Books I Listened To/Read In February

Fiction
'Siege of Heaven' by Tom Harper
This book covers the same phase of history, the 1st Crusade from after the fall of Antioch to the fall of Jerusalem that was covered by 'Prince of Legend' (2013) by Jack Ludlow, also the third book a trilogy: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-books-i-listened-toread-in-june.html However, in terms of quality Harper's book is in a completely higher league. Ludlow featured no real characters whereas Harper's story is from the perspective of Demetrios Askiates, a representative of the Byzantine Emperor travelling with the crusade, his friends and ultimately members of his family. Thus, while we see the same sieges and the same arguments among the crusaders we can engage with them far better than in Ludlow's book, which read as if a history text book had been simply transposed. Askiates has adventures, even travelling to Egypt and coming into scrapes with the leaders both military and religious, of the crusade. These come at a personal cost, so as with the best historical dramas, we see both the big and the small, sparking off each other. Harper has very good descriptions of, for example, pushing a siege tower and the streets of Antioch and Jerusalem, you feel much more that you are there rather than flying over it all. I am tempted to go back and find the previous two books and certainly if I see any other books by Harper, I will pick them up. The book might not be outstanding, but it is entertaining, and importantly for a historical novel, engaging on a personal level rather than like reading a decent textbook.

'The Death of Faith' by Donna Leon
This novel, the sixth in the Brunetti series is not as strong as the previous one, 'Acqua Alta' (1996) which I read in December: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html  However, this is not on the basis on which it has been attacked by some readers who are resentful of its portrayal of Catholic institutions and by the way forgetting that this book, published in 1997, predated 'The Da Vinci Code' (2003). It also predates all the public revelations about paedophilia in the Catholic Church which actually make aspects of this book even more believable than back when it was published.

I feel that the characters, while possibly uncomfortable for co-religionists are realistic. The problem is that the book lacks the dynamic of its predecessor. The first half of the book is really just a sequence of interviews by Guido Brunetti that vary very little in nature. Added to that, the crime is not really a crime, but ironically triggers criminal activity. Having read the work of Leonardo Sciscia and Michael Dibdin, I know a time comes when any crime novelist setting stories in Italy has to face the power of the church in that society. However, while some critics feel Leon has gone too far and relied on stereotypes, for me she baulks at the last and lays the blame firmly on an individual rather than on the institution that permits the behaviours she highlights in the novel. In some ways I admire Leon from not feeling compelled to adhere to a standard resolution of the crime, something I always liked in Sciscia's work. However, I feel she held her hand rather than pressing right in, perhaps for fear of a more stronger antipathy to her books from Catholic supporters than has proven the case anyway.

'Guardians of Time' by Poul Anderson
This is in fact four short stories that Anderson published in 1955-60 featuring an American veteran from the 1950s, Manse Everard, who is recruited by very powerful people from the distant future to work in fighting back against those trying to alter our known history. This gives Anderson a chance not simply to highlight lesser known parts of world history but also ask moral questions about the right to tinker with the universe and who makes the decision over what is 'right'. In the first story he investigates radioactive material that has turned up in the 6th Century in part of England controlled by the Jutes in an attempt to prevent the start of what in the 1950s were called the Dark Ages. He also gets drawn into trying to stop a fellow guardian seeking to spare the life of his wife during the Second World War.

In the second story one of the guardians has accidentally ended up becoming Cyrus II of Persia in the 6th Century BCE. Everard not only has to rescue him but also find a suitable replacement. In the third story he works to prevent Mongol and Chinese explorers effectively taking over 13th Century North America before the Europeans arrive in large numbers. This leads him to question whether the USA he knows was the correct path for the continent. The final story has Everard going into battle to prevent people from the future overseeing a victory by Hannibal in the Second Punic War which leads to a Europe and North America dominated by Celtic peoples and a slower development in technology so there are still steam cars in the mid-20th Century.

While it has the earnestness of 1950s science fiction and very easy to use devices for both time travel and moving around in the past, the stories are not simplistic. It is also interesting that Anderson highlights alternatives that even now tend not to be explored very much in all the writing focused on the American Civil War and Second World War. For anyone interested in alternate history, I suggest this book. My edition only had 160 pages, so it is a quick read too, but packs a lot of ideas in.

'Masaryk Station' by David Downing
This is the final book in Downing's 'Station' series and takes events forward to 1948. I was given these books but there is a reasonable chance I would have bought them anyway. However, I would have done this on the basis of being misinformed. There are some small elements of thriller and spy story in these books, but primarily they are just 'slice of life' novels about people living in Berlin through 1939-48. Almost as soon as an adventurous element arises, Downing snuffs it out. We have a little bit in this book with the hero John Russell looking at how former Nazi collaborators are being smuggled out of Yugoslavia and getting a blackmail film from Czechoslovakia. However, repeatedly, Downing backs up from real jeopardy. He also dodges around important historical events. The coup in Czechoslovakia is over before this book starts and the Berlin Blockade occurs after the book finishes. Downing's obsession throughout has really been to provide a sporadic travelogue of Berlin and some other Central European cities in the mid-20th Century. The novels are very fragmented and real points of tension simply dodged. I had expected a very different book to this, something much more like the work of Philip Kerr and Alan Furst who Downing is wrongly likened to. I admire his research for these books, but they are really just vignettes bundled together lacking in clear direction and certainly in adventure even when there seems to be ample opportunity in the context he uses, for it. If you are looking for details of Berlin around the Second World War then this is fine. If you are looking for a follow-on to Kerr's and Furst's work, look elsewhere.

Non-Fiction
'How to Write Alternate History' by Grey Wolf
This book published in 2013, should not be confused with the 2019 book of the same name edited by Andy Cooke, though their approach is very similar. Wolf's book is a series of blog postings that have been made into chapters. This means that the book is brisk, but I did miss connecting narrative between the chapters and an overarching conclusion. The approach also leads to some repetition as Grey highlights the same aspect more than once in the context of different chapters. Rather than giving a structured masterclass in writing alternate fiction, Wolf, provides a series of prompts and encourages the author to think about things that are often neglected in alternate history fiction such as architecture and music as well as things such as common names and whether the technology available has also been disrupted by the divergence from our history, e.g. a political divergence might alter railway building. Grey is good on the importance of characters in alternate history, which surprisingly, is something that recently I have found have been absent not just from alternate history but even straight historical fiction I have read. Overall, I do not think this book will enable you to write alternate history fiction if you have not already been thinking through it, but for authors of the genre I think it provides a useful checklist of reminders of things not to overlook.

'The Edwardian Crisis, Britain 1901-1914' by David Powell
This is a brisk book that clinically highlights all the different elements of crisis that the UK faced in the 20th Century before the outbreak of the First World War including the cost of living, constitutional, female suffrage, labour unrest and conflict over Irish independence. He tones down the more excited portrayals as these occurrences and while he does consider how much worse things could have turned out, he certainly keeps to sober analysis. It does take some of the 'wind' out of the sense of crisis, but on the other hand it challenges the surprisingly resilient popular view that these years were some kind of golden twilight before the very modern horrors of the First World War. At times you feel he could give more details, but this is largely an analytical book rather than an account, so he steps in with detail when it adds weight to the points he is addressing rather than to bulk out the book. The book is also very good at looking inside political parties and the various movements, especially connected to female suffrage and the Irish question, highlighting that there was never a single viewpoint. Over all this is a very useful book if you want to look at what was actually happening in the UK at this time and also how much worse it could have been.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Bloodline' by Mark Billingham; read by Robert Glenister
Having finally waded my way out of listening to 'Death of a Charming Man': http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/01/books-i-readlistened-to-in-january.html I have been able to get into more audio books this month. I had been hesitant to return to Mark Billingham's work following listened to 'Death Message' (2007) which because the detective uses a serial killer to murder someone he feels has escaped justice, I found morally unsound. However, I had already bought this audio book so turned to listen to it. Though it features a serial killer, son of a serial killer, it is less morally dubious. It has the grittiness that Billingham does well though some of the regular characters, especially pierced, gay pathologist are almost turning into caricatures. Billingham balances the tension in seeking down the killer who is active across Britain with the 'hero' Tom Thorne dealing with his girlfriend's miscarriage. The book, published in 2009, feels modern and appropriate. Glenister voices not just Thorne excellently but also provides a good range of voices for both the female and male characters. This book has a very good twist and I certainly think the book was an improvement on 'Death Message'. However, given my concerns about Billingham's moral compass in his writing I will not be buying any more of his books.

Audio Books - Non-Fiction
'Dear Me' by Peter Ustinov; read by the Author
I got know Ustinov from movies such as 'One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing' (1975) - which unsurprisingly given that (von) Ustinov of German-Russian extraction plays a Chinese in it now has 'racist' appended to its search terms and 'Death on the Nile' (1978) in which he plays a Belgian, does not. He was a regular on chat shows which is where he probably came most into his own as a raconteur. This autobiography was published in 1977 and tails off about 1972, so covers his life before I was really aware of him. I have seen 'Topkapi' (1964) and 'Spartacus' (1960) - though was not conscious he was in it - from that period. However, a lot of the movies, let alone the stage productions he was in or had written were unknown to me.

The book, at times, has Ustinov speaking to himself as a dialogue between different facets of himself which comes out very well in an audio book. The story of his life which was international throughout and involved lots of eccentric people is witty and interesting, showing up the petty madnesses of school, the military and performance. I had not been aware that he had been married three times and his first two marriages, the first when he was 19, seem to have been unpleasant. Those aspects offer a bitter element which sets off the rather rollicking nature of some of the other parts. Overall, while I might have found this book interesting to read, it certainly works best as an audio book as it is like sitting down and listening to a rather peculiar old uncle speaking of his life. I do not know if there is an equivalent for the latter part of his life - he lived until 2004 - but if there is I would buy it as an audio book too.

Books I Listened To/Read In January

Fiction
'Lehrter Station' by David Downing
This is the fourth book in the 'Station' series and is set at the end of 1945 and early 1946. The heroes, John Russell and Effi Koenen are living in London with John's son, Effi's sister and nephew and an adopted Jewish girl. Russell is persuaded to return to Berlin to work as a double agent for the Soviets; Effi accompanies him as she is given a new role in a movie being made in the city. I have come to realise that action does not realise interest Downing. There are brief moments of excitement as Russell deals with his US and Soviet handlers and he and Effi uncover black market dealers in medicines. Russell follows a route getting Jews from Germany to Palestine but only as far as northern Italy and doing so uncovers an SS officer. He has to help snatch a scientist from the Soviets. However, the moments of action are largely that, moments and generally end after a couple of pages so Downing can return to his main focus of interest. Downing loves to simply show Berlin and other locations and to note in great detail the impact of the war on them. Many have made effective use post-war Germany/Austria as the setting for adventures, but this author prefers to have a historical travelogue. I do not know if that is what genuinely interests him or he simply cannot stop himself showing off all the research he has done. As a historian I find some of this interesting, however, if you are looking for a spy or adventure story set in this period read something by Philip Kerr or rewatch 'The Third Man' (1949).

'Seventy-Seven Clocks' by Christopher Fowler
Though this novel, the third in the Bryant & May series is set in 1973, Fowler fails really to communicate a sense of that period. Maybe he would argue that the upper class family portrayed would not behave in such a snobbish way now, but I feel you could put them into 2013 and they would act in exactly the same way. Fowler and his characters clearly love London and in the two preceding novels in this series we get lots of material of quirky details about the city; the mystery at the heart of this story involves and obscure guild and its buildings. When I started this series I had expected much more magic realism and actually when Fowler first wrote this particular novel it had a supernatural element that he later removed. Thus we get nothing more than quirky and given the oddities that many mainstream detectives have to deal with - they always get at least one story with a cult or an ancient mystery - Bryant & May do not stand out as much as I think Fowler would like them to.

I found this story moved more briskly than the previous two, perhaps because as a counterbalance to the grumblings of the two lead detectives. I found the perspective of the hangovers from colonialism which work better in 1973 than now, an interesting angle. Though at times the book has longueurs, I felt it was tighter than the two before it and I am hopeful that I will see an improvement overall as I got further through the series.

'Matter' by Iain M. Banks
This book ironically suffers from some of the same problems as 'Lehrter Station' even though it is set on alien planets and spaceships. I have enjoyed a couple of Banks's science fiction books, 'The Player of Games' (1988) and more recently, 'The Algebraist' (2004). However, this novel does not come close in quality to either of those. Perhaps it is because it is part of Banks's 'Culture' series of super-powerful utopian civilisation. The story features three siblings of a humanoid royal family that live on the eighth layer of an artificial hollow planet. The murder of their father by his chief minister sets the three eventually coming together to resolve the situation. It is a lengthy story (593 pages in my edition) with two of the characters travelling via numerous intelligent spaceships and worlds and getting mixed up with very diverse alien species. There are lots of interesting ideas here, but that is the problem, Banks seems determined to detail every single one of them. There are swathes of the book which are 'info dumps', emphasised by the fact that he has a long glossary of all the different names, even the types of spaceships, towards the end of the book. 'The Algebraist' communicated a complex, alien set-up well, without choking the action off with stopping to inform you how great Banks's imagination was. Another thing is that he baulks away from showing the death of leading characters, that all happens 'off stage'. There is also a jump from the climax to the happy ending of the story which makes it feel weak as we do not see how the apocalypse was averted. Banks had a wonderful imagination and created immense environments. However, with this novel, that overwhelms the story which as a result is diminished. I wanted the book to move on rather than hear more about how a particular spaceship configures with another.

Non-Fiction
'War Underground' by Alexander Barrie
This book covers an often neglected aspect of the First World War - the tunnels dug and the mines laid under trenches on the Western Front. It is very much from the British perspective, though Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders get a look in, the French and the far more efficient German efforts are only mentioned in passing. The story is one which will be familiar to anyone who has read British military history. The units, initially drawn from 'clay kickers' who excavated sewers, were cobbled together by the MP John Norton Griffiths, though largely in response to the work of the highly skilled German pioneer units digging under British trenches and then blowing them apart with explosives. There were mix-ups with pay and the chains of command.

The tunneller units were alternately sought by established units as defence against German tunnelling and dismissed as slackers taking good men away from the front. By the end of the way, combined they were the strength of a division though spread along the frontline in companies. The typical British chaos at war is shown, the low point being the delivery of three diving bells to the frontline.  This is a brisk book which manages to balance focus on the individuals involved and the dangers they faced - not just being buried alive or blown apart, but in the skirmishes with revolvers and hand grenades that took place when German tunnellers were encountered underground. There is also technical detail of the mines and the tunnels that housed them. It is an interesting story and one that is often forgotten. However, it does make you wonder again how Britain ever manages to win a war, given the tendency for snobbery and simply poor organisation, to get in the way. I would certainly be interested to read a book telling of this kind of warfare from the German side.

Audio Book - Fiction
'Death of a Charming Man' by M.C. Beaton [Marion Gibbons]; read by David Monteath
Regular readers of this blog might have noticed that in recent months I have not been posting reviews of audio books. That is because I have been struggling to get through this one. I had heard of Hamish Macbeth as a result of the television series which ran for three seasons, 1995-97, though I had never watched any. Starting in 1985, so far 34 novels have been written in this series and this is the 10th in the series, published in 1994. Details in the story make it feel as if it is set much earlier and I had imagined it dated from the 1960s or 1970s. I have been aware of the concept of 'cosy crime' novels, but this takes the cosiness far too far and in fact murder only features very late in the book.

This is more a soap opera about a police sergeant rambling around parts of the North-East Highlands doing very little; he moans about things, he gets a woman to challenge her abusive husband, he looks at houses to buy and verges on having a relationship with a woman who is not his fiancee. His fiancee, an Englishwoman who works in the family hotel has attitudes that would have looked dated in 1964, let alone 1994 and that gives the whole feeling of this being pretty unreal, Beaton (1936-2019) would have been better off making this a historical crime novel set in an earlier decade. There are lots of old fashioned characters who dully spark off each other, but for large stretches the story does not move forward and you are actually glad when Macbeth dumps his fiancee from another time. This would have been dull at 3 hours as many crime audio books, but at over 6 hours it was very hard to get through. I certainly will not be going anywhere near Hamish Macbeth books again. If I wanted this kind of story I would watch 'Coronation Street'. Monteath does pretty well with Scottish and non-Scottish accents especially as he has to do a wide range of sour women.

Books I Read In November

Fiction
'Clockwork Angel' by Cassandra Clare
Having read this book and given how little satisfaction I have received from much I have read this year, I have begun thinking I should simply read Young Adult steampunk/fantasy books. I had not connected this book with the Mortal Instruments series also by Clare, of which I have seen the movie, 'The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones' (2013) and this has many similar tropes, but set in 1878 London rather than contemporary USA. There is a secret organisation fighting the manifestation of demons in our world and having an ambivalent relationship with various vampires, werewolves and other supernaturals. There are eldritch and steampunk weapons and some combine both elements. It focuses on Tessa Gray, an orphan from the USA with the ability to slip into the form of another person, a skill highly valued by many of working in this demi-monde of London.

Though there are standard elements of kidnap, treachery, the poverty and dark streets of Victorian London and some very large battles, Clare handles it very well and you are really swept along by the narrative. While there is a plethora of tropes present, I also think her character building is pretty good and this really helps. As a mature reader, the honesty of Tessa's feelings, particularly towards potential love interests, plus her struggling to determine her identity, does come over in a very teenage way. However, this is largely counter-balanced by the politics of the underworld and the twists in the plot which lift it above other books in this kind of category. I am not certain if I would rush out and buy the two other books in this Infernal Devices series, but would be tempted to pick them up if they appeared in a charity shop.

'Potsdam Station' by David Downing
This is the fourth book in the Station series and jumps from 1941 in the predecessor, 'Stettin Station' (2009) to the closing days of the Second World War in 1945. One of my complaints bout the previous books in the series is that the main character John Russell, a British-born American journalist based in Berlin, spends a lot of time simply travelling around. This shows off Downing's knowledge of Berlin and some other cities at the time, but really deadens the action rather than heighten it. This book takes that to the extreme. The point of view jumps between Russell, brought back to Berlin by Soviet authorities to find German atomic secrets, his girlfriend Effi Koenen who he left behind in 1941 and has become involved in smuggling Jews out of Germany and his teenaged German son, Paul, who has been conscripted into an artillery unit on the Eastern Front but is steadily driven back to Berlin. At times, the jump between the different points of view is abrupt and it can take some sentences to realise which character is being focused upon especially when they are all in different parts of Berlin.

Very little happens. The spy element is killed off very quickly and so you are left simply watching these three people wandering around ruined Berlin largely trying to stay alive. Russell tries to find the other two as well as people he knew four years earlier. There are points of tension especially when Effi is arrested as a Jew, but as in the previous novels, Downing is poor at communicating real jeopardy and I see this is something other reviewers have criticised him for. Ultimately this is really just an erratic guided tour of Berlin in the last days of the war. If you find that detail interesting then you might engage with this book, but otherwise it lacks the necessary elements even of a family wartime story let alone the (spy) thriller aspects which I once believed this series was supposed to be about.

'The Water Room' by Christopher Fowler
Despite what it says on the cover of my copy of this novel, it is in fact the second book in the Bryant and May series and the plot follows on from elements featured in the first, 'Full Dark House' (2004) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/10/books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html  The fact they were published in the same year may have led to some confusion. Initially I felt happier with this novel than its predecessor. It is set in the 2000s in a part of North London in a typically odd street left over from the chopping and changing down the decades. As you expect from Fowler there is a peculiar murder, an elderly Asian woman has been drowned in river water in her own home. It is followed by a number of murders which increasingly seem to be linked to the four ancient elements and to the various rivers of London which have been covered over down the centuries but still exist. The truncated close gives a set number of suspects and Fowler is good at developing these characters well.

We get more on Bryant and May, the octogenarian detectives, their assorted colleagues and eccentric helpers. The motive for the murder and a range of secrets is played out well, being both exotic but also credible. The prime problem is, especially after about the halfway point is that the book becomes slack. As with Downing, there is simply far too much going from place to place. Adding in the viewpoints of the two detectives' colleagues adds bulk without increasing tension. As a result by the resolution, which is interested, you are simply glad it is over. I have commented how these days with editing even by publishing houses, being less common some authors are allowed to simply drone on in quite a repetitive way and I feel Fowler has been allowed to do this. This novel could have shed 100 pages (it had 429 pages in the edition I read) and have been better for it. I have hope for the series because of Fowler's character development and detail on London. Do I ask too much in expecting my thrillers whether crime or spy to have tension and pace in them? Perhaps in the 21st Century where size for the sake of size in a novel seems more important that such elements, I am.

Non-Fiction
'The Old Country' by Jack Hargreaves
This book followed the success of 'Out of Town' (1987) which I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/10/books-i-listened-toread-in-october.html and was similarly Jack Hargreaves outlining lost crafts and behaviours from rural England with quite a lot of reference to his own life. A lot of this book is about fish and angling techniques and even some of the ones he mentions as being contemporary in the late 1980s, have become obsolete due to new materials. He also speaks about wild birds, which of course have become rarer still with the loss of so many in the UK and odd things such as appreciation of time, accents and various travelling traders such as wool packers. It is a light easy read with some jarring moments when the conservatism of an old man breaks through with politically incorrect statements on race, though he is more sympathetic to Roma than many of his generation would be and in turn very dismissive of New Age Travellers. This is a good resource book if you want to set stories in rural England in the 19th and 20th centuries and draws your attention to facts that you might have overlooked or never realised. It is very much an old man telling you stories by the fire and as such I can understand why it is still in print, though sold at garden centres rather than in bookshops.

Books I Listened To/Read In September

Fiction
'The Historian' by Elizabeth Kostova
The title sums up this novel pretty well, because while it is actually a vampire story, tracking down Dracula across south-eastern Europe and Turkey, much of 'action' takes place in a series of archives. Having spent much of my youth researching in archives, I know how unexciting places they can be even when fellow readers are discussing how they would kill the pro-Nazi historian who has started attending. You have to admire Kostova's willingness to challenge what readers now seem to demand in terms of narrative structure. She has the narrative running in three parallel time periods: 1931, 1954 and 1972. Much information is provided through letters and accounts and it is typical that you are following what is happening in one of these phases but primarily gathering what has happened in an earlier one. To some degree this renders telling the three stories unnecessary and she could have simply gone with found resources. She portrays the various locations very well and is adept at showing the different social mores of the time she is showing, aided by two romances and the fact that a lot of events occur in Communist-era Romania and Bulgaria.

There is some fun with young people having to sneak around in the various locales, searching out lost relatives and enlisting the aid of a Turkish secret society but the book is far too long (704 pages in my edition) and too much is simply about working in archives. Even with secrets about vampires to be found, this cannot, as I know from personal experience, inject excitement into archival research. The final denouement ironically is far too terse. Overall it is a good idea but it has been taken to the extreme so deadening what could have been distinctive about this novel. If it had been 400 pages shorter it would have been crisp and with a greater degree of excitement but still able to contain the non-linear narrative and a different approach to vampire hunting.

'Stettin Station' by David Downing
This is the third book in the 'Station Series' featuring British/American journalist John Russell and German movie star Effi Koenen. It is set late in 1941 with the lead up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which shuts off Russell's last chance to remain in Berlin as a neutral American. The fact that I thought this was the fourth book in the series, I think highlights some of the problems with it. The book follows the pattern of the previous two. Russell spends a lot of time travelling back and forth to places whether around Berlin or, as in this book, back to Prague.

This allows Downing to show great research and knowledge of Central Europe at this time. He is good on the food shortages Germany was already facing two years into the war. However, too often these books are rather like the old Usborne Time Traveller books of the 1970s (the 1990s anthologies of them are now very collectable) in that simply showing what life was like back in the time visited is deemed enough. A spy novel needs more. Russell does lots of things with a kind of half-hearted nature. He gains information and statistics of the trains of Jews already being sent to Eastern Europe for their execution but really does nothing with what he has found. He works for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, in making links to US intelligence, but it falls through. He makes contact with the remnants of the German Communist organisation in Germany, aided very much at arm's length by the Soviets and he eats, drinks, goes to press conferences and travels around, occasionally picking up secrets or finding out the fate of someone.

The best bit of the novel is when Russell knows he has to escape Germany and is aided to get all the way to Riga and then on to a neutral Swedish ship, at much cost along the way. However, even then we do not feel invested in the people he meets. They are gone, arrested, tortured and executed almost as quickly as we have been introduced to them. Downing had excellent resources with which to work, but there is a spark missing in these novels. Russell is very prepared; Koenen even more so and somehow you never feel they are at real jeopardy and Downing fails to connect you to those who end up victims of the machine. To some degree the immense detail deadens the plots and we see far more of Russell on public transport or in cafes than we need to if the novel was to be gripping. The novel is not uninteresting, but it lacks the edge one would expect from a spy novel whatever time period it is set in.

Non-Fiction
'Worktown' by David Hall
This book is about one part of the first years of Mass-Observation an amateur social research project that later developed into working for the government and then became a company. This book focuses primarily on the work done in Bolton 1937-39, i.e. 'Worktown'. It was led by an anthropologist Tom Harrisson [sic] who developed a kind of cult of individuals, typically middle class young men, but some women and some local people who went round observing and interacting with the people of Bolton whether in the workplace, particularly the cotton mills of Bolton or social settings, notably the pub, churches, the cinema and dance halls, often noting obscure things like how long they took to drink a pint of beer or how long people spent buying something. Harrisson was oblivious to sociology and its practices, continuing to believe that he was creating something very new but lacking structure to what was done, a lot of effort achieved nothing.

There was a second branch in Blackfriars, London headed by Charles Madge which used a panel of people noting down their own activities. At times artists and a photographer also became involved. Harrisson was incredibly self-centred and certainly behaved like a cult leader, being lazy in himself but expecting volunteers to labour for long hours; raising some money for the project but leaving the volunteers short of food and running up unpaid bills with local suppliers while gallivanting off to Paris at great expense and using telegrammes when letters would do. As a result of his character, much of the mass of information gathered was never processed and the books promised especially to Gollancz, never appeared. The archive fortunately was saved and transferred to the University of Sussex but much of it remains unanalysed.

Hall's book is fascinating. Despite his focus on the Bolton end, he does give a history of the movement as a whole. However, the book itself is almost a reflection of the chaos of the Worktown project. Particularly in terms of assertions, such as this being an encounter with working class life for middle class participants, Hall repeats not just points, sometimes more than once, but even the same phrases. Even on a single page he flits between topics, going back and forth between telling the story of Harrisson's group and their findings. The chapters are titled as if they are going to cover specific themes but in fact have a very bumpy passage through the material. The book could have been much better organised either simply telling the story first and then looking at the findings in thematic sections of having distinct chapters about the lives of interesting people involved kept distinct from the findings. The group proved to be largely bohemian, drinking heavily and being very promiscuous.

The best bits of the book are the quotations from the observers' reports on a wide range of topics from behaviour in churches, pubs and factories to doing the football pools or attending all-in wrestling, a popular pastime in Bolton. These remind us that while some of the viewpoints seem dated, others are of the kind we would expect now - breast feeding in public being a notable one - and the struggles of working people to afford all the costs of living are familiar today. This is an interesting book, but it could have been a whole lot better with serious editing, but that increasingly seems to be absent in published books, including non-fiction, properly referenced history books like this one.

Audio Books - Fiction
'Trick of the Dark' by Val McDermid; read by Haydn Gwynne
McDermid is a strong crime writer who happens to be a lesbian. This novel features three lesbian and one bisexual characters, but what she has done successfully is make that not matter. This is not a novel making a point, it is one simply featuring some lesbians. Though there are murders involved, the focus of the book is really a psychological investigation when Charlie Flint is called upon by a former tutor to investigate the woman her daughter is seeing who may or may not have been involved in a number of deaths. Flint is able to call on police contacts, but goes about the investigation in an intellectual way rather than like the police. Her lust for one of the suspects, despite being married to another woman, complicates matters. This story could have been set up on a heterosexual basis, it just happens to be that it is not. It is a taut read and generally feels modern. I do wish, though, that McDermid had had a different university to Oxford to be the setting. The UK has 132 universities but too many authors come back just to Oxford (and not even Oxford Brookes). I guess it sells better internationally, but it would be nice to see characters with a university experience not subjected to the oddities of Oxford and Cambridge. This is a one-off story and proved to be well-written and satisfying.  Haydn Gwynne had a wide range of people to voice but did the accents pretty well and was very suited to the Oxford ones, even those of an American lecturer.

'A Killing Kindness' by Reignald Hill; read by Anonymous
So far I have been unable to find the name of the man who read this audio book. It is the sixth of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels set in Yorkshire and was published in 1980. You can feel the age of it in the text; Pascoe is very generous in giving 50p pieces to children who feature in the book and the technology with which we are now familiar is absent or primitive, in the case of the computers.  Even the use of linguists and psychologists by the police, a graduate in sociology as a detective and a gay detective, all something common now, are seen as innovative/distinctive. It is a traditional crime drama about the murder of various young women, not mutilated but left as respectfully arranged corpses. An added element of gypsies, a flying club and a clairvoyant confuse matters and the looting of a corpse complicates matters. Superintendent Andy Dalziel plays a rather stereotypical gruff Yorkshireman still willing to use intimidation in investigations counterbalanced by the modern, liberal Inspector Peter Pascoe with his feminist wife Ellie, member of various women's organisations; she has a baby during this novel. The aged nature of the novel gives it some charm and it is sufficiently complex to engage without bewildering; the explanations at the end do seem overlong.  The anonymous reader does well with a diverse cast and handles the various Yorkshire voices well, as far as I know, living far from the county.

 'The Creeper' by Tania Carver [Martyn & Linda Waites]; read by Martyn Waites
I know that publishing houses now cannot afford to employ editors to work thoroughly on novels with the result that you see grammar errors let alone weaknesses in styling and structuring. However, I find it difficult to understand how any publisher let this novel through. It is the second in the series of eight books published 2009-16 featuring Inspector Phil Brennan and his wife, psychologist Marina Esposito. The premise is fine. There is a stalker who penetrates women's houses and unnerves them with 'gifts' before abducting them, holding them and ultimately murdering them. As is common for crime novels now we see through the perpetrator's eyes and get to understand motivations well ahead of the detectives. In this novel there is an added element that the main perpetrator does not work alone. So far, so good.

To start with, one flaw is that, despite Brennan and his pregnant wife supposedly being the leads, we see the story through a wide range of people's eyes. Many of the police have very strong motives themselves; some of those involved are almost comically incompetent and there are whole sub-plots that are pretty petty in nature about police disadvantaging colleagues. Many of them behave in a very over-exaggerated manner in how they speak and act, not aided by Martyn Waites's own narration of the novel he has co-authored. The breathlessness of the text is taken further by Waites's reading of it and simply wears you down. Genuine tension is actually decreased by the insistence that it is a tense scene. The exposition at the end of the book goes on for far too long, sapping any of the tension that remains.

The greatest problem with the book, however, is the language. It really sounds what you might get from an undergraduate who has not studied a creative writing degree. It is chock full of clichés which is bad enough, but then the authors repeat them. I counted two 'heads will roll', two 'heart skipped a beat' and two 'heart hammered' and lost track of how often many others came around. Adjectives are piled on, sometimes four to a single noun. A joke about 'Finding Nemo' referencing the children's movie and a make of van, dates the story very quickly and is repeated, adding to the sense that the characters are poor at their jobs and obsessed with the trivial rather than what should be at the heart of the story. All of this, I understand, is supposed to make the book seem contemporary and gritty like the best of current US crime thrillers, but has the opposite effect, making it seem very amateurish, with language and styling that would be criticised at a writers' group and should have been stopped by the publishers. It is frustrating when there is so much great crime fiction out there which does not get highlighted that a book of such poor quality could have been accepted instead by a publisher and the authors encouraged to continue working in this low standard way.

The Books I Listened To/Read In July

Fiction
'The Mammoth Book of SteamPunk' ed. by Sean Wallace
There was a recent debate on the Never Was online journal about whether you could be steampunk and right-wing: https://neverwasmag.com/2019/06/can-you-be-right-wing-and-steampunk/  I had said that it was not that simple and there are elements of the genre such as the excitement of heavy industry and portrayal of Victorian social structures that could be seen as favoured by right-wing commentators.  However, reading this anthology which came out in 2012, I realised that my reading in the genre was dated.  Almost every protagonist in the 30 stories of this collection is either disabled or gay or from a black, Asian or other group in a minority in Western Europe. Indeed Ekaterina Sedia has written an opening essay that emphasises what she feels is the prime purpose of steampunk to paint a better picture of the alternatives available in the past as this can be the only basis of a brighter future.  Though a number of the stories connect more clearly to the fantasy genre, Sedia links them explicitly to science fiction, bouncing from the past into the future.

If this was your first contact with steampunk (or SteamPunk as Wallace has it) you would assume that these were necessary parts of the genre and perhaps, in the late 2000s they had already become and are this firmly in the late 2010s. In many ways by emphasising all the bad that steampunk has kept concealed beneath its bluster, this collection showed me that the genre is effectively dead or, at best, a very gloomy type of writing. It has turned me away from the genre completely to the extent there seems no point in me ever writing in it again.  I guess for the authors featured in this book, that would be a victory because it is apparent my kind of steampunk has no place in their universe.  I am sure the authors would tell you that as a white, middle-aged, formerly middle class man from Western Europe, I have no place in the genre anyway given the views that I must hold given that background.

All the stories collected are certainly informed by feminism.  This becomes anti-man in James Morrow's 'Lady Witherspoon's Solution'.  I do not know why editors of steampunk anthologies feel obliged to include horrific stories that really, despite their steampunk trappings, belong in the horror genre. I still shudder when I think of 'The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down' by Joe R. Lansdale in 'Steampunk' (2008) by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer which is effectively torture porn; 'Victoria' by Paul Di Filippo in the same collection features bestiality.  Morrow's story featuring the reduction of men to beasts and their castration and the collection of testes as entertainment for Victorian ladies, is of the same ilk.  The men are portrayed as the worst of their kind, but even the USA, parts of which tolerate the death penalty would not permit such abuse of prisoners let alone lionise it the way Morrow does.  Simply putting something into a steampunk setting does not excuse authors from churning out such vile work.  If they feel obliged to include such 'stories', editors should include a warning.  The inclusion of the story undermines the feminist approach adopted elsewhere in the book by suggesting it is no better than male chauvinism.  Imagine if Morrow had written a story in which women were injected with chemicals that reduced them to beasts that were then compelled to fight to the death and then the victors were mutilated; he would have been roundly condemned.

'Machine Maid' by Margo Lanagan, is almost as bad. It sees a skilled woman left largely deserted in a house in the wilds of Australia, altering a clockwork 'sex robot' to mutilate her husband. Fortunately Lanagan uses implied outcomes more than Morrow. However, it does alarm me how we have come to such a bad situation in relations between the sexes that it is seen as alright to have a 'mild' little story having men mutilated and this not been deemed to be horror if not a form of sick pornography. Apparently if an uncaring man, let alone a malicious one, is the victim then it is acceptable. Even the USA has a law against 'cruel and unusual punishment' of the kinds apparently happily shown by the authors in these stories. Such porn has no place in true steampunk.

Aside from Morrow and Lanagan's chapters, there is a mixed bag of stories.  Interestingly, a number of them shade from strict steampunk into fantasy. 'Clockwork Fairies' by Cat Rambo is set in Ireland and features real fairies countering the ones of the title. 'Icebreaker' by E. Catherine Tobler, concerning a dwarf widow of a scientist taking his remains to bury at the South Pole has fantastical creatures at the pole too.  'Tom Edison and His Amazing Telegraphic Harpoon' shows North America fragmented as the Mormons have summoned forth demonic flying creatures to defend Deseret. In both cases, the steampunk technology helps the protagonists win through. 'Prayers of Forges and Furnaces' by Ailette de Bodard combines her use of South American contexts with both a post-apocalyptic setting and a vampire. 'Numismatics in the Age in the Reigns of Naranh and Viu' by Alex Dally MacFarlane, is one of the stories that uses 'artefacts' as the basis of the story rather than telling the story in a straight forward way. It is a feminist story in a fantasy setting and shows how a queen went off to form her own realm, via the coins that she and her followers produce. It is an interesting idea but a bit lifeless.

'To Follow the Waves' by Amal El-Mohtar is one of a number of Middle Eastern set stories, a context unusual for steampunk stories; one of the lesbian romances in the book and features a woman who can craft dreams into jewellery that reminded me a lot of crafting in 'Humility Garden' (1995) and 'Delta City' (1996) by Felicity Savage.  'The Mechanical Aviary of Emperor Jula-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar' by Shweta Narayan is told by a clockwork bird and straddles not only those stories which seem to be more from mainstream fantasy than steampunk, but also come over as morality tales.  'The Clockwork Chickadee' by Mary Robinette Kowal is another of these, set among clockwork toys with a rather nasty revenge story. 'The Ballard of the Last Human' by Lavie Tidhar is in a similar vein though even less realistic as the heroes are a clockwork dog and a clockwork spider. 'Clockmaker's Requiem' by Barth Anderson is a surreal story about a world shifting from personal time to clock-based time, something which happened in our world, but not in a context as bizarre as this. As a result it is one of the philosophical stories of the book rather than one with real action. The clearest of the morality tales is 'The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi' by Peter M. Ball in which very little happens and it is really a parable than a standard short story.

Less fantastical, but with the same philosophical questioning at its heart is 'To Seek Her Fortune' by Nicole Kornher-Stace which features a single mother travelling the world with airship gypsies seeking a true prediction of her death. It is really about how she raises her son and is better on the context than the story. 'Fixing Hanover' despite being by Jeff VanderMeer a writer I have come to strongly disapprove of, is rather a parable too, about fixing a humanoid robot that washes up in a seaside town where a technician has fled. However, like the best short stories it hints at a far larger world that could easily fill a novel. It has a feel a bit like the settings of the 'Dishonored' (2012-16) computer games.  Perhaps similar if 'The Steam Dancer (1896)' by Caitlin R. Kiernan is like the warnings seen in the 'Terminator' movies (1984-2019) about robots becoming aggressive and/or dominant. It also highlights how much more sophisticated machinery is now portrayed in steampunk.

'Arbeitkraft' by Nick Mamatas is similar in seeing clockwork cyborgs to do dangerous jobs. It combines a robot takeover story with a Marxist critique as Friedrich Engels is the hero of the story.  It is easily assumed in these stories that with steam and clockwork technology robots with the intelligence of machines we see in science fiction would be possible, further ensuring that link to the genre I highlighted above. To me, though, this is really breaking down steampunk as having a level of rational limits and so making it simply a science fiction or indeed fantasy sub-set. 'Dr Lash Remembers' by Jeffery Ford, straddles such 'warning' stories with a fantastical element in which steam has been made into the carrier of a disease that leads to loss of control among humans so wrecking the steampunk world.  'Reluctance' is a steampunk zombie story with a disabled airship postman fighting against zombies in a remote USA town in order to refuel and escape. It is fast moving but very much as I have described it.

In my view the best story in the book is around a lesbian romance. This is 'The Effluent Engine' by N.K. Jemisin and sees an alternate history in which the uprising on Haiti has led to a black sovereign nation seeking help to defend its position by making use of the by-products of rum manufacture. Though a short story it is a great little adventure with a romancing of a female engineer at its heart and certainly hinting at a far greater 'world' that could feature in a novel.  Another one, though with an tragic lesbian theme, is' Hands that Feed' featuring a Jewish female engineer and people in a city that she encounters, one a young female thief. Again, it is set in a rich context that you want to find out more about. You hope for a happy outcome but I guess with the tone of much of this collection a tragic one should be predicted from the oppression of the setting.   Similarly mournful in tone is 'The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois' by Megan Arkenberg.  A ghost hunter is brought to the house of the former lesbian lover of the late margravine but finds that really all that is happening is all the clockwork devices she built are decaying on her death; melancholy and little more.

I wonder if it is the alternate history facet that attracts me, but I feel another strong story is 'The People's Machine' by Tobias S. Buckell, not only in a steampunk context but one in which the Aztec Empire, rather as Japan did in the 19th Century, has persisted and the geography of North America is different with New Amsterdam having persisted and the British having won two American Wars of Independence have kept the independent USA no greater than the Thirteen Colonies. It is a murder mystery with a computer at the heart of it, like 'The Steam Dancer (1896)' addressing concerns that many science fiction stories look at.

'A Serpent in the Gears' by Margaret Ronald is a strange story about a robot protecting his master while they are approaching a cut-off settlement which has sophisticated technology combined with biology, it is a kind of steam version of cyberpunk, though it is unclear where this is located even though the story is in theory set on Earth. It is not bad but rather unsatisfactory. I found I mixed it up easily with 'Biographical Notes to "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Airplanes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum' which is by Benjamin Rosenbaum who in a conceited way has put himself into this alternative world.  This story sees a steampunk world in which India has become the dominant force in the world and its culture supreme.  In the book while avoiding airborne assassins he considering writing an alternate history novel in which Western philosophical approaches are used and aeroplanes rather than airships predominate. The background rather stymies the action presented, though jumping between airships after the assassin is well done.

'The Zeppelin Conductors' Society Annual Gentlemen's Ball' by Genevieve Valentine is not really a story but one of these 'artefact' chapters, in this case a series of fragments outlining how men working in airship envelopes become physically distorted, so effectively it is another story featuring disability as well as highlighting the detrimental impact of steampunk developments.  However, it is really a series of notes for a setting rather than a developed story. 'The Anachronist's Cookbook' by Catherynne M. Valente is another artefact one. It has a bit more of a story but it is largely outlined in flyers that the heroine carries calling on revolution against what a lot see as traits, certainly pre-2000s, of steampunk in being socially oppressive and misogynistic.  It is an interesting approach but basically you are reading bombastic political leaflets for a fictional setting, so it is imagined propaganda rather a real story. Not an artefact story but one in which very, very little happens is 'The Armature of Flight' by Sharon Mock which is about a male gay couple splitting up as one goes to be fitted with mechanical wings and the other marries a woman. It is more like ideas for a story, rather than an actual story.

'Zeppelin City' by Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick is a fast moving story in a city ruled by brains in glass tanks where aerial bombing has become a sport. It has interesting ideas and is adventurous with a couple of engaging heroines. However, it is clearly dieselpunk, even with 1950s US slang, rather than steampunk and it belongs in a different collection to this one. 'Cinderella Suicide' by Samantha Henderson which seems to be set in Australia is so full of slang from that context that it is very, very difficult to work out what is going on. I do not know if Australian readers could make any sense of it. It seems to be about an exploration to where a spaceship has crash landed on the interior of Australia. It might be more mainstream science fiction than steampunk, it is hard to tell.

Overall, how tiresome I have found reviewing this anthology has brought home to me that I was largely unimpressed by the stories. Aside from the horrific, many lecture the reader as if we are all ignorant of various essential lessons and readers.  Others drown the reader in the authors' conceits. You read a novel or short story for entertainment rather than to be harangued as happens so often in this collection.  There are some good and interesting stories but in a large anthology they are quickly lost amongst the bulk of the others.  In the future I will certainly avoid any steampunk anthologies, even if, as with this one, I find them cheap at a carboot sale.

'Silesian Station' by David Downing
This is the second book in Downing's 'Station' series set in Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s.  This one begins in the summer of 1939 and ends with the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe that September. His hero, John Russell returns from the USA where he has visited with his son and has been given a US passport in place of his British one. He now also writes for a San Francisco newspaper.  As in the first book, 'Zoo Station' (2007), Russell spends a lot of time simply travelling around, whether in parts of Berlin or out to various countries. In this one he manages to go to Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, Slovakia and Poland as well as visiting the Silesian region of Germany.  There are various motives for his journeys. In Berlin he socialises with his girlfriend and takes his son by his divorced German wife to various locations. Ridiculously he is working not only for US intelligence, but also the German SD counter-intelligence organisation and the Soviet foreign intelligence body at the time, INO.  Russell is also given personal missions, to help track down a missing Jewish woman from Silesia and help another Jewish woman who is the mistress of a high-ranking SS officer to escape Germany.  This web detracts rather than adds to the tension of the novel. There is far too much about where Russell is going with his girlfriend, a film star, or his son, where he parks, where he has lunch, what he has for dinner and so on.  Downing gives us loads of detail about Prague and Bratislava and other locales Russell visits, but largely to show off his research than truly add to the story. There is tension but only right at the end of the novel when Russell seeks to rescue Jewish women from an SS brothel and get a friend who has committed a murder, out of Germany.  Downing simply has too much going on for his main character and insists on so much detail, for the novel to really work. It is all very interesting but there are only brief moments when he snares you as a reader of a work of fiction rather than a book of popular history.

'Sherlock Holmes and The Hentzau Affair' by David Stuart Davies
As you might guess from the title this is a double pastiche, on both the Sherlock Holmes novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Ruritania novels of Sir Anthony Hope.  It is written as the Holmes stories were from the perspective of Dr. Watson.  It is very much in the style of one of those stories and Davies only makes a few slips, most jarringly when he uses to the term 'surrealistic tableau' to describe when two men masquerading as King Rudolf V of Ruritania encounter each other on a platform of Streslau station.  The story is set in 1894 and supposedly written in 1919, five years before the first meeting of the Surrealist group.  He might have got away with it if he had said 'Dadaist'. Overall, however, it is a brisk action story with sword fighting, abductions and numerous deaths.  It is a pleasure to read if you enjoy either Doyle's or Hope's work and can avoid trying to spot where Davies erred.

Non-Fiction
'Creative Editing' by Mary Mackie
I bought this book when it was published in 1995. I have dipped into it periodically since then but have never before read it cover-to-cover. While it shows its age, wordprocessors were only really coming into common use when it was published; it suggests you go to a library to do research because there were no internet searches and novels were still submitted on paper rather than via email, it has many principles that remain useful today. I should have read this book sooner because it has become apparent recently that with my school's strange aversion to direct speech, at times insisting on only reported speech in creative writing, what I learned about it was wrong. I was depressed to realise that I had not noticed my errors from reading hundreds of books since then. This added to the sense of despair that I will come back to at the end.

I did find Mackie's guidance on handling points of view much better than other commentators who insist on just one. I do disagree with her on the passive voice as she seems oblivious, like many people, to how it can distort the intended meaning and lead to highly contorted sentences. One compensatory thing is that Mackie, while highlighting various aspects to consider, keeps emphasising that it is down to the author themselves to decide how to apply them, rather than insisting that the author follows her prescriptions to the letter the way that some other help books on authoring do.  Added to that, including exercises, the book in the edition I read is only 208 pages long and is broken up into easy to access sections.  Thus, while I would recommend reading the book right through, it can be dipped into in the way I foolishly did over the past 24 years.  Having read the book in its entirety, I now recognise that even from this 'light touch' rather than dictatorial book, there are just so many things that you must get perfectly right to just get your book to a level at which a publisher might consider it, that it is an impossibility and that I should have abandoned my fantasy of ever getting a book published, decades ago.

Audio Books - Fiction
'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' by Ian Fleming; read by David Tennant
Unlike for most James Bond books, the movie of this one stuck very close to the original novel.  As a consequence, if you have ever seen the movie, you will have a very good idea of what happens and even individual lines from the book feature in it.  At the start of the novel, Bond is back in Royale-les-Eaux a fictional town between Étaples and Montreuil-sur-Mer that featured in 'Casino Royale' (1953), following Teresa 'Tracy' di Vicenzo who had beaten him racing recklessly through neighbouring towns. Paying her gambling debt he is then abducted by Tracy's father, Marc-Ange Draco who happens to be head of the Union Corse organised crime group. He tries to bribe Bond into marrying his daughter.  Draco puts Bond on to the trail of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. he has been pursuing since the end of 'Thunderball' (1961).  Bond goes undercover as a member of the College of Arms to Piz Gloria, a mountain top base in Switzerland where Blofeld is hypnotising British and Irish women to spread agricultural pests and diseases to wreck the British economy.

This novel actually feels like a James Bond movie, with the chases and the final climactic explosions.  While lining up to marry Tracy who is murdered at the end by Blofeld and his accomplice Irma Bund, he still sleeps with one of the hypnotised women.  While Bond is ambivalent about marrying Tracy until very late on, he seems to have less self-doubt than in the previous novels, though he wearies of chasing Blofeld with so little outcome. His relationship with Tracy is almost accidental but he feels that he has found someone of his nature who is as equally reckless as himself driving and gambling.  Bond does not, however, have any qualms dealing with Draco despite him being a major criminal engaging in smuggling and prostitution.  In fact the burgeoning relationship between the two men develops more steadily than that between Bond and Tracy and is reminiscent of the relationship between Bond and Felix Leiter which features in a number of the novels.  For Fleming to have continued the series Tracy had to be killed to free up the agent once more.  As a result, perhaps you come to expect it and it is less cutting when she dies than you might expect.

There are longeurs when Bond is undercover at Piz Gloria. He seems very dim in failing to work out what Blofeld is up to.  This leads to an extended section of Bond being at M's house working with various ministers over the Christmas period, which as it is laboured, fortunately does not feature in the movie.  For some reason Fleming felt compelled to replicate large tracts of a US government document on biological warfare as if he feared readers would not believe the basis of the plot featured in the story, but at times it is just a list, slowing the story unnecessarily.  The action scenes are well handled but interspersed at times with too much 'info dump' sections.

Tennant does pretty well and seems to have been brought in for this book because his natural accent is Scottish which Bond uses when pretending to be Sir Hilary Bray while undercover at Piz Gloria.  He is generally good on all of the voices, though, as he outlines in the interview at the end of my edition of the book, he struggled with the French and German names.  Overall, this is perhaps the book in the series which we would see as being most clearly 'James Bond' as it is understood in  popular culture and it does that job pretty well, but could have been tauter.  Perhaps by this stage of his career, Fleming was not being edited as thoroughly as in the past.

The Books I Listened To/Read In April

I must apologise, but despite repeated efforts to rectify this, Blogger keeps spacing out the paragraphs in an odd way.

Fiction
'Steampunk!' ed. by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant
As the title suggests this is an anthology of Steampunk stories.  Link and Grant say that they have sought out locations rather than Victorian London, though I think one slips through the net.  Despite the inclusion of two cartoon stories, the collection is far better than the 'Steampunk' one edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer that I read 7 years ago.  That included one horrendous story and some very unpleasant ones.  In my view that gave Steampunk collections a bad name: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-book-i-read-in-september.html
As a result I have stayed away from Steampunk anthologies and am no longer abreast of the different authors that write in the genre.  The decline of Steampunk writing as opposed to cosplay, crafting and music has been noted.  I picked up this collection and another I plan to read later in the year, unread at a carboot sale.

This collection, while predominantly featuring US authors with the odd Australian and New Zealander thrown in, does not have that sense that Steampunk somehow is American. It is good to see a balance of genders both in terms of authors and the leading characters; in fact female protagonists predominate. There are no golems feature in the collection, but there is more time travel than I have seen before in Steampunk stories.  Setting aside the two cartoons by Shawn Cheng and Kathleen Jennings which have their place, but not in a book like this, I enjoyed the stories and found them refreshing.

'Some Fortunate Future Day' by Cassandra Clare is a well formed short story which hints at more than it covers, rather than feeling like a chunk of a broader project.  It has a well realised though insular setting in a Steampunk context and a kind of  'The Butterfly Effect' (2004) feel, though you hope for a better outcome than that movie.  Despite the title, as the editors promised, 'Clockwork Fagin' by Cory Doctorow is not set in London but the USA.  It does well in looking at the impact of a Steampunk world in the cost of mutilated child machine operators.  It is an upbeat story as these children increasingly take control of their lives through their engineering skills.  It thus well combines the grittier aspects of the genre but in a way which is part of the story rather than preaching.  While a long short story it is worked through in its extent.

'The Last Ride of the Glory Girls' by Libba Bray feels like the pilot for a longer novel.  It also features a time manipulation device combined with a group of female bandits in a Steampunk American West.  It is crisp and well realised with engaging characters and is one of the stories I would like to see more of.  Another one which seems like the start of something larger is 'Hand in Glove' by Ysabeau S. Wilce which covers a female detective in a Steampunk city and the challenges she faces in solving a murder, the perpetrator of which is highly unexpected.  The story has some standard elements but is good in portraying places and has some interesting twists.  One could envisage novels featuring the protagonist, Constable Aurelia Etreyo.

'Ghost of Cwmlech Manor' by Delia Sherman is set in Victorian Wales and has the feeling of a classic Victorian horror story though the Steampunk elements, here seen in a rural rather than an urban setting.  It did however remind me of the 'The Unquiet Dead' episode of 'Doctor Who' set in Cardiff in 1869 which was broadcast in 2005.  Despite these elements it is an upbeat story with both the local and incoming characters interesting and just about avoiding being a set of tropes.  'Gethsemane' by Elizabeth Knox is another which feels to be as much a different Victorian genre as a Steampunk novel.  It shows Steampunk technology being used on a tropical island to gain energy from a volcano, but the focus of the story is more on the island's inhabitants, a form of zombie and sailors who come to the island with the Steampunk facet in the background of what happens rather than the foreground.  'Oracle Engine' by M.T. Anderson is very sandalpunk, being set in an alternate Roman Empire where a computer is constructed.  It is really a morality tale looking to take the style of accounts by Roman historians, so while not bad, has something irritating in the tone, rather self-righteous.

'The Summer People' is not really a Steampunk story at all and feels more like a folklore story set in just a slightly different North America from the one we know.  It focuses very much on a kind of magical creatures, the eponymous people.  It has interesting ideas and has that nice edge of such stories but you do wonder if it would have been included if Kelly Link was not one of the editors. 'Steam Girl' by Dylan Horrocks is another oddity for this collection.  In it Steampunk is not real, we just see contemporary USA, so it is a meta-story as the Steampunk elements including the 'golden age' science fiction aspects of travelling to see civilisations on Mars and Venus, are just in the mind of a schoolgirl.  I do wonder if contemporary American teenagers actually have interest in stories of that kind; perhaps it would have been more realistic to have a Japanese teenager featured.

'Everything Available and Obliging' by Holly Black also owes more to a different science fiction genre than Steampunk and is really a steampunked version of  'I, Robot' (1950) though with more awkward questions about affection for humanoid machines.  'Nowhere Fast' by Christopher Rowe is a post-apocalyptic story set in one of the states which has formed in the eastern USA.  It is reasonable largely interesting for seeing how the insular American communities you find in these post-apocalyptic stories react when technology, even of the Steampunk kind, is the thing to hate.

'Zoo Station' by David Downing
It took some time for me to realise that this was the same David Downing (it is a surprisingly common name combination as an online search quickly shows) who had written 'The Moscow Option' (1979) a successful alternate history novel of the Second World War, though all I remember from it was the sex scene and the assassination of Adolf Eichmann in Palestine, it was about 35 years ago that I read it.  Anyway, since then I had been unaware of Downing writing anything until this series was given to me by a family member.  This is the first book concerning a British journalist working in Berlin early in 1939.  He has a son by his German ex-wife and has a long-standing German girlfriend, both he is loath to leave despite the sense that war is approaching.

Downing has done an immense amount of research regarding Berlin at the time and that is part of the problems.  Russell traipses all over the city with great detail about where he is going, what public transport he is using, where he stops for his meals and what he eats and drinks.  It begins to expand out from Berlin with him paying visits to Hamburg and the Baltic coast; to Poland and Czechoslovakia.  The detail is great but it reduces rather than adds to the tension.  Russell, a former Communist is recruited by Soviet intelligence and then British intelligence to carry out various tasks; he is also monitored by the German SD counter-intelligence body.  He helps a Jewish family get away from Germany and sort of investigates the murder of a US journalist who had stumbled across the T4 Programme of killing disabled German children.

I know the book is establishing the characters and the situation, but nothing is really resolved.  It is very much a 'slice of life' novel that just peters out.  This might be alright if it was a literary novel, but it is supposed to be a spy novel and really lacks the tension necessary.  I have the rest of the books in the series and hope that now everything is established the tension will be built up.  I assume it is a successful series given how many books are in it.

Audio Books
'Aggressor' by Andy McNab [Steven Billy Mitchell]; read by Steven Pacey
Having been presently surprised by listening to 'Zero Hour' (2010):http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/02/books-i-listened-toread-in-february.html  I thought I would give another McNab story featuring Nick Stone a go when I came across it cheaply.  It is pretty similar to the previous book, though it is a friend of Stone's who is suffering a terminal illness and the adventure takes place in the country of Georgia rather than Moldova.  The story is fast moving and you get what you expect, though the course of events does not run smoothly for the hero.  McNab shows awareness of the political situation in the places he sets his stories and is sympathetic to local conditions, showing how big money manipulates the situations and groups are played with so this is not a colonial adventure.  As with 'Zero Hour' the role for men, especially ex-servicemen, in peacetime society and male ageing feature as themes.  While a pretty straight forward book, it is better than it might otherwise have been and if this is a genre you like, McNab seems to be one of the best writers in it.  Steven Pacey is another reader who sounds very much like the character and was pretty good at doing not just British but Australian, German and Georgian accents, women as well as men.

'Pulse' by Julian Barnes; read by David Rintoul
I mistakenly thought I had read some of Barnes's books before.  This is a collection of short stories, a genre I usually enjoy, but having heard this book, I know I will now steer clear of Barnes's work.  Most of the stories are set in Britain of the 2000s (the book was published in 2011).  They are painfully middle class and in many cases painfully male.  Many of the protagonists are white Englishmen unable to have successful relationships with women.  There are a few exceptions to these dreary stories, but the round dinner table discussions, while showing off Rintoul's ability with accents and jumping between characters are very like the dinner party sketches in featuring John Bird, John Fortune, Pauline McLynn and Frances Barber on 'Bremner, Bird and Fortune' (broadcast 1999-2010).  One of these would have been fine but they become repetitive.  The only really decent story is about a painter in the USA in the 18th Century.  Otherwise I found the collection dreary and repetitive, very narrowly focused on what I imagine is Barnes's life experiences at the time.  Rintoul, a well-established audio book narrator, does well, though for many of the stories there is little to stretch him, but when called upon he does demonstrate why he is among the leading narrators at present for accents and portraying female as well as male characters.