard, one of the various heretical lay communities in western Europe at the time. Ironically Vexille is in fact a Cathar, another more extensive heresy which had been purged in southern France in the 13th and early 14th centuries, but in a refreshing change from so much fiction set in medieval southern France, they do not take up much of the story.

The fact that Cornwell had to include so many more fictional elements than is usual for his stories, highlights the root of the problems with this book. There seems to be no point to it. There is no epic battle. There is no outright victory for anyone. The grail might still be fiction itself and men fight over simply the box that might have contained it. Almost all the leading characters are killed in skirmishes having switched sides once or twice. Genevieve escapes the fate of Thomas's other women and survives. However, the rapid change in women Thomas is with in the books means each is sketched out poorly and what could have been strong, interesting female characters (which can be a challenge with historical war stories) are not completed and are snuffed out too quickly. The ultimate futility of the book is shown by one incident that I will not reveal as it is a spoiler but even more so by the fact that many of those who survive the monotonous raiding and skirmishes die of the Black Death anyway.

Overall, I am not certain why Cornwell bothered with this book. It appears that having promised a trilogy he felt obliged to provide one rather than it being planned out properly. As a result, he fumbles around for some point to this third book and it would have been better if he had closed the story at the end of 'Vagabond' with some conclusion that seemed to have been worth reading hundreds of pages to reach. This book was very disappointing and I certainly will not bother with the coda volume, '1356' (2012) which is set 8 years after 'Heretic'.

Non-Fiction

'The Pleasures of Peace' by Bryan Appleyard

Despite some flaws, I found this quite an impressive book. It looks at developments in various facets of art in Britain from 1945 up until when it was published in 1990. He does look into the pre-war period and even the 19th Century for ideas and trends that continued after 1945, but as the book progresses, it is the contemporary developments which are dominant. Though Benjamin Britten gets a brief mention, it explicitly does not cover music and in theory does not cover popular culture, though reference to movies and science fiction books are, at time included. The prime focus is on literature, poetry, theatre, painting, sculpture and architecture, breaking the years down into four periods.

Various themes reappear throughout the book such as the tension between a modern world and traditional/nostalgic perspectives and associated with this between the urban and rural. There is discussion of the interplay between art and science, especially the concern that science would overwhelm art or whether art could assimilate scientific aspects. The issue of representation in art whether figuratively or and whether it needs to be seen in order to be art also comes up. There is analysis of language, especially in literature, poetry and plays not just in terms of what is seen as appropriate language and the meanings it communicates, but also in terms of post-modernism of how culture impacts on language and its comprehension. Society and its changes are constantly used as a context for these discussions.

As can be seen just from this brief summary the book powers through a great deal. Comprehension is aided by Appleyard breaking the text into short thematic sections but also making a connection between one and the other, sometimes surprisingly such as going from poetry to architecture and drawing parallels in developments of the 1980s. Appleyard also keeps grounding what he is saying by using examples from the artists he is discussing, typically focusing in particular on one or two pieces of work to illustrate his point. This stops the book being painfully abstract and makes it more accessible to a non-academic reader. 

One challenge is, because he focuses largely on those artists who attracted the most attention in their time, there is a parade of white Englishmen. We do get Iris Murdoch, Sylvia Plath, Germaine Greer, Seamus Heaney, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and a few others. There is reference to American and French artists and thinkers, but the prime focus is on Englishmen. By the end I did feel that there was almost a parallel book somewhere to this one in which other contributors to the artistic culture of Britain was included. However, if you want to know who were seen as the 'important' artists and movements of the mid-late 20th Century this is an energetic, detailed book which works well not just to introduce them but to explore why it is felt they produced the art they did.

Audio Book

'Prince Caspian' by C.S. Lewis; read by Lynn Redgrave

As I have not been commuting to and from work, I have been listening to far fewer audio books and indeed, though this one only runs to 4 hours, I started it in March and only finished it this month.

This was a children's book that I got in a mixed bag of audio books. I had 'The Magician's Nephew' (1955) read to me when I was a boy and in I saw the movie of  'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' (novel 1950; movie 2005). However, as to the other stories in the Narnia series - though a fictional world, named after a Roman region of Italy - I have just been vaguely aware of them. This story happens in Narnia some centuries after the events of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe', and animals have generally ceased to be able to speak and the humans have been overtaken by a nation called the Telmarines, who ultimately turn out to be descendants of pirates from Earth. The story centres around Prince Caspian, in line to the throne, but is usurped by his uncle and flees to try to find help to recover his position as king. He both encounters talking animals who aid him in the war against his uncle and summon the four Pevensie children from England of the 1950s where they had returned after ruling as monarchs in Narnia for many years centuries earlier.

As you would expect from English upper middle class fiction of the mid-20th Century it is very 'jolly hockeysticks' with lots of worthy behaviour and exclamations. The Christian overtones, represented by the giant lion, Aslan who also reappears in Narnia and those having doubt or faith in him, run alongside Classical references, notably to Bacchus who turns up with Maenads and leads a drunken orgy and other folklore like a river god. There are arguments between the various animals which make up the armies, but generally a reawakening of nature, especially tree spirits, as the four children aid Caspian to victory. How the lands have changed in the centuries since the children have been away is interesting. More unsettling are the colonial overtones, indicating that only the wise English brought in from outside can resolve tyrants and other difficulties in 'less developed' lands; indeed through bringing faith in Christianity too.

Despite all these themes which may be off putting in various ways, the story is one of sweeping old fashioned heroics tempered occasionally with the weaknesses of children. Ironically it all ends with the Pevensies being sent back to where they left our world at the railway station and the two eldest, Peter and Susan are advised that they are too old ever to return to Narnia, so somehow representing the loss of innocence for children even while pre-adolescent. That may reflect recognition of how the war and the following austerity still hung over England at the time the novel was written. Lynn Redgrave does a wonderful job of voicing all the characters in that very energetic, very English style which fits the novel and she is called upon to voice a whole host of different animals, which she does with great variety, so bringing those characters to life in all their variety.

Books I Read In September

Fiction

'Vagabond' by Bernard Cornwell

This is the second book after 'Harlequin' (2000) which I read in July: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html in the Holy Grail series. That book built up nicely seeing the hero, archer, Thomas of Hookton drawn into English campaigns in France and Brittany in the opening stages of the Hundred Years' War climaxing with the Battle of Crécy in August 1346. This book is much messier. Moved on by the very nebulous quest for the Holy Grail seems to really be simply a tool to get Thomas as part of two battles, many hundreds of miles apart, the Battle of Neville's Cross outside Durham and the defence of La Roche Derrien in Brittany. Unlike in many of Cornwell's stories, the women that Thomas encounters seem pretty disposable. So far he has got two women pregnant who have either been killed or abducted. He has returned to the third, Jeanette Dowager Countess of Amorica, who had previously abandoned him but now is back in La Roche Derrien. Thomas encounters various English and French lords who want to eliminate him or torture him to find out where the Grail is. There is a horrendous torture scene in this book. However, they are so pretty similar in nature that it is often difficult to tell them from their equivalents in the first book.

Cornwell is always good on the battle scenes, no matter the era. He manages to make use of the actual history and weave in his fictional characters among the historical ones. The two battles in the book went the opposite way to what would have been predicted so do make gripping scenes. The trouble with this book, though, is the 'workings' are rather to visible; what motivates Thomas to be in various locations at particular times seems much  more forced than, say, in the Sharpe novels. The women and Thomas's opponents, similarly are more obviously part of the story telling mechanism than they were in the first book and in most of Cornwell's other novels. The Grail quest is thin and while I accept that in the mid-14th Century it did drive people on irrationally, the main characters seem able to take it or leave it as their mood takes them, so it seems more of a device than it otherwise might have been. I do have the third book, 'Heretic' (2003) but not the fourth, '1356' (2012) to read and only hope it at least gets back to the quality of  'Harlequin', if not to the level of Cornwell's best books.

'The Dead Can Wait' by Robert Ryan

This is the second book in Ryan's Dr. Watson series set during the First World War. I read the first, 'Dead Man's Land' (2012) back in July: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/07/books-i-read-in-july.html This one is set in 1916 and sees Watson back in Britain having recovered from the damage he sustained especially in no man's land during the first novel. He is once again employed by Winston Churchill. Georgina Gregson, former suffragette and VAD and finally Sherlock Holmes are also involved. Having promoted blood transfusions in the previous book, Watson is now working on the 'talking cure' what we would now term counselling, to help soldiers recover from shell shock. From May 1916, Churchill was back in Britain after the merging of his unit and was simply a backbench MP. However, his earlier involvement with 'landships', i.e. tanks, when First Lord of the Admiralty means he continues and interest in their development and he sends Watson to dig into deaths at Elveden in Suffolk where they are being hurriedly tested.

The book is far less a murder mystery than spy novel. Ryan is a bit better in control of what he is covering than in the first book. However, he does leap point of view very regularly, sometimes in the middle of a piece of action only to return to it later. A new author would certainly be chastised for doing that. In addition, as a reader we are constantly lied to about the identity of characters, even those whose eyes we are seeing through. Yes, the revelations are a climax, but Ryan uses this technique three times in the book which is over-working it. Added to that there seem to be German spies all over Britain, far more successful than was the case in reality.

Ryan is a little better than in the previous book in jamming in all the history he wants to include, but his frustration, shared by specialists at the time, that tanks were not used more effectively, comes through rather as preaching. I have seen one review that likens this book to a Bulldog Drummond novels by H.C. McNeile ('Sapper') or indeed the Chandos books of Cecil William Mercer ('Dornford Yates'). I know some of the Sherlock Holmes stories were spy orientated, but this one especially the action scenes, despite the age of the protagonists, owes more to those thrillers of the 1920s and 1930s. If that is what you are looking for, then that is fine. However, Ryan needs to refine his art in writing this style of books. Unlike his unwieldy novels, those were tight and brisk. You have to admire his research, but it does tend to weigh down the books when he could leave much more to reader. I know however, that modern readers welcome, even insist on 'info dumps' than those of the past. It is not a bad book, but with serious editing and improved structuring it could have been a lot better.

'The Long Utopia' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Given that this book, published in 2015, fourth in the 'Long' series, suffers from many of the same problems as 'The Dead Can Wait' (2014), I am wondering if unwieldy books, dumping loads of ideas and information without properly digging into them and hurtling around between lots of character points of view is not the style that publishers are looking for. Perhaps I am too old to deal with this approach but to me it seems unfinished as if readers are being given perhaps the second draft and not a book that has been edited to the final point. All the 'Long' books are bursting with ideas, all most too many for even two authors to control.

The reader is bombarded by these, flitting from one view to another and then having the characters jumping across almost infinite worlds. In amongst all of this are some interesting stories, but this novel is like two books put into one with a lot of extras around the outside. We see many of the characters from the previous books like Joshua and Sally, natural 'steppers' between worlds and Lobsang and Agnes, now consciousnesses in robotic bodies. There is reference to the Next, the arrogant super-intelligent people who left our Earth and the nearby ones, in the previous book.

The most interesting part was the stories of the natural steppers in the mid to late 19th Century and while this provides background to the characters we see in the mid-21st Century settings. The other main story is about sinister aliens who have interceded in one of the idyllic forested versions of Earth to essentially rip it apart in order to power their expanding empire which is at war with another species. The problems with this book as with the others, is that Pratchett and Baxter take a lot of time to build up the potential jeopardy only to veer away or report the outcome from a distance. You almost feel that there are actually alternate versions of these books in which the characters deal with the various crises that we miss out on. The constant jolting may be to instil pace but spread over 400+ page books any momentum is lost. At least in this book we see the cataclysmic climax, but the decisions of certain individuals to sacrifice themselves there to save the rest of the Long Earth is really skimped over rather than providing tension.

Added to these issues, there is the ongoing problem that you struggle to find any sympathetic characters. There are a couple like Rocky, the friend of Stan a Next who is effectively setting himself up as a messiah and Nelson Azikiwe, a priest from South Africa who is employed by Lobsang, and these are minor characters. Everyone else is terse, arrogant and patronises everyone else as much as possible. There are still lingering elements of the US frontier self-righteousness of the earlier books and this time we see nothing outside the American perspective, bar references to parts of Europe where the climate has changed by the volcanic winter brought about by the Yellowstone eruption on our version of Earth. Maybe in the age of social media when everyone insists that they are right and all must acknowledge how right they are and commend them for enlightening us, these are the sort of characters young readers want. However, as a mature reader, it is a slog wading through yet another character that treats everyone else as if they are scum that need to be lectured at length about how wrong they are in everything.

I am beginning to think, maybe I need to only read books written before the 2010s when authors were unafraid to write characters we could feel some affinity with and while flawed were willing to acknowledge that rather than blame someone else. Fiction does reflect the society we live in and unfortunately, while looking at lots of alternate Earths, Pratchett and Baxter show very painfully how twisted our society is with unlikeable people to the fore.

Non-Fiction

'The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain' by Tony Bunyan

This is an edition of the book produced in 1976 and it is another of those I should have got around to reading some decades ago. My untouched new copy had sat in storage for many years. The book does pretty much what it says on the label. It outlines the background and development of all those British agencies that could be considered the political police of Britain, primarily Special Branch and MI5. At times it is tedious in going on about all the structure and the numbers of different departments; it is quite repetitive too. The book also looks at how law across the UK, especially conspiracy law, has developed to counter domestic unrest and to monitor and detain those seen as a threat to the capitalist status quo of the country. For a modern reader, the explicitly Marxist angle that Bunyan brings to what he is writing would probably seem quite unusual. I attended university at a time when some lecturers would identify themselves as Marxists but even then, I find Bunyan's dogmatism distorts what he writes. Of course, it is easy for people now to look back with hindsight, but even in 1976, I feel he could have been challenged in some of his assumptions, even by those on the Left.

Though Bunyan was writing at a time when industrial unrest had come out of a period of great turbulence of the early to mid-1970s, he keeps on insisting that British capitalism has been in crisis for almost the entirety of the post-war period. This is despite the prosperity especially during the 1950s and 1960s, which despite the industrial unrest and the oil price 'shocks' actually continued into the 1970s, with, for example, 1975 marking a new peak in car sales. Ignoring this means that he can only see Conservative governments as a result of them holding on to power through nefarious means, especially through control of the police and military. He makes passing reference to consumerism and to how a few working class people felt benefit from policing, but is unwilling to shake his view that the police are primarily there to protect property and suppress the working class, ethnic minorities and drug users, especially in terms of political activity. However, he makes the crude assumption that all workers have a left-wing class consciousness without seeing that many were instead ardent supporters of consumerism and anything that would be done to protect that.

In Bunyan's world, there are no working class Conservatives at all, when in fact they were to sweep Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 and keep her the Conservatives there for 18 years. He makes lazy assumptions on the numbers who would volunteer to aid the state in the case of a crisis, somehow assuming 300,000 would volunteer simply from the property-owning classes without seeing that there would be ardent working class volunteers too, though in smaller numbers than he expected. Political apathy is absent from Bunyan's thinking too, despite its prevalence in Britain at the time even if simply showing by turn-out at elections, when, say, compared to France, Italy and West Germany. Despite his faith in the strength of the left-wing working class and their uniform consciousness, in fact the trade unions had unleashed their power most against a Labour government in the winter of 1978/79, though I guess Bunyan would have argued that Callaghan who replaced Wilson as prime minister in 1976, was hardly a real Labourite, given his personal closeness to the police and his willingness to move towards monetarist polices.

There are some things on which Bunyan did make accurate predictions. He saw the importance of computerisation which was beginning to develop in the mid-1970s. He also foresaw how the police would monitor and control political protest as they did in the 1980s, especially during the Miners' Strike of 1984-85, for example stopping people suspected of travelling to demonstrations when even hundreds of miles away. However, the cause of these things was less his anticipated crisis in capitalism and more the New Right economics which while begun in 1976 were adopted in full force in the 1979-83 period.

The greatest use for this book now is that it is good if you are setting a drama in the 1960s or 1970s featuring Special Branch or MI5. It is also a reminder of various trials and political campaigns, such as the Stop The 70 Tour and against the visit of Portuguese Prime Minister, Marcello Caetano, which had generally been forgotten from the popular consciousness. The recent focus back on the Mangrove 9 of 1970, shows, though that there is something to learned still from the incidents of that era. This could have been a better book if Bunyan had been able to write it without feeling he had to squeeze everything into his very dogmatic view of British society, which objectively did not fit his story of it. As a result he leaves out things that would have explained situations he was surprised by and would have helped better contextualise the developments he highlights. Instead the reader has to add in that context themselves and see that Bunyan is blind to many trends and indeed types of people, that did not fit his world view.

Books I Read In July

Fiction

'Friends in High Places' by Donna Leon

Perhaps it is because she is an American that Leon has an interest in issues around social class. Her protagonist, Guido Brunetti is the son-in-law of a Venetian count. Social standing and protecting it is an element of a number of her books, but becomes very apparent here. By this stage in the series, this is the ninth book, Leon had become very adept at starting with disparate threads, in this case informing us of the rules around construction in the restricted space of Venice and the associated corruption. However, with a bit of a jolt we then find how Brunetti's problems with his own apartment connect into murder. It comes together well and it is a little refreshing to have a different kind of motive which while it appears initially to be more Italian corruption, is one we can believe motivates people even more now twenty years after this book was published. I have the tenth book to read and then some other random ones from the series I have picked up from charity shops. However, I must say, despite sometimes the narrative seeming to jump a little or spend too long on unimportant aspects, these are easy to read crime dramas which come up with often refreshing solutions.

'Kaleidoscope' by Harry Turtledove

This is another collection of Turtledove's short stories, published in 1990 with stories dating back to 1984, it is older than 'Counting Up, Counting Down' which I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html  'And So to Bed' features an alternate world where earlier versions of humans co-exist with homo sapiens and have found refuge on North America which, as the story is set in 1661, is being opened up by Europeans. The story is told from the perspective of Samuel Pepys and shows how the existence of these other versions of humans allow him to propose evolution some three hundred years earlier. 'Bluff' is an interesting science fiction story set on a planet where humans arrive to find a humanoid species which sees their inner thoughts as being the voice of their gods. This is a fascinating premise and is handled well. It is a good reminder to those writing science fiction that alienness is not simply physical. 'A Difficult Undertaking' is a straightforward story of a siege in Turtledove's Videssos setting, a kind of Byzantine Empire and is pretty entertaining. '

The Weather's Fine' takes an interesting premise that time is like weather and so different parts of North America on different days can be in different 20th Century decades. The protagonist had a good relationship with his girlfriend in the 1960s but not in the 1970s so it is about how they work around this. Time conditioning can keep a building at a certain decade. I think more could have been done with this story and it was a bit depressing that the couple could not work through their issues or separate properly but were condemned to live in fixed behaviours dependent on the decade they were in. 'Crybaby' is a horrible story, a typical demonic child one which really would fit better in a 'Tales of the Unexpected' setting than here. Apparently, Turtledove's wife will not read this story and I can understand why.

'Hindsight' set in the 1950s about a science fiction author who is writing stories before the authors have managed to complete them and is revealed to be a time traveller who is trying to steer the USA down better paths than it followed in our 1960s and 1970s. The story is well handled, not just in terms of the technology, but the different behaviour of someone from the 1980s to those from thirty years' earlier. The blurred line between science fiction and science writing is well done too. A nice story all round. 'Gentlemen of the Shade' is another good one. Turtledove is always sharp when he brings a new spin on vampires as can be seen in his 'Under St. Peters' which is available to read free online now. In this story a club of vampires in late Victorian London hunt down Jack the Ripper who is one of their kind. It is well handled in terms of practicalities and in terms of the atmosphere of the time and place.

'The Boring Beast' is a silly spoof fantasy story which annoyed me. 'The Road Not Taken' is an interesting exercise in looking at how a species might acquire some technology that we see as hyper-advanced but lack technologies that we see as mundane. The encounter with alien invaders equipped for war as if it was the 17th Century is interesting and again reminds writers not to go down easy or lazy paths when portraying alien civilisations. 'The Castle of the Sparrowhawk' is a kind of fairy tale/parable about a challenge in a Middle Eastern land, which did not appeal to me; 'The Summer Garden' is very similar with the protagonist paying a bitter price for their 'victory'. There is a lot less sex in this book than in 'Counting Up, Counting Down' but 'The Girl Who Took Lessons' - it is actually a woman not a girl - is sordid and feels more like a 'joke' a man would tell in a bar. It is a pity it was included in this collection.

'The Last Article' is the other main alternate history story, featuring the German invasion of India in the 1940s, having defeated the British, and coming up against the passive resistance of Gandhi and Nehru. It might be controversial these days to paint British colonial rule as any better than Nazi hegemony, but Turtledove cleverly does highlight the differences and why that would enable the Nazis to defeat Gandhi when the British authorities failed to do so.

Overall an interesting collection with some great highlights. Importantly I would recommend it to science fiction writers to remind them where you can go when portraying aliens similar but different to us.

'Harlequin' by Bernard Cornwell

This is the first in a trilogy set during the early phases of the Hundred Years' War in the 14th Century. It follows an English archer, Thomas of Hookton from fighting a raid by the French on his home village on the south coast of England through battles in Brittany and Normandy coming to a climax at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. As you would expect with Cornwell the portrayal of life at the time and the battles are rendered very well. Unlike some historical authors who cover wars, Cornwell is also good at including a range of interesting female characters with distinct motives. I am concerned though that one who becomes Thomas's 'wife' towards the end of the book is clearly stated to be 15. He might argue it was seen as appropriate at the time but it is uncomfortable to see as a modern reader.

There is a lot of intrigue with lots of people out to kill Thomas, though he also makes friends among the opposite side. This is a strength of Cornwell's writing in that while combat plays an important part he does not skimp on characterisations which make his books that much richer. The sub-plot about seeking the Lance of St. George, let alone the Holy Grail, seems unnecessary and I can only think he included this either as a McGuffin or because publishers asked for it. I have the other two books in the trilogy and am looking forward to seeing what the characters do next.

'Dead Man's Land' by Robert Ryan

This novel features Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson solving a series of murders on and behind the frontline of British forces in Belgium during the First World War. Ryan has done meticulous research but unfortunately at times, especially in the early parts of the book, he tends to 'info dump', given immense detail about the hierarchy of treatment of the wounded rather than revealing it to us. The date when the novel is set is difficult to pin down. The book starts with Watson being commissioned as a major in October 1914, but as the book progresses, with reference to the Gallipoli Campaign (February 1915 - January 1916) and Winston Churchill serving as a lieutenant colonel on the Western Front (November 1915 - May 1916) as well as references to particular gases and aircraft, it is not clear when the action is happening. Given the involvement of Churchill and particular weaponry, notably poison gas, this is important and this uncertainty was an irritant as I was reading.

At times the book feels fragmented, in part because of the serial killing in different parts of the front. Added to that Sherlock Holmes makes odd appearances back in England and these elements are not integrated well into the story. They make him appear even more of a deus ex machina that would be the case anyway. The same can be said for the German sniper. We read about his attempts to assassinate Churchill and his various roles. However, he is not really a full part of the story and his role in the denouement could easily have been filled by an unknown character. The sections covering these two characters feel bolted on. Overall, however, the book improves as it goes on and Ryan provides a good motive for the killings fitting with the time. It could have been a much stronger book if the structure was streamlined and in other places what was happening, when, was made more explicit. The detail of the medical provision, especially the conveyor belt for the wounded, was fascinating especially at times when Ryan shows these things rather than lectures us on them.

'The Long Mars' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

There is a comment on the cover of this book from a reviewer at 'SFX' magazine saying '"Pratchett and Baxter ... skipping along their quantum string like giddy schoolboys ...'" That sums up the problem with not just this book but its predecessors http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/05/books-i-read-in-may.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/06/books-i-read-in-june.html  Pratchett and Baxter seem to have a thousand ideas for alternate versions of worlds and as more of the characters travel into many tens of millions of variants away from our Earth, they get to look at many of them. However, in large part it is like flicking through a catalogue and we only see them briefly. The action when it happens is like a number of vignettes which are only distantly connected to each other. In fact with three characters exploring alternate versions of Mars, even less exciting as most versions are desolate deserts, there is a real detachment between the returning characters. 

As in The Long War when we seem to be building to an important climax, the authors turn away. We just hear reports of them not finding the team they left on an Earth which is a moon of a larger planet; we see nothing of them deciding to bring The Next - a group of arrogant super-humans back to our Earth and minimal detail of how imprisoned Next are got out and get away to some unknown version of Earth. It is as if the most gripping elements of the story have been cut out so as not to distract from the beauty of all the geological, even astronomical variants, the authors could think up. I think they would have done better to have anthologies of short stories in different contexts rather than piling them all into what is supposed to be a single novel.

The other problem that continues from the previous books is how unsympathetic so many of the characters are. In this book smug Russians are added to smug Americans and smug Chinese. Then the Next come along and they are very smug humans who feel it is their right to enslave the 'dim-bulb' population which encompasses the rest of humanity. While it is good to have irritants and antagonists, when even the supposed 'heroes' are not people you could tolerate spending five minutes with because they would constantly patronise you, it is difficult for the reader to get a handle on the story. Again it is like flicking through the brochure or, even, someone else simply flicking through in your sight, expecting you to be invested in something that does nothing really to engage with you.

Non-Fiction

'A History of Modern France. Volume 2: 1799-1871' by Alfred Cobban

As I noted when reviewing Volume 1, for Cobban it seems that Louis XIV was the perfect leader of France and anyone else will struggle to come close to him in ability. I suppose that it is no surprise that a history written in the mid-20th Century focuses has a 'great man' history perspective. However, as Cobban judges so many of the country's leaders harshly, even ridiculing them at times, it really distorts what he is trying to cover. He views Napoleon Bonaparte as a Corsican bandit who could do nothing good for France. He sees Louis XVIII and Louis-Philippe as ineffectual, muddle-headed rulers. He gives a little to Napoleon III but then sees him as ineffective from quite an early period in his reign and as in fact utterly marginalised in the closing years of his rule. Cobban outlines all the political manoeuvring but seems impatient with it as if frustrated that no-one in France could appoint an effective king. 

This level of subjectivity and the repeated derogatory comments on the various rulers and politicians not only makes reading the book irritating, it weakens his accounts of the complex situations of what was happening in this period. The best parts of the book are when he (occasionally) steps away from the peak of the political system and looks at societal and economic aspects. With these he does reasonably well in showing the exceptionalism of France, why it did not modernise the way some neighbouring states did and its population stagnated through the 19th Century when others were growing sharply. Completing the book, I felt I had learnt little especially on the post-1815 period which tends to be neglected in general histories of Europe. Allowing Cobban to judge so much on the basis of his particular animosity to certain men, really undermined this book.

Books I Read In May

Fiction
'The Long Earth' by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
This is the first book in the 'Long' pentalogy by Pratchett and Baxter. It works on the common science fiction basis that there are an infinite parallel universes and people can travel between them. However, in contrast to many books on this them, not least 'Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen' which I review before, the different versions of Earth are devoid of humans. Many of the differences are biological - the main one being that humans are on just one version of Earth. Some of the differences are geological/geographical, but even these are not particularly noticeable in 'near' versions of Earth, i.e. people can still mine gold in exactly the same place as on Datum Earth, our Earth. As the book goes on some other humanoid species, usually with the ability to 'step' between the different versions are encountered and finally after lots of quite tedious travelling the threat to them is encountered.

The trouble with the book is that it is like a bag of ideas that have not really been worked up into a successful story. At a distance we see how the ability to step can aid criminals and terrorists, how so many people leaving our Earth impacts on the economy and the backlash to the whole ability to step - about one fifth of people cannot do it. We get a scrap about a First World War soldier thrown into a different Earth and a bit about a girl growing up in a new settlement in one of the alternate Earths, but very little is done with them. The main story is about a natural stepper and an airship run by an artificial intelligence, Lobsang, which has gained human status basically touring through Earth after Earth, seeing a few things and trying to work out various jeopardies. It is interesting to see these but it is not really a gripping story.

Another challenge for non-American readers is the American focus of the book. I know Pratchett and Baxter came up with the idea while at a convention in Wisconsin and used the locale as the basis for some of the characters' experiences. However, it means that the book gets rather filled up with the kind of American frontier myths that populate survivalist fiction. You can only stomach so many people being smug about how much more they know about living in the wilderness than others, let alone the self-righteousness in building a 'better' society, in fact simply replicating white domination of North America once more in a hundred different locations.

Despite the fact that stepping is open to four-fifths of the world's population, we only see one Briton using it inadvertently and no people from other nations doing so. Though the lead character Joshua Valienté spends much time hovering over parts of Central Asia and Europe, we do not see how people from those nations are using it, let alone from highly populated Asian states or those with dictatorships rather than democracy. Even when focused on North America, there is not even coverage of how black people, Hispanics and indigenous Americans might have used the ability to make a different America in one or more of these alternatives. The white Pilgrim Fathers/Frontier mentality/narrative is almost painful in being so dominant in this story.

There are some good ideas in this book. However, in too much of the text little happens. Certainly though some of the questions of this effect are discussed, many are overlooked and instead the book lazily falls back on simply assuming that the frontier mentality would reign supreme once again, trapping you in a book which is like being stuck next to an American on a plane lecturing you on how little you know about how to survive. Overall, despite the good premise, this was disappointing.

'The Fort' by Bernard Cornwell
In contrast to some of Cornwell's other books, this one has a very tight focus on the so-called Penobscot Expedition during the American War of Independence and covers only a few weeks. The book is informed throughout with letters and accounts of the battles. The campaign was around the British attempt in 1779 to establish a port as the basis of a new British colony of New Ireland in what is now eastern Maine, but was at the time part of Massachusetts. The fort of the title is Fort George, established on Majabigwaduce Peninsula by a small British force and despite being initially outnumbered by the 44-ship armada sent against them was able to hold on until a British fleet arrived trapping the American ships and destroying many of them.

Cornwell shuttles back and forth between the American and British perspectives, showing how in campaigns egos and cunning can have such an impact and can counterbalance numbers. The Americans were hampered by incessant arguing between the army and navy commanders and as a result of the ego of Paul Revere, who, despite his subsequent reputation was lazy and arrogant, and unwilling to yield to superiors. As with all Cornwell's books we get a range of perspectives of men serving at different ranks and in this case of some of the locals, whether loyal to the British or the American side. There are good skirmish scenes and, if you do not know the specific history, tension over which side will be reinforced first. Overall, it is an interesting microcosm which shows how the attitudes of commanders and their soldiers can have such an impact. My only complaint is that once the final naval battle is engaged it all ends abruptly and there is a long discourse by the author, some of which add nothing to this story.

'Fatal Remedies' by Donna Leon
Sometimes with Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti novels - this one, published in 1999 was the 8th in the series - it is uncertain what she wants the focus to be. Sometimes she manages to pull disparate elements to make a stronger whole. However, at other times, this process is a little less successful. This novel is an example of the latter. For much of the first third of it the focus is on Brunetti's wife, Paola who, in a protest against a local travel agency that is providing sex tours to the Far East to allow paedophiles to exploit children there, twice vandalises the agency's window. Guido himself is put in a difficult position and there is some pressure for him to resign. However, then, quite abruptly, this point of tension seems to evaporate and the rest of the novel focuses on a more straight forward Leon plot around the illegal selling of expired and placebo medicines to African and Asian states and murder to cover this up.

The two parts are not really well integrated. The element of Paola and her belief in calling out corrupt business is interesting, but is not really resolved. The jeopardy for Guido's career and the tension between the couple is not followed up. I accept it might be laying the ground work for developments in subsequent novels - at present there are 21 more in the series - but if that was the case it should have appeared as a sub-plot rather than a kind of different plot with only very loose connection to the other plot in the novel which becomes its main focus for the latter two-thirds of the novel. This is not a bad novel, but it could have been far better with some restructuring to blend the two streams rather than having them effectively abut against each other.

'Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen' by H. Beam Piper
Published in 1964 (in my edition, but apparently not actually out until the following year), this short (192 pages in my edition) novel starts from the same basis as 'The Long Earth' (2012) reviewed above, i.e. that there are parallel versions of Earth that people can inadvertently or intentionally travel between. In this case, however, the bulk of these versions are filled with humans, though at very varied stages of development and with diverse distribution across Earth. I do not know if Pratchett and Baxter felt this approach had been looked at in so many books that they should leave humans out of theirs. Anyway, in this book, the different Earths are policed by the Paratime organisation in part to prevent the planet being used up fully as happened in their own stream. However, passing between the different strands in vehicles, means that sometimes people are caught up and dumped in a different version.

In this story, Corporal Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police, a veteran of the Korean War is accidentally dumped in a version of Pennsylvania with sort of 16th Century technology. In this world, Aryans left south Asia and migrated eastwards into North America rather than westwards to Europe, so a series of petty kingdoms are now founded along the Atlantic seaboard. In this version of Earth a religion controls access to gunpowder and uses this to hold power over the various princes. With his more technological knowledge, Morrison manages to break this monopoly and through a serious of wars rises up to be king of the region. For some reason the paratime authorities, rather than preventing him from altering the history of the region actually help him, contrary to their precepts.

Piper clearly had an agenda with this novel, which started as a short story and was a context later taken up by other authors. The main one is that he wants to show that the 'great man' view of history is not wrong. At one stage one of the paratime officials even feels Morrison's achievements disprove the emphasis on steady societal changes. This mirrors arguments in Piper's own time, especially against Marxist historical interpretations. Piper clearly believes one man can alter history and emphasises the role that warfare plays. Indeed much of the book is taken up with complicated battles. It is very hard to follow these without a map. For most readers, references back to the local geography of Pennsylvania does not help. Piper also clearly wanted to portray his state's police in a positive light too, with one character saying they are among the best ten forces on Earth.

As a fantasy battle romp, the book is not bad. However, you do feel that the character has it his own way for too much of the time as if Piper was keen not to admit any weakness in his thesis. Maybe that was acceptable in the early 1960s but I imagine would jar with many readers of contemporary fantasy. I suppose the book is useful as an artefact in the development of parallel worlds, which as the 'Long' series discussed above shows, remains a popular one for writers even fifty years later.

'The Good Earth' by Pearl S. Buck
I only became aware of this book when it was re-released in 2004 and did not realise until reading it that it had been published in 1931. It was a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and was followed by two sequels. Buck was an American missionary who spent much of her life as a child and young woman in eastern China. The book focuses on the family of an initially poor farmer, Wang Lung as it grows and he faces many travails but eventually becomes wealthier to the extent that he and extended family replace the local gentry encountered at the start of the book. The most effective bits of the book are when Buck is describing when the crops fail whether due to drought or flood.

The book is set in Anhwei [Anhui] province. During a famine, Wang Lung and his family flee 'south' by steam train to a town named Kiangsu [Jiangsu], but that is a province to the East of Anhui, so it seems likely she meant Soochow [Suzhou] or perhaps Nanking [Nanjing] itself. While there, it appears that they witness some of the incidents of the 1911 Revolution. This seems to occur when Wang Lung is in his early 20s. However, the time frame is awkward as towards the end of the book when Wang Lung is explicitly a man in his 70s there is talk of another revolution. Things which might count as this: the uprisings, the appearance of the Chinese Communist Party and then the Great Northern Expedition of the Nationalists, falling in the 1920s would occur while Wang Lung was still young or middle aged. If it were not for the railways which were not constructed in the region until 1908-09, one might assume the first 'revolution' was the Taiping Rebellion, 1850-64 which included Anhui. Thus, Buck is either projecting into the future beyond her own time, correctly expecting China to have another revolution, which it did, or effectively much of the story is 'out of time'.

While the book uses vocabulary which we understand, a lot of it is more complex than we would use commonly nowadays. The tone of the book seems very influenced by what Buck would have read and often sounds like a parable. There is no explicit judgement of the mistakes Wang Lung makes, his treatment of different people, for example, how he buys slaves and a concubine; neglects his hard working wife and effectively tries to kill his uncle and aunt through plying them with opium. It is left to the reader to make decisions. I guess this should be welcomed rather than Buck imposing  judgements on a different culture, even one which sees girls in particular sold into slavery or killed at birth.

Wang Lung's mentally disabled daughter is neglected except by her parents. No-one, bar perhaps O-lan, his wife, is a hero. Wang Lung behaves in an appalling manner at different stages of the book and many of the people around him are deeply unpleasant. However, I guess this willingness to show people with all their flaws is one attraction of the book. Above all, it highlights life in a rural region of central China, which despite references to steam trains and bayoneted rifles, was the way it had been for millennia and presumably opened the American audience's eyes to the country they knew little about, though with the Japanese invasion of North-East China in 1931, effectively starting the 14-year long Pacific War, it was to be in the news for the next two decades. Buck is far from being a work of propaganda and as result, as you will see noted in commentary, despite its success did nothing to improve the American perception of China. Ironically missionaries and Christianity do not feature in the book at all.

Overall it is an intriguing book which to some degree shows realities of life in rural China in the early 20th Century and if you are willing to accept the distorted chronology and the tone of the book you might find it engaging. It is very much of its time and no-one like Buck could write such a book now without being accused of cultural appropriation and being patronising to the people it features. Consequently despite the flare up in popularity in the mid-2000s it is more likely that readers nowadays would be happier reading 'Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China' (1991) by Jung Chang, instead.

Non-Fiction
'Europe 1780-1830' by Franklin L. Ford
This is another of those books from my collection that I should have come to far sooner. I bought it in 1987, four years after it was reissued and it has largely remained in storage since. That is a shame because it is a brisk but comprehensive study of Europe over fifty years, that deftly explains a very complex period without losing the reader. Ford achieves this by taking a thematic approach, not simply, for example, looking at society or population, but when he turns to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. This enables him to disentangle the complexity of these times, for example, keeping apart Napoleon's reforms in France from narrative of the conquests. I think his description of the phases of the French Revolution are some of the clearest I have read in a general history of the period. I also like that he contextualises the events within longer-term economic, demographic and intellectual shifts. He is also willing to take time out to look at how things may have gone differently, so pushing against the sense that anything of what happened was 'inevitable'. These acute, perceptive approaches to the mess of the period effectively allows him to show how while this was a period of great change it also had strong strands of continuity. Overall, this is an engaging read and a refreshing perspective on a period that is detailed but because of its approach never allows the detail to choke up the progress of the book.

Books I Listened To/Read In January

Fiction
'The Ghosts of Altona' by Craig Russell
Though I have always been interested in crime stories set in Germany, for some reason I had not come across Russell's series though the first came out in 2005.  This book published in 2015 is the seventh, and so far, last book in the series featuring Jan Fabel.  In this book he has risen to the rank of Erster Kriminalhauptkommissar which Russell clumsily renders as 'Principal Chief Commissar' and is even offered the chance to become head of all of Hamburg's detectives.  It is always a challenge with a successful police detective character that they tend to get promoted and so moved away from the heart of crimes.  Ian Rankin has resolved this by trapping John Rebus at Inspector rank for many years.  The rendering of Hamburg police ranks, though not other German titles into English is one thing I do not like about the book. It leaves the reader in confusion about what standing the various police have.

Overall, I felt this book was much like one written by Colin Dexter, added to by the fact that it features a club from a university.  Though at times Morse's investigations on screen felt ponderous (the books are far brisker) this book stretched for far too long (535 pages in my edition).  Though there are some reasonable twists, a bright reader, let alone one who reads crime novels regularly, will have solved the crime well before Fabel does, so it is rather frustrating to find that the detective who is supposedly nationally famous for his skills, is slower than amateurs like us.  It would have been a far better book with 200 fewer pages.  The details about Hamburg and its surrounding districts, plus Fabel's background, his colleagues and family, are fine, but at times feel like padding when we want greater speed.  The murders are well portrayed and the meshing of different cases is reasonably done, though the 'lesson' from one for another seems heavy handed and again suggests that Fabel lacks imagination, even deductive powers.  Fabel could be an interesting character, and maybe he is in the earlier books.  If Russell has decided not to continue with this series, it is probably slightly overdue.  I might check out one of the earlier books if it crosses my path, but while this book was not bad, it was far from brilliant.

'Ruled Britannia' by Harry Turtledove
This was another book that could have benefited from tightening up.  My edition came in at 458 pages but with smaller than standard text size, so probably as wordy as 'The Ghosts of Altona'.  Turtledove is the undisputed king of alternate history fiction and it is disheartening to read quoted on the cover '[n]obody plays the what-if game of alternate history better' in one stroke being complimentary to the author but utterly dismissing his genre as a 'game'.  I notice his latest book will be historical fiction rather than alternate history.

While with my alternate history books, I often get people complaining that the focus is on everyday life in the changed world and that the focus should always be the point of departure, typically a violent one, I am glad that Turtledove takes a different line.  This novel is set in London in 1597, nine years of the victory of the Spanish Armada.  Queen Isabella and Archduke Albert are on the throne of England, with Isabella's father, the ailing King Philip II, still in charge of Spain.  The book focuses primarily on William Shakespeare and the Spanish playwright, Senior Lieutenant Lope de Vega, who is serving with the occupying army.  Other real people appear including the imprisoned Elizabeth I and some of her ministers, Christopher Marlowe, killed 6 years later than in our world, and a range of people connected with the theatre that Shakespeare knew or worked with.  The plot is around Shakespeare being pressured to both write a play celebrating the life of Philip II on behalf of the occupiers and one around the story of Boudicca in an attempt to rouse English resistance to the occupation.

The setting is excellently portrayed.  Turtledove shows acute knowledge of the context and paints it richly in this novel.  He makes use of plays from the time to provide 'what if?' lines and plays for Shakespeare - he has not produced any of his historical plays, but his comedies and tragedies are well liked; he is still active as an actor too.  It takes some time to become comfortable with the Tudor language and terms.  At times you feel Turtledove does not know where to go next and though the book builds to a climax, you feel it wonders and could have been tightened a great deal.  The role of a witch with the ability to hypnotise really riled me and she seemed just to be a very irritating plot device.  There is also far too much sex in the book.  Shakespeare is at it a lot of the time and De Vega has a string of mistresses, some simultaneously.  At times it gives the author a chance to show different facets of the alternate London he has created, notably the bear-baiting, but given the longeurs anyway this just adds more padding.  Thus, while there were points which irritated me, even riled me, I felt this was a very strong alternate history book, well researched and very interesting.  I hope people will remember it when insisting that all alternate history novels must focus on the immediate point of departure and subsequently only on warfare.

'Redcoat' by Bernard Cornwell
This books suffers from a problem that I have noticed in other of Cornwell's books set in North America and many which do not feature Richard Sharpe.  The problem is, that while he creates rich characters with a good attention to attitudes and behaviour of the time, far too few of them elicit any sympathy from the reader.  As a result you wade through nasty people being nasty to other nasty people.  While is it great to have some strong antagonists, if unpleasant people are in the vast majority, it is difficult to be more than a spectator sitting well back from the conflict.  In the Sharpe books, while you had nasty people, you could always fall back on Sharpe and his comrades, who while flawed, were people you could feel sympathy for, even affinity with.  Cornwell seems to have particular problems with sergeants and women.  All the women in this book are self-serving even when professing zealous patriotism, deceptive and really people you would not want to go anywhere near.  There are the fragments of a love story, but even then the woman featured is so hard, she seems to have very little romance in her and is much more concerned about victory for the American side than anything or anyone else.

The book is set in Philadelphia in 1777 during the American War of Independence.  It was the largest city in the Thirteen Colonies at the time and at the start of the book is occupied by British forces.  However, many still loyal to the American side remain in the city and most of the book is really about spying and passing on information, focusing on the British soldiers and American civilians who get mixed up in this which ultimately leads to the British occupation being troubled and costly, ultimately after the book has finished, to end.  I like the fact that Cornwell has focused on a specific location and set of characters rather than ranging all over the place.  He does well in portraying the city in grim weather (to the extent that I would never want to visit it) added to the growing shortages it faces.  As always, Cornwell has good battle scenes, but in this novel they are pretty limited.  For the rest you are effectively watching a dance of unpleasant and/or deluded people in a very grey setting.  Thus, it was quite interesting, but far from engaging.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Lifeless' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
This appears to be the fifth of what so far are fifteen books featuring police detective, Tom Thorne, published since 2001.  Again it reminded me of how many books are coming out in genres that interest me, that simply pass me by, for many years at a time, until I stumble over them.  This one sees Thorne go undercover as a rough sleeper on the streets of Central London.  I used to spend a lot of my time in the 1990s and early 2000s in that area and so could really envisage the places Billingham writes about and the kind of people encountered there.  The case involves the murders of rough sleepers.  Billingham cleverly dodges a standard serial killer approach and is very good about sowing distrust about those in authority that Thorne meets.  The case is soon connected to the military - in part because so many rough sleepers are ex-armed forces - and to atrocities committed in Iraq.  I thought Billingham handled the novel very well, especially in terms of the setting and the homeless people that Thorne encounters and develops friendships with.  The plot is reasonably twisted and again, like the setting, very credible.  This might not be the best crime novel I have ever come across, but I was engaged by it and have already bought a couple more audio books of Billingham's novels.  Glenister sounds how you would imagine Thorne to be and that works very well for the story, but he does a pretty decent job with the other characters, including the few women that appear.

'Thunderball' by Ian Fleming; read by Jason Isaacs
This novel has formed the basis for two movies 'Thunderball' (1965) and 'Never Say Never Again' (1983) which stick surprisingly close to features of the book.  It starts with Bond, smoking 60 cigarettes a day and drinking the equivalent of half-a-bottle of whisky a day, being sent to a health retreat where he ends up in a fight with another guest which actually postpones the schemes of SPECTRE - the first time the criminal organisation appears, rather than having Smersh of the USSR involved somewhere even if far in the background.  The story is pretty straight forward, with MI6 and the CIA scrambling to find where one of their atomic bomber aircraft has ended up, Bond is sent to the Bahamas and is fortunate enough, with the aid of his old friend Felix Leiter to find out that Emilio Largo (the deputy head of SPECTRE but in this book number No. 1) has retrieved the bombs and is planning to use them to destroy a US missile testing base in the Caribbean and threaten Miami.  A ransom of £100 million in gold (worth about £5 billion now) is demanded to prevent the attacks.

The book is reasonable.  Fleming returns to some of his favourite themes - the Caribbean and treasure hunting.  Domino Pettachi, the sister of the man who stole the bomber and is kept by Largo, comes over as a flawed character who as in quite a few of these books, is the woman who saves Bond's life when he makes mistakes.  As Isaacs points out in the interview at the end, though Bond and Leiter have clandestine Geiger counters, they are in fact poorly equipped compared to SPECTRE and Bond's intervention to prevent the planting of the first Bond leaves 6 US sailors aiding him, dead.  Bond is certainly not the superhero of the movies, and in fact is very unhealthy.  The book is engaging rather than gripping but also is a slice of history, showing the concerns; the continued hang over from events of the Second World War and even the brands of 1961 and that while they were misogynistic times, Fleming, as in previous books, is content to let a woman win through when Bond proves slow-witted.  Isaacs does the voices very well, including Domino, though as he points out, trying to work out what half-Greek, half-Polish Blofeld, based in Paris, sounded like, was a real challenge.

The Books I Listened To/Read In March

Fiction
'Sweetsmoke' by David Fuller
This is probably the best book I have read in a long time.  It is a crime novel set in 1862 and features a slave carpenter, Cassius as the detective.  He works on a tobacco plantation in Virginia and the woman who treated him when flogged and taught him to read, something very rare for slaves of the time, has been murdered. Fuller is skilful in exploring the relationships between different types of slaves, freedpeople and the whites.  He is attuned to the subtle interplay of rising and falling status among slaves and the variety of motives for their behaviour.  Naturally his protagonist's actions are more inhibited than those of most detectives and unlike Wallace Nicholls's Sollius, a Roman slave, he does not have a high status backer who can open doors.

Fuller is adept at quickly creating notable characters well, whether slaves or whites and this is a real strength of the novel.  It seems unfortunate that given the setting he feels compelled to have Cassius as a frontline witness to the Battle of Antietam; it would have been more realistic to have him further behind the lines.  However, this seems to be a pressure on any US author writing a story set within the timeframe of the American Civil War and if you read the old 'New York Times' review of the book, they bang on about how little he talks about the war as if this has to be compulsory.  This is not even a true judgement, Fuller shows the impact on the home front of the Confederacy and personally I have only seen that focus in 'Cold Mountain' (1997 book; 2003 movie).  There are satisfying twists in the novel which has a good pace and effective points of tension.  However, the real strength of this book is the interaction between people in very particular circumstances; Fuller handles this very well.  This is the first book that I have read in ages that I would recommend.  It certainly fits no classic model of any murder mystery story but it is possibly all the better for that.  It is very well written.

'The Power' by Frank M. Robinson
This 159-page book from 1956 (and 1968 movie based on it) should not be confused with 'The Power' (2016) by Naomi Alderman.  It is, however, also a science fiction book and interestingly, a very Nietzschean one at that.  It features scientist Jim Tanner who is working on a project funded by the US Navy to explore the extremes to which the human body can be put, for example in terms of cold or pain.  Though set in peacetime USA, this parallels experiments conducted by the Nazis at concentration camps on inmates, the results of which, controversially were used by some democratic countries after the end of the war.  As a result of these experiments, Tanner finds out that one of his colleagues on the project is a 'superman' with both telekinesis and the ability to alter people's perceptions of people and those around him.  For the time, interestingly, the team includes two female scientists, though they are later revealed to be catspaws.

Tanner is soon on the run from the 'superman' whose real name is Adam Hart and engineers Tanner's erasing from his career, his bank account, etc.  Hart even tries to make Tanner and his colleagues kill themselves.  Tanner's investigations take him across the USA to discover the origins of Hart and what he has done to the people of his home town.  However, much of the action takes place in Chicago.  One thing which is interesting is how many 24-hour outlets a city like that would have in the 1950s which enable Tanner to keep going especially when he seeks protection among crowds, in a way which is only recently becoming common in UK cities; he would have had a harder time dodging Hart in a city centre of closed up shops.

Some reviewers have criticised that Robinson gives no detail of how this next stage in human evolution represented by Hart comes about.  In some ways his book is a precursor of the X-Men arc, but Robinson's focus is more on the challenges of fighting back against such an individual rather than exploring how they come about or whether they are widespread.  As people note, Robinson is skilled in writing that unsettling approach about powerlessness.  The way different members of the team have been manipulated and often longer than realised, is well handled.  In this regard it reminded me of paranoid science fiction novels of the era like 'The Day of the Triffids' (1951; various television adaptations) and 'The Body Snatchers' (1954; became the movies 'The Invasion of the Body Snatchers').  Though it references the Korean War, the shadow of the Nazis and their views on eugenics hangs right over the book; ideas which would be very familiar to readers of the time.  Despite the period setting, even now, this is a successfully taut and unsettling book.

'Excalibur' by Bernard Cornwell
This is the final book in the Warlord Chronicles trilogy following a story of Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin, Galahad, Lancelot and other characters from Arthurian legend but as if they had been real people in 5th and early 6th century Britain.  The books are well written, but given the nastiness of so many of the characters moving around a decaying post-Roman Britain often in appalling weather and simple grubbiness, it is hard to enjoy the books.  The book has a couple of set-piece large-scale Pagan events which are impressive and then there is the full-scale battle against the Saxons close to Bath which is well handled; Cornwell is always very good with battle scenes.  However, then the book goes on and the final two-fifths of it sits uncomfortably with the rest. 

I know Cornwell has aimed to eschew the legendary approach to Arthur but it does go down into even greater bleakness.  Furthermore, though there have been various curses and 'magic' rituals from Druids and others throughout the book, none of them have worked.  The cynicism about both the Pagan and Christian gods is common throughout but then abruptly, at this late stage, magic suddenly starts working causing agony for Ceinwyn, the narrator Lord Derfel's partner, at a distance.  It is almost as if Cornwell has forgotten the rules he has set himself.  As a result it is a pretty unsatisfactory ending and it would have been better to end with the bittersweet conclusion following the battle at Bath rather than carry on for another couple of hundred pages in  this peculiar coda.

Overall, I can say I have been impressed by the trilogy.  The action is engaging; the level of detail of the times and places is excellent and the characters are well drawn and believable with all their motives and baggage.  However, I cannot say I enjoyed these books and I will be more cautious about picking up another series by Cornwell.  I have been given a number of books in his Saxon Stories sequence, but reading the details they seem pretty similar to this trilogy, though now stretched out over 10 books already.  I do not think the premise is likely to be an enjoyable one and I certainly could not have continued with the Warlord Chronicles if they had run for ten books rather than three.

'The Big Gold Dream' by Chester Himes
This one was published in 1960 and like 'The Crazy Kill' (1959) which I read last month, features the black local Harlem detectives, 'Grave' Digger Jones and 'Coffin' Ed Johnson.  It is marginally better than 'The Crazy Kill', perhaps as Himes does not feel as obliged to take us on a guided tour of the food, clothing and culture of Harlem at the time.  His information on the local lotteries in the area is of interest and important to the story.  The problem is, however, as with 'The Crazy Kill', so much of the short book (160 pages in my edition) is spent with people going back and forth speculating about what is going on rather than anything much happening and despite the length, it becomes pretty tedious, pretty quickly.  Jones and Johnson, the latter much more antagonistic than portrayed in the book from the year before, only wander into the book about a quarter of the way in and feature sporadically before bringing the book to a close at the end.

The plot circles around a woman's winnings on three lottery games in the same day and some Confederate money.  The hunt for the winnings leads to a string of murders and people hunting around and threatening others to try to find out where it has gone.  There is the same kind of range of criminal characters and a peculiar clergyman, that seem compulsory in Himes's books.  However, it is almost as if, like one of the characters, you have sat in the window in an apartment in Harlem and watched people toing and froing without doing much in particular.  It is a curiosity these days; in part a record of a time and a place, but it utterly lacks tension and mystery.  By the end you are no longer interested in who did what to whom, just glad that the book has ended.

Fiction - Audio Book
'Dr. No' by Ian Fleming; read by Hugh Quashie
I drive for at least 10 hours every week.  As a result I have been listening to more radio than I watch television or DVDs and little less than I read.  Having had an irritating trip to try to find a new car, at two dealerships whose websites show vehicles that have long been sold or not as how shown or indeed the site itself had no staff visible, despite being open, I stopped at a service station.  With a constant barrage of the same news and often many of the same songs being repeated on the radio, I ended up picking up this audio book and in minutes had been converted to audio books.  I do not know why I had not thought of this before.  I have a good friend who has been into audio books since the days when you could borrow them on cassette from the library in those large thick boxes.  Indeed, I have clearly missed another era of them.  Most of the audio books now on sale, even if on CD, are as MP3 files which means you can download them to an MP3 device but cannot actually play them in a traditional CD player.  As a result, I am now a regular on eBay trying to buy up old CD versions.  With them having a duration of something like 6-7 hours for a typical unabridged novel, my capacity to consume them rapidly in an ordinary week, is clearly high.

There was a small selection of these audio books in the service station and I lit on this one as my introduction.  It was part of a 'Bond Reloaded' series in 2012 in which renowned movie and television actors each narrated a different one of Ian Fleming's books.  This was the first serious Bond movie made, though it was not the first of the books, so I guess it was from having seen the movie that I was influenced to turn to this one first.  As I am sure many people have said, the books are pretty different to the movies in many aspects.  Quashie, in a brief interview at the end of this one, outlines this himself.  Bond has much more self-doubt than in the movies, about his own abilities and what he has to do.  However, he is much more innovative and, rather than relying on gadgets, in the books he improvises.  A lot of the closing stages of this book revolves around what he can do with a sharpened steak knife, a table lighter and thick wire ripped from a ventilation shaft cover.

Though there are periods of high tension, the book is slow moving.  In part this is because of the amount of detail Fleming puts into what he is describing, whether it is an individual, a landscape or some food.  Furthermore, he gives a great deal of background information.  We learn a lot about Jamaica under British colonial rule and even about the guano industry.  You are reminded that the books began to come out before even package holidays were common and British people's knowledge even of the rest of Europe, let alone the Caribbean, came from books and occasional things they saw in movies.  However, as Quashie notes, nowadays this gives a window into a previous era.  The book was published in 1958, so Jamaica has not gained its independence and Cuba is not yet a Communist state.

Added to this, though there is reference to tampering with US rocket trials, the book, as Quashie points out, feels more like an adventure story from the Victorian period, more related to work by Rider Haggard than Robert Ludlum let alone Mick Herron.  For example, there are extended sections about paddling the canoe to Crab Key where Dr. No's base is and dealing with the surviving on the island.  Bond is assailed by quite an exotic array of creatures, but being menaced by a large centipede and a giant squid do sound as if they belong in an earlier age; I imagine the books that Fleming grew up reading. 

There is also the reference to race.  The racial characteristics of almost every character, certainly all the non-whites, are described.  Dr. No himself of mixed Chinese and German heritage and having used plastic surgery, is described in detail.  However, possibly uncharacteristically for the time, and maybe in contrast to other Fleming novels, he does not make judgements about people's character based on their race.  Bond has a genuine companionship with Quarrel, a Cayman islander and mourns his killing.  Bond is a long way from being a feminist and Fleming refers to most women as 'girls'.  Still Honeychile Rider, a white orphaned young woman, though she adds the sex interest to the novel (though Bond holds back from having sex with her until the end), towards the end of the book she actually frees herself from the trap Dr. No puts her in, using her knowledge of the local fauna to better effect than either No or Bond and is on her way to kill No with a screwdriver when Bond finds her again.

This book established many of the tropes seen in spy and adventure novels and movies throughout the 20th and into the 21st century - a disabled mastermind in a secret island base who monologues his plans to the hero and then rather than simply shooting him, puts him into a complexly perilous situation which with strength and ingenuity the hero can escape.  I guess we have seen this so much and the focus of satire so often that it seems a little ridiculous.  Quashie does well to freshen it up and restore some of the sinister nature to these encounters.

Unlike with a standard book, there is an additional aspect to review and that is the skill of the reader.  Quashie has a wonderfully rich voice that really adds to the extended descriptions and well conveys the urgency when Bond is battling for his life.  In the interview he explains he wanted to do all of the voices, both male and female and he produces a whole spectrum of them as would be done in the Roman 'pantomimes' for which one actor played every role.  He does not read the dialogue out, he acts it.  At times the accent of the Jamaicans and Quarrel are hard to follow especially when listening on a car's speakers.  I felt incredibly unsettled by him doing Honeychile Rider, though he does well at giving her a slight Jamaican twang, but it does sound rather odd, even unsettling.

Overall, then, the book was pretty different from what I expected.  It is a very old fashioned adventure even for 1958.  However, the rich description and the inner dialogue of Bond make it engaging.  The scenes where he is in mortal danger are well done and gripping.  As a result, I have got four more Bond books to listen to now.

Non-Fiction
'The Industrialisation of Russia 1700-1914' by M.E. Falkus
This is a short classic text beloved of numerous modern History courses in universities.  Having been published in 1972, as with 'Explaining Munich' by Lammers last month, it reminded me of how strong Marxist history once was and meant authors had to address its particular distorted view of historic developments.  Fortunately Falkus approaches the issues highlighted from the statistical data rather than trying to impose any particular political perspective on what he is considering.  While not coming to a firm conclusion about what stage of industrialisation Russia had reached by the outbreak of the First World War, he does show that the issues of distance and terrain had not really been overcome.  There were pockets of industrialisation in a vast agrarian country, that in output could rival, even exceed those of other Powers, but the impact of which was reduced by the context.  There were foundations laid for future industrialisation but there remained to be a long way to go.  Of course, we know that many of the comparators were not as industrialised as is often assumed, notably France and Italy, let alone the Netherlands.  Their industrialisation would not come for two to three decades later either.

What I found most interesting in this book when compared with general surveys of Russia in this period, was how well Falkus showed that Russian industry was in fact not really capitalist, but even after the 1861 Emancipation of the Serfs, was a kind of feudal industry.  Even the large scale of some industries, notably in the Ural Mountains actually betrayed an early level of development rather than a modern form of growth.  He shows well how different types of serf were put into industry before 1861 and that the cost of compensating former owners, shackled many of the post-1861 workers as much as if they had remained serfs.  This largely blocked the rural-urban migration that one would have anticipated and kept down the availability of industrial labour as a whole.  Furthermore, the locking in of poverty prevented the rise of a large internal mass market, another important driver for industrialisation.  In turn, this kept down returns and the accumulation of domestic capital, leading to the need for vast foreign investment, foreign advisors and workers, etc.  Though the role of the state in industrialisation fluctuated, declining through the latter 19th century, it was always there.  Given this context of state involvement and really, at best, a bastardised, capitalist economy, perhaps in fact Russia was fertile ground for the totalitarian industrialisation that Stalin introduced in the 1930s rather than a steady progress towards capitalist industrialisation seen elsewhere in Europe, anyway.